ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
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User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
What's interesting in this thread is how esteemed the concepts like 'counterculture', 'rebellion', 'new punk' and so on are.
Between a lot of people here having their roots in the left, and appreciation for fighting for what's right, regardless of societal pushback, probably being a universal quality, how is that interesting at all?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
You want to send Palestinians to Argentina?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Most of your analysis is based on economic performance and your negative opinion of how he runs his business even though he has been very successful.
Not quite. My analysis is that claims of Musk's greatness are based on his promises of delivering revolutionary new technologies that will change the world, and I'm saying these technologies are never going to be delivered. There will be no self-driving, robo-taxis, semis, bipedal robots doing manual labor for us, revolutionary new batteries, manned missions to Mars or the Moon. All of these things would make him a great man, if he managed to deliver, but he is not going to. This will also have financial consequences, because the stuff he might deliver is not going to be enough to sustain his companies, and as a result they will crash.
Apologies for the financial emphasis, but the last time I was in a conversation about Musk, someone literally made the opposite argument: "who cares the tech he's promising is hype, look at how much his companies are worth!"
Frankly, since this is the culture war thread, why should I really particularly care about the fact that the guy is not the business Messiah? I
I can tell you why I care: because for some reason Musk is the face of letting techies think outside the box and do whatever they want, and if he crashes we are going to see an unending stream of arguments telling us they gave us a chance, and we have to "color inside the lines" now.
I don't think there are that many blind Elon fanboys here.
I literally just got "but have you considered space mining" as a response.
Well, I didn't bother to read their financial statements,
Even if you bothered to, you can't. It's a private company.
What I know is that Space X is highly innovative and even the American goverment rely on them in regards to part of what they are doing. Or with technology like Starlink.
Ok, cool. On the other hand he has a contract to help NASA go back to the Moon, and I'm nearly certain he's going to fail. All the little and big things that the failure resulted from is going to be talked about non-stop, and anyone whoever believed in Elon is going to be subjected to a non-stop shaming campaign. I'm here to tell you you still have time to get off the Musk hype-train.
Your analysis is more like what a random individual who made some research on the issue would provide when trying to suggest whether we should, or shouldn't buy shares on Elon's companies.
No, I don't care about shares. I mean, yeah you probably shouldn't buy, but that's irrelevant. I'm telling you that anyone circling the wagons around Musk will end up in about a similarly humiliating position, as people trying to sell "gender-affirming care" for children.
Anyway, the important thing is the influence of buying twitter, not whether it is profitable for Musk.
I agree, but I'm afraid he's going to be ousted, if his companies come crashing down around him. The relative freedom we are enjoying right now might end up being very brief.
By those metrics Musk should be judged
I think he should be judged by the promises he's making, and whether or not he can deliver on them. Also on whether or not his companies crash.
It is weird, to see this common judgement of Musk based on that when nobody judges Soros or Singer or some of the EA donors massively donating to the Democrats only by those metrics.
He's being judged by the same metrics as Elizabeth Holmes or Trevor Milton, I don't think that's weird.
re SpaceX one thing you leave out as a potential economic case is space mining. Could be insanely valuable.
This goes directly into the big bag of wild ideas the might happen sometime in the future, that could be insanely valuable, and are never delivered. Can he please deliver on any of the other wild insanely valuable things he promised, before we entertain this? Can he at least do ship-to-ship refueling first?
Also most financial analysts value Starlink quite highly. Maybe you are missing something they are not.
Maybe, but then again, maybe not. I'm not one for "trust the experts" type arguments. It's not like there isn't a long history of eggs ending up on financial analysts' faces, in my short time on this planet alone.
is to attract talented young engineers in spades who will work overtime for sub-market rates.
And how long do you think that's going to last? As a techie, I can tell you techies can indeed accept overtime and submarket wages, but they want to actually build stuff. They want to point at the cool thing everybody is going crazy about, and be able to say "I built that". When they catch on you're dealing with vaporware, they're probably not gonna sign up, and definitely not for a sub-market wage. How long do you think they'll keep signing on when they hear you can get fired from one day to the next, like what's happening at Tesla?
Even at the boring company,
It's another meme. My post was already long so I didn't go into it. The company that wants to revolutionize the world with cheap tunnels makes tunnels that aren't cheap.
