SpaceX has grown to 87% of the tonnage to orbit | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX has grown to 87% of the tonnage to orbit

twitter.com

61 pointsdelichon146 comments

Once StarShip becomes fully re-usable, that percentage will go closer to 100.

I'm excited to see how RocketLab's Neutron could maybe add a second real player. Somebody's gotta do something! But yes indeed, Starship being operational and reusbale will absolutely dominate.

We're looking at multiple Starship launches per day, right? Eventually. Each with far more mass-to-orbit capability than anybody else, and per launch. It's going to be 1,000x the rest of everyone combined.

We will need more useful metrics though. Many of Starship's tonnage to orbit will be fuel for other missions, and this will clutter the stats. Of course, tonnage-to-orbit will still be a metric. Even "useful tonnage to orbit" (which is even an Elon-touted metric I think) will be tainted by the large number of fuel launches (Which are useful of course, but not the same as active hardware).

Other than RocketLab/Neutron, realistically, what other competitors are there in reusibility for the next 10 years? Is BO going to burst on to the scene with a surprise cadence of useful orbital launches and flip the discussion a bit on strategy? - I mean, so far SpaceX is so ahead in the game based on their iterative development that any suggestion that BO has the right idea is falling flat. Clearly SpaceX has the right idea.

But gosh!! There's gotta be somebody! to compete. Neutron isn't even quite at F9 level - there is no Starship competitor at all AFAIK.

If Starship starts to work as advertised, everybody else except maybe Blue Origin (if New Glenn also works as advertised...) will be out of the business.

The government backed organizations will continue as well, but commercial launch providers will need to find billions of dollars to build competing platforms without being able to start small and build their way up like SpaceX did because small boosters will no longer be economically viable. Blue Origin might be able to pull it off since their backer has very deep pockets, but their track record so far is dogshit so I'm not betting on them.

> The government backed organizations will continue as well

Including SpaceX.

I'm talking about Arianespace/etc, SpaceX won't need the government to keep them from being pushed out of the business by themselves. ULA might be put onto life support just so the US government has a fallback. Alternatively, a forced ULA/Blue Origin merger could be viable.

I suppose you probably mean that SpaceX owes their success to government contracts, but the point I'm making is that nobody but SpaceX will be able to win contracts except through acts of charity motivated by national security. France and the EU will continue buying rockets from Arianespace even though those launches will cost orders of magnitude more, simply because they don't want to lose their domestic capabilities.

The Chinese will try to copy it eventually but there’s no other entity that can even compete once starship is up and running. The price per kg for LEO is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper than conventional rockets. Startups can’t compete and only a government can afford to waste money at that magnitude. In order to compete with starship you need to build a rival starship but it took 25 years and many many mistakes to get to where SpaceX is now and no one can afford that runway.

The reason NASA's attempt at a modern launch platform has had so many problems is because they were required to base everything off shuttle systems in order to keep congress happy. The shuttle, somewhat infamously, had parts from every single state in the country - which again was done to keep congress happy. It was a giant flying barrel of pork, and so is SLS.

Nothing like using fifty year old technology; the SLS is four shuttle engines bolted on to the bottom of the orbiter fuel tank, with orbiter solid rocket boosters...but because there are four engines, and the orbiter tank didn't have four engines worth of thrust under it, they've had to modify everything, and it still doesn't work properly.

It doesn't help that NASA has an institutional allergy to actually developing, or even using, new technologies.

Disposable LM5 looks already price competitive with F9 at $3000/kg. Good indicator PRC commercial space can drive down costs once they figure out reusables at scale. LM9 might rival Starship in 10 years. IMO, SpaceX delivered new capabilities, but it's still delivering them on TBF rookie American scale, rotating through 40 launch vehicles is really not that much. Once PRC figures out renewable then can probably do to space what they're doing to shipbuilding - explode into magnitude more capacity that can eclipse lifetime spaceX tonnages in a few years. Question is if there's enough demand for sending much payload into orbit outside of rolling out and sustaining mega constellations. SpaceX/US is ahead because they can secure developed country customers with more space demand. Worry is when payload to orbit is cheap, and there's no demand, then only thing that's left is using excess delivery to weaponize space.

Still IF I think rather than when. Some good progress has been made but a large number of critical technologies still need to be demonstrated and development is burning a lot of money.

The challenges they've had are easily surmountable with time and iteration. And SpaceX has a really healthy financial runway these days.

This is what happens when an industry is shaken out of a rut. I hope aviation is next. It is equally behind.

>I hope aviation is next. It is equally behind.

