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>Just not how Musk describes it. Every innovative mission needs someone pushing people to do the impossible. That being said, every company trying to accompli

by tw04 2y ago

>Just not how Musk describes it. Every innovative mission needs someone pushing people to do the impossible. That being said, every company trying to accomplish the impossible needs an adult in the room to ground that visionary. In the case of Space-X, there's an adult in the room. Elon's direct input at Space-X almost set the entire Starship project back a year by insisting on trying a concrete launch pad that all of his engineers told him would fail (and it did). After that failure he appeared to get so distracted by Twitter that Shotwell could point the engineers in a more effective direction. In the case of Tesla, there unfortunately is not. Elon's direct input resulted in canning a low-cost model in favor of a "robo-taxi" that is 100% dependent on full self driving using nothing but cameras. That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. An adult in the room would've told him to either stick with the low-cost model to compete with incoming Chinese imports, or use Lidar so that there's a viable self-driving vehicle that can be sold sometime in the next decade...

pclmulqdq 2y ago
The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. He goes on stage and says a bunch of bullshit (IMO he commits securities fraud) and then his executives generally do what they think is correct for the company while making sure he feels placated. It seems to sort of work out well enough. It may be that this layer of management is getting weaker.
- TMWNN 2y ago
  >The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942 https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9. (If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    "Musk was right" is too early to determine on both of these fronts. Starship is an experimental vehicle still, and as a program is at least 5 years behind schedule. Musk's will was done because he is the boss. Remember that this is the architect of the cybertruck and the hyperloop.
api 2y ago
It’s too bad the visionary lunatic and the sane person can’t be the same person, but this is exceedingly rare. The lunatic alone will hype and then fail. The sane voice alone will plod along and take aeons to make any progress, or stagnate entirely.
- iwaztomack 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure if I knew I could never lose a dime of my billions of fortune I'd be working on teleporters, warp drives, and time machines. People would call me a genius because I could pay for the press. Musk isn't a visionary, he's just a rich nerd throwing money at really cool things other visionaries imagined before he was born (all of his companies were ideas other people already had been working on; 100%), and then failing upwards when it doesn't work out.
  - api 2y ago
    Why hasn’t Blue Origin done similar things then, or any of the other billionaire funded space ventures? SpaceX is just spectacular. Something is different there.
    - cmorgan31 2y ago
      Isn’t that difference Shotwell? It might be a bit myopic to credit a singular leader when many contributed but she feels like the obvious answer.
      - api 2y ago
        I don’t credit just Elon. It’s tons of people. But he did do a good job getting this thing going and has some role in pushing them to take risks and do hard things. Shotwell is probably a big reason SpaceX does better than Tesla or the others. Elon needs to be paired with a cooler head that knows how to manage well. I get the sense the others don’t have anyone as strong in that role.
  - cameronh90 2y ago
Dalewyn 2y ago
>That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. Counterpoint, new technology needs a bleeding edge product necessitating and thus incentivizing its birth and existence. When you need to create a chicken from nothing so you can get eggs which turn into chickens for more eggs, it's oftentimes expensive as fuck and more likely than not going to fail. But someone needs to do it if you want those eggs and the chickens.
fallingknife 2y ago
It was 6 months to the next launch after he "almost set the entire Starship project back a year." And after the next launch, which didn't destroy the pad, it was 4 months to the next launch. So maybe he set it back two months. Maybe. He also came up with building it out of stainless steel, which worked, and catching it at the launch tower. But I'm sure you know better.
- tw04 2y ago
  >So maybe he set it back two months. Maybe. So you didn't follow it at all? Because multiple government agencies were considering blocking them full-stop for an extended period of time after that disaster. So "maybe 2 months" was their absolute best-case scenario. https://www.tpr.org/environment/2023-04-27/photos-spacex-is-grounded-after-rocket-explosion-caused-extensive-environmental-damage https://www.tpr.org/environment/2023-04-27/photos-spacex-is-... >He also came up with building it out of stainless steel And you know he was the one who personally came up with that idea... how? You work at Space-X? Or you've just read a couple press releases where he took credit for it? Elon has a long history of taking credit for other people's ideas. And I'm willing to bet whatever you'd like to risk that one of the engineers at Space-X suggested using stainless steel, not Elon.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    "Disaster" LOL. 0 injuries. That's how Spacex does it. Blow it up and iterate, and that's why they are decades ahead of the competition. So useless government bureaucrats, not Elon Musk, almost set them back a year over a stupid concrete launch pad.
    - tw04 2y ago
      LOL killing protected wildlife and destroying protected wetlands is funny! Government is useless and clean water is for betas! Tell me you’re an Elon apologist without telling me you’re an Elon apologist.
      - 2y ago
tjpnz 2y ago
>compete with incoming Chinese imports The current regime of tariffs and restrictions means they won't have to.
zarzavat 2y ago
> That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. What Musk understands is that technology is a moving target. You shoot for where it will be, not where it is now. Sometimes he's overoptimistic, however a robotaxi seems well timed. Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off. It takes years to manufacture a new vehicle type. When the Cybertruck was announced the SOTA in language models was GPT 2. Now we have multimodal conversational models with vision. By the time the robotaxi rolls off the production line, the software will be ready. And if the software is ready, then the model of owning cars will be disrupted for many people living in dense urban environments. The real risk is in not preparing for that eventuality, which is the same type of unpreparedness risk that the legacy launch industry is facing with Starship.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off. Because chatting and driving a car are two entirely different problems?
  - glimshe 2y ago
    I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". I think people got desensitized, as they usually do, of how incredible GPT-4o looks like compared to what we had recently. We were going through a rough patch in technology where we hadn't come up with anything terribly exciting since the mobile revolution. AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem.
    - tivert 2y ago
      > I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". > ...AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem. But that's sloppy and fallacious reasoning, and there are literally thousands of examples of it failing in many different areas (including AI!) in recent and no-so-recent history. One example is SHRDLU, which led to similar excessive optimism back in the late 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences. It's like someone with the fuzzy category "technology" interpreting the amazing advances in computer graphics over the 90s and 2000s to conclude we will be colonizing Mars soon.

