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Notes -
Twitter's been acting weird for several hours. Turns out that Musk has done something extraordinary:
Of course everyone on Twitter knows that 600 posts/day is basically nothing, so it's basically something to get people to pay for Twitter and get that blue check, but even then it's not an unlimited offer.
Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?
updates:
It gets better
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675260424109928449
all within the span of a few hours
I saw someone semi-jokingly say that the rate limits were increasing as Elon ran into them himself, and at this point I find that distressingly likely.
Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars, though a more based Twitter is still nice to have.
Consider the idea that he's not actually running the rockets and electric cars any better...
Damn that's actually a scary point. Not just for the rocket/car users themselves but also for the rest of humanity considering that he's 100% the best in those areas at the moment.
Consider that, this too, is not the case.
Look, I appreciate the ethos Musk represents, but that's also the main reason I'm so critical of him. If this guy crashes and burns, which I find likely, the ideas he represents are going to get discredited.
As long as the rockets continue to fly, and land, and the competitors continue to largely not do that, or do that plainly worse, at some point you're asking me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes.
I don't believe in ideas, I believe in dollars per kg to orbit.
All I'm asking for is some skepticism of his accounting, surely that's not too much of a stretch?
It is a bigger and bigger stretch as time goes on. If SpaceX were losing money on each commercial flight, you would expect them to minimize the number of those flights and attempt to maximize the number of government flights. Instead, they are turning down almost no commercial partners and have increased launch cadence every year, to the point that they are putting more commercial tons into orbit than everyone else in the world combined, and growing. This would not make sense if it were not profitable for them. You believe they are burning investor capital to do this...why, exactly?
The government overcharge theory doesn't make sense either, because even if they are inflating their bids, they are still beating all competitors and managing to deliver. They could only do this if their costs are unusually low by industry standards. But if that is true, then it is also true that their commercial costs world be lower, so the lower price for those would also be profitable.
The more parsimonious explanation is just that their costs actually are lower, which makes them more profitable at market clearing prices and enables then to discount the market price without losing money.
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