SpaceX took the launch market from a niche, almost artisan thing to something which actually does volume. There is no comparable improvement to be made in commercial aviation unless someone snaps their fingers and wills into existence both all the technologies and regulatory changes necessary to make flying cars work.

Bring the cost per craft mile down enough to enable everyone to have their own lounge space for current ticket prices, for example?

Almost 50% of the cost of flying is fuel. Then there's a bunch of fees on every airport the plane lands as well as costs for parking in that airport.

Airlines run on thin margins and junk fees.

Cost per craft mile comes down if we drastically reduce price of energy (no real jet fuel alternatives anytime soon) and build a ton of new airports with low regulation / low overhead costs.

Ruts are there because everywhere you look is worse than where you are at, but that just appears to be true because you are in, well, a rut.

I can think of a few ways aviation could break out of its rut. I originally thought the aviation rut would break because of autonomous or near autonomous aircraft enabling safe and more efficient small aircraft. That would have led to cheaper more personal travel and broken the hub and spoke nightmare system we have now. We would have gotten into a whole new optimal for aviation. The rut was too large though and getting to that level of automation isn't happening any time soon without some other massive change. I now think the thing that will do it is electric. Batteries are getting so much better along with electric motors and soon (a few years?) batteries will outpace JET-A enabling a massive shift to smaller, cheaper aviation. I think this push will be so strong that it will finally break the aviation rut. Whatever the eventual reason, and there will be a reason, when we get out of it we will see radical changes to the whole industry and we will look back, just like the space industry is now, and ask 'why did it take so long' and 'how did we do things so slowly/badly?'.

Here is a quick aside about ruts. I almost wrote up the math of this once. Ruts are caused by the algorithm we all use, linear regression. It is powerful and good at what it does. Assess, step, assess step. So simple and so powerful but totally misunderstood. In a fixed world if you throw a dart and use linear regression to find a better optimum you will almost always find a way better place than where the dart initially landed. But we don't live in a fixed world. In a dynamic world you still think you are selecting for optimality, but in reality you are selecting for stability. If the world keeps changing but where you are at is standing still then you are in a rut, a stable point. A rut is a local optimum where the walls are higher than your assessment vision and those walls, for whatever reason, don't get lower than your point even though the world is changing. If they did you would see the route out and take it. An algorithm to bust out of this is to double your step size every time you go back to your starting point. If you do this then eventually you will 'break out' and finally be able to find a new optimum that is likely way better than where you were at before. An interesting counter-intuitive consequence of all this is that the more visionary the industry, the bigger the eventual rut it will get caught in. Aviation, space, medicine have all been in massive ruts -because- the people in them are so smart and can see so far. When they finally got caught in their ruts those ruts were massive. The break out will be equally massive too (as we are seeing with space right now)

There is a lot of fun math behind ruts. I am surprised by how underdeveloped it is. One thing is sure though, aviation is in a deep one and when it does break out it will be amazing.

batteries will outpace JET-A

What is it you think that means?

Batteries aren't going to get 100-200 times better, so I guess it can't be energy density.

Electric has many advantages that make a direct comparison of jet-a vs battery a little hard. First, what is the overall weight of the fuel storage/support systems plus the mass associated with getting that fuel to the engines? What about the weight of the engines and all their support systems? How about how efficiently that energy can be turned into work? How efficiently can you place the engines? What about the efficiency that you can maintain in all flight regimes? What about the volume it takes to store it? How about the cost to refuel? What about the environmental advantages (not just air pollution but noise) Finally, what about the simplicity and safety of the design?

Conventional aircraft are barely improving in any of these areas while electric is rapidly improving in all of these areas. It may take a while for batteries to get the same energy density, but there is a good chance they won't need to even come all that close before the other advantages push electric ahead.

That's a lot of handwaving but the reality works out to jet fuel being orders of magnitude more efficient than batteries on the basis of how much of either you can get into an airplane and how far they will take you. One key factor is a load of jet fuel gets much lighter as you burn it, but batteries don't get lighter as you drain them.

One thing I have been thinking about for electric is how it may allow completely different flight possibilities that could leap ahead of what we have now. For example, extremely high altitude flight is a huge challenge for current aircraft on a number of fronts, but a big one is how do you design an engine that can produce power at extreme altitudes. The higher you go the more heat limited you are in a gas turbine engine. Electric doesn't have that issue so it may be able to push aircraft a lot higher which would enable faster/further travel for far less energy use. The energy density comparison is predicated on using that energy in exactly the same way with the same efficiencies. If long distance flight becomes 100x more efficient then the density difference isn't a problem.

Batteries will never get anywhere close to the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons.

We are already using the best potential chemistries and are a good long ways into optimizing the physical structure.

