One point in favor of X succeeding: personal social skills don’t seem to be required for building a social media giant. Case in point: Mark Zuckerberg, who is ten times more awkward and less inspiring than Musk. Yet Meta still manages to be the industry leader, dumb metaverse decisions included.
I think the bottleneck is less "personal skills" than "PR skills". If Congress subpoenas Zuck to decide whether to regulate him, I bet Zuck prepares really hard and has well-thought-out, reassuring-sounding answers for them. And if the media tries to accuse Zuck of spreading misinformation, he builds some kind of connection to friendly journalists and anti-misinformation groups and has respected people say good-PR things that soothe people's worries. Musk is just going to tell these people to go f*** themselves.
I see what you mean, but I also think you underestimate his PR skills. If I had to summarize Elon’s “magic sauce” it’s that he is good at building a narrative that he’s a genius, working on incredible projects, etc. This is his true skill, not being an engineering wizard. Most of the people that dislike him intensely in government and media are themselves disliked by the majority of the population.
"If I had to summarize Elon’s “magic sauce” it’s that he is good at building a narrative that he’s a genius, working on incredible projects, etc."
I'm not sure of this - is the "Musk's projects are incredible" narrative stronger than would be expected from the actual incredibleness of his projects? I think maybe a little stronger, but not so much I'd call it a real exceptional talent of his. It's crazy how much more advanced SpaceX is than anything else that any of its much larger competitors or big national governments were able to do.
There was a huge media push about a decade ago to frame Elon as this genius engineer guy saving the world. He was even in Iron Man. It was everywhere.
There are plenty of people doing just as amazing things that aren’t nearly as famous, largely because I argue they don’t understand the power of marketing and storytelling as well as Elon does.
Again this isn’t saying that their accomplishments aren’t real, or that he’s just faking expertise, but that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. He gets the best people and the best government contracts because he understands this power of PR and narrative. A whole lot of people seem to think he’s running these companies entirely on his own, which is patently absurd. He’s very very good at getting good people to work for him.
To paint him as someone oblivious to this is a naive view IMO.
I could be reenacting my own trauma here, but "he's very very good at getting good people to work for him" is IMHO his real secret sauce. Hiring good technical people is *hard*, especially when you're trying to hire people more expert than you. That he can do this at companies which are widely known for their terrible working conditions is impressive.
Who else is doing equally amazing things and is less well known?
Vance says that the Iron Man people approached Elon rather than vice versa. They were filming in Los Angeles, someone told Robert Downey Jr there was an impressive space magnate with a factory nearby, and RD thought it would be a good acting project to study him.
Literally everyone that has a high level position in all of his companies? How many people working at space x or Tesla other than Musk are household names?
He’s also the richest man in the world, which brings its own PR benefits.
From what I've heard, it was Downey's idea in the first place. When producing the first movie, the director didn't really know how to portray the larger-than-life comics persona of Tony Stark as a realistic human character, and after some brainstorming, RDJ said "we need to talk with Elon Musk." This is why Musk got a cameo in the sequel: Tony Stark's personality was based on him.
Artist Tyrant is not arguing in good faith, so you're wasting your time engaging with them.
Like many people, the starting point is not "Musk is interesting, what can I learn"; the starting point is "Musk is evil because he will not accept DEI hegemony", everything subsequent flows from that axiom.
I'm curious how you would distinguish a "media push" from "a bunch of people independently spread a meme, and once it takes off enough, traditional media desperately echoes it to seem hip and cool and with-it". I feel like I've seen examples of both, but am ill-equipped to tell the difference, other than the rare cases where I'm there to see it start.
Perhaps it's the very scale of his projects that makes people remember the big successes. This review never brought up The Boring Company, for instance; a proposal that made me go "what the hell?" when I first heard it and which seems or does not seem to be making progress, depending on what coverage I'm reading when. Ditto NeuraLink.
Now, I know Vox is a little sour on Musk, but the big visionary project seems to have stalled for various reasons (one being that the self-driving cars aren't good enough yet). I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to instead revolutionise how large tunnels are dug or the likes, but that's not at all the same as "you'll be ferried in your car on a moving walkway in a tunnel and then raised up by elevator to the very front door of wherever it is you want to go".
EDIT: I seem to have conflated The Boring Company with the Hyperloop, apologies, they're both basically tunnels so far as I can tell but if The Boring Company is about "digging tunnels better, faster and cheaper" I think that is a lot more achievable than whatever the Hyperloop was/is supposed to be doing.
The political switch has an awful lot to do with the coverage, I think, as well as the simple passage of time and reality hitting the ambitious projects on the head. When he could be seen as at least liberal, with some genuflection in the direction of progressivism, then he was the Tony Stark of our days.
Now he's next thing to Orange Man Bad and is ushering in fascism in America. (The amount of *seething* over Twitter before he bought it, with the appeals to stop him in order to preserve democracy, and the gloating over perceived losses once he did buy it was amazing. The 180 on what a blue check mark meant was also amazing - the same people who were smugly repeating what a blue check mark said as 'the expert has spoken, shut up idiot conservative' were now 'all it means is that you're verified as a subscriber, it doesn't mean anything else and nobody ever at all used it as meaning the right opinion because it was an expert saying it')>
I have much the same view of him as I do of Trump: he's not as marvellous as his fans make out, and he's not as terrible as his detractors make out. He's smart and driven and ambitious, and part of that is sometimes when he shoots for the moon, he hits it and sometimes he misses.
I don't understand your point about the blue checkmark. What it signified *did* change, didn't it? From a "we've checked that this vaguely-famous person really is who they say they are" which doubled as a kind of Official Acknowledgement Of Being A Public Person, to something any old dick and harry can buy even if they are in no way a Public Person (Semi-Officially-Acknowledged or otherwise). People being annoyed at people who bought their blue checkmarks as a pure transaction, while respecting the people who'd been *awarded* a checkmark in the old regime, seems entirely unsurprising, and in no way hypocritical.
