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Brian Dear

@rodhilton Never heard this genius talk until this year, frankly. It’s someone’s narrative.

SpaceX was and is a team of scientists and engineers. Tesla was and is a team of scientists and engineers. They designed and built the rockets and cars.

It’s also a narrative that SpaceX = Tesla = Musk. “His cars.” “His rockets.” It’s one of the stupidest narratives anyone’s ever said, but millions upon countless millions believe it and get all bent out of shape from it and make decisions based on it.

50 comments
Gerego

@brianstorms @rodhilton exactly. Musk went batshit crazy with Twitter, and all of the sudden re-usable rockets, and all the geniuses behind them that put in extreme amount of their lives to make them happen can be completely dismissed? The same with Tesla engineers. This sounds stupid to me.

#Musk #SpaceX #Tesla

Thorsten

@Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton Afaik, SpaceX is the first company he actually founded, which actually achieved something noteworthy (although largely government sponsored, so no business success in a purely capitalist sense). Starlink is imo actually useful, as well for crisis regions (Iran, Ukraine) as in rural areas e.g. in Germany.

Not saying it was Musks achievement, but this one company does not fit into the rest of the list.

Daniel Bohrer

@th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton apparently he co-founded X.com, which later became PayPal

Thorsten

@daniel_bohrer @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton No, it did not become PayPal. x.com merged with Confinity because Musk liked their simple payment system. They merged to become PayPal, the payment system was already invented without Musk.

Kl@rinettistische @ktion ❌

@th0r5t3n

inventing something and making it a billion dollar company requires two different kinds of genius.
Maybe Musk got the latter one?

@daniel_bohrer @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton

Daniel Bohrer

@logorok @th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton you mean making Twitter a 1 billion dollar company out of a 44 billion dollar company? definitively! 🤡

Kl@rinettistische @ktion ❌

@daniel_bohrer
no, I mean making a 1.5 B company out of Confinity.

But you are right. Losing 43 B and still owning more than all of us here combined is still an achievement

@th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton

Thorsten

@logorok @daniel_bohrer @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton Yesno. He did successfully advertise himself, sold promised features he wasn't able to deliver, etc. It is a talent, but also a lack of moral and integrity, to an extent which *should* be prosecuted and punished.

Also, success *always* requires a bit of luck. He definitely had a large portion of that.

I wouldn't deny the marketing talent, though.

Roger Moore

@logorok @th0r5t3n @daniel_bohrer @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton
I think there's a lot to this. Musk is basically a salesman rather than an engineer. He can take an interesting idea and sell the hell out of it. One of the ideas he's sold the hell out of is his own genius.
The problem is that isn't what Twitter needs. Twitter had some serious problems, but lack of public awareness was not one of them.

Bea Furniss

@VATVSLPR @logorok @th0r5t3n @daniel_bohrer @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton Suspect he’s skilled at selling a vision, which attracts competent employees who want to successfully deliver that vision. But the anecdotes I’ve heard suggest his other employees succeed by carefully managing Musk out of their processes. A skill Twitter staff have seemingly yet to acquire…

Jorge Stolfi

@th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton

He may have "founded" in the sense of providing initial capital. He cannot have contributed anything to the engineering, although he always talks as if every feature of every rocket was his idea.
🧵‍>

Thorsten

@JorgeStolfi @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton He might have contributed to the initial "vision". He's got a lot of pipe-dreams, and like a broken clock is bound to be right twice a day, I could imagine the idea of a short-lived low-orbit sattelite-network for Internet to be one of the crazy ideas which turned out to be actually doable.

I think it's clear from other toots I'm by no means a fanboy. Just trying to stay objective.

Jorge Stolfi

@th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton

Starlink is certainly "doable", like Iridium was. The big question is whether it will be a profitable enterprise. Starlink is not a public company so we cannot tell what the market thinks about that...

emmatonkin

@JorgeStolfi @th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton
One does wonder whether many govts will be looking at the CEO's current behaviour and thinking "Yep that's a totally acceptable set of risks, no way reliance on tech controlled by this guy could backfire."