I wasn't clear, is this across all time or only over the lowest recent period?

this year

And it's even worse (in terms of lack of alternatives) than the headline suggests: The next two entities visible on the chart are the Chinese and Russian space agencies. Sanctions likely mean that most Western companies can't access at least the Russian capacity.

If you're looking at at least marginally Western-aligned or neutral countries, you have a Japanese and Indian company with ~1% of SpaceX's launch mass each, and everything after that, including ULA, is so small it's only visible on the inset zoom-in chart (together less than 1% of the entire mass).

An important data point - something like 60% of that number comes not from customers, but from their own Starlink.

Which has 3 million customers in 99 countries. Starlink is their retail department.

Is there any breakdown of what the total tonnage to space is used for? What % is exploration / research, telecommunications, surveillance/imaging, other?

Much of it is Starlink.

How much? And what are other companies putting in space?

I don't know. I'm sure someone has calculated it, but I don't have time to find updated numbers.

Check this out though: https://www.n2yo.com/

The most massive things up there are spent rocket upper stages + ISS.

The most numerous things are tiny debris.

The most numerous intentional things are Starlink satellites, by a large margin.

Yeah I was hoping the HN community could provide some insight there, because my searches came up fruitless.

One problem you'll find is that manifests are not completely public, and the mass of each item on the manifest isn't typically published either. We're left with estimates of individual satellites, and aggregate estimates based on rocket payload capacities.

I wish Elon abandons US culture wars, Tesla and focus on this.

Think about it, if (and this is a giant if) he successfully pushes humans to become multiplanetary species by colonizing Mars, he will objectively be the most important human being who has ever lived.

one reason that spacex has been so successful is because he isn’t getting in the way. he hired Gwynne Shotwell as the president and chief operating officer (COO). She runs a tight ship.

She doesn’t waste her weekdays posting on social media or getting bad press lol.

I agree that Gwynne should be getting more praise than she gets now.

But Elon is phenomenally good at getting from 0 to something that works. And colonizing Mars has many, many various needs beyond Starship that have never been done before.

my opinion is that Elon is fantastic at very early stage startups, like what SpaceX was years ago. I don’t think Elon is as helpful after a companies become more mature.

That’s why I worded my comment the way I did. :)

SpaceX is not at the early stages because LEO transport is not the destination, Mars colonization is. In that light, we're not even at fully reusable rockets yet and then there's making them cheap and reliable and then there's the actual transport of large amounts of stuff and people to Mars. That's what SpaceX is about, not lofting up com sats and astronauts. So, no, they are not mature yet except on one tech they need to get to Mars and that's being operationalized efficiently by Shotwell just fine. The rest of SpaceX's much harder work, still in its infancy.

I'm suspecting with popcorn in hand that this must have been a massive contributing factor for successful Tesla Shanghai spinup. He'd have zero control over anything.

No knock on Gwynne.. but they are executing HIS vision using HIS money with a company that HE started

agreed. he deserves a lot of credit for starting SpaceX and helping it be successful early on.

I’m just explaining (IMO) he’s not going to be very helpful getting them from “current day” to “land on mars”. I don’t want Elon to get too involved with day to day operations of SpaceX. It’s going VERY well without his micromanaging at the moment.

I understand your sentiment, but honestly at this point probably you should hope that Elon stays focused on culture wars, Xitter, and Tesla and leaves SpaceX alone.

Seriously, this is the correct take. None of the “Elon success stories” were his alone.

That's a tautological statement. No man is an army.

Yeah if he focuses too much on SpaceX you get things like him launching a Tesla roadster into space.

I agree with Buzz Aldrin that the exploration is better left outside corporate hands.

You do realise that when other space agencies have launched test rockets, they’ve loaded the cargo bay up with stuff like lumps of concrete? Launching the Roadster instead of a lump of concrete was entirely harmless fun.

As a partial representative of humanity (and Starlink customer) speaking, I'd rather we shoot the brick of concrete into space and avoid giving aliens poor impressions about the cars we build. That's just my opinion though, I've always been adverse to mass-market masturbation.

If the aliens are smart enough, they'd realise that the vehicle is clearly someone's unwanted garbage, which is pretty much exactly the case.

The original Roadster is the vehicle which Musk had the least technical involvement with, and which was severely laden with technical debt courtesy of Eberhard and Tarpenning. (Most crucially, the pointless and arguably counter-productive use of the Lotus shell.) This technical debt nearly sank Tesla from the start, which would have basically turned US$100 million of Musk's money into ash. I'm not surprised that Elon had no love for it and was happy to see it flung into space... and maybe explode.