(If the US government began selling Medals of Honor for a thousand bucks, I expect people who currently kowtow to medal-wearing vets would start hissing and booing at the "fakes" — how is this different? In both cases, maybe the kowtowing to the original group is excessive, but the signifier has plainly changed meaning, and its original salience or lack thereof is irrelevant to the legitimacy of complaining that whatever meaning there may have been earlier has been completely washed out.)
Hyperloop was just a tech whitepaper that Elon and some engineers at Tesla released. It was not ever one of Elon's companies, although he did find some design contents.
> is the "Musk's projects are incredible" narrative stronger than would be expected from the actual incredibleness of his projects?
There's a pretty well-known argument about this wrt Tesla. If we look at current market capitalization, Ford (stock ticker: F) is worth $50 billion. That is the price of owning all of Ford if you could buy all of the stock at current prices, which you can't do.
Meanwhile, Tesla (ticker: TSLA; this makes me wonder if Elon Musk is trying to get T) is worth $840 billion by the same metric, or just under 17 times as much. I am much less confident in the sales figures I pulled off the internet just now than I am in the market capitalization numbers, but they tell me that last year Ford "sold" 4.2 million cars and Tesla "delivered" 1.3 million, or 0.31 times as many cars as Ford. (I'd really like to compare number of cars manufactured, but good luck figuring that out.)
If neither company had outstanding stock and therefore they both had a market capitalization of zero, how likely would you be to conclude that owning Ford would be 17 times worse than owning Tesla?
If you buy Ford you also have to pay off it's debt which makes the ratio a little less crazy. "Ford Motor long term debt for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $93.895B, a 10.45% increase year-over-year." vs. "Tesla long term debt for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $0.872B, a 69.91% decline year-over-year."
Using debt + market cap we get a ratio of ~6 instead of 17 (which is of course still substantial, but quite as crazy). Also the trends in sold/delivered debt/profitability definitely favor Tesla over Ford which is prob. worth something (though whether it's 6x or not is another question).
Whereas Ford is a mature company founded 120 years ago, Tesla was founded 20 years ago and has been growing torridly ever since. The difference is very material to any valuation of the two companies.
Telsa has all the signs of being a bubble stock, but the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent, as they say. In its non meme form, you can see a more grounded high valuation being a bet on Tesla's ability to control a huge % of the electric market share as that inevitably takes over the auto market.
Sure but IIRC for Tesla's value relative to make sense relative to other car manufacturers you'd have to expect them to be owning basically the entire current car market if not more. That seems like an awful lot of growth to be plausible.
"Torridly" is a reach. The company has been aggressively slashing costs on their cars to keep sales up in the face of competition, eating hard into their margins.
A lot of the expectation of future value with Tesla seems to be the belief or hope that it will become a "network effect" company: that Tesla charging networks will become the de facto US national charging network, and that the Tesla car OS will become the Windows of EV/Self-Driving cars. Both seem rather unlikely in the long run.
If I was a professional trader, quite likely, if the market price is any judge.
If the people making this argument think that market price is totally wrong, then by all means, go ahead and short TSLA. If they're right, it's a great deal!
I mean, rational people also look at the price of gold, or the price of Bitcoin, and are perfectly aware that valuation and logic are not always closely linked.
And as others have said: the market can stay irrational longer than you stay solvent.
It is largely because of stuff like this I have to disagree with Musk being bad at PR. I understand what's meant here (basically lots of people dislike him and he doesn't care that much to placate them) but he is the richest man in the world rather than another merely rich and successful company founder because of his PR skills.
Musk is the richest man in the world not because he has a lot of money in the bank but because of what he owns, specifically lots and lots of very valuable Tesla stock. Now, Tesla is a fine company that can even turn a profit these days, but at a market cap of ~$860 billion it is the world's seventh most valuable company; the stock price is quite high relative to current business fundamentals (A better comparison than Ford is Toyota, the world's largest carmaker and a pretty solid business, which has a market cap of under a third of Tesla's with roughly 4 times Tesla's annual revenue). So if you buy Tesla shares at a high price and thus help make Musk the world's richest man, you do it either because 1. you believe that Tesla will, in the future, be worth a lot more because of self-driving or incredible growth prospects whatever, or 2. you intensely love Elon Musk and Tesla and want to support them. Both of these things are probably the most important factors driving Tesla's share price up, and are entirely dependent on marketing and PR done largely by Elon Musk personally.
It is only a little hyperbolic to say that Musk's many stunts have created a kind of technophile cult of personality around him that he has leveraged into becoming the world's richest man. This is not someone who is bad at PR! It is just a different skillset than making everyone blandly accept him. There's lots more to say on this topic, but probably you get the idea. I'd say Musk is bad at PR in the same way as e.g. Donald Trump, who lots of people hate but did manage to become President of the United States through a combination of strong media skills and personal charisma. Musk went for getting rich instead, which is probably for the best because a lot of the profile of him here reminded me strangely of descriptions of Napoleon[1].
[1] Incidentally I remember seeing an Elon Musk tweet where he strongly endorsed the Age of Napoleon podcast, so consciously or not there might be some real affinity there.
"is the "Musk's projects are incredible" narrative stronger than would be expected from the actual incredibleness of his projects?"
It depends which narrative and which facts you compare/contrast. If you consider the self promotion and public image he's cultivated and the cottage industry of Tesla/SpaceX bulls and Musk click-bait content, then compare that to a more skeptical or jaded view of Tesla and SpaceX, yes. It's a bit like Jobs/Apple and consumer tech - one of the great things Tesla did was turn an appliance into a gadget, which has the benefit of being judged in a different way.
(Sidenote: Anyone know how close we are to rocket launches being frequent enough for having both rocket building and rocket refurbishing operations to make a lot of business sense? Not to minimize the achievement of implementing lower-stage landing as well as SpaceX has, a lack of use-case is the reason the old proofs-of-concept weren't further developed, prior to them.)