Even if most of his ideas fail, it seems like all the talent he has working there should be able to make something worthwhile. It turns out that young engineers really want to work on sci-fi hardware, not manipulating data to sell ads.
Well, another issue he has is that even when he attracts talented people, he doesn't seem to listen to them. Listen to this Twitter space with George Hotz. Hotz sounds like exactly the kind of guy that Elon should hang on to for dear life, but what happened is that Hotz's ideas were ignored (probably for financial reasons), and he left after a few months.
SpaceX specifically might pay off if it can land a big military contract. Get the government to pay him an oversized for providing a service that no one else can do.
I kind of have the idea this might already be happening with Starlink, behind the scenes, but I'm not sure it's enough to keep the lights on in perpetuity. But the whole problem with SpaceX is that it's pretty opaque, so who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
Twitter wasn't meant to be a profitable business.
Tell that to the people who gave him $10 billion in loans to buy it.
He kicked a four digit number of problem employees and greatly improved free speach on the global public square. That is a major achievement.
Yes, which is why I put it at the top, as the least problematic of his companies. If he could do that after winning Twitter in a lottery, and not having to pay for it, or if there was no advertiser boycott in response, I'd say things have gone quite well for him.
SpaceX has been the most successful rocket program since the 60s. F9/FH, the dragon capsule have been true game changers.
I guess this is another part of the Motte and Bailey that I mentioned - the things he already did already were revolutionary. Ok, cool. Show me how it's paying for their bills, though.
Starship is a complete paradigm shift
No, it is not. Maybe it will be one day. This is the thing that drives me a bit nuts in discussions about Elon, people are acting like he already achieved what he promised.
The other problem is that "the paradigm", such as it is, falls apart after you want to do anything beyond LEO. 15 refuelling launches to get 1 rocket to the moon is a little bit excessive, wouldn't you say?
They made sci fi tech happen
What they did was cool, but not mind-blowing. It's not even clear there's much benefit to reusability. In either case, again, show me how that will satisfy the investors.
Starlink is almost profitable as is and has 50% growth per year
Can you give a link to breakdown of their numbers? I'd be interested in seeing that.
Growth in itself doesn't necessarily mean much, if you have to keep launching satellites to expand service.
While starship will take several years to get operational it unlocks a giant market as it allows regular cell phone users to send text messages globally and use basic services everywhere in the world.
But... most people don't go around to "anywhere in the world", they tend to stick to their local population hub. Their phones tend to already have perfectly fine Internet access, and when they don't, and need a satellite connection, it's not exactly clear why they would be willing to pay more just to get their latency a bit lower.
The launch market has a shortage and the demand is greater than supply.
Again, any links will be appreciated.
The legacy manufacturers don't have anywhere near the experience with electric cars
This is only a problem, if we're all going to switch to electric cars. I can already tell you I don't want to. The EU played with the idea of forcing people to switch, but even if they go through with it, the Chinese are providing perfectly fine alternatives.
Tesla was one of the biggest things to happen to the car industry in decades.
Teslas are still a rarity, and it's not clear how long they will stick around. Their sales numbers have gone down, and they have competition now, so even if electric cars will stay, it's not clear that people will keep buying Teslas.
Musk became obscenely rich from it.
Yeah, through people buying meme-stocks on the back of wild promises he never fulfilled. Do you think people will see "but Musk got rich from it" as an argument in Elon's favor, if Tesla crashes with no sign of semis, self-driving, robo-taxis, bipedal robots, or revolutionary new batteries?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses.
Yes! I wanted to bring it up in this comment but it ended up slipping my mind. This discussion is useful in figuring out where Elon's strengths and weaknesses are. Like you said, from the replies it seems like Falcon 9 and Starlink are his strong points.
Is there an effective way to "short" him? What's the benefit to doing so
Well, the only "short" I'd urge people to do is to avoid falling on any swords for the guy. He (rightfully) won a lot of goodwill with his takeover of Twitter, but I'm worried people are too defensive of him. It might all be very silly in the end, I doubt preventing the establishment to have a gotcha on the contrarians will work, even if it's achievable... but, I dunno, I feel like this will end up being a pretty big egg on some people's faces.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
I recognize this as a valid comeback, but I think their patience has limits. Politically the blob has turned against him. so the moment they find an alternative the gets ejected. This is why I think the EscaPADE mission is potentially the mark when the tide turns for him.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
I'd be interested in his answer too, but the basic case is pretty simple: being a part of that subculture puts you at risk of exclusion from polite society, therefore it's a counterculture. Calling it "the true" counterculture might be going to far, I'm sure there's plenty of other groups that can lay claim to being countercultural, but this one's by far the biggest.