The Lotus chassis may be counter-productive from a business standpoint, but it was also a beautiful and even poetic choice, representing a storied automotive legacy. Having one in space seems far better to me than almost any other lump they could have opted for.

SpaceX is where Elon spends the plurality of his time, and where he is having the most direct involvement /impact.

I don’t agree with some of Elon’s political takes, but I also don’t get especially freaked out or triggered by people who hold opinions I don’t agree with. And I’m not so stupid as to think that my opinion is better than someone else’s because I me and not them.

Yeah before turning into 2nd howard hughes, I hope he can.

1) one of the biggest reasons spacex is successful is because he rarely mucks with it.

2) colonizing mars is not serious and only truly foolish rubes think otherwise. Even the most hostile corners of the earth are orders of magnitude more approachable.

Even ignoring the culture wars stuff, with the decisions we've seen from him, I wish he'd step away from Space-X. I think it's only a matter of time before he pulls the same antics and boondoggles we've seen at his other companies.

> I wish he'd step away from Space-X

How much do you really know about his involvement with SpaceX if you don't even know what the company is called? Don't tell me that's a typo.

Starship is his initiative BTW, not Gwynne Shotwell's. It's funny how many concern trolls seem to assume otherwise because it seems to be going well.

I'm pretty convinced he only really cares about asteroid mining and colonizing mars is just marketing.

Building up the infrastructure for asteroid mining is really the only thing tying all his companies together.

- Boring company: we need to dig tunnels for mines

- Hyper loop: we need to move minerals and miners through the mines

- Satellite internet, electric vehicles, reusable rockets. This is all self explanatory.

Plus his family history of mining.

It kind of makes me wonder what Neuralink is about.

> It kind of makes me wonder what Neuralink is about.

Asteroid telepathy!

Riiiight.. so he can make even more money and be the richest person on earth..

Or… maybe he wants to do it for exactly the reasons he has stated so many times

If he's not worried about making more money why are the "approve Elon's compensation package" ads the only ads that Tesla has ever run?

If someone successfully mines an asteroid in our lifetime, it would probably make them a trillionaire. Not only is that a lot of money, it cements their place in history.

Teleoperated remote presence robots that can do the majority of what astronauts need to do and allow for experienced operators to do EVA manually if needed (due to crossover between mind and machine)

But also human cognition augmentation

Yeah this makes sense I think

The reason Elon is successful is because he doesn't give a crap about what you or half the country thinks. You can't have one without the other.

I don't see how we're really close to that objective, nor would it be a really pivotal accomplishment. NASA was ordered to shift plans away from Mars to the Moon during the Trump admin and even with their efforts plus sending billions to SpaceX, it's behind schedule by years. Putting humans on Mars is far more complicated and we're not even working on it right now. Doing so would be momentous, but it's not like Martians are ever going to be productive citizens. Mars would be 100% dependent on resources from Earth to even survive. And I don't think they'd credit the guy who they paid to build the rocket over the people who traveled.

I keep hearing that Elon Musk is a "fraud". He's about as far from a fraud as one could get.

yea getting tired of people confidently asserting their ignorant opinions about spacex and tesla based on ragebait headlines.

Musk has his faults, but most of his critics have nothing close to his risk-taking ability and grit.

It’s usually people who have hardly ever risked anything to start a business, nonetheless in a cutthroat industry.

If you gave most people $180 million, they’ll happily retire into the sunset, not invest it in very risky electric car and aerospace companies like Musk.

Once you have enough money for you and your children to live comfortably for the rest of your lives without lifting a finger, there is no risk whatsoever to spending whatever money you have left over. At no point was Elon Musk ever risking his comfort or the future of his family's financial well-being, unlike actual rags-to-riches entrepreneurs with skin in the game and actual consequences for failure.

This applies to every billionaire and millionaire, he risked a larger percentage of his wealth than 99% of them.

If you read his biography, he was at one point within 4 hours of being reduced to a net worth of about $100,000.

He risked everything he had.

He also came to this country with nothing but a suitcase, slept in youth hostels, and took sanitation jobs to support himself.

He's exactly the classic American self-made zillionaire industrialist.

It seems to correlate with reddit usage. Reddit is easily astroturfed to manufacture consensus, and there are plenty of people out there with an interest in turning people against SpaceX. Notably the CCP. If you chart tonnage to orbit by year, you'll see that China briefly overtook America before being absolutely eclipsed by SpaceX. Not much they can do about it either, but stoking domestic opposition to SpaceX is one thing they could do.

US politics propaganda.

I think a lot of the criticism is political. When you separate from that, Elon has had a profound impact on space and automotive. He isn't perfect and has certainly made many mistakes, but there isn't really anyone like him pushing technology forward like this.