Renée

@JorgeStolfi Also, he lied A LOT to get funding, like how the real purpose was magnanimously to provide third world internet. Yeah, no. This is a "Comcast sucks" competitor, he never intended to deploy this usefully anywhere unprofitable - he just knows what to say to get people to give him money.

Same with the tunnels, he killed real and good public transit intiatives for a very stupid idea that basically became "subways, but private."

@th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton

Brian Dear

@reneestephen @JorgeStolfi @th0r5t3n @Gerego @rodhilton By all means, now document what telcos have done for years in terms of laying out careful PR promises of a rosy internet future for all, and receiving billions in taxpayer money for "rural high bandwidth" that's never been delivered, or the staggering amount of money Big Oil gets from taxpayers in terms of subsidies and abandoned well cleanup by the govt while Big Oil laughs all the way to the bank. Then there's the Pentagon...

Renée

@brianstorms Sure? Governments being captured by wealthy companies in any form is bad. No argument there!

Billionaires: bad.

@JorgeStolfi @th0r5t3n @Gerego @rodhilton

Brian Dear

@reneestephen @JorgeStolfi @th0r5t3n @Gerego @rodhilton

Paul McCartney: bad?
Steven Speilberg: bad?
Peter Jackson: bad?
George Lucas: bad?
Jim Cameron: bad?
Andrew Lloyd Webber: bad?
Rihanna: bad?
Jay-Z: bad?

Renée replied to Brian

@brianstorms Interesting you had to stick to just the entertainment industry to try to make your point! The vast majority of billionaires are *not* from this industry and are people whose names you do not know.

But if you think Hollywood and record labels haven't done some deeply shitty things, I have a whole handful of overtime and safety labour laws in destination locations to sell you, and the names of people maimed or killed on sets as a chaser.

@JorgeStolfi @th0r5t3n @Gerego @rodhilton

Cleopatra replied to Brian

@brianstorms @reneestephen @JorgeStolfi @th0r5t3n @Gerego @rodhilton
Yeah, pretty much.
You don't become an entertainment-billionaire by doing what you love and giving free tickets to the poor.
nebula.tv/videos/polymatter-th

just adrienne

@reneestephen @JorgeStolfi @th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton Also Starlink has already largely ruined astronomy, and it's only going to get worse.

Sören

@th0r5t3n @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton Germany’s population density even in rural areas isn’t that low. Surely it would be far more efficient to force cellular operators to fill coverage holes.

But satellite sounds fancier, so it’s easier to get investors that way. (See also, especially egregiously, The Boring Company and Hyperloop, vs. a goddamn metro. The latter isn’t sexy but makes much more sense.)

Thorsten

@chucker @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton Our Government had decades to force telecommunication providers to provide DSL, optic fibre or decent mobile networks. They simply didn't.

In rural areas of Brandenburg, I'd go for Starlink, in spite of the price, since all other options suck hard.

Renée

@th0r5t3n and ironically governments also paid for Starlink, but don't even own the profits. @chucker @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton

Thorsten

@reneestephen @chucker @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton "My" government (I'm German) didn't pay for it, they did afaik funnel money into German telcos for no return though...

Renée

@th0r5t3n Mine either (Canada), but IMO failure to hold telcos responsible for their commitments and then not realizing the problem needed a different solution (nationalized community networks) is a very boomer failure everywhere...due I think to not really believing the internet was a real thing that was gonna truly matter to the future of industry let alone society as a utility. Just... "more interactive TV."

@chucker @Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton

Not a dog

@brianstorms @Gerego @rodhilton yeah I agree we should hate on Tesla automobiles for their own merits, that is being luxury priced yet incredibly bad build quality, and having baffling design decisions such as car doors that require power to open and won’t open in the cold, the ability to brick your car by an OTA update, and selling access to hardware by software locks (ie seat warmers)

Lonewolf

@notadog @brianstorms @Gerego @rodhilton
Don't forget for awhile they were using balsa wood in electrical component

isaacs

@Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton the most effective way to prevent genius engineering from becoming genius products is by having someone like musk in charge of the business.
A car company with genius Tesla engineers who realized musk is an absolute idiot and got the hell out? I'm all in.

