It was a disappointing turn from someone who could lead with vision to a billionaire troll that shows signs of what looks like depression to me. He's slowly sliding off the deep end.
In doing so he’s not only following the footsteps of polarizing figures like the previous president or Kanye West. There’s no shortage of such figures in tech, from pmarca to pg. Becoming a pontificating blowhard is practically a rite of advancement these days. The only difference is the degree of detached-from-reality contrarianism and level of politeness in tone.
The difference is that instead of a TV network exploiting the crazy for profit, the lunatics are now fully in control.
It's truly something that Elon went from calling a rescue diver a "pedo", spreading dangerous covid misinformation, and generally doing everything a normal person would get banned from twitter for to becoming a board member. But I'm not surprised.
How can you watch this drone video of Giga Berlin and not be impressed and inspired?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-4yOx1CnXE
Or inspired by what SpaceX is accomplishing? None of this would exist if he hadn't invested all his Paypal earnings and time over the past 20 years into them. He could have retired and burned it on a yacht instead.
Aside from the nifty drone work, it looks no different from the Toyota and Corvette plants I toured 20+ years ago as a child.
Also, what about leaving space up for NASA, instead of funneling away government funds from it to a private company? How is that even okay?
Because NASA is a civilian agency, not military, contracting operations out to commercial companies is the next logical step, just like the government hires commercial air travel, shipping, and ground transportation.
We've spent much of the past 50 years since Apollo funneling money into aerospace giants like Boeing with very little to show for it in terms of efficiency. When SpaceX entered the launch market, the US was not particularly competitive with the rest of the world for commercial launches, Boeing and Lockheed had a duopoly and had grown fat on government money, with no serious desire to improve their rockets. Even today, we're at $80B+ invested into SLS+Orion to be years late and only capable of launching once per year at nearly $5B per launch.
Meanwhile, SpaceX earned nearly 60% of the commercial launch market on the back of its significantly lower launch prices, has returned US human spaceflight capability for much less cost than the competition (who still haven't delivered), has been responsible for paving the way for all the other 'new space' startups (setting legal precedents and getting entrepreneurs interested) and has allowed NASA to do more on several missions due to much cheaper launch costs, for instance:
- DART did not have to rideshare due to Falcon 9's dedicated launch price being lower than competition's shared price, eliminating the possibility of failure in case the new ion thruster design on it had issues
- Europa Clipper will not have to spend an extra $1B to make its delicate instruments able to handle SLS's rough ride and will not have to budget an additional $2B for an SLS launch
- Saving NASA the ~$4B extra that the less capable, more dangerous but more 'traditional' lunar lander design would've cost to make.
Then add in that due to Soyuz becoming unavailable and pretty much all other western rockets in the same payload class being fully booked and in a transition phase to their next generation, Falcon 9 is saving the US a massive amount of government money that would have otherwise been funneled to companies like Boeing in another 'blank check' type project like SLS.
Even considering future developments, as a direct result of their success with SpaceX, there's a big push from within NASA for future contracts for things like rockets and space stations to be fixed cost and partially commercially funded (with the hope that eventually these will be mostly commercially driven, where NASA only has to pay to be a tenant instead of paying for the entire thing from start to finish), again improving the cost effectiveness of space activity.
Specifically about Gigafactory, I too was awestruck when I watched Tesla's assembly line for the first time. Only later did I learn that's how most of the cars are manufactured now a days.
Volvo assembly line for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T5TKzyv_ds
I think Elon's Twitter investment, in capital and his own personal time, is stupid in the basic way that he has genuinely vastly more valuable (by his own words) things to do with both. At the same time the products that his vision, luck, and perhaps some level of madness have helped bring into being have directly improved my own life, the lives of a number of clients, and I believe the world. That's far more than most of us can say. And he didn't have to do it at all. As sibling comment points out, he made a solid fortune before SpaceX and Tesla, and could have done a range of other things that most rich people do. Both new startups were very risky endeavors, and very capital intensive very risky endeavors not just software. The classic kind where someone well off loses everything. A hundred someodd million is in one sense a lot of money, but it's not the money where one can just spend billions as a hobby. Those startups' resounding success shouldn't result in 20/20 hindsight white washing that, he was on the brink a number of times and some pride he feels over it is flat out justified.
So sure it's too bad those same instincts and untempered self-confidence seem to result in self-destructive/counter productive tendencies in some spheres. But he has in fact earned it and it doesn't require any kind of "fanboy" thinking to objectively conclude based on his impact on my life and society that between what he apparently says sometimes on social media vs on the ground hard achievements the balance is tipped firmly towards the latter. I much prefer that to the scary "quiet" "civilized" rich barons who quietly, politely and out of the lime light go about their business of fucking us all over with pollution and corruption.