Did Vance write about fraud and production problems at Tesla? I read "Ludicrous," by Edward Niedermeyer and it's worse than the headlines, according to him.
Can you explain more? If Congress is threatening to shut you down, isn't it better for business to say nice reassuring things to Congress that make them like you, than to tell them to f**k off?
(regardless of whether you secretly think Congress should f**k off and he is morally in the right)
I think it's more complicated than that. I'm combining "placating Congress" with "placating the media", because I think they're basically the same skill of placating-the-broad-political-cultural-regime. If you offend the media too badly, they can . . . well, they can do what they're doing to Elon now. I don't know how well it's working; it seems to be working very well, but part of their strategy is to make you think that. But it can't be great for him. It's definitely not as easy as "you tell Congress to f**k off, the media reports on this fairly and accurately, and you are hailed as a hero by the common man."
I wasn't necessarily suggesting it was a good idea/strategy, just what I understood of Jack Johnson's comment - though he's now replied directly so...
But as to your own reply - I think the media IS reporting fairly on Elon Musk i.e. he's turned alt-right (or always was alt-right, just was hiding it better) and that is burning a lot of the goodwill liberals/leftists had for him given he's more or less single handedly created the EV sector as a viable car segment (with the obvious impact on climate change).
Obviously, liberals and left leaning folks like myself aren't going to be too fond of Elon Musk new/revealed alt right tendencies. I tend to be forgiving, and most of us are but terminally online leftists... well, not so much. Kinda goes with the terminally online aspect.
Some companies may decide it's best avoiding advertising on X but, I dunno, Fox managed to make money out of old scared/outraged right wingers. Maybe X can do the same with younger right wingers?
I'm definitely not making a moral point, more of a Danegeld point ("That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld. You never get rid of the Dane" with apologies to Danish readers).
Once you've bowed and placated them once, they are incentivised to do it again.
I'm not an expert in US politics or social media, but I think in other situations where someone has power over you it isn't always the right solution to say nice reassuring things to them.
This position on tribute is kinda silly, though. There were all _kinds_ of good reasons to pay tribute, such as the Danegeld historically. For one thing, if you pay it, you get at least a chance to reconstitute after being beaten or harassed by an insurmountable force.
Paying tribute is a bit like paying protection money - no-one does it because they like it, but depending on the context, it might be a lot better than the alternative.
It's a political tool that's been used all over the world for literally millennia.
I'm not espousing "never pay protection money" I'm saying there are arguments against it. In Scott's original comment it seemed taken as obvious that the "rational" Zucklike actor should always pay the protection money. I don't think that's true, and I don't think it's true in the situation described.
Right, I think it's less about skills and more about willingness to play the game. Zuck is willing to roll over and show his belly when he's threatened by power, whereas Musk wants to exert power of his own. Zuck can be relied upon to do what the various organs of power within the United States want him to do, but Musk wants to make his own decisions like he's the goddamn player character.
I've previously expounded here on my theory that there's five independent power centres in the United States: Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the news media (which lacks a geographical metonym). I might modify that to say there's really five and a half, and the 0.5 is Elon Musk.
Half of Congress WILL massively respect someone who tells them to go f*** themselves...
This is (one of) the lessons of Trump – in a world where you can NEVER make the complaining classes happy, you might as well at least earn the respect of everyone else who also has contempt for the complaining classes.
Certainly better than kowtowing to them as Zuck did – has that improved Meta's image any amongst the Left? While not at all impressing the Right.
I somewhat disagree with the framing here -- the first job that Zuckerberg had was building a social network from scratch (in a very different competitive landscape to the current one), which was well-suited to a move-fast hacker, and did not require any PR or much social skills; it was predominately a technical problem. By virtue of the company's growth rate and various political and economic accidents of history, Zuckerberg is still the controlling shareholder of Meta, and so he's managed to keep the job of CEO and has hired a great team around him. The job of running Meta now is very different than his original job, and does require PR, leadership, and interpersonal skills.
The job that Musk has today with X is a very different one than Dorsey had when he built Twitter or that Zuckerberg had when he built Facebook; it's more like the new job Zuckerberg happens to have now as CEO of a major social network. Twitter already had a robust network of users, and also had a lot of regulatory baggage (FCC consent decrees), global legal commitments around content moderation, election integrity, anti-terrorism, etc., and a large existing org.
Musk's task at Twitter was not to "build a social media giant"; that was already done, it's what he paid $42B for. The challenge for Twitter was more of a typical MBA textbook "how do we fix this broken, rudderless, unprofitable company?" which is very much a socio-political organizational challenge. I'm sure in addition there is a big technical component like "why can't we run this company with 10% of the technical staff?" but that is a mundane technical challenge that many CTOs would feel comfortable stepping into, not requiring a revolutionary/visionary invention that nobody has pulled off before.
To be fair Musk has brought in a CEO at Twitter, but I'm skeptical that Yaccarino actually has authority; can you imagine her bringing Musk to heel on anything? I suspect she's more of a glorified COO, when it comes down to it. (This last part is fairly idle speculation on my part, to be clear.)
In short, impressive as his portfolio is, I don't think Musk has demonstrated a track record with the sort of problem that Twitter faced at the time of his takeover. And his superpower on hiring doesn't seem to translate well either; "colonize Mars" is a unique mission that people are willing to work late nights to advance even at risk of being fired on the spot, "build a free-speech social media platform" has less of a ring to it. Employees must be asking themselves why work at X and not at Facebook, where they have zero chance of being arbitrarily fired? I think Twitter has so much regulatory, technical, and organizational debt that it's going to be very hard to succeed at iterating as quickly as he wants to.
I think that I've spotted a flaw in your logic ?(!)
> You're admitting there are people worse than you - [lazy cousin Larry,] Alex Jones, the fossil fuel lobby, etc.
One of these is not like the others.
We owe compassion (among other things) to other fellow human beings (including Alex Jones). We do NOT owe this to non-human entities (including groups of humans).
