This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Starship bet update
A few years ago I made a series of bets about Starship making it to orbit with other posters, last rounded up here:
The last one is a real nail-biter. When I heard about the SpaceX IPO I first thought it's time to call it a day. My model for my predictions about Elon was that he has a hype-compulsion, making wilder and wilder promises to get money out of investors, and as it becomes clear he won't be able to reach the hyped up goal, at some point they will get fed up with him. So when the news of the $85.7 billion came out, I figured that even if I do win, it will be on a technicality - maybe they won't pull it off by end of this year, but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road.... Then again maybe not! It also turned out that they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone, so maybe I will lose on a technicality instead, where they will indeed get to orbit by end of year, but will be dragged down by the unprofitable parts of the company.
I now believe that such a "loss on a technicality" is a pretty likely outcome, precisely because of the IPO. Like I said last year, if my bet was with Elon, he probably could have ordered the damn rocket to be put in orbit, just to prove a point, and while I'm lucky enough to have made my bet with internet randos instead, the IPO changes the dynamics such that he will be very tempted to do such things just to prove a point. Currently 95% of SpaceX stock held by insiders is locked up and it will be gradually released over the course of the year. Stonks are largely guided by hype, hype is generated with media articles (such as "SpaceX makes history with Starship orbital launch!!!11"), so while a frivolous orbital launch would make little sense before, it could make a lot of sense now. There's already talk of Starship 14 being orbital, and I fully expect them to schedule it just before one of these unlock dates.
That said, it's not over until it's over! Just because they might want to do it, doesn't mean they'll pull it off. This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.
I haven't been following Starship progress over the last 12 months, and all your bets are essentially bets about timing, which is contingent on uninteresting factors like the political environment, Elon's newest distractions (attention and finance wise), stochastic problems and causes for caution, so I won't comment on them. Ignore if you're in this for the pure love of the game.
But bets aside, you make a categorical prediction:
Have you elucidated your logic anywhere?
I'm afraid you have a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome. I see it a lot on X. Musk has a lot (as in, millions, a significant percent of X population) of extremely annoying fanboys of the lowest castes – crypto bros boosting #grok who got rich off $DOGE pumps, bots, edgy right-wingers, desperate $TSLA investors who are literally, well, invested in his success. He is obnoxious himself, prone to making false promises, grandiosity and loathsome behavior. So there's a reactionary cohort that naysays everything he does. But isn't this beneath human dignity to let that influence the judgement of the technical project such as Starship?
Starship, at this point, essentially can't not work. We know of no compelling reason why it won't, and a plethora of reasons why it will. Exactly a decade ago, there was vigorous skepticism that Falcon program can work. Russians in particular, being pathologically proud of Soviet space industry, dunked on the idea of rocket reusability with our typical overwrought literary wit, which hopefully can evoke some cringe in you today:
It goes on for a while but the conclusion is obvious already: Falcon is Another American Grift, the metal will get le tired, defect inspection will be prohibitively costly, the construction is suboptimal modulo reusability, and anyway the first landed unit didn't qualify for reuse, so QED. Coming from an engineer by training, this all sounded persuasive to my engineer friends at the time. To me, it sounded like status anxiety. It sounds quaint today, when Booster B1067 has a record of 35 launches, when Falcons provide the majority of LEO lift capacity for the planet, when the shortest turnaround is a bit over a week, and the safety track record of Falcon has exceeded that of Soyuz, painstaikingly built over half a century. The metal seems really vigorous and not tired at all. My understanding is that Elon's hypothesis was: all of the industry was thinking too small, these paranoid quality standards and laborious procedures are mostly downstream of cost ker kilogram to orbit, you can just do propulsive landing well enough that the vehicle takes negligible damage, and this unlocks a whole different regime of unit economics; and this is a mere issue of engineering. Seems like he was just correct. Then Starlink happened. Similar dismissals, similar outcome, SpaceX acquires the perfect demand sink and revenue stream and can seriously invest into what is functionally and economically near-equivalent to a reusable SSTO with 100+ tons of payload. But you know Starship's pitch, of course, and how it renders SLS and all other alternatives obsolete. Mars or Moon – in the context of full reusability with these payloads, does it even matter? These are mission details, what is important is what kinds of missions you can begin to plan at all at $1000/kg to LEO, at $100/kg, at $50/kg… and, much as I loathe to agree with @Shakes, the military can come up with quite a few. «Spy catellites» is thinking too small, for sure. On the civilian side, the space compute idea will genuinely work too, given political and logistic problems with terrestial datacenters in the US – and the objections to it are more motivated thinking, not solid engineering or bottom-line costs analysis; and this can trivially become another Starlink. You can start to actually think about microgravity manufacturing, as well. There is a lot to do in space, once you can get there cheaply. The last Starship feat that I've watched was the chopstick capture, it looked like they're really close to maturity. It can take a year or 5 years, but the probability of Elon running out of capital on the way there in the American system is… remote. So what's the actual crux? You say it's not scaleable and cite an article about Raptor production from 2021. They're on Raptor 3 now, all the concerns in that email are, far as I can tell, obsolete. Do you have some physics-driven argument as to why Falcon works but Starship does not? I am confident that you don't, because I've never seen any and apparently neither have SpaceX's investors, for all the hate Elon gets.
