Note the date on that: it was published in Nature on July 30 2018, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody would've sent a preprint to Musk up to a month before then. The "pedo guy" tweet during the Thai cave rescue was July 18 2018. Musk's "funding secured" Tweet that the SEC sanctioned him over was Aug 7 2018. His appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was September 2018. Most of his children and extramarital affairs post-date 2018; at that point, he only had the 5 with Justine Musk. Pre-2018, most of his ideas were crazy but at least engineering-focused on reasonable causes.
Musk has repeatedly said his ambition is to die on Mars. After a reputable scientific paper came out saying that if you step off Starship, that will be the very first thing you do, he doesn't really have anything to live for. Meanwhile he's given up so much for that goal (most notably, his first family) that it must feel pretty bitter to have invested so much in something impossible.
For that matter, the psychology is likely pretty similar to the core MAGA demographic, many of whom work hard all their life to achieve the American Dream and then find that the American Dream is going to other people.
I always thought Musk's turning point was in the pandemic when he was wrong about how dangerous it could be (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/business/Elon-Musk-tesla-...). And from there the decline began, but now I realize and remember that before 2020 he was already doing some crazy things...
Nah, terraforming has never been Elon's immediate plan. He knows that it's difficult and very slow process and won't happen in his lifetime. Their goal is to set up a self-sufficient Mars settlement, which doesn't depend on terraforming at all.
Also, impossible with current technology doesn't mean that it's impossible in the future.
He actually talked about this on his latest Diablo stream, here: https://youtu.be/wzIJDU8SPMM?t=2066 He seems to think that terraforming is possible in the long term, with solar reflectors in the orbit which warm up the planet.
Using mars as a long shot target to develop real affordable space capabilities which will help us learn how to stop asteroids and launch cheap internet satellites is cool. Being serious about living there being a near term important and realistic goal is lunacy.
I think you mean: many of whom work some of their life to try to get richer than they already are and then continuously watch Fox News and Newsmax for 20 years and therefore believe brown people should suffer.
Right, if this is true (possible I guess, but does sound a bit Syndrome-from-The-Incredibles), even if there's really no technical way at all to terraform Mars it's hardly the end of the world, uh, planet.
Not least, terraforming would take centuries in any plausible effort. If he goes to Mars to die, he'll die in a pressurised environment whatever happens.
Well, that's a crazy theory (but fun to think about). I don't think he ever believed that terraforming Mars would be achieved in his lifetime. It's not necessary for a colony, and he always talked about "window" in which colonization can be started. Like, there are many things that can set our civilization back, like nuclear war, pandemics, meteors etc., and technical progress isn't guaranteed (we've been on the Moon on 60's and can't do that now), so his philosophy is that we must do it as soon as we can because at any moment we can lose that chance. And starting a colony without terraforming is of course better than not doing anything at all.
I think his behavior is just the consequence of his wealth and success, of being literally at the top of the world in terms of money. And especially because his money comes from SpaceX and Tesla, both of which were considered crazy and impossible enterprises by most people (and there were many people people saying that it all will fail well before he became really famous and really rich). So I think he just started believing that since he was right with SpaceX and Tesla, and others were wrong (and he became the world's wealthiest person because he was right, so he was in a certain capitalistic way more right than literally everyone), he is right about everything and can do everything. And he was always kind of crazy.
Politically I think that maybe his actions are somewhat calculated, maybe he's predicting that Trump will win and be more willing to finance crazy big missions to space? Right now Tesla isn't dependent on American environmental programs as much as it was before, and SpaceX is in a position in which they'll get government contracts forever, no matter who's in power, so he doesn't need to please the current government. And I think he was always more of a libertarian, so that checks out with many things he's saying. His "anti-war" views can also be explained by desire to minimize the risk of closing that window in which Mars colonization is possible.
Bad means they're different from your own which are automatically good because NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are?
Many public figures just copy popular opinions and present them as their own precisely so that most people will like them. They haven't even tried to understand what they're talking about. At least Musk has some understanding and isn't driven by conformity.
>NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are?
God, I fucking hope not. I'm just a single individual, just a man. No different than anyone else here.
I think Musk's political/economic opinions are awful because he's so far abstracted away from the real world that his opinions are effectively worthless. I wouldn't trust a random homeless guy's opinion much like I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos' or Elon Musk's opinions - they both represent an extreme of how thing ares, but no way would they represent how society should move forward.
