6 ms·

Seriously. Musk has enough money to fuck off and go build something. His political and economic opinions are pretty bad. He should just shut up.

GaggiX 2y ago
He'll never shut up, people will learn to ignore him if they haven't already.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Like they've learned to ignore Trump?
  - GaggiX 2y ago
    What do you mean?
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      The person who still owns one of the two major US political parties despite being manifestly unfit, and who continues to hold sway over at least 33% of voters nationwide? Say what you will about Musk, he's no Trump. At least, not yet. He hasn't alienated that many people, and even if he were to do so, it wouldn't be enough to impact Tesla's sales.
r00fus 2y ago
Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.
- woooooo 2y ago
  I think this is taking it too far. There are a lot of money and hype guys out there, none of the rest of them transformed the automotive and space industries. Most of them were shoveling money into "disrupt laundry" startups instead.
- wustangdan 2y ago
  Just to be clear, you're saying that Shotwell has contributed more to SpaceX than Elon? What about, without Elon they'd have reusable rockets but without Shotwell they wouldn't? Do you believe this? I get you hate Elon but at some point these takes are just so outrageous I can't believe you are making them in good faith.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > Just to be clear, you're saying that Shotwell has contributed more to SpaceX than Elon? Which contribution do you believe that Elon Musk had on the development of reusable rockets? Let's put it this way: if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
    - bilvar 2y ago
      Yes. Everyone was ridiculing him for believing they could do it. Including industry experts.
    - wustangdan 2y ago
      Okay read Walter Isaacson and Vances biography and get back to me. There is hundreds of examples in each. Or read this thread that has a few snippets from the book. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... He is a constant technical driving force. > if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day? Would we have reusable rockets in the same timeline as SpaceX, absolutely not. The proof is all the other rocket companies that have failed to do so, including government entities. So yah obviously if Musk never founded SpaceX, we would not have reusable rockets right now.
    - Prickle 2y ago
      Yes, unironically. In the USA you have the SLS, which can only be described as a congressionally designed failure. Past experiments by NASA for self landing rockets had their funding denied as well. In the EU there was the Arianespace CEO who explicitly said that self landing rockets were a waste of time. In Japan, space experimentation and failures are such a public nightmare we would never have bothered. The idea of losing dozens of rockets in order to aim for reusability would have been untenable. Starship would not exist. Because the idea of a rocket with that many engines on the booster was also believed to be impractical. Elon is egomaniacal sure, but that's only magnified by his status as a CEO. His behavior, unfortunately pretty close to the average person. Doesn't change the fact that SpaceX under his leadership is the only reason we have reusable rockets, or the ridiculously ambitious Starship launches. No one could have predicted the current incredible cadence of launches by SpaceX either.
- havefunbesafe 2y ago
  I could be wrong, but it seems as though he built Zip2? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2
- mlindner 2y ago
  This is such a poor hot take. Literally every single person that has personally dealt with him disagrees this narrative. It's only popular on reddit/hacker news boards and among some journalists. Karpathy has a good discussion on it that I've heard several employees at his other companies agree with. Karpathy: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1bpwo0w/andrej_karpathy_on_elon/ https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1bpwo0w/andrej... Tom Mueller: https://i.redd.it/89dqiz2lc2t81.jpg https://i.redd.it/89dqiz2lc2t81.jpg Or even Shotwell herself for that matter and how she has expressed how she and Elon subdivide the work. Elon Musk is not nice person, but he gets things done and he's deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of his companies. I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    > I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes. You say that like its a good thing. Normally CEO attending random low level meetings is considered a pretty big red flag.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      (Shrug) It seems to be working for them.
    - elevatedastalt 2y ago
      It's a red flag in traditional companies. Musk has never been a traditional CEO or run his companies like a traditional company. If you want to run an IBM or Cisco, don't hire Musk, sure.
    - mlindner 2y ago
      Tom Mueller also mentioned how he had like 20+ direct reports. The organization is _extremely_ flat with almost no middle managers.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  The original Tesla guys recognized and agreed Musk was a founder as part of their settlement, and this is now both the formal and legal truth of Tesla. I think some others were also recognized as founders too. The two initial guys didn’t really achieve anything prior to Musk and other early people joining. Calling SpaceX Gwynne’s baby is just straight up misinformation. Talk to actual employees from SpaceX, especially early on. They’ll tell you that Musk actually does get involved in various deep aspects of the vehicles. You might not be aware, but Gwynne Shotwell was in BD not product.
  - jonathankoren 2y ago
    I'm sure Elon does get involved. The question is, does he get involved in a constructive way. All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage". I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.
    - acchow 2y ago
      Twitter is a software company. Elon doesn't seem to be an actual software guy. Instead, he has an incredible knowledge of rockets and electric cars. He probably takes his rocket knowledge and under-estimates software complexity.
