I am for sure.
Wait what?
Given the volume of ads that litter my feed every several posts someone out there is paying to advertise.
yeah scale and efficiency. it’s like how simply adding an extra step of a “are you sure you want to retweet this?” check can massively decrease the spread of misinformation and bigotry.
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I met Fly irl, they aren’t the same person.
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It shows
Peter mentioned on either a 5-4 ep or an interview somewhere that he used to play online pokers and had a 2p2 account. To be clear, I don’t know if he ever set foot in the politics section.
Whoa
So… the test failure turns out to be not nearly as big of a deal as people convinced themselves it was, plus further confirmation that Elon is a skillful businessman?
So I had been harping that there doesn’t seem to be much about Musk’s business style unlike Bezos, Bill Gates, etc. I was looking though books on Amazon and spied
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger
And figured I would give it a shot. It’s a bit too hagiographic in a sense. Any time Musk does something stupid it’s explained away, but not in a Great Leader kind of way, just his side is always given weight when it really shouldn’t. For instance, he busted into mission control right when they were counting down to launch the first rocket to yell at the mission leader about some shipment of aluminum for another rocket line in development. The mission leader yells at him to GTFO they’re about to launch their first ever rocket. The author is then like “Well that’s Elon. Always thinking about the future and on a time crunch”, and I was like “I mean yea maybe, but he could wait like an hour or two”.
Anyways, SpaceX truly did amazing things. He basically went into an extremely capital intensive field that’s dominated by a cartel and within 6 years built a rocket that achieved orbit that was cheaper than any other rocket, by a magnitude. It wasn’t some clear sky revelation that that was the path to go, plenty of other companies had attempted to do the same thing, but they all failed either by never achieving orbit or by going bankrupt before they could.
So how was Musk’s leadership that allowed him to do that? Well the book is a bit more circumspect on that because in spite of having access to Musk and Musk’s name in the title, he only pops in and out of the book, it’s mostly about the engineers that did it. But from what I gather is his leadership style is very much a start up mentality. He hired the right people, those right people had the passion to achieve the goal and put in some extremely long hours to do it and he had a strong vision that he constantly and intently focused on.
They constantly mention that he was a hands on owner, with him sitting in on the engineering missions, making strategic decisions, etc. They never mention him making a straight up engineering decision though. I only mention that because, in the book, he’s constantly bragging that he’s an engineer, has a engineer’s mindset, that Jeff Bezos isn’t an engineer. In any case by all accounts he’s an active leader who needs to be the CEO, but he seems to do best when it’s a small company. He doesn’t seem to deal well with the inevitable bureaucratization that comes in when you’re no longer a small start up.
For Twitter that does explain why he immediately axed a large amount of the company. He either wants to get back to that start up mentality or like with SpaceX feels like the companies are bloated and could really operate on a much smaller headcount or both. (or, you know, save money because the company was bought at an extremely steep price)
Where I think Twitter differs from SpaceX is one it’s not a small start up. It’s one thing to create a new company, it’s another to take a large incumbent company and try and make it a start up. Would Musk have succeeded if somehow he were made CEO of Lockheed Martin? I don’t think so. I also think that there’s a personal involvement that didn’t exist with Tesla and SpaceX. Both of those companies he created ex nihilio to do what he wanted. He was on Twitter long before he bought it and so emotion might be clouding his judgement. No one had to force him to buy Tesla.
In any case, building two companies from (nearly) scratch in two of the hardest industries isn’t anything to sniff at and it’s highly unlikely that it was purely luck that did it.
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Gotta be dids imo
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I reviewed the tape:
April 22: After the 4/20 launch attempt, Elon says next launch is in 1-2 months.
May 26: One month after his prior prediction, he now says it will be another two months.
August 4: Over two months after saying it would be two months more, he says they’re preparing a launch but doesn’t give even an approximate date.
Now: The pattern of Elon’s statements is not promising but there is at least one solid bit of information. The US Coast Guard published a notice of rocket launching activities east of Brownsville for August 31.
I don’t think a launch attempt will actually occur on that date unless they plan to fly without a license. More likely, Elon will claim they were ready to go but the damn regulators stopped them. So something like the cage match: Elon was willing but Z was too afraid of the X-man.
Ronan Farrow
Current and former officials from nasa , the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official.
Maybe he’ll get that launch license after all.
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I’m ready to nationalize SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.
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After reading that article, I don’t know what the remedy is but Elon is a goddamn menace.
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I’d agree that 8/31 is not likely for a launch, but SpaceX has submitted their formal incident report to the FAA about a week ago with their analysis of the last launch and any fixes they either have or need to make prior to the next attempt. It obviously remains to be seen whether the FAA will accept their report and mitigations, but typically they rely on the launch providers for these technical details so I’d expect they’ll have their license amended before too long. September seems reasonable imo.
Not that much new here, but Bridenstine’s comments were pretty 
. Was he drunk when he did this interview or something?
“At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”
This was the guy who was in charge of putting astronauts on Elon’s rockets!
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The remedy is for Elon to OceanGate himself with a rocket.
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“Oceangate, may I have the language of origin?”
“English.”
“Oceangate, can you use it in a sentence?”
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It took SpaceX four months to compile and submit its mishap report. It does not seem reasonable to me that the FAA can review the report, evaluate changes SpaceX has made, consider additional measures, make recommendations, and allowing for back and forth, issue a license all within a few weeks. This with a lawsuit hanging over them. Is September possible? Sure. Especially since, if you read that Ronan Farrow piece, Elon doesn’t feel he needs an FAA license.
There’s a lot we can’t see as casual outside observers but aside from the regulatory stuff, it’s also unclear whether or not SpaceX has adequately addressed all of the technical issues that came up in April. Imo they most likely haven’t.
Maybe none of this matters. But Elon screwed up in April. I don’t think he should be awarded a triumph if he manages to escape any significant consequence.