If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons the work becomes corrupted, impure, and ultimately self destructive.

and if you do nothing or fail to execute for good reasons you do not matter

I don't think you understood what I was trying to express

He is doing the right thing, for the right reasons. He wants to preserve humanity’s existence into the future. EVERYTHING he does is driven by this

I have a bridge to sell you then

It's pretty funny, there was so much pent up demand for EVs that the one guy that actually did it not as a political stunt became a billionaire.

It's not like they didn't have a chance to either, they all developed EVs as side projects [1]. Some of which were incredibly loved by their leasers (?) [2].

[1]: https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/fsev/HistoryOfEl...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

Anybody could put batteries in a kit car and sell it. And people did, but they didn't make much of any money for it.

What Musk did is:

1. add regenerative braking

2. design the look of the car to be exciting

Those two things are the critical engineering innovations Musk did.

I think they say it for some other stuff that don't work as well, like Hyperloop or self driving cars.

I just used FSD yesterday. It works pretty damn well.

The marketing still over promises.

Show me a company that doesn’t over promise on their marketing.

Most of them don’t, go to a local pub some time. Some people misunderstand that companies use puffery like “The Best” specifically because it doesn’t mean anything. But you will rarely find someone make material statements that aren’t true, if an advert mentions the EPA rated gas’s mileage it’s going to be close.

Musk on the other hand has this odd issue of trying to overstate his accomplishments such as calling himself a founder of Tesla for some bizarre reason. I don’t know if imposter syndrome or what, but it’s been very detrimental for stockholders when he had Tesla rescue Solar City rather than letting it fail etc.

Making material statements about self driving was just dumb from a legal perspective compared to puffery, but hey it sold some cars and he’s not in prison so ehh it worked out.

Your argument has nothing to do with what we're discussing, you're just piling unrelated talking points. That's a classic red herring fallacy.

How Musk approaches marketing is directly relevant here in terms of Tesla and SpaceX.

He also materially over promised Starlink’s bandwidth for zero gain and meaningful legal risk. It’s a consistent pattern and worth remembering for both customers and investors. In 2020: “The speeds are still not as fast as what SpaceX originally claimed for the constellation, but they are slightly faster than what early user testing has shown.” https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/3/21419841/spacex-starlink-i... and in 2024 it’s still not there even if it’s a useful product anyway.

Not the founder? maybe read Walter Isaacson's book.

Stock graph shows Tesla stock had no material impact from the Solar City purchase, 90% of it's value coming after 2020. Today, Tesla energy and solar dominates the industry to the point where every installer offers Tesla Solar including the largest US installer Sunrun.

> Not the founder? maybe read Walter Isaacson's book.

The company was founded in July 1 2003, Musk didn’t even hear about the company until 2004. That’s a rather large gap to call someone a founder. But hey it’s an arbitrary distinction so feel free to disagree.

> Stock graph shows Tesla had no material impact from the Solar City Purchase

From the announcement of the purchase to its completion Tesla’s stock dropped ~20%.

Buying or creating a solar company in house made sense, over paying to bail out a relatives solar company he was involved with didn’t. Solar City was in 1.5 Billion dollars in debt, their business model was failing, and they had just laid off 20% of their workforce so yea Tesla shareholders got hosed.

Tesla was nothing but two guys, a name, an office, and an idea when Musk invested $6.5 million into it. They had no technology, no car, no money, no nothing. That makes Musk a founder.

No, that makes Musk one of two series A investors.

> two guys, a name, an office, and an idea

Add in the paperwork they filled out and we call those things companies. The entire point of incubators like Ycombinator is getting companies to a point where someone would make a significant investment, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright who joined a few months later pulled that first major hurdle off on their own.

If Musk had walked away they would’ve just kept looking because it was a very compelling investment as made clear by finding funding within a month of looking and the 1 million put up from a 3rd party.

Apple generally underpromises when it comes to perf per watt and battery usage, and then blows everything out of the water.

Regardless, that isn’t an argument worth making. Whataboutisms are silly.

Holding all companies to a similar standard isn’t whataboutism.

In my experience people shout “whataboutisms” when they’re trying to justify their own bias.

Really? Show me which marketing actually overpromises and doesn't tell you that it's a beta system, where you have actually sit, pay attention to the road and take over if needed.

How about the main feature on tesla.com/autopilot, a (faked) video still there from many years ago that starts with the text that the driver is there only for legal reasons?

But it tells you the driver is required.

And it's actually accurate. The driver is legally required, and it drives itself. Nobody said it drives perfectly.

But it's called "Full Self Driving", while not even being level 3.