      - StackRanker3000 2y ago
        His two first successful business endeavors were web-based services (i.e. software), and he had no real experience with or education in cars or rockets before he joined/founded Tesla and SpaceX respectively (he’s got a bachelor’s degree in economics and one in physics). I think he’s probably a smart guy who’s worked hard to learn as much as possible about the fields he’s entered into, but I find it hard to believe that he’s a world-leading technical mind at either. The reason he’s struggling comparatively with Twitter is partly that he doesn’t take it seriously, and partly that he has other ambitions for it (“X the everything app”) than what it actually is. The main attributes behind his success are his obsessive desire to achieve certain goals, and his willingness to take on a very large amount of risk over and over again (he could easily have gone bankrupt several times, but so far things have mostly gone his way). Edit: Another reason he’s had a tough time with Twitter is that he’s acted out of spite and alienated people and organizations he should have been on good terms with, mainly advertisers (Twitter’s actual customers).
- acchow 2y ago
  It seems the internet has decided some narrative about Elon Musk which is not true, and people go around repeating it. If you talk to actual employees, especially early and senior employees, you find that Elon Musk is absolutely pivotal to the engineering direction.
- cchi_co 2y ago
  [dead]
nostrademons 2y ago
My pet theory is that Musk basically unraveled when the study came out that there does not exist enough CO2 on Mars to terraform the planet: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-possible-using-present-day-technology/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-poss... Note the date on that: it was published in Nature on July 30 2018, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody would've sent a preprint to Musk up to a month before then. The "pedo guy" tweet during the Thai cave rescue was July 18 2018. Musk's "funding secured" Tweet that the SEC sanctioned him over was Aug 7 2018. His appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was September 2018. Most of his children and extramarital affairs post-date 2018; at that point, he only had the 5 with Justine Musk. Pre-2018, most of his ideas were crazy but at least engineering-focused on reasonable causes. Musk has repeatedly said his ambition is to die on Mars. After a reputable scientific paper came out saying that if you step off Starship, that will be the very first thing you do, he doesn't really have anything to live for. Meanwhile he's given up so much for that goal (most notably, his first family) that it must feel pretty bitter to have invested so much in something impossible. For that matter, the psychology is likely pretty similar to the core MAGA demographic, many of whom work hard all their life to achieve the American Dream and then find that the American Dream is going to other people.
- neilv 2y ago
  People can come back from shattered dreams, and he can afford any therapist. Being a billionaire makes pivoting to executing on new dreams easier. Newfound empathy could give him a new dream of making that American Dream happen for others.
  - gravescale 2y ago
    Right, if this is true (possible I guess, but does sound a bit Syndrome-from-The-Incredibles), even if there's really no technical way at all to terraform Mars it's hardly the end of the world, uh, planet. Not least, terraforming would take centuries in any plausible effort. If he goes to Mars to die, he'll die in a pressurised environment whatever happens.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
EnigmaFlare 2y ago
Bad means they're different from your own which are automatically good because NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are? Many public figures just copy popular opinions and present them as their own precisely so that most people will like them. They haven't even tried to understand what they're talking about. At least Musk has some understanding and isn't driven by conformity.
- NickC25 2y ago
  >NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are? God, I fucking hope not. I'm just a single individual, just a man. No different than anyone else here. I think Musk's political/economic opinions are awful because he's so far abstracted away from the real world that his opinions are effectively worthless. I wouldn't trust a random homeless guy's opinion much like I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos' or Elon Musk's opinions - they both represent an extreme of how thing ares, but no way would they represent how society should move forward.
  - EnigmaFlare 2y ago
    They're surely wrong, at least in some on way, but so's everyone else's opinion. These are areas which are far to complex for anybody to understand. All we really have is opinions. At least Musk's opinions aren't just a carbon copy of whatever's popular at the time. That alone makes them at least potentially worth something. The celebrities who can only repeat what they're supposed to say to make themselves look good are the ones who should shut up. Their stated opinions are simply whatever they think will serve their popularity.
john_minsk 2y ago
Interesting. What makes "political and economic opinions" bad?
- NickC25 2y ago
  He's so far abstracted away from the world we live in due to his hundreds of billions of dollars that he really has no idea what he's talking about, but because the new-age version of "might makes right" which is "obscene capital makes right", people tend to give him more credence than he deserves. He got lucky with PayPal, and lucky with Tesla. That's it. He is not the president, he is not god, not allah, not yahweh, the flying spaghetti monster, he is just a man that got incredibly wealthy both through his own intelligence and some good fortune. That does not mean he's qualified to opine on something outside of his area of expertise. Would you trade your ability to speak publicly about things you don't really understand in depth in exchange for 100 billion dollars? I sure would. Give me 1/100th of that and I'm off to a private island to read books and grow my own food.

