Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[celedhring]

BREAKING: Elon Musk has directed Twitter's teams to find over $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings by cutting cloud services and extra server space, per Reuters.

Back to 130 characters per tweet (unless you pay for a premium package)?

Or they will stop storing tweets after X years, which would do many people a lot of good 

[Berkut]

Occam's razor. He's just not that bright.

He has driven down the cost of putting a kilogram into space, or at least been a significant part of that happening, by about 10x.

We could use some more not bright assholes.

[HVC]

Occam's razor. He's just not that bright.

He has driven down the cost of putting a kilogram into space, or at least been a significant part of that happening, by about 10x.

We could use some more not bright assholes.

Has he done any of the engineering, or been the hype man? Serious question, with his physics degree this would be the only business where he could have actually done any of the grunt work.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Musk has certainly not been involved in the aerospace engineering. SpaceX didn't drive costs down because of any magically amazing engineering feats, there's a lot of misunderstanding of what SpaceX is and how it has done what it does. They appear to have largely cribbed research done by ULA years ago that showed exactly how they could lower launch costs, but ULA is a consortium of two major aerospace companies that had a vested interest in not lowering launch costs. All of the early guys who helped SpaceX get started were ex-NASA / DoD / aerospace major employees, initially they were helping Musk pick out decommissioned Soviet ICBMs to use as a rocket platform but shifted to in house manufacture because existing rockets were seen as too expensive.

There is "big idea" stuff and "particulars", SpaceX is definitely doing particulars that other companies had not done, but the big idea predates SpaceX and was essentially not pursued because the cost+ model of getting NASA and DoD to pay for your launches was seen as far more lucrative to ULA than pursuing what SpaceX is doing. Essentially aerospace is a small industry in terms of number of firms, DoD and NASA have historically had deep and probably improper relationships with the aero/defense majors and there had been and continues to be a system of funneling lavish contracts on them that aren't based on what you would see in a genuinely free market with operators who seek to lower costs. SpaceX and to a lesser degree the also-rans doing the same thing (there's a few lesser knowns) basically are doing what they are doing because they didn't benefit from the existing corrupt system. Much like Musks' ability to fund Tesla with hype capitalization and not actually generating profits, his business innovation here is interesting.

But being a 'business innovator' with funding and contracting strategy doesn't create the sort of profile Musk wants. Musk wants to be seen as a genius inventor of technology, and that isn't what he is.

[Zanza]

How can the richest man in the world not understand free markets? Companies do not want to be associated with him. That's all.

[Syt]

[Jacob]

It seems typical Libertarian-Bro approach to free speech:

"I should be able to say whatever I want - however untrue, however hurtful, however shitty - and if people complain about it they're against free speech."

"Other people should not be allowed to say things that are hurtful or shitty about me, and if they use their speech to react against me in a way I don't like - especially if it impacts me financially - then they are being political and against free speech."

[grumbler]

SpaceX does space vehicle engineering differently than ULA and their ilk, so it isn't just a parasite on what others do.  SpaceX doesn't spend a lot of engineering time on gold-plating their launch vehicles, and they don't launch prototypes expecting success.  They build a prototype cheaply and launch it to find out where it blows up, not whether it blows up.  Then they refine the design, test to destruction again, and iterate to a successful design.

SpaceX was also one of the first space launch companies to realize that investment in re-usable vehicles was the key to lowering launch costs, and they were the first to actively pursue reusability as a major goal. 

The extent to which SpaceX's innovations were do to Musk is something I will leave to those better able to read minds, but it is probably not accidental that SpaceX is pursuing pretty much exactly the path Musk laid out when he first talked about his over-arching goal of settling Mars.  In Musk's vision, Mars will not be settled by NASA astronauts.

Those who compulsively reject the idea of "brilliant asshole" might have less emotion invested in rejecting "visionary asshole."

[Jacob]

"Free speech is when you give my company money."

[Syt]

An author on Twitter summed it up nicely: "People don't want to come to my house after I took a shit in the living room! Why do they hate free speech??"

[Sheilbh]

Although I think that's a little passive - activists do play an important role here. Same as companies ending parties with the NRA, say. It's not because of a passive revulsion from the general public.

Edit: Maybe another side of libertarian approach there in the contempt for activists in the public sphere rather than just homo economicus?

[The Larch]

I thought that most companies that had withdrawn their advertising from Twitter was due to possible conflicts of interest by Musk, not the result of negative activism against him.

[Jacob]

Apparently Elon is continuing whining about "activist groups".

I guess civil society is okay when it's astro-turfed (and paid) by foreign and domestic interests hostile to democracy, but not okay otherwise?

[crazy canuck]

It seems typical Libertarian-Bro approach to free speech:

"I should be able to say whatever I want - however untrue, however hurtful, however shitty - and if people complain about it they're against free speech."

"Other people should not be allowed to say things that are hurtful or shitty about me, and if they use their speech to react against me in a way I don't like - especially if it impacts me financially - then they are being political and against free speech."

Yeah, the thing that continually has to be pointed out, especially to right wing protest groups, is that freedom of speech does not include a freedom from criticism. 

[The Minsky Moment]

Those who compulsively reject the idea of "brilliant asshole" might have less emotion invested in rejecting "visionary asshole."

I'll go with brilliant but increasingly erratic asshole.  Even at the top of the game, he got into some serious problems with his loose online communications.  And the latter have gone from being an occasional lapse of judgment to a daily circus event.  It's not a reassuring trend, and his new job running the world's pre-eminent shitposting factory can't help.