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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...
I can't see how SpaceX is anything but an unqualified success in every single way.
As soon as Starship is flying, Musk will have achieved every single goal he had short of the Mars colony, which is likely to happen when the reduced launch costs make it cheap enough for governments beginning to wake up to a space race.
Tesla could be run better, but it's still highly successful and has absolutely achieved Musk's vision of democratizing electric cars, and even if other companies overtake it, they're doing so by adopting the technology themselves.
If it's a hype bubble, you're not going to see how it's a failure until it crashes.
Yeah... that's a big if. Care to take a guess when we might see it in orbit? I'll be happy to take the "no it won't" side of that prediction.
My 50% confidence interval is within this year, and 70% within 2 years and 90% within 3 years for the first successful orbital flight and return for a Starship. I haven't actually checked further launch plans before writing this, but I think I can still hold myself to this.
Frankly speaking, I don't see any reason to be anything but bullish on SpaceX. Even if Elon was eaten by a wild doge today, the company has already revolutionized space travel, reusable rockets were as outlandish as fusion power for fucking forever. Starlink is profitable, and even the humble Falcon and Falcon Heavy have made lunar exploration feasible on post-Cold War budgets.
Ok, I'm going "no way" on all 3. The one in 3 years might surprise me, but for the sake of simplicity I'll round it down to "not going to happen". And I'm talking about simply going to orbit, if it successfully lands, I'll be shocked.
That's just not true. Others will point out that the actual innovative thing is making reusability cost-effective. We've seen reusability as a "mere" technical feat working for decades in the form of Space Shuttle.
Is it? I seem to remember a leaked email where Elon was complaining about Starlink's financials.
Are you serious? The only example in the entire history of rocketry of cost effective reusable rockets is SpaceX's Falcon 9. Other companies have caught up after 10 years by copying their design. If anyone can do it, it's Gwynn Shotwell.
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Well, the whole crux of the issue is making reusability profitable! That's what people really mean by that statement, or at least I do.
You can make the claim that fusion power exists today, except it costs more to get energy than you can sell it for. But nobody claims that we've "got" fusion power do they?
The Space Shuttle was a flying white elephant swollen with pork, too compromised from it's original vision to satisfy anyone except horny Texan senators. Same deal with SLS, though it doesn't even pretend to be reusable. It would be cheaper to fuel the Starship with dollar bills or just pile them to the Moon (this is hyperbole).
I find such a claim dubious, and it's more likely Elon kvetching even if it's true.
It is such a stunningly superior product to any other orbital internet provider that it's ludicrous. And they have massive positive feedback from the experience curve of having so many launches on hardware they own.
It's not like anyone is forcing them to do it, if it wasn't profitable or on the road to profit with massive growth they simply wouldn't do it.
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