And Apple is called Apple, but they make no apples.

Tim Cook is such a fraud! But Steve Jobs is like Jesus ;)

It drives on every street instead of just freeways, hence full self driving. And its amazing

Or cynically pump & dumping Dogecoin, or the Cybertruck rollout, or the cave rescue sub, or buying and maintaining Twitter, or not calling decent people pedophiles because he felt slighted.

Or pretending he had bigger parts in the development of companies which he actually bought after the work was done. Or selectively withdrawing Starlink access to entire regions on his own whims at critical moments. Or creating a special system to promote his own tweets above everyone elses.

Or covering up heinous and illegal animal abuse for Neuralink. Or setting us up for an ablation cascade. Or not paying rent in his offices. Or lying about his father's emerald mines in apartheid South Africa.

... I'm just saying - the anti-fraud he fuckin ain't.

Smells like EDS.. Elon Derangement Syndrome

Animal abuse?? Pray tell what happened Emerald mines? I thought that was debunked Starlink - I think he managed it extremely well.. and now there will be StarShield that our government controls Pretended - if it was all pretending, he wouldn’t be doing it over and over and over again.. he has made an incredible impact with these companies

Yes, extreme animal abuse. Knowingly covered up. [0]

Elon musk admitted his father owned a share in an apartheid emerald mine in a 2014 interview, an interview which has since been deleted without comment [1]. Kinda makes all the later denials look... Well, fraudulent.

"I thought that was debunked Starlink" - What? You gotta finish your sentences if you want to call people deranged bruh.

Kessler syndrome hasn't been debunked - ask Scientific American, or NASA. And he certainly did cut access to it during multiple crises, there's no shortage of sources for that.

> he has made an incredible impact with these companies

Certainly - but a lot of it is only spun to be positive and is in fact profoundly negative, if you think about it. Electric cars are not the way out of the energy crisis, public transportation is - which Musk has seemingly deliberately held back [2]. And the corporate takeover of space has been a dystopian sci-fi theme for a very, very long time.

> "Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it."

Lots of people get taken in by fraudsters. And you know what they do when the fraud is uncovered? Most often, they double down protecting the fraudster, often even lashing out at the messenger. Because admitting you got got is very hard on the ego. I believe in you electriclove - break your bubble.

0 - https://www.wired.com/story/neuralink-uc-davis-monkey-photos...

1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20140901222916/https://www.forbe...

2 - https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...

His father having "a share in an emerald mine" doesn't mean Elon used his father's money for his business ventures, and it doesn't mean the share was substantial.

The idea that Musk has single-handedly held back public transportation is funny. Musk has zero control over the California government that has failed multiple times in building high speed rail.

> His father having "a share in an emerald mine" doesn't mean Elon used his father's money for his business ventures, and it doesn't mean the share was substantial.

It doesn't, no. But it does mean that when he later claimed not to have anything to do with an emerald mine in apartheid SA, he was being knowingly fraudulent. And it takes no small effort to get articles taken down. If it weren't for the Internet Archive, there'd be no evidence he's lying when he says so.

In his own words [from 1 above, already linked]:

> This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”

Does that sound like something someone with an insubstantial share would do with their 15 year old? It's possible, I guess, and if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt on that you're welcome to. Seems naive though.

And the point wasn't that it got him his start, although it certainly didn't hurt. That's a strawman. The point was that Musk has denied having any part in an emerald mine since that interview to build his myth as an entirely self-made entrepreneur. Fraudulently.

> The idea that Musk has single-handedly held back public transportation is funny.

It sure is. Many people have had a part in driving America's infrastructure further into shambles, as they like things just as they are. Especially car makers. So hilarious.

However, if you read carefully over the thread so far, you'll see that no one actually made the claim that he "single-handedly" is responsible. Although, Musk himself seems happy to have had a part in it:

> As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

- [from 2, also linked above]

Or firing the whole supercharger team in an apparent tantrum, or killing the blue checkmark to turn it into a "revenue stream".

I love it when headlines distill complex decisions and/or power dynamics that happen within organizational structures down to a level tiktokers will understand, and then they run with that and assume they know better than the person who built the entire company. Or three. Pat yourself on the back.

FSD is one of the best in the business. It's close to Waymo's, but without LIDAR.

He never said Hyperloop was great, just that it was a good idea.

There's a mountain of assumptions in this tiny little comment, so let's try to separate them out.

1. Elon is 100% successful. ("As far as one could get")

2. "Fraud" means the opposite of success.

3. Elon is successful because SpaceX is successful.

4. SpaceX is successful because of the sheer tonnage of stuff they have thrown into space.

5. More stuff in space is better than less stuff in space.

Are any of these assumptions true? I wouldn't like to speculate, but I would at least claim that it's worth the debate.