When we say that platforms are fundamentally evil, it's because there are fundamental reasons, coming from what is involved in their very definition, that make them be a net negative for human flourishing.
A recent example (which in some ways just repeats old arguments, but in his usual brilliant way) would be Cory Doctorow coining the term "enshittification [of platforms]" :
More specifically, and what prompted my first reaction : the closed, proprietary nature of platforms is incompatible with the practice of free speech. (Compare with the liberal governments being banned from engaging into censorship.)
Now of course, there probably *might* be a way to rein in platforms with an extremely heavy legal framework, where most of their damage would be minimized... but why bother ?
(Also reminds me how allowing privately owned press (opposed to journalist-association press) after WW2 might have been a mistake that we are now paying for.)
Again, they aren't human beings, we don't owe them anything, not even a right to exist, why tolerate them, especially when we can just use protocols (or even something else) instead ?
(The reason why the USA and China tolerates them, is likely because they give them a lot of power : respectively internationally, and against their own citizens.)
P.S.: I've left out potential discussions of limits (what about a group of only two humans ?), and of what we owe to non-human living entities...
"Today I learned that Cory fucking Doctorow is being given credit for coining 'enshittification'. In 2022. I used it in 2013, and I'm probably not the first."
Yeah, I agree. What Twitter really needs in a leader is a boring management guy to come up with a way of monetizing their product without either: bankrupting the company, pissing of their entire client base, destroying their technical base or being destroyed by the government. Musk is not that guy.
Zuck also was operating in a very different marketplace when he founded FB than today. FB's contined if wavering success is mostly for legacy reasons, not because of Zuck's continued wise leadership. If Zuck never worked in social media but became a billlionaire in some other space and then bought twitter in 2022, I don't expect he would have any chance of significantly growing the company.
As somebody who also worked on getting humans to Mars (the Orion project, which now only going to the moon after a large demotion), yeah having good ideas at those companies is soul crushing.
Getting trivial changes done to anything takes 6-12 months. I’m talking 1 hour fixes. Because they weren’t planned for already, so they can’t even be planned in this 3 month cycle.
And on the workload front I used to put in 70+ hour weeks every once in a while, so working for SpaceX would be a large step up in quality of getting things done and getting to build the cool stuff, while not being a horrendous downgrade in the other dimensions (though 75 hour weeks eat you alive. It’s basically 6 hours of sleep per night and every other moment is reserved to working or getting ready for work / commuting).
I understand the frustration... but my impression is that space exploration is one of the fields where very thorough, very systematic planning with very conservative change cycles is the most promising approach to get something that works at the first attempt - even if it takes longer and costs more than planned. Compare the JWST to the most recent "Starship" launch for illustration.
Yes, but space flight is not AI alignment – you don't have to get it right the first time. Building lots of starship prototypes and letting some of them fail is still cheaper and faster than whatever the people running SLS are doing.
I would withhold judgment on that until one of those prototypes has done what SLS has done. So far, Starship has not even reached LEO, and there are some ridiculously high hurdles before it even attempts to go farther.
Keep in mind that government money is much more closely tracked than business money. Unless you have an Apollo-project situation where the president is backing you every step of the way and Congress wants to beat the damn Russki's, no one is going to take kindly to millions of tax payer dollars blowing up a bunch of times when it could be done more slowly but right at once.
No, not how mishap reports work. SpaceX leads the mishap report for the April 20 launch (IFT 1), they compile the list in collaboration with FAA, and then they turn it in for review. SpaceX turned in the mishap report on Aug 21, and FAA reviewed it and closed the case however many days ago. It's in the mishap report where you find the 63 items which SpaceX themselves listed, and they've spent the last 5 months fixing them. Elon just reported that SpaceX are done with all 57 items that are required for the upcoming flight (IFT 2), with the exception of 6 items that are required for later flights (IFT 3, 4 etc). What they're waiting for now is a launch license, which gets issued by FAA. It's currently unclear if we're waiting for SpaceX to apply for the license or if FAA are currently reviewing the license. Regardless, launch license is expected in the next few days or weeks.
But SpaceX is also Musk's most incredibly successful project so far, so I would NOT bet against it. (Well, for mildly outrageous goals like first stage landing and recovery, Mars colonization is something else...)
Yea, SpaceX is the company that's the farthest ahead of the competition. Like we're talking monopoly level dominance. SpaceX has launched 80% of all payload to orbit in the whole world in 2023, and they've steadily increased launch cadence by 40% year-on-year for the last 6 years. The closest competitors are probably 10 years behind in terms of technology.
SLS is like 5x the development cost so far and has been in development since 2011 (6 years delay). And they only have 5 scheduled flights at a marginal launch cost of $4.5B per launch. Meanwhile the Starship flight of April (IFT 1) was literally just a telemetry gathering event that had about a 50% chance of even reaching orbit. The primary goal was to just clear the launch tower. They're using a fundamentally different development approach. In IFT 2 in the coming days or weeks, SpaceX are testing hot staging, which is a new approach to staging, which again has downgraded their odds for success. Once again they're putting probability of reaching orbit at 50%. These exploding rockets are not "failed missions". They're literally expected to blow up, the same way the Falcon boosters when they worked on figuring out booster reuse.
Starship may turn out to be a bust, but Falcon Heavy reached LEO and beyond, five years ago. And unless you have a conniption any time someone says the words "on-orbit assembly", anything you can do with a ginormous NASA SLS, you can do with three Falcon Heavies at maybe a quarter of the cost.
The SpaceX way is faster, better, and cheaper than the NASA way, or the LockMart/Boeing/Grumman way. So much so that the NASA way is increasingly "hey let's just pay SpaceX to do it for us".