by tw04 2y ago

pclmulqdq 2y ago

The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. He goes on stage and says a bunch of bullshit (IMO he commits securities fraud) and then his executives generally do what they think is correct for the company while making sure he feels placated. It seems to sort of work out well enough. It may be that this layer of management is getting weaker.

TMWNN 2y ago
>The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942 https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9. (If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  "Musk was right" is too early to determine on both of these fronts. Starship is an experimental vehicle still, and as a program is at least 5 years behind schedule. Musk's will was done because he is the boss. Remember that this is the architect of the cybertruck and the hyperloop.

api 2y ago

It’s too bad the visionary lunatic and the sane person can’t be the same person, but this is exceedingly rare. The lunatic alone will hype and then fail. The sane voice alone will plod along and take aeons to make any progress, or stagnate entirely.

iwaztomack 2y ago
I'm pretty sure if I knew I could never lose a dime of my billions of fortune I'd be working on teleporters, warp drives, and time machines. People would call me a genius because I could pay for the press. Musk isn't a visionary, he's just a rich nerd throwing money at really cool things other visionaries imagined before he was born (all of his companies were ideas other people already had been working on; 100%), and then failing upwards when it doesn't work out.
- api 2y ago
  Why hasn’t Blue Origin done similar things then, or any of the other billionaire funded space ventures? SpaceX is just spectacular. Something is different there.
  - cmorgan31 2y ago
    Isn’t that difference Shotwell? It might be a bit myopic to credit a singular leader when many contributed but she feels like the obvious answer.
    - api 2y ago
      I don’t credit just Elon. It’s tons of people. But he did do a good job getting this thing going and has some role in pushing them to take risks and do hard things. Shotwell is probably a big reason SpaceX does better than Tesla or the others. Elon needs to be paired with a cooler head that knows how to manage well. I get the sense the others don’t have anyone as strong in that role.
- cameronh90 2y ago