They're surely wrong, at least in some on way, but so's everyone else's opinion. These are areas which are far to complex for anybody to understand. All we really have is opinions.
At least Musk's opinions aren't just a carbon copy of whatever's popular at the time. That alone makes them at least potentially worth something. The celebrities who can only repeat what they're supposed to say to make themselves look good are the ones who should shut up. Their stated opinions are simply whatever they think will serve their popularity.
The person who still owns one of the two major US political parties despite being manifestly unfit, and who continues to hold sway over at least 33% of voters nationwide?
Say what you will about Musk, he's no Trump. At least, not yet. He hasn't alienated that many people, and even if he were to do so, it wouldn't be enough to impact Tesla's sales.
He's so far abstracted away from the world we live in due to his hundreds of billions of dollars that he really has no idea what he's talking about, but because the new-age version of "might makes right" which is "obscene capital makes right", people tend to give him more credence than he deserves.
He got lucky with PayPal, and lucky with Tesla. That's it. He is not the president, he is not god, not allah, not yahweh, the flying spaghetti monster, he is just a man that got incredibly wealthy both through his own intelligence and some good fortune. That does not mean he's qualified to opine on something outside of his area of expertise.
Would you trade your ability to speak publicly about things you don't really understand in depth in exchange for 100 billion dollars? I sure would. Give me 1/100th of that and I'm off to a private island to read books and grow my own food.
Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.
I think this is taking it too far. There are a lot of money and hype guys out there, none of the rest of them transformed the automotive and space industries. Most of them were shoveling money into "disrupt laundry" startups instead.
> Just to be clear, you're saying that Shotwell has contributed more to SpaceX than Elon?
Which contribution do you believe that Elon Musk had on the development of reusable rockets?
Let's put it this way: if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Would we have reusable rockets in the same timeline as SpaceX, absolutely not. The proof is all the other rocket companies that have failed to do so, including government entities.
So yah obviously if Musk never founded SpaceX, we would not have reusable rockets right now.
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
> do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Correct.
You don't need a hypothetical, it's not like SpaceX is the first rocket making entity in the world. Why were all the other darlings incapable? SpaceX didn't invent a new branch of rocketry after all. And they hired from the pool of engineers who could have and did work at all the other rocket companies.
How did this same pool of scientists and engineers end up with a viable reusable rocket with 300+ successful landings only when they came together at SpaceX?
There are many reasonable points of criticism one can make for Musk. 99% of Musk-hate I see on HN isn't among them though. It's more reminiscent of the kind of nonsense articles Tesla short sellers used to publish back in 2016-17.
The original Tesla guys recognized and agreed Musk was a founder as part of their settlement, and this is now both the formal and legal truth of Tesla. I think some others were also recognized as founders too. The two initial guys didn’t really achieve anything prior to Musk and other early people joining.
Calling SpaceX Gwynne’s baby is just straight up misinformation. Talk to actual employees from SpaceX, especially early on. They’ll tell you that Musk actually does get involved in various deep aspects of the vehicles. You might not be aware, but Gwynne Shotwell was in BD not product.
I'm sure Elon does get involved. The question is, does he get involved in a constructive way.
All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage".
I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.
His two first successful business endeavors were web-based services (i.e. software), and he had no real experience with or education in cars or rockets before he joined/founded Tesla and SpaceX respectively (he’s got a bachelor’s degree in economics and one in physics).
I think he’s probably a smart guy who’s worked hard to learn as much as possible about the fields he’s entered into, but I find it hard to believe that he’s a world-leading technical mind at either. The reason he’s struggling comparatively with Twitter is partly that he doesn’t take it seriously, and partly that he has other ambitions for it (“X the everything app”) than what it actually is.
The main attributes behind his success are his obsessive desire to achieve certain goals, and his willingness to take on a very large amount of risk over and over again (he could easily have gone bankrupt several times, but so far things have mostly gone his way).
Edit: Another reason he’s had a tough time with Twitter is that he’s acted out of spite and alienated people and organizations he should have been on good terms with, mainly advertisers (Twitter’s actual customers).
This is such a poor hot take. Literally every single person that has personally dealt with him disagrees this narrative. It's only popular on reddit/hacker news boards and among some journalists. Karpathy has a good discussion on it that I've heard several employees at his other companies agree with.
Or even Shotwell herself for that matter and how she has expressed how she and Elon subdivide the work.
Elon Musk is not nice person, but he gets things done and he's deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of his companies. I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes.
His political and economic opinions are pretty bad. He should just shut up.