Honestly, I am not sure. I have worked in space engineering for years and my impression is that the big space agencies and companies have a lot of inertia and reluctance to consider new ideas and change. A lot of the processes have been built up in response to past failures, but they also stifle a lot of innovation. When people come in with a fresh approach and the resources to implement them, they have tended to get quite far. You can look at how SpaceX has done, but also the early days of the space program at NASA were a lot more open to innovation than today. Its true the JWST worked, whereas Starship hasn't (at least not yet) but the way in which these projects work is different. The JWST was a very expensive, one-off space telescope that pushed the limits of what was possible - and by, the way, despite its success it has come at the cost of a lot of other possible astronomical projects - Starship is not a one-off, it has been designed from the beginning to be mass produced. Of course, whether Starship will ever meet its goals is another thing, but even if it doesn't I don't think the approach to building it will be the fatal flaw.
You can do that - and 17 billion dollars and 20 years later you might launch the first one, which will likely reach orbit on the first try.
Or you can build and blow up a bunch of much cheaper ones, and 20 years later you're launching 60+ rockets a year - and recovering a large portion of them so you can re-launch them again later. And you've spent about 5% as much money.
SLS runs into the problem that so much effort has been put into the rocket that it cannot fail. If it blew up, there would be calls (more calls that is) to cancel the whole thing as a bad job. Which is also why they ran into problems with e.g. replacing the batteries meant they needed to wheel it back into the shed, because they're buried 6 layers deep - the thing is a jeweled watch, so changing anything, even obviously replaceable parts like batteries, is an enormous production.
This, although with the caveat that the larger the rockets have gotten, the slower the testing and prototyping. Something like a Falcon 9 blowing up on the pad sucks, but it's not a huge disaster - whereas a fully stacked Starship Superheavy blowing up on the pad is like setting off a small nuke, and even the last failure from April set them back by almost six months. You have to start doing more "linear" development style testing because of that.
Maybe it would be different if they had some kind of offshore launch platform where they could take more explosive risks, but not where they are in Boca Chica.
Uh, for an engineering task like this, building rockets quickly to observe all the ways in which they fail catastrophically seems like the default right thing to do to me?
Slow feedback cycles are death. To me, that's a core anchor in planning research projects. I work on AI science and math, not rocket engineering, but this very much seems to me like something which would carry over to almost all types of projects where you're attempting very novel things. You're trying to do things that will yield the most bits of relevant information per time and resources invested possible as quickly as possible.
Actually building a version of the rocket to observe how exactly it will blow up seems excellent for that, if this is an option you have. Direct contact with reality, tons of high dimensional data. Many answers to research questions you didn't even necessarily realise you needed to be asking.
Charlie Stross (no friend of Musk) has pointed out that it's how we used to test military aircraft in the US in the 1950s. The way SpaceX is doing it now is actually better, since there's no risk of killing dozens of test pilots.
Really? Observing all the ways in which a rocket filled with 5000 tons of fuel can catastrophically fail seems the smart thing to do? Your intuition is obviously different from mine...
The first thing you do is set off maybe 50 tons of rocket fuel in the middle of some desert, see how big the kaboom is, and calculate how far away you need to keep people and valuable property from the 5000 ton rocket before you see what happens. Then, yes, you probably do find a sufficiently remote site to launch a bunch of 5000 ton rockets and see what happens.
If anyone heard a loud kaboom out near Dugway, UT yesterday morning, well, I'm not sure I can comment on whether that might be relevant here, but I'm definitely not saying it's *not* relevant.
It's such a pity because it used to be that it was quite easy to do crazy idea innovation at Google even for people at the bottom (20% time and stuff). I know, I was there and I did it.
Uh-uh. You don't get to call anything "the Orion project" unless it involves nuking Heaven. You worked on the utterly lame, international-law-compliant pseudo-Orion "project."
I worked on ISS early in my career. My very first software fix took 18 months from “writing” it (about 2 hours) to it launching on the ISS. This bug was to help prevent ammonia leaks into the station atmosphere! 18 months of potential failure waiting to happen… crazy.
“Writing” is in quotes because it was done in this control system application, MatrixX, that let you build logic blocks with drag and drop.
I never saw Birdwatch but I regularly see Community Notes. It seems to at least have become much more popular during Musk's reign. The average quality of the notes is also surprisingly high.
The vetting system for people who can write Community Notes is pretty well-designed - you have to have used Twitter/X for a period of time, then you sign up and then all you can do is vote up/down notes. If you vote for a hidden note that later becomes unhidden (they are unhidden when they reach net +5 votes), then you get one point. You have to score five points before you can write notes. Once you start writing notes, you get points based on the votes for and against your notes, and you can lose note-writing privileges if your score drops below five. You can't score more than +5 per note (so you can't get +500 for a really good note and then write as much crap as you like).
When you vote for/against a note, there are a list of categories and you tick which ones the note is good/bad in. I'm assuming there is both an automated consensus system and some manual vetting of these.
What is obvious about the CN vetting system is that it takes a long time to build up a large pool of CN writers - it's pretty plausible to me that it's being used much more now more because there are now a large pool of people writing notes and it took a long time to vet the people in that pool, rather than it being anything Musk has specifically done.
If Musk has done anything, it's more that his own tweets get community noted from time to time, screenshots of those go viral, and this publicises community notes so more people sign up.
Fascinating how similar this is to Slashdot's meta-moderation, an approach to quality that I would love to see adopted more widely. Make that digital reputation Black Mirror episode real again!
I remember seeing a talk by the UK rapper Akala a couple years back. A (paraphased) line that stood out to me:
"You spend your 20s reading about how to become successful and think you know it all. Then, later, when you actually try and build something yourself, you realize just how difficult it is to make anything even moderately successful, and your respect for people who have done so grows exponentially".
I think a lot about this when I hear the weird sub cult of people who hand wave away Elon Musk's accomplishments and dismiss him.
You don't have to like Musk, he is absolutely a massive tool on a regular basis. But he is, by any reasonable metric, an outlier and an exceptional human being, who's achievements speak for themselves.
We shouldn't conflate politics with recognition of the above.
False dichotomy. Saying you have respect for Elon's accomplishments is not the same thing as thinking he should have carte blanche to do whatever he wants.
