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I have no faith in elon products for one simple reason: if you have talent you have options and if you have options, why would anything elon has tainted be anyw

I have no faith in elon products for one simple reason: if you have talent you have options and if you have options, why would anything elon has tainted be anywhere near the top? There was a time it was reasonable, early space x days for example, when elon was still managable, easily abstracted away and you were able to work with better funding and less red tape vs other options - but modern times i cannot see a reason one would work with elon unless desperate or in the cult, and lets be honest, you dont reason your way into joining cults.

roncesvalles 1y ago
Because the world has random error and not all incredibly talented people are correctly identified and picked up by the OpenAIs and Anthropics.
- Grimblewald 1y ago
  OpenAI isnt exactly a top choice anymore either.
abxyz 1y ago
A lot of (talented people in a field) are idiots / irrational in other parts of their life. A very talented engineer with options may buy in to Elon’s public vision (which sounds good on the surface) and may be completely incapable of recognizing when someone is betraying their vision. Very smart people get caught up in nonsense all the time.
- ActorNightly 1y ago
  If you consider actual intelligent people, this isn't true. Intelligence is about dealing with information and interpreting it in correct ways - what domain that information comes from, whether politics, social issues, or coding or engineering, is irrelevant. Most people really just DGAF about politics in US. The (few) smart people working for Elon are those who are really into whatever technology and just like to play with toys while getting paid. I used to work with such a dude a few jobs back in my aerospace days, guy was multi talented across both software and hardware, and could easily be making bank at Apple Amazon Google in one of their edge programs, but was content with getting paid like 80k a year in 2010s in a fairly high CoL area with an hour commute all because he got to play with a rather big UAV.
  - ml-anon 1y ago
    Ah the “no true Scotsman” of intelligence.
    - Grimblewald 1y ago
      There's a difference between being well read and being able to do something with what you've read. I would argue a far more useful and pragmatic definition of intelligence is one that focuses on, given the same information, a more intelligent person can achieve more with that information. In such a scenario, doing nothing if the information is bad is obviously more than what is achieved by acting on it. The idea, I guess, is that intelligence is about how you wield information, not what information you have. Being able to swim long distances unassisted is fairly called having high endurance. Doing so with all manner of aids, assistance, and pre-planned routes, is less impressive. So in a space of information, intelligence is like strength, or endurance. It allows one to defend, to change, to build, to create, especially in areas where others might be limited. So this is in no way a `no true Scotsman` fallacy. Being able to be well read is a product of having intelligent people in your society, people who make hard things accessible, make it learnable, but it does not itself make you intelligent.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    Surprisingly, to me anyway, is that Elon has a larger negative popularity in the US than Netanyahu. Even people who aren't politically aware think he's a jerk.
- bamboozled 1y ago
  I find while this is true, those talented people aren't very good at the long game, or building things in a sustainable way. Like most of the "brilliant" people I know that fit the profile you're describing, the usually build product in the same way they maintain relationships, chaotic.
nebula8804 1y ago
I spoke to SpaceX people at previous defcon and the answer was simple: Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team. If you are olympic class you only want to be working with those kinds of people. The mission didn't hurt either: Make life multi-planetary, electrify the world etc. Dont know how much of that has damaged itself post Trump. Seems like Tesla is losing a lot of top talent. Remains to be seen if SpaceX is falling off the wagon.
- reactordev 1y ago
  SpaceX is well insulated from Musk shenanigans. Its leadership team is fantastic and their engineering org, as you stated, is Olympic class. Single handedly keeping the space coast of Florida afloat.
  - ActorNightly 1y ago
    > is Olympic class Is that why their rockets keep exploding?
    - throw310822 1y ago
      No, it's why they outcompeted every other space company in the world, public and private, and still have the spare capacity to put in orbit a constellation of 7600 satellites, more than half of all the active satellites on Earth.
      - reactordev 1y ago
        No one else puts up a rocket about once a week. No one. :D
      - ActorNightly 1y ago
        Privatization of space is not really outcompeting - nobody was racing to build reusable launch vehicles. The cost is also not fully "turnkey" - if you overwork your employees, fail to pay your suppliers, rely on subsidies, then of course you are going to reduce your cost. And all of that happened before Musk fully lost his mind. Efficiency wise from pure physics, they would have been better off developing something similar to Scaled Composites. Air breathing is way more efficient to get to altitude, then you do a High Altitude Orbit insertion, and then do your vertical landing. For stuff like Starlink Satellites that are rather small, you have to do more launches but the cost of launch goes down significantly.

roncesvalles 1y ago

Because the world has random error and not all incredibly talented people are correctly identified and picked up by the OpenAIs and Anthropics.