Dalewyn 2y ago

>That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. Counterpoint, new technology needs a bleeding edge product necessitating and thus incentivizing its birth and existence. When you need to create a chicken from nothing so you can get eggs which turn into chickens for more eggs, it's oftentimes expensive as fuck and more likely than not going to fail. But someone needs to do it if you want those eggs and the chickens.

fallingknife 2y ago

It was 6 months to the next launch after he "almost set the entire Starship project back a year." And after the next launch, which didn't destroy the pad, it was 4 months to the next launch. So maybe he set it back two months. Maybe. He also came up with building it out of stainless steel, which worked, and catching it at the launch tower. But I'm sure you know better.

tw04 2y ago
>So maybe he set it back two months. Maybe. So you didn't follow it at all? Because multiple government agencies were considering blocking them full-stop for an extended period of time after that disaster. So "maybe 2 months" was their absolute best-case scenario. https://www.tpr.org/environment/2023-04-27/photos-spacex-is-grounded-after-rocket-explosion-caused-extensive-environmental-damage https://www.tpr.org/environment/2023-04-27/photos-spacex-is-... >He also came up with building it out of stainless steel And you know he was the one who personally came up with that idea... how? You work at Space-X? Or you've just read a couple press releases where he took credit for it? Elon has a long history of taking credit for other people's ideas. And I'm willing to bet whatever you'd like to risk that one of the engineers at Space-X suggested using stainless steel, not Elon.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  "Disaster" LOL. 0 injuries. That's how Spacex does it. Blow it up and iterate, and that's why they are decades ahead of the competition. So useless government bureaucrats, not Elon Musk, almost set them back a year over a stupid concrete launch pad.
  - tw04 2y ago
    LOL killing protected wildlife and destroying protected wetlands is funny! Government is useless and clean water is for betas! Tell me you’re an Elon apologist without telling me you’re an Elon apologist.
    - 2y ago

tjpnz 2y ago

>compete with incoming Chinese imports The current regime of tariffs and restrictions means they won't have to.

zarzavat 2y ago

> That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. What Musk understands is that technology is a moving target. You shoot for where it will be, not where it is now. Sometimes he's overoptimistic, however a robotaxi seems well timed. Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off. It takes years to manufacture a new vehicle type. When the Cybertruck was announced the SOTA in language models was GPT 2. Now we have multimodal conversational models with vision. By the time the robotaxi rolls off the production line, the software will be ready. And if the software is ready, then the model of owning cars will be disrupted for many people living in dense urban environments. The real risk is in not preparing for that eventuality, which is the same type of unpreparedness risk that the legacy launch industry is facing with Starship.

tivert 2y ago
> Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off. Because chatting and driving a car are two entirely different problems?
- glimshe 2y ago
  I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". I think people got desensitized, as they usually do, of how incredible GPT-4o looks like compared to what we had recently. We were going through a rough patch in technology where we hadn't come up with anything terribly exciting since the mobile revolution. AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > I read OP's message as also saying "this looked like science fiction just a couple of years ago". > ...AI is evolving quickly in many domains, so it's not a huge stretch to think we might make another order of magnitude improvement in self-driving cars. At least enough improvements to fully solve the robotaxi problem. But that's sloppy and fallacious reasoning, and there are literally thousands of examples of it failing in many different areas (including AI!) in recent and no-so-recent history. One example is SHRDLU, which led to similar excessive optimism back in the late 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU#Consequences. It's like someone with the fuzzy category "technology" interpreting the amazing advances in computer graphics over the 90s and 2000s to conclude we will be colonizing Mars soon.