Dangerous mindset because you can ascribe whatever implications you like to someone's statements. Unless there is a weight of context to suggest otherwise I'd lean on assuming people mean what they say.
Speaking of context, this is one reason why Twitter/X is such a garbage fire : navigating the tree of tweets (to get a better sense of context) is so cumbersome that I'm suspecting it's hard by design...
The thing is, Musk's brand has always included a significant moral dimension. He's always pitched himself as the cool tech visionary trying to save humanity. Certainly in my social circles this seems to have been an early motivation for people to join the not-so-weird sub-cult of people who think Musk is the apex of homo sapiens.
I like the phrasing you've used. And I agree, there's definitely a moral element intertwined when someone is trying to "save" humanity, but through their own means.
This is where I feel most disappointed by Musk's Trump-esque turn -- I'm shocked at his consistent lack of courage. His speaking truth to power clams up real fast when it comes to, say, China torturing prisoners.
Re "everyone always thinks Musk companies will fail but then they succeed", worth noting that he has also had some flops (e.g. the boring company or the Hyperloop). He still has a pretty good batting average in tough businesses, but it's far from guaranteed.
(also, most likely outcome seems to be "twitter keeps working about as well as before but he still loses money on the deal because of the general tech downturn". Is that success or failure?)
The book talked about Hyperloop a little. It suggests Musk originally made it as a throwaway comment to make fun of California's high-speed-rail boondoggle, sort of "if you were going to do a COOL high-speed train system, here's how I would actually do it". Then everyone got excited about it, Musk himself got caught up in the general excitement, but it's not clear he took it seriously as a company (I don't know what the relationship between that and Boring Company is).
I'm not sure what to think about Boring Company. It doesn't feel very exciting right now, but it did get a contract to dig lots of tunnels in Las Vegas and is valued at $6 billion. If anyone else had created a $6 billion startup that was digging exciting infrastructure five years after being founded, they'd be world-famous. I don't know how much we should discount Musk for being so famous that it's easy for his companies to get publicity and resources.
Re. the last sentence: a lot. Who else would have had the clout to bamboozle officials into funding another doomed-to-fail project after the first was so underwhelming?
The job of The Boring Company is not to make tunnels better, it's to make tunnels cheaper. Building tunnels currently costs something like a billion dollars a mile, which seems to just be a manifestation of cost disease because nobody can figure out why it should be so expensive.
Building tunnels doesn't cost a billion dollars a mile. There was a single subway tunnels that cost that, *including* stations (which are a majority of the cost), which also had to be much bigger to be able to contain subways. We already know how to get tunnels for orders of magnitude less than we pay for them. The bottleneck is competent government planners, not contractors.
You have to move a bunch of earth out of the way, stop the tunnel from falling in on itself, and (for passenger tunnels) devise some way of getting everyone out if there's a fire. And then you've got to maintain an underground structure for decades. While I absolutely concede that we could probably build safe tunnels for much less than we currently spend (particularly in the Anglosphere), I think there are good fundamental reasons to think that surface infrastructure is always going to be cheaper.
That said, there's definitely money to be made here if you can figure out how to, say, build an underground power transmission cable for merely 2x the cost of an overhead line rather than 10x, because a lot of people seem to really hate looking at pylons and they're holding up a lot of necessary grid expansion.
My recollection at the time was Elon dumped a white paper on the internet and said, "Someone else do this, I don't have the time." Those calling that a 'failure' for Musk seems a little off. Sure, he suggested it, but mostly his involvement in the project seems to be cheerleading. (E.g. holding an annual hyperloop competition seems to be exactly this kind of hands-off approach.)
> I'm not sure what to think about Boring Company.
I think the way to think about the Boring Company is that it's mostly a joke company that he founded for the lulz; it's where he launches his joke products like the flamethrower. He was initially bullish that they would somehow be able to get a 10x cost improvement in tunnel boring machines, claiming to have found room for 4x improvement in speed from a thermodynamic first principles analysis, but he does not seem to have achieved much. (I was fairly skeptical that there would be that much free lunch, but he did manage a 10x cost improvement with SpaceX so I felt a strong inclination to defer to him at the time.)
Regarding the valuation, as the Twitter acquisition showed, he can text his buddies and raise billions. I don't index too much on Boring's $6b valuation; it just means he persuaded VCs to pay $675m for ~11% ownership stake during the zero-interest rate period, it doesn't say much about the company's ultimate profitability. For non-Musk founders I'd say that's a strong signal, but I think we've established that there's billions of dollars available for whatever project he's working on, with sparse due diligence, based on his reputation earned with Tesla and SpaceX.
Neuralink is another one to put in the "not a home run" bucket. Seems more like an excuse for him to get involved in speculative neuroscience stuff and hang out with neuroscientists, which to be fair is fun.
IIUC each of these companies are something like 1-2% of his time so it's also plausible that these are just fun relaxing meetings for him, not his primary focus.
This is the exact type of comment that confuses me. Background: I'm a tunnelling engineer in California, very pro-public transit, very anti-Musk for about 8 years now.
The California High Speed Rail project will be the fastest train speed anywhere in the US. In my view it's an exciting new type of project we haven't built before. But in public opinion it's panned as a disaster or "boondoggle" project. Yes I admit it has schedule problems and cost overruns, and this is a legitimate gripe about the project. But this is unfortunately normal for a construction project in California, or the US in general.
The Boring Company Las Vegas system is tunnelling a ~14 ft diameter tunnel that can fit 1 lane of car traffic, and it's light on some safety features like ventilation, exit walkways, or fire suppression systems. It will use Tesla cars, driven by Tesla employees. In my view this is basically an underground Uber system, but it will probably have more expensive fares to regain the capital costs of building the tunnel (Boring Company is paying for the tunnels, and casinos are paying for the stations, they do NOT have funding from City of Las Vegas AFAIK). But this expensive Uber system is exciting??
I think some observers see the situation as "The City of Las Vegas agrees that this company is legitimate" when really it's more like "okay, sure, we give you permission to build us a bizarre gadgetbahn system on your own dime, good luck".