Grimblewald 1y ago
OpenAI isnt exactly a top choice anymore either.

abxyz 1y ago

A lot of (talented people in a field) are idiots / irrational in other parts of their life. A very talented engineer with options may buy in to Elon’s public vision (which sounds good on the surface) and may be completely incapable of recognizing when someone is betraying their vision. Very smart people get caught up in nonsense all the time.

ActorNightly 1y ago
If you consider actual intelligent people, this isn't true. Intelligence is about dealing with information and interpreting it in correct ways - what domain that information comes from, whether politics, social issues, or coding or engineering, is irrelevant. Most people really just DGAF about politics in US. The (few) smart people working for Elon are those who are really into whatever technology and just like to play with toys while getting paid. I used to work with such a dude a few jobs back in my aerospace days, guy was multi talented across both software and hardware, and could easily be making bank at Apple Amazon Google in one of their edge programs, but was content with getting paid like 80k a year in 2010s in a fairly high CoL area with an hour commute all because he got to play with a rather big UAV.
- ml-anon 1y ago
  Ah the “no true Scotsman” of intelligence.
  - Grimblewald 1y ago
    There's a difference between being well read and being able to do something with what you've read. I would argue a far more useful and pragmatic definition of intelligence is one that focuses on, given the same information, a more intelligent person can achieve more with that information. In such a scenario, doing nothing if the information is bad is obviously more than what is achieved by acting on it. The idea, I guess, is that intelligence is about how you wield information, not what information you have. Being able to swim long distances unassisted is fairly called having high endurance. Doing so with all manner of aids, assistance, and pre-planned routes, is less impressive. So in a space of information, intelligence is like strength, or endurance. It allows one to defend, to change, to build, to create, especially in areas where others might be limited. So this is in no way a `no true Scotsman` fallacy. Being able to be well read is a product of having intelligent people in your society, people who make hard things accessible, make it learnable, but it does not itself make you intelligent.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Surprisingly, to me anyway, is that Elon has a larger negative popularity in the US than Netanyahu. Even people who aren't politically aware think he's a jerk.
bamboozled 1y ago
I find while this is true, those talented people aren't very good at the long game, or building things in a sustainable way. Like most of the "brilliant" people I know that fit the profile you're describing, the usually build product in the same way they maintain relationships, chaotic.

nebula8804 1y ago

I spoke to SpaceX people at previous defcon and the answer was simple: Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team. If you are olympic class you only want to be working with those kinds of people. The mission didn't hurt either: Make life multi-planetary, electrify the world etc. Dont know how much of that has damaged itself post Trump. Seems like Tesla is losing a lot of top talent. Remains to be seen if SpaceX is falling off the wagon.

reactordev 1y ago
SpaceX is well insulated from Musk shenanigans. Its leadership team is fantastic and their engineering org, as you stated, is Olympic class. Single handedly keeping the space coast of Florida afloat.
- ActorNightly 1y ago
  > is Olympic class Is that why their rockets keep exploding?
  - throw310822 1y ago
    No, it's why they outcompeted every other space company in the world, public and private, and still have the spare capacity to put in orbit a constellation of 7600 satellites, more than half of all the active satellites on Earth.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      No one else puts up a rocket about once a week. No one. :D
    - ActorNightly 1y ago
      Privatization of space is not really outcompeting - nobody was racing to build reusable launch vehicles. The cost is also not fully "turnkey" - if you overwork your employees, fail to pay your suppliers, rely on subsidies, then of course you are going to reduce your cost. And all of that happened before Musk fully lost his mind. Efficiency wise from pure physics, they would have been better off developing something similar to Scaled Composites. Air breathing is way more efficient to get to altitude, then you do a High Altitude Orbit insertion, and then do your vertical landing. For stuff like Starlink Satellites that are rather small, you have to do more launches but the cost of launch goes down significantly.