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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12312 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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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 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.

Fundamentally, manufacturing is underrated and design is overrated. So people generally think that there's like this Eureka moment of you come up with this idea and and that's it, now it's good. But as good as a design is, it could literally be that a thousand percent, maybe ten thousand percent more work that goes into the production system of the thing itself. So, how much effort we've put into say designing Rapor, versus the manufacturing system? Uh it's ten to a hundred times more effort to design manufacturing systems than the engine.
– Even for Raptor?!
– Oh yeah, absolutely ESPECIALLY for Raptor. The amount of effort that goes into the design rounds down to zero. Relative to the amount of effort that goes into manufacturing. Yeah. If this is not true, great, I'd like uh a thousand Raptors. Uh oh we can't make them? Oh alright. This is like just very fundamentally underappreciated. If people have not been in manufacturing, especially manufacturing of something that's uh relatively new, then they don't understand and they they think the design is the hard part and they think production is like the copier or something like that. This isn't said enough, I'm trying to correct the misconception that design is the hard part, it is not the hard part. Uh, there's been lots of great rocket engine designs. I've spent a lot of time looking at the Russian rocket engine designs. There's some amazing Russian rocket designs. They've been doing stage combustion for a long time, yeah. And they've done I don't know, hundreds of different designs. So the the hard thing is not any design of staged combustion. This has been done. Yeah. Um now admittedly our is higher pressure than before and it is a full flow combustion. But these are, that that's a relatively minor increment relative to what the Russians have already done. Right. What is super hard about Raptor is uh, how do we make a Raptor where the cost per ton of thrust is under a thousand dollars.

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