Maybe California HSR fails, maybe Boring Company fails, maybe California HSR succeeds, maybe Boring Company succeeds. But I feel that the public is putting points on the scoreboard before the projects are completed.
Also, on a more abstract level, why would anyone trust a private company to make good public transit? If your transit system can make 20-30% of its revenue from fares, that's considered a win. Most of the budget is funded with tax dollars because transit is considered a public good. I agree that private companies can be more efficient than government, but public transit seems like an especially bad industry for a private company - they would need to charge sky high fares to regain capital costs, and they don't have eminent domain powers either. (Eminent domain probably isn't needed in Las Vegas - the casino owners, with large properties all along a single line, will probably be on board. But the plan doesn't scale to other cities.)
The fact that Musk chose to put his weight and efforts behind putting more cars on the road, ostensibly to solve climate change is what ultimately gave me pause and brought me to my present position that Musk is not necessarily good for humanity (although I'm not necessarily convinced he's a menace for humanity either). Before this I was a huge fan and thought he was going to propel humanity forward, kicking and screaming.
It appears that if he really wanted to make a massive dent in climate change, he would have worked his miracles to fix the US's car addiction and road-brained design, and create massive public transit systems that would be doing for them what Tesla is doing for EVs. The simplest explanation for why he didn't do this is that he's more interested in winning capitalism (although he is undoubtedly a nerd at heart), rather than serving humanity. This also aligns with his other efforts, although I would classify some of them as well-intentioned but flawed and possibly dangerous (e.g. AI alignment).
He might just have thought that convincing USians to abandon their car-centric culture was a losing proposition in the short term. (Especially with Bush Jr. infamous "The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.")
In the medium term, economies of scale for battery making and much better know how in electric vehicle production would open up alternatives.
That doesn't seem like a satisfactory answer considering how much he seems to relish going against the grain. I think profitability and building something cool seemed to be his primary motivations here.
Nothing wrong with that, it just doesn't seem like the actions of somebody who is more concerned with ensuring an egalitarian thriving future for humanity.
Oh yeah, but one does not necessarily prevent the other...
As a successful businessman he probably has a sense, to parallel the review, of what is just outlandish but possible (in the relevant time period), and what is guaranteed to fail ?
"worked his miracles to fix the US's car addiction and road-brained design, and create massive public transit systems that would be doing for them what Tesla is doing for EVs."
I don't think this is the kind of miracle that Musk can pull off. Maybe he knows this, and went for something more feasible?
I think Hyperloop and The Boring Company perfectly illustrate his approach and its limitations - both ideas arise out of considering physical limits and rounding off everything else to zero. Except it turns out that the obstacles to commercial feasibility lie elsewhere in those cases. You can't reduce transit economics or subway OPEX factors to applications of physical laws, so it's hard to get Elon to care about or even notice them.
To my knowledge the boring company (unlike SpaceX) hasn't successfully reduced tunneling costs (beyond just building smaller tunnels, which do come with lower capacity). Even on the purely technical side, he failed to improve TBMs like he did rockets.
Yeah, and this is what I mean - from a physics-based best-case analysis, "build smaller tunnels" jumps out at you, but it turns out there are a bunch of operational reasons not to do that.
even aside from that, it's not really a huge improvement - price scales with tunnel diameter (which determines capacity for car tunnels). It makes more sense to do it for subway tunnels (which often are built too big, e.g. in Bart) but musk doesn't want to do those.
To be fair, the bull case for the project is compelling - if tunnels are small, then we can dig more of them and have smaller stations, which could reduce the overall difficulty of those projects. If you just buy a building, and dig an elevator down into the basement and then dig horizontally to connect to the loop network, that is potentially much easier to construct and much less work to plan, vs. a major subway station that's a huge multi-year construction project.
So even if you need to build 10x as many stations to maintain throughput, you might be able to do so for cheaper than 1/10 the cost of a subway station.
The bear case of course is just that all of the existing research on public transport seems to point to the idea that to get high throughput you need lots of large train cars, and the hypothetical throughput of the Loop systems is way, way lower than equivalently-priced subways, so you'll need to build way more stations than if you were building subways even controlling for the smaller tunnel/station size.
So I think the bull case is reasonable (well, the details don't quite work out, but I could be wrong in my calculations), but it's also not something new he contributed - we already know how to dig smaller tunnels, the arguments against depend on local politics (and occasionally fire safety). With rockets or EVs he could successfully solved previously-unsolved engineering challenges, with tunnels he didn't (it'd be different if he'd invented a vastly better TBM or something).
Another important difference here: With aerospace and car manufacturing, the US is at the technological forefront, so he could start at the peak and hire a lot of top experts to work with him. With infrastructure though, the US is pretty behind many other countries - Spain already know how to build tunnel projects for 3% of American costs. So it's inherently less likely that someone could reduce costs by being a really good engineer.
the somewhat conspiratorial take is that Hyper loop was pushed to stop some public transport funding from going through, which then conveniently went away as the hyper loop failed. The guy does run a car company after all. It’s demonstrably against his interests to support public transport.
It was the California high-speed rail. "Trying to stop that from going through" is superfluous and no reasonable person would waste time on it. Also, if it succeeded it would decrease the amount of driving in one state by ~5% ten years down the line. This isn't worth Elon's time to sabotage and he probably hates it for the same reason everyone in California hates it.
I don’t agree with most of what you wrote there. California is a huge leader when it comes to regulations, technologies, culture, etc. A well-functioning public transportation system in California is a HUGE beacon for other places to do the same. More importantly it pushes a vision of a future world that is car free. This is absolutely worth his effort to sabotage. Seeing it only as this single thing with 5% of the population using it is missing the bigger picture.
The state of California is dysfunctional and terrible at building infrastructure and has been for many years (look at the SF subway or the San Jose Bart extension). Blaming Elon Musk for sabotaging it is kinda like blaming him for making the Washington Generals lose a baseball game.