Not necessarily. I had a comment about this, but I think it got sucked into the abyss when out database crapped out, but the short of it is that due to the fundamental properties of rocketry, you get the most oomph out of the last bit of fuel you burn. If you reuse your rocket, that last bit will be necessary to bring your rocket back. So there's a simple exercise you can do with an excel spreadsheet that shows you the economics of reusability relative to one time use, and it's not impossible to end up above the break-even point. The Shuttle was barely below, and it wasn't really due to NASA's incompetence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Well, again, they are scheduled to go from zero to Mars this year. How well it goes is anyone's guess, and I'll admit that if their launch goes about as good as SpaceX's that will be very humiliating for them.
But if it works, it will prove what I'm suspecting - Elon's "iterative design" and "move fast and break things" are memes, and an anemic pace can easily prove to be faster.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Somebody who's currently taking your lunch money has no need to document their balance sheet.
Sure, but if they don't publish it, I have no way of confirming that they are, in fact, taking anyone's lunch money.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
One of our local Germans will have to go into the details on that, all I can tell you is that their PMC is extremely woke, from my experience. Then again, so is the rest of Europe these days.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Even without Starship, there is no other company that can hope to do anything like those numbers anytime soon.
Ok, why the push for Starship then? My contention is that Starship is one of the galaxy-brained promises Elon will never deliver on, and that this will be the end of him. If Falcon 9 is more than enough for them to rake the cash in, why not just rake the cash in, instead of blowing $1 billion on every rocket that goes boom?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Speed is hardly the only important factor for an internet connection. HughesNet has latency in the 600-800ms range,
Yeah, I know. My question is, do I really need gaming-rate latencies, when I'm in the middle of literal nowhere? I'm sure there are cases where the answer is a resounding "Yes!". Drone operators probably hate being fragged as much as gamers, and it's only so many times that your CO is going to take "lag" as an excuse. This is why I'm also willing to believe there is a lot more money in it, than a naive analysis of the civillian market would let on, and possibly how SpaceX was sustained for so long.
But for everyone else? Bro, move somewhere close to a cell tower. I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe you pretty much have to go underground to escape cell coverage.
Either that or live with the lag, and that's the whole question here. How many people absolutely need to low latencies, because if they don't the ISP's that are in geo-synchronous orbit are going to slaughter you on costs. For every one of their satellites, you're going to need... scores? hundreds?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9d ago
I'm not the best person to answer this question, since I don't dislike immigrants, and the current world is so far away from my perfect one that it renders your ennture question moot, but generally it's about loyalty. Leave your past loyalties behind, and endorse the host population as your tribe, and we're good.
Everything that's talked about around this subject - jerbs, crime, language, culture - is just a proxy for that.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
The thing is, if it's not the case, we have to consider that SpaceX is putting down more launches than the rest of the market put together as some sort of stunt or fraud, which starts to edge into conspiracy theory.
Not if you realize the overwhelming majority of those launches are for Starlink, than it becomes a straight-forward application of using hype to generate more hype to extract as much money from investors as possible.
Either Musk is a machiavellian genius running a massive misinformation campaign using billion dollars of hardware
I unironically believe that this is closer to the truth than the alternative, and that we'll see it soon enough (I'll go with Thunderf00t's 5 year clock, starting last year, though like I said the vibes are telling me it might happen a lot sooner).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8d ago
Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this
Are you sure this isn't more of a US / Anglosphere thing? Sweden went from a left-wing meme about the glories of social welfare and prison rehabilitation, to a right-wing meme about the dangers of immigration. Data from any country that has the guts to record the ethnicity of criminals tends to show that whatever crime they have, is mostly attributable to immigrants.
The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.
What is this bit supposed to bring to the discussion? If it turns out you're wrong, are you going to admit to your racism, or does it only go one way?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11d ago
If they’d released AC2 in current year, the same people would be complaining that beating up the Pope was an attack on Western civilization.