Reputation damage through faux media is the cheapest form of information warfare. Many industries, and now days many world governments, have a deeply vested interest in Elon failing.

Please point to the portion of the rocket that was designed or manufactured by Elon Musk.

Testimonies from SpaceX's own employees show that Musk is a capricious and immature meddler whose presence is to be managed and deflected rather than welcomed. His documented cronyism and looting of Tesla with his ridiculous and petulant demands for tens of billions in bonus compensation while threatening to leave the company if he doesn't get his way show that he treats Tesla as his personal piggybank rather than offering anything tangible, other than alienating Tesla's core demographic via his ill-considered tweets. Meanwhile, here on this site, every programmer knew he was a fraud of a manager the moment he ordered Twitter employees to print out their most recent code so that he could determine who to fire.

If Elon Musk didn't want to be called a liar, maybe he should try telling fewer lies?

Twitter is running fine post-firings, and he saved a ton of money.

If Elon is so horrific at SpaceX, why is it the only space organization (including NASA) able to innovate and ship anymore?

You can dislike his personality, but criticizing his performance is silly.

Twitter dropped in value to just 25% of what it was. Racism and naziism are rampant, endless stream of bots pushing propaganda or porn, and has any advertiser actually come back?

This is more rhetoric driven by a personal dislike of someone vs. reality.

> Twitter dropped in value to just 25% of what it was.

It's a private company. You don't know the value.

> Racism and naziism are rampant, endless stream of bots pushing propaganda or porn

Maybe on your feed? Statistically, no.

> and has any advertiser actually come back?

Who knows. It's still running after firing anyone: that's the point.

Tesla was the first and still the only electric car player that matters.

Same with SpaceX and space.

Again: you can dislike Elon's personality or politics, but trying to attack his results is ridiculous.

Fidelity cut the valuation of its stake at Twitter by 72% [1].

Elmo himself unbanned the prominent whitesuppremacist and neonazi “Nick Fuentes”.[2]

Hate-speech has increased significantly [3], and of course the lying and hypocritical self-proclaimed stalwart of free speech threatens to silence researchers documenting this [4].

Of course these are not the only instances of Elon’s grotesque behaviour.

For example, the pathetic little boy thinks “cis” is an insult and had that coded into the platform. His platform has tons of documented cases where the platform selectively hides speech deemed against the in-groups he favours.

His platform also pushes the visibility of neonazis, bigots and white suprematists like catturd. He keeps inserting his worthless little tweets into my feed despite me blocking and muting him.

Kindly, stop licking the boot.

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/01/02/elon-musk-twitter-value-72-pe...

[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/05/03/elon-musk-nick-fuentes-x-ac...

[3] https://phys.org/news/2023-04-analysis-speech-significantly-...

[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/musk-threatens-to-sue-r...

Apparently you're still using X, despite loathing it?

Not really. News about all these come up on Reddit. I might open it once in a blue moon or if somebody sends me over there to read something supposedly interesting.

I love the fact that the comment with references is negative. Keep it classy HN.

> why is it the only space organization (including NASA) able to innovate and ship anymore

Willingness and the ability to try and fail.

They haven't really invented anything conceptually new, it's just NASA has to play politics to get it's funding.

They have lost interest in actually shipping things since they get paid to do nothing anyway.

Same happens in big organizations like IBM, Yahoo, and now Google. Urgency to deliver results is missing from a lot of orgs, especially the public sector.

> They haven't really invented anything conceptually new

Concepts are a dime a dozen. Making them work is where the real contribution lies.

Blue Origin doesn't have to, and had much more investment. Virgin, too.

It's not just SpaceX outperforming NASA, it's SpaceX outperforming everyone.

SpaceX critics often forget (or more likely, never knew in the first place) that Bezos-backed Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX. The way they describe it, any rocket company backed by a very rich guy would have been destined for SpaceX's success, but that clearly just isn't true.

Someone here collected statements from SpaceX employees and others like John Carmack and Jim Keller testifying to Musk's deep technical knowledge, involvement and position as chief engineer: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

You do realise that people can be capricious, immature, meddling, petulant, etc. while still being skilled engineers? This history of science and engineering is rife with people who were brilliant in some ways and childish and dishonest in others.

“capricious, immature, meddler, cronyism, looting, petulant, ill-considered, fraud, liar”

Ever consider you may have some bias against him?

I like to listen to the opinions of people that worked directly for him. Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy both have very positive things to say.

As I've gotten older I've realized the stunning difference between people's public personas and the experience of actually knowing them. They are, at best, loosely correlated.