Stroad Warrior

@rodhilton @brianstorms @Gerego Twitter had software engineers that knew what they were doing. Musk fired a ton of them and told the rest to do really stupid things. There's no reason to assume he didn't do the same with rockets and cars.

Brian Dear

@cholling @rodhilton @Gerego Fine. No disagreement, though assuming anything related to Musk is a time-drain. I’m still gonna quietly enjoy my breakfast while listening to a Lawfare podcast and not think about this E.M. entity just for once.

geobeck 🏳️‍🌈

@Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton
My concern on that count is that, while the scientists and engineers did the real work, Elon made the top decisions, and is enough of a conceited megalomaniac that he could have overridden enough key decisions for a fly to land in the ointment. Like the autopilot shut-off "feature."

You'd think that he'd respect his experts a little more when it comes to rockets, but seeing how he completely disregarded EVERY logical decision with Twitter...

@Gerego @brianstorms @rodhilton
My concern on that count is that, while the scientists and engineers did the real work, Elon made the top decisions, and is enough of a conceited megalomaniac that he could have overridden enough key decisions for a fly to land in the ointment. Like the autopilot shut-off "feature."

emmatonkin

@brianstorms @rodhilton
Agree with your conclusions but just ought to note that I have heard a shedload of this genius talk over several years, mostly at the dinner table when visiting a certain relative who is in his seventies and a huge fan of Musk, SpaceX and Tesla. This used to annoy the other half so much we more or less developed a No Musk At The Dinner Table rule. So... it's not a *recent* narrative.

Mikko Lipasti

@brianstorms @rodhilton

Even the greatest team of engineers and scientists can be completely betrayed by delusional, incompetent or dishonest leadership.

Case in point: Tesla Semi

Mazal ​:blobcatpeek:

@pasti @brianstorms @rodhilton

^ Case in point: Tesla Semi

Case in point…
…Tesla Self Driving
…The Boring Co.
…The Hyperloop
…Neuralink Corp

Kristi Lamarca

@brianstorms @rodhilton it is really weird. He’s created this narrative and it is just bizarre that people accept this narrative as fact.

It's still Just Jason

@brianstorms @rodhilton He still makes decisions about which engineers are right, which projects to fund, etc. The instability and ready/fire/aim approach I saw makes me mistrust vehicles that rely on remote updates for future functionality. He may well can a team for "reasons" and leave people stranded. It WAS his achievement to fund these engineers and it can be his achievement to ruin it.

Brian Dear

@herr_jason @rodhilton No disagreement there. While all the Musk teenie-boppers squiggle with glee every time a new over-the-air software update becomes available, I take it as a moment of dread, wondering what new bugs have been introduced, whether any longstanding bugs were finally fixed, and how the UI might have been made worse. I always ignore the games and amusements. All that said, I’ve not run into any issues in 10 years of OTA updates that harm the car’s ability to function.

(((X Æ Å-12)))

@brianstorms @rodhilton I agree with your latter paragraphs, but I have heard his praise for years. He couldn't pick the wrong m&m from the bag. Maybe it's because Tesla and other electric cars are relatively tax free in Norway.

猫好きな人

@brianstorms @rodhilton

I’ve heard it for years especially with regard to Tesla. (In a culty way, for sure)

For example:

quora.com/Elon-Musk-is-obvious

marnanel

@brianstorms @rodhilton cf Edison

Ironic that it's called Tesla, really

Hobblin 🐀

@brianstorms why is twitter different? Ideally twitter should be maintained by a bunch of engineers and developers... But he fucked that up... It would be pretty naive to think he isn't as close as possible to do exactly that with all his other companies no matter how successful they are.

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