There is another strong reason to think that Starship can work. We had more ambitious designs in the 20th century, and today other companies are doing similar things. New Glenn works, 9x4 will haul 70 tons, and although they've had a setback with explosion on the pad, Bezos will see to it that they recover, they have their own constellation program that adds urgency, and will need heavy lift capability. More saliently, LandSpace has a pretty well-validated engine of roughly Raptor 2 class, and plans to use it in a Starship-class rocket somewhere after 2030; this far they've been fast-following SpaceX at a crazy pace, they've started in 2015 and have actually put the first methalox-powered rocket in orbit (3 years ago), so I'm optimistic about this schedule. Within a month they will likely make their second attempt at landing ZQ-3, which is basically a Falcon-9 with Starship characteristics (steel body, methalox). The first one failed in Dec 2025, but it was close and Elon himself said it's potentially better than Falcon. If they succeed, no doubt this boosts Elon's standing with the government and military again, because that'll make China the second power with reusable rocketry, and we can't allow a reusable rocket gap, can we? And if Starship doesn't work, then the gap is extremely likely - China can weld steel cylinders at scale and mass produce engines like nobody's business, like look at their shipbuilding or the recent pace of fighter jet delivery (they make ≈100 J-20s per year now, which above the total F-35 program output in 2024, though 2025 was a big year for LM with 191; and recall that J-20 is a massive twin-engine). They have something like 20 private companies competing for the launch provider market. On the state side, CASC's CZ-10B likely does its own launch and barge landing (very interesting mechanism by the way, initially explored by the US, abandoned) this week. CASC has a whole family of partially reusable Falcon-esque rockets in the pipeline (10A, 12A, 12B, maybe 8) and a very Starship-like superheavy CZ-9. They even have plans for space-based solar and compute. Regardless of how all this goes (I'm personally bearish on Chinese rocketry aside from LandSpace), it obviously bolsters Elon's narrative. In light of this, I don't even think the speculations about future Democratic hostility are convincing – the US has strong bipartisan support for any anti-China and arms-race-with-China initiative; Biden tightened the screws of Trump-1's trade war, Trump-2 didn't touch Biden's export controls. So Starship will almost certainly keep being funded and the only thing that can kill it is physics.
In sum, I'd like you to spell out your bear case that survives these objections.
P.S. SpaceXAI (what a lousy name) has just released a frontier LLM, I can vouch for it being genuinely on the same tier as Anthropic/OpenAI's latest (Fable/5.6 excluded), and with Chinese open source costs. Elon: «Grok groks engineering. Next month’s release will be another step-change improvement, as we close the loop on solving real-world engineering problems at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Boring Company.»
I have seen enough of his empty promises, but it does feel qualitatively different, an unexpected closing of the gap. He's still got it.
The reason the bets are timed is that I wanted them to be resolvable within a reasonable timeline. I made the original bets 3 years ago, and 2 of the 3 users I made them with no longer seem to be posting here, so I think it's fair concern. I agree that it's possible for me to win them due to uninteresting factors, which is what I called a "technical" win in the top level post.
Closest I got was here. It's not a specific prediction about Starship, it's a general prediction based on the hype-cycle of his products / companies, and it boils down to:
This was about Tesla, but I get the feeling that Starship is SpaceX Roadster/Semi/Optimus, where Elon bit off more than he can chew. It's mostly based on instinct though, but in my defense, I've made a few long-shot predictions on my instinct, on this very forum, that turned out to be true.
Your specific arguments for why Starship can work all sound reasonable to me, but they don't sound different to me from arguments for why Cybertruck could be a good truck, why FSD could drive safer than human drivers, why optimus could be a great humanoid robot, etc. I'm not arguing for physical impossibility, I'm arguing against the "make insane marketing promises, and let the techies figure it out" management style.
Maybe. I know exactly the type of people you're talking about, and I admit I was influenced by them. On the other hand, my "I don't have MDS" argument is that I don't actually want to win these bets. I want to lose them, and lose spectacularly. A world where I get btfo'd is by far better than the one where I win, and the reason I'm betting the way I'm betting is because it sounds too good to be true.
Didn't he buy Cursor, and these guys were the ones who figured it out? It certainly shows a lot of political / business acumen, but I didn't get the impression that that's the sort of "it" he's supposed to have.
I don't challenge your reasoning for making resolvable bets, my problem is that they don't have much relation to the interesting question. This is the usual forecasting problem.
All of these efforts being meh (so far) is not very informative. Cybertruck is just a goofy car, there's only so much you can achieve by making a big electric pickup with edgy body panels. It adds very little to Tesla's current position. Car people are somewhat insane in paying so much attention to car models. FSD works, Waymo is reportedly great, so Tesla robotaxi also could work. Optimus is a legitimately good robot, it's just not the time for robots yet, and China is way ahead of Elon on the entire robot supply chain except high-end chips (both the brain and external compute). Starship is a categorical breakthrough in space logistics, which is the one area where Elon is far ahead of the competition already. There is no way for others to overtake him on any reasonable timeline.
He did, and no doubt their data has contributed a lot. But the base model is in-house, and I see that RL was done on xAI's stack. This is impressive because the original xAI team has completely fallen apart, there was the impression that xAI has become a mere compute provider for Anthropic. He has crashed and rebuilt a near-frontier lab from the ruins. This suggests at the very least good capability for delegation outside the hardware domain.
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree, that is the primary "it" that he has, and the most important one by far. It doesn't really matter how elegant your product is, how technologically advanced, how innovative. The ability to create a solid business plan and actually execute it (eventually) is the critical factor. SpaceX is the best example: none of the technologies involved are especially novel: keralox rocket engines, aluminum alloy rocket bodies, carbon fiber fairings, etc. The actual innovation of SpaceX was figuring out a way to build and operate these things in a way that made them profitable at scale. This is an unpopular view, I know, due to the implications about whig history, but is something I think is true of all the great industrialists.
Elon himself is very well aware of this. I sometimes say that he's spiritually Chinese, which is lost on his greatest admirers in the West, who imagine his success is due to some brilliant insights. No, it's similar to what guys like Lei Jun do, just with American capital scale and more chutzpah. It's maybe the most potent recipe there exists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link