GaggiX 2y ago

He'll never shut up, people will learn to ignore him if they haven't already.

CamperBob2 2y ago
Like they've learned to ignore Trump?
- GaggiX 2y ago
  What do you mean?
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    The person who still owns one of the two major US political parties despite being manifestly unfit, and who continues to hold sway over at least 33% of voters nationwide? Say what you will about Musk, he's no Trump. At least, not yet. He hasn't alienated that many people, and even if he were to do so, it wouldn't be enough to impact Tesla's sales.

r00fus 2y ago

Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.

woooooo 2y ago
I think this is taking it too far. There are a lot of money and hype guys out there, none of the rest of them transformed the automotive and space industries. Most of them were shoveling money into "disrupt laundry" startups instead.
wustangdan 2y ago
Just to be clear, you're saying that Shotwell has contributed more to SpaceX than Elon? What about, without Elon they'd have reusable rockets but without Shotwell they wouldn't? Do you believe this? I get you hate Elon but at some point these takes are just so outrageous I can't believe you are making them in good faith.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > Just to be clear, you're saying that Shotwell has contributed more to SpaceX than Elon? Which contribution do you believe that Elon Musk had on the development of reusable rockets? Let's put it this way: if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
  - bilvar 2y ago
    Yes. Everyone was ridiculing him for believing they could do it. Including industry experts.
  - wustangdan 2y ago
    Okay read Walter Isaacson and Vances biography and get back to me. There is hundreds of examples in each. Or read this thread that has a few snippets from the book. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... He is a constant technical driving force. > if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day? Would we have reusable rockets in the same timeline as SpaceX, absolutely not. The proof is all the other rocket companies that have failed to do so, including government entities. So yah obviously if Musk never founded SpaceX, we would not have reusable rockets right now.
  - Prickle 2y ago
    Yes, unironically. In the USA you have the SLS, which can only be described as a congressionally designed failure. Past experiments by NASA for self landing rockets had their funding denied as well. In the EU there was the Arianespace CEO who explicitly said that self landing rockets were a waste of time. In Japan, space experimentation and failures are such a public nightmare we would never have bothered. The idea of losing dozens of rockets in order to aim for reusability would have been untenable. Starship would not exist. Because the idea of a rocket with that many engines on the booster was also believed to be impractical. Elon is egomaniacal sure, but that's only magnified by his status as a CEO. His behavior, unfortunately pretty close to the average person. Doesn't change the fact that SpaceX under his leadership is the only reason we have reusable rockets, or the ridiculously ambitious Starship launches. No one could have predicted the current incredible cadence of launches by SpaceX either.
havefunbesafe 2y ago
I could be wrong, but it seems as though he built Zip2? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2
mlindner 2y ago
This is such a poor hot take. Literally every single person that has personally dealt with him disagrees this narrative. It's only popular on reddit/hacker news boards and among some journalists. Karpathy has a good discussion on it that I've heard several employees at his other companies agree with. Karpathy: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1bpwo0w/andrej_karpathy_on_elon/ https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1bpwo0w/andrej... Tom Mueller: https://i.redd.it/89dqiz2lc2t81.jpg https://i.redd.it/89dqiz2lc2t81.jpg Or even Shotwell herself for that matter and how she has expressed how she and Elon subdivide the work. Elon Musk is not nice person, but he gets things done and he's deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of his companies. I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes.
- bawolff 2y ago
  > I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes. You say that like its a good thing. Normally CEO attending random low level meetings is considered a pretty big red flag.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    (Shrug) It seems to be working for them.
  - elevatedastalt 2y ago
    It's a red flag in traditional companies. Musk has never been a traditional CEO or run his companies like a traditional company. If you want to run an IBM or Cisco, don't hire Musk, sure.
  - mlindner 2y ago
    Tom Mueller also mentioned how he had like 20+ direct reports. The organization is _extremely_ flat with almost no middle managers.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
The original Tesla guys recognized and agreed Musk was a founder as part of their settlement, and this is now both the formal and legal truth of Tesla. I think some others were also recognized as founders too. The two initial guys didn’t really achieve anything prior to Musk and other early people joining. Calling SpaceX Gwynne’s baby is just straight up misinformation. Talk to actual employees from SpaceX, especially early on. They’ll tell you that Musk actually does get involved in various deep aspects of the vehicles. You might not be aware, but Gwynne Shotwell was in BD not product.
- jonathankoren 2y ago
  I'm sure Elon does get involved. The question is, does he get involved in a constructive way. All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage". I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.
  - acchow 2y ago
    Twitter is a software company. Elon doesn't seem to be an actual software guy. Instead, he has an incredible knowledge of rockets and electric cars. He probably takes his rocket knowledge and under-estimates software complexity.
    - StackRanker3000 2y ago
      His two first successful business endeavors were web-based services (i.e. software), and he had no real experience with or education in cars or rockets before he joined/founded Tesla and SpaceX respectively (he’s got a bachelor’s degree in economics and one in physics). I think he’s probably a smart guy who’s worked hard to learn as much as possible about the fields he’s entered into, but I find it hard to believe that he’s a world-leading technical mind at either. The reason he’s struggling comparatively with Twitter is partly that he doesn’t take it seriously, and partly that he has other ambitions for it (“X the everything app”) than what it actually is. The main attributes behind his success are his obsessive desire to achieve certain goals, and his willingness to take on a very large amount of risk over and over again (he could easily have gone bankrupt several times, but so far things have mostly gone his way). Edit: Another reason he’s had a tough time with Twitter is that he’s acted out of spite and alienated people and organizations he should have been on good terms with, mainly advertisers (Twitter’s actual customers).
acchow 2y ago
It seems the internet has decided some narrative about Elon Musk which is not true, and people go around repeating it. If you talk to actual employees, especially early and senior employees, you find that Elon Musk is absolutely pivotal to the engineering direction.
cchi_co 2y ago
[dead]