The same people who are complaining about woke stories today, were alive and active on Internet forums back then, and did not, in fact, complain.
Anyway, can't wait for the new Black Panther game to come out.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Elon was long ago pushed out of OpenAI. But this is not important for the exceptional influence he had on the course of multiple industries
Ok, but don't bring up OpenAI as an argument for Elon's greatness, only fallback to other industries when I ask what he had to do with it.
That he funded/cofounded OpenAI in the first place is crazy.
But why though? Overhearing a bunch of nerds planning on doing nerdy things at some cocktail party, and deciding to back them, is not crazy at all. Unless he did more. Did he?
For the same reason all his endeavors can now crash and burn and it wouldn’t matter
That would be the "Elon already deserves a trophy" argument I mentioned earlier. Fine, I hereby officially award Elon with Greatest Entrepreneur in the World Trophy! But I think it does matter if his companies crash, and I think they will.
That Elon memed other car companies kicking & screaming into a future where e-cars are not anymore a mere novelty, but instead seen as inevitable
They're not inevetible. Some people seem to like them, but others have to be forced to switch by using government force to enshittify ICEs, if not outright banning them, like they're talking about in the EU. I'm pretty sure they'll end up doing squat for global warming, and battery disposal will turn out to be an environmental disaster of some sort, making the whole reason for their existence moot.
this would not discredit Musk, instead this would be a triumph as his competitors would either not exist or wouldn’t be as good as without him.
I'm fine with the claim "Musk is great because he inspired a billionaire space race", though that depends on how the whole thing pans out. It's not out of the question that the whole "private-sector space" idea crashes with SpaceX.
Using Methan as propellant?
Why is that bonkers?
Using cheap steel? Proofing that the failed Soviet N1 concept is viable with modern tech? (...) eliminating landing legs and instead trying to catch Starship?
Can we please limit our praise to things he accomplished, and not involve things he promised to do?
Other rocket companies, Europe and China will have to copy them.
You mean copy their actual tech, their paradigm, or the general ideas of reusability?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
You never talked to @Lizzardspawn?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
I'm pretty sure SpaceX is going down as well. Admiteddly contracts for BlackOps satellites, and Jewish Space Laserss are a wildcard, but if Bezos proves he can compete, that's when I'm betting the cascade starts.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Ok, so your contention is that they're already making massive profits because they revolutionized space launches, and Starship is just a way to make even more money?
Would you consider contractors not being paid on time an indication that their financial situation is not that great?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
That’s the thing. I don’t think it’s a reasonable opinion at all.
For the record @FCfromSSC is 100% right about my motivation. The difference between me and Holocaust deniers is that I hope I'm wrong. Like I said my pride is a small price to pay for getting to see Earth from orbit, before I die.
The guy has founded three different companies with huge market values. SpaceX trades hands at over $200 billion in private markets, Tesla has a public market value of over $200 billion, OpenAI has a weird market structure as a nonprofit but if was a normal corporate probably would have trades happening at over $200 billion market cap.
Since you brought it up, I'll also ping @Belisarius - this is why my arguments sounded like they're about financial analysis.
Look, my entire point is that the value of his companies is propped up by promises of crazy technologies he's not going to deliver on. When that becomes apparent to the public, it's over, they're crashing. OpenAI is probably exempted, but does he have any actual control over it? I thought it was all Sam Altman.
Ok, well that, to me, is the Bailey. Upon interrogating the arguments, the Motte ends up being something like "Ok he's hyped up, but he still innovated a lot of stuff" or "But look at how much his companies are worth".
The hell they didn't. They were driving around golf courses for decades before that. People didn't drive them on roads before, because it might no economic sense, and here's the kicker: we still don't know if it makes any economic sense. They're being hyped and subsidized by tech enthusiasts, and clueless green activists, in a futile attempt to do something about global warming, and despite that they're not really enticing when compared to ICE cars.
A completely meaningless achievement, if it's based on promises he will never deliver on, and his company ends up crashing.
Reusability is not a fundamental advancement, it was always a question of whether it's worth the effort, and again, it's even less clear that it is, then in the case of electric cars, since we have no insight into the costs.
I hope you're right, and I end up looking like an idiot, but don't say I didn't warn you, if I don't.
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