Elon Musk: I, for one, welcome our new pasty overlord

So basically he has money. That’s his talent: he pays people to do amazing work for him. Dude may be a drug-addled Nazi idiot, but you gotta hand it to him, he has money.

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I know it sort of isn’t how anyone really likes to get down these days but it’s possible for both Elmo to be a dingleberry and SpaceX to be good at space stuff.

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So starting a company is just luck, nothing else. The only reason others failed or didn’t even try is because they are not lucky enough or didn’t have the money. Actually we live in a deterministic world and nothing really matters. It is all predetermined like a rock rolling down a hill.

What is it he does, though? When we say he “hires the right people,” is he drawing upon his deep knowledge of the aerospace industry or does he simply hire a hiring manager to do that for him? Aside from bringing in raw capital, what exactly does Elon do here?

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Based upon Elon’s well documented idiocy in several areas, I’m going to need some serious evidence before I conclude that any successes of SpaceX occur because of his leadership and not in spite of his leadership.

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Nah dude. White man has success, white man responsible for success

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IMG_6109

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Huh? You’re giving him credit for creating an idea, ignoring that he didn’t create the idea, and he probably adopted that idea out of dumb luck rather than a special insight

“He deserves credit for starting a business”

This is cult talk

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Couldn’t you say this about Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple? Do you think he personally engineered or designed the iPod?

There’s such a thing as strategic direction in companies, and it’s not as easy as it looks, it is also not the same thing as intelligence. I used to work for a guy who was an asshole and dumb as rocks, but he had also founded and sold three companies. I came to appreciate that there’s a skillset there.

It’s easy to be reductive about any job with an intangible skillset. Why do sales guys get paid so much? I mean the job is just talking to people and describing the products, I could do that.

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Like when people post pictures of the Cybertruck everyone is like “hur hur Elon so dumb” like it’s obviously his personal creation and then when we discuss any success his companies enjoy it’s back to “wait what does this guy even do”. I’m going to need people to pick one.

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Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Jensen Huang, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Henry Ford etc. were all just lucky. That is all you need to start a successful company. A bit of luck and a bit of money.

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He’s no Tyler Perry

So maybe it’s a language issue

“Get credit for” is like if the scorekeeper in baseball gives the win to a pitcher, or in another sport gives an assist, or the dealer awards you the pot

But we’re talking about does the analytics show a value over replacement, or is there any predictive value going forward. We are talking about FIP, not ERA. Or we are talking about third order wins, not Pythagorean wins (which are second-order and based on run differential)

What is the data that shows this dude was more than a broken clock? Because we have plenty of data regarding him being idiotic. But some of y’all seem to think there’s some kind of sample size where there isn’t, like you’ve got the units way wrong. You think it’s days the business has been open or some shit. The business is just one hand, man

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The cult of Elon is very real. Had a flatmate who was completely normal in all other capacities but once the topic shifted to Elon, his eyes changed. It was as though he was talking about a God.

This is closer to the truth than you were before.

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Not just luck and money, being a sociopath with an unquenchable thirst for power and wealth and zero regard for other humans (they are just “NPCs” after all) also helps.

Sprinkle in some charisma to mask your sociopathy and its winner, winner chicken dinner.

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He hired all the leadership directly and then sat with them as they hired their subordinates. From there it was the leadership and down the org chart hiring, but he did all the hiring for the first generation. A lot of it, like a lot of start ups, were networking effects where he hired someone prestigious, and they suggested brining X and Y on, and Elon would interview them and hire them.

You are making a lot out of an issue with a single launch that hasn’t even had its FAA accident report published.

Maybe, but

So far all that was found is that not using a deluge system caused a lot of sand to be blasted all over the place.

is not true, according to the environmental groups that filed a lawsuit.

But let’s say you’re right, and all that happened was some hicks had to wash their cars, some birds got fried, and a beach got littered with chunks of concrete. So what? And say the regulators didn’t strictly do their job wrt impact statements and whatever. Big deal. Maybe getting Starship going is more important than any of that. But how far are you willing to go? Remember, Elon is already deciding who lives and who dies in real-time.

And not using a deluge system was not even as dumb as everyone with 20/20 hindsight now claims.

It was obvious at the time. And Elon knew it was a bad decision. At least by his estimate, it would not have taken longer than 1-2 months to put it in. He didn’t want to wait. That plus the lol factor was enough for him to risk it. But now, over 4 months later, he still doesn’t know when he’s going to be able to fly again. And it could be a lot longer. That’s on him.

As for Elon giving hugely optimistic launch dates. That is nothing new either. Artemis gets its dates pushed all the time and is not even using new technology. ULA kept announcing Vulcan launches that never happen and is now delayed indefinitely.

Yeah, that’s part of the game. But we’re on the 5th iteration of Elon announcing an imminent launch just since 4/20. And his fans actually take him seriously. A week ago they were expecting a launch at the end of the month. That’s religious cult shit.

Elon is a problem these days but he got the right people together for SpaceX which is doing things the entire space industry at that time said was foolish and impossible. He deserves credit for that no matter what dumb shit he says and does these days.

I don’t think it’s true that everyone was saying that kind of thing. Competitors sure, but what do you expect? On the other hand, Congress was pushing for privatization and limited FAA regulation of the industry. There were other startups; somebody had to believe in them.

Maybe I don’t give SpaceX enough credit. They didn’t even exist when I was in the industry, now they’re Big Rocket. They made some big bets and won, good for them. But Elon is a dangerous clown. He should be out.

If Twitter is down but people can’t report it being down on Twitter, is it really down? Quite the paradoX

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