One small thing though, even though funding startups was risky, I don’t believe it is entirely fair to reward this risk-seeking behavior as it is pure luck in a very significant percentage. Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.
Thank you as well. I can certainly understand not liking some of his public stream of consciousness stuff. There is a definite impulsive streak there, and a bunch of other stuff that I'm not going to join the list of armchair psychoanalysts in going over but yeah. At the same time though I observe some odd group social effects that happens with regards to him and others like him, a "nails that stick up get hammered down" sort of thing. Comparing amount of press and dislike Musk has gotten in the West over the last decade and change he really entered the public consciousness vs, say, Putin up until a few months ago is enlightening. Or a host of other dictators/wannabes worldwide. Or fossil fuel CEOs and the like at American majors, whom I highly doubt most of the population can even name a single one of. Or CEOs/etc fighting rear guard actions against getting rid of lead or repairing infrastructure or a thousand other key things because it would be against their immediate personal financial interests. The world is full of rich folks who are not merely parasites but monsters, yet have a fraction of the virtual angst spilled over them vs Musk doing some silly thing on twitter. It's worth checking our impulses there I guess, what humans focus a lot on is definitely not always rational. Who irks us in some specific fashion or tugs our strings isn't necessarily the same as who smoothly and slowly slides knives in our collective backs, smiling self-deprecatingly and offering refreshments the whole time.
>One small thing though, even though funding startups was risky, I don’t believe it is entirely fair to reward this risk-seeking behavior as it is pure luck in a very significant percentage. Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.
With apologies, but I don't agree fully with either part of this. First, while luck certainly played a role in Musk's trajectory, serious hard work, intelligence, vision and ability to gather around other even smarter people was critical too. Like much of HN I've been part of a few startups (zero home runs though some cool tech in one case), and doing one is never easy and most fail. Having lots of money to start can make some aspects easier but certainly not remotely a guarantee either as we can see from a stream of unicorn failures. There has to be some "there" there, real substance. And sometimes having lots of money to start can be outright poisonous if it means nobody ever feels any real pressure. For a direct SpaceX corollary consider the case of Blue Origin. Older than SpaceX. Has unlimited backing and has spent billions as well. Literally has never even once gotten something to orbit. Nothing. Not even an engine for somebody else's rocket. Bezos' backing may well in some ways have been a liability, it's allowed BO to act like a lazy unproductive Old Space company despite having zero revenue stream. They haven't needed to do the desperate hustle and focus that SpaceX did. They also didn't have an productively and intimately interested founder/leader. It shows.
Musk was key to making X.com and then the joining with PayPal work. And it can't be said those were just wasting money on something silly either, for all its massive disappointments the online payment thing was a big deal and fully viable as real business. It wasn't just luck. And even if it was, you're still being too blasé in your follow up analogy:
>Otherwise we should also congratulate lottery winners for their grand risk-taking behavior.
If someone won the lottery and then, rather then live on those winnings in luxury, turned around and sunk it all into two enormously capital intensive (orders of magnitude more than their winnings) ventures attempting to completely disrupt THREE entirely different massively entrenched global government/megacorp industries (orbital spaceflight, mechanized land transport, and the whole fossil fuel industry) to the benefit of all humanity with things along the way like creating a new player in the global information network industry that specifically was tuned to serve the most left behind, and then succeeded? Yes we can congratulate said lottery winner at that point right?
So Tesla and SpaceX were in no way "luck in a very significant percentage". There were very fundamental strengths there and huge holes being ignored. There was risk in how it would all come together, but the engineering was very good, Musk was deeply involved in that according to those on the ground floor, and they weren't trying to do something physically impossible at all. The vision and guts to see that through, the risk to go up against established lobbying to do it, even the hustle to get others to buy into it, is all a worthy accomplishment. There isn't any need to put any asterisks next to that just because he also says stupid shit or does silly things as well. Not even dangerously stupid things like his dumb stubborn insistence on doing autonomous driving with just cameras (because 'that's what humans do'). If he died tomorrow he still would have played a major role in seriously changing the world for the better.
But you are right, it is not 100% luck to discover a business opportunity for sure (but it is still more luck than we often attribute to it — there have been studies done on it and successful people often overattribute their cleverness and other skills over sheer dumb luck and being at a good place at a good time)
I suspect you probably mean more severe “consequences” though.
Would you mind sharing some? Maybe seeing outside my own bubble here will lessen my cynicism
Are these mutually exclusive? My model is that he's picked up trolling as a hobby, but I don't understand the impulse to assume that it's changed his job performance.
No, my impression is that he is a very loud shareholder spending his days spewing stupid things on twitter.