As a rule most people, especially successful ones, are generally pleasant to interact with. They wouldn't be successful if they weren't.

There are some notable exceptions of course but as a rule: don't believe what you read about people and assume they're probably pretty pleasant to be around or work with.

There is no need to turn people into absolutes. He can be a genius in one industry and a fraud in another.

Which industry is he a fraud in though? You're implying it's tech I assume?

The self driving car industry.

Agreed on this. The "full self driving" moniker is absolutely over hyped and ridiculous. "We don't need lidar" also sounds quite silly.

Well, “fraud” was the OP’s word, not mine. In my mind it connotes something criminal and I’m not sure Musk has reached that bar. But I do think he’s some kind of a confidence man, trading on SpaceX’s reputation to project competence elsewhere where he simply doesn’t have it. Tech in particular, yes.

I think the tech criticism is kinda weird since he founded successful software companies before SpaceX. One of which gets used all the time to this day, although obviously PayPal has changed a bunch since then.

Like is it ridiculous to print code out to "review"? Obviously, yes, but a few stupid ideas doesn't make someone an outright fraud.

I'll note that here I'm using fraud as I believe OP was using it, to indicate that someone is pretending to be something or have some talent that they do not.

IDK, I find "fraud" to be a weird criticism in general for Elon. Like he seems like he's kinda a huge asshole and he's really bad at estimates.

People in general seem to want to criticize people they don't like on multiple angles and often don't care if the other angles are true at all as long as one is. That kind of thing really irks me.

Recall that Musk got fired from PayPal and his history there was not illustrious:

https://disconnect.blog/elon-musk-wants-to-relive-his-start/

You're failing to account for the most common cognitive bias on the entire internet which is : "People I agree with are smart. People I disagree with are stupid."

For most people, it is indeed a bias. For myself, however, it's the truth.

I reject your truth and replace it with my own.

Yup! People (even seemingly intelligent folks here) want to hate on the guy. Yeah, he can be a jerk sometimes.. but if you are denying the tremendous positive impact he is making with Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Twitter, Boring, etc.. please take a moment to consider that you may be suffering from Elon Derangement Syndrome

Agreed on SpaceX and partly on Tesla. What is his “tremendous positive impact” with Twitter and Boring? Not trying to argue, just curious if there’s something I don’t see.

Twitter - free speech Boring - no big impact yet but there is a possibility it could Neuralink - incredible potential to have a big impact

I like Musk's reincarnation of twitter. I didn't care much for the "sanitized for my protection" earlier version. I wish I could buy some stock in X, though I understand keeping it private to keep the scourge of activist investors out of it.

But the tv said I should hate him!

Some things he does seem to be fraud. Some things are not. What fraction is needed for one to be "a fraud"?

To clarify some of those things: Self driving car, Flying Tesla Roadster, "Funding secured"

It is hard to define what value Musk brought to his enterprises apart from capital and hype. I do not like or respect Musk but SpaceX are undeniably a world leading aerospace engineering company and very likely would still be if he wasn't associated with them in my opinion.

He is the main decision maker after all, and hires the other major ones, and exercises veto power. Is the success of the company really independent of those choices?

He certainly had an impact on Tesla's supercharger team. I know it goes against the prevailing mythology in the US of great men and visionary leaders but sometimes success or failure have more to do with the market and time. He did recruit a spectacular team for early SpaceX. For all I know he may have had some extraordinary talent for hiring or it might have been luck and a target rich environment. Either way the success of SpaceX was very real and greatly contributed to the mythos surrounding Musk.

> and very likely would still be if he wasn't associated with them

Not a chance. It would be worthwhile to read a biography of Musk.

> SpaceX are undeniably a world leading aerospace engineering company and very likely would still be if he wasn't associated with them in my opinion.

How much has Blue Origin put into orbit? They've had as much money and more time than SpaceX, but aren't lead by Elon Musk, and how do they compare today?

Blue Origin have been consistently disappointing. The leadership of Bezos and Bob Smith had a lot to do with their lack of achievement but that might change with Smith gone though they are still persisting with the stupid sub-orbital joy rides which will never be wildly profitable or lead to other things. BE-4 production still seems very slow which hasn't been good for ULA but there is at least signs of movement with New Glenn with a launch scheduled this year.

I do read books and I acknowledge Musk was a bit more than just the money man in early SpaceX. Perhaps I am too cynical but I think many people are prone to cults of personality and over-estimating the impact of individuals. SpaceX is well beyond being a founder's plaything. If they were truly dependent on Musk's micro-management they would have a very serious bus problem for an organization of their size and importance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com