nostrademons 2y ago

My pet theory is that Musk basically unraveled when the study came out that there does not exist enough CO2 on Mars to terraform the planet: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-possible-using-present-day-technology/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-poss... Note the date on that: it was published in Nature on July 30 2018, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody would've sent a preprint to Musk up to a month before then. The "pedo guy" tweet during the Thai cave rescue was July 18 2018. Musk's "funding secured" Tweet that the SEC sanctioned him over was Aug 7 2018. His appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was September 2018. Most of his children and extramarital affairs post-date 2018; at that point, he only had the 5 with Justine Musk. Pre-2018, most of his ideas were crazy but at least engineering-focused on reasonable causes. Musk has repeatedly said his ambition is to die on Mars. After a reputable scientific paper came out saying that if you step off Starship, that will be the very first thing you do, he doesn't really have anything to live for. Meanwhile he's given up so much for that goal (most notably, his first family) that it must feel pretty bitter to have invested so much in something impossible. For that matter, the psychology is likely pretty similar to the core MAGA demographic, many of whom work hard all their life to achieve the American Dream and then find that the American Dream is going to other people.

neilv 2y ago
People can come back from shattered dreams, and he can afford any therapist. Being a billionaire makes pivoting to executing on new dreams easier. Newfound empathy could give him a new dream of making that American Dream happen for others.
- gravescale 2y ago
  Right, if this is true (possible I guess, but does sound a bit Syndrome-from-The-Incredibles), even if there's really no technical way at all to terraform Mars it's hardly the end of the world, uh, planet. Not least, terraforming would take centuries in any plausible effort. If he goes to Mars to die, he'll die in a pressurised environment whatever happens.
KerrAvon 2y ago

EnigmaFlare 2y ago

Bad means they're different from your own which are automatically good because NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are? Many public figures just copy popular opinions and present them as their own precisely so that most people will like them. They haven't even tried to understand what they're talking about. At least Musk has some understanding and isn't driven by conformity.

NickC25 2y ago
>NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are? God, I fucking hope not. I'm just a single individual, just a man. No different than anyone else here. I think Musk's political/economic opinions are awful because he's so far abstracted away from the real world that his opinions are effectively worthless. I wouldn't trust a random homeless guy's opinion much like I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos' or Elon Musk's opinions - they both represent an extreme of how thing ares, but no way would they represent how society should move forward.
- EnigmaFlare 2y ago
  They're surely wrong, at least in some on way, but so's everyone else's opinion. These are areas which are far to complex for anybody to understand. All we really have is opinions. At least Musk's opinions aren't just a carbon copy of whatever's popular at the time. That alone makes them at least potentially worth something. The celebrities who can only repeat what they're supposed to say to make themselves look good are the ones who should shut up. Their stated opinions are simply whatever they think will serve their popularity.

john_minsk 2y ago

Interesting. What makes "political and economic opinions" bad?

NickC25 2y ago
He's so far abstracted away from the world we live in due to his hundreds of billions of dollars that he really has no idea what he's talking about, but because the new-age version of "might makes right" which is "obscene capital makes right", people tend to give him more credence than he deserves. He got lucky with PayPal, and lucky with Tesla. That's it. He is not the president, he is not god, not allah, not yahweh, the flying spaghetti monster, he is just a man that got incredibly wealthy both through his own intelligence and some good fortune. That does not mean he's qualified to opine on something outside of his area of expertise. Would you trade your ability to speak publicly about things you don't really understand in depth in exchange for 100 billion dollars? I sure would. Give me 1/100th of that and I'm off to a private island to read books and grow my own food.