> A well-functioning public transportation system in California is a HUGE beacon for other places to do the same.
It certainly would be. But conversely, building a tremendously expensive boondoggle of a high speed rail project that runs from Motherfucking Bakersfield to Motherfucking Merced, doesn't touch the major cities, certainly isn't integrated with any other transport system, and which burns assloads of money while carrying tiny numbers of passengers per day... that will be a beacon for other places not to bother.
Which is a shame because there's at least one place in the US where high speed rail actually makes a lot of sense (DC to Boston) but it certainly isn't California as anyone with a map could have told you at any point in the past.
Interestingly it looks like Florida is busy demonstrating how to actually build a useful train system.
SF to LA is a not-unreasonable third or fourth project for a veteran HSR-building agency to take on as a bigger challenge. It's a wholly possible project, but has some significant barriers.
The through-NY project (DC to Boston) should be project two or three, as the NYC tunnelling is a tricky problem and you need some experience.
Since the first project is likely to be a bit of a disaster as you build experience, my recommendation for the hypothetical "US National High-Speed Rail Building Agency" would be
1. Chicago-St Louis. This is the easiest possible project. Two large cities, nothing big enough to be worth stopping at in between (though an out-of-town stop for Springfield would be fine and would buy off some politicians), largely flat terrain.
2. Chicago-ORD-Milwaukee-Minneapolis/St Paul (possibly with a stop as MSP). This one should be a home run for an agency that has got its feet under the table. There are some harder technical challenges (airport-area construction), the terrain is less flat (you go through the Wisconsin Dells) but manageable, and you connect to the other service
3. Boston-Washington. You're in a much more densely populated area; you have to get into and out of New York (which probably requires a new Hudson River tunnel and then either crossing the East River twice, or bringing a tunnel under the whole of Manhattan), you have to deal with the political arguments between cities in New England over the route (Providence or Worcester), you have to run through Philadelphia and Baltimore, you have to get into the centers of Boston and DC. But these are the normal sorts of problems.
4. Either Chicago-NYC or LA-SF. Both have far worse terrain than anything you've looked at before. Both have many plausible routes (e.g. Chicago-Fort-Wayne-Columbus-Pittsburgh-Harrisburg-Philadelphia-NYC vs Chicago-Toledo-Cleveland-Pittsburgh vs Chicago-Toledo-Cleveland-direct to NYC; in California, while Bakersfield-Merced is shared by any route, there are at least four ways into LA and three into SF) - which cities you pass through generates a lot of lobbying/politics, so you have to be able to manage that.
The problem is that CAHSR is a brand new agency that is doing "brand new agency" mistakes, and California has dysfunctional politics that means that it can't make decisions.
Like: they've overspending on the Bakersfield-Merced section because they've stolen the entire budget for the LA and SF tunneling to use to buy off farmers in the central valley.
They can't make up their minds over the routes into LA and SF (they have officially picked routes, but you can tell they haven't really picked them because the politicians who favour the other routes are still lobbying for changes and the sorts of technical decisions like ordering TBMs haven't yet been made).
They haven't made the obvious decision to spend a little bit of money electrifying the existing LA-Bakersfield and SF-Merced railroads so they can run CAHSR trains from LA to SF from day one (slowly on the existing lines, fast through the valley). This is because they won't admit that the SF and LA bits aren't going to be finished "soon", and that the temporary solution will be in place for a decade or more meaning it's well worth doing.
Also CAHSR is doing a really bad job of actually building and is overspending even above what the overdesigned route should cost.
LA-SF should be about three hours with HSR all the way, if they'd just wire the track so the HSR train can run at normal speed into the cities, it would be about six hours - about the same as driving. Not great, but it would get far more passengers than Bakersfield-Merced, and they could then dig tunnels into the two cities and speed things up as they go. But that would involve having an agency that is interested in running trains, rather than one that is interested in making Gavin Newsom cut ribbons. If no-one uses it, no-one complains about the service.
Just as a clarification - the last and third-from-last paragraphs in that comment are about how a competent organisation would rescue the project even now, not about what CAHSR should have done, but what CAHSR, if their senior management were all replaced by competent people, would do now.
What they should have done in the first place is identified the most politically or technically difficult bits and then done those first, because they will take the longest. In both cases, they are the crossing of the mountains from the Central Valley to the city and the entry-route to the city station.
Just as an illustration (there's more to this, plenty of which I'm not expert enough to comment on), there are three obvious possible routes into San Francisco from Merced, one is to cross the mountains from Merced to approximately Gilroy, then come up Silicon Valley to San Jose and connect to CalTrain and use Caltrain up to San Francisco. The second is to continue up the valley as far as Modesto or Manteca, then cross the mountains to Fremont and rebuild the Dumbarton Rail Bridge to connect to Caltrain (between Menlo Park and Redwood City stations). The third is to carry on up the valley all the way to Stockton, then come around the northern edge of the East Bay (through places like Antioch and Martinez) and then cut a new tunnel under the Bay and then have underground platforms under the Caltrain terminus.
The further north you go in the valley, the better the connection to Sacramento from SF (if you have to go via Merced, then it's useless; via Stockton is very reasonable). If you have a station in the East Bay (either at Fremont or in the Richmond/Berkeley area) then that's serves a different group of people. Crossing south of San Jose serves the area south of San Jose (Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy, etc). Using Caltrain track (well, new track along the same ROW) serves both San Jose and San Francisco. Using the Dumbarton Bridge means that trains from LA can't serve both SJ and SF, so they each get half the overall service (which should still be adequate) but that also means that SF-SJ passengers need a separate train: you could run a "super-Baby Bullet" on the HSR track doing SF-SJ non-stop if you want. Running only from SF means passengers from SJ have to use the Baby Bullet and transfer at 4th and King or at Transbay (depending where the HSR terminates).
So what do you prioritise? East Bay residents not having to go into SF? San Jose? SF-Sacramento? the Valley south of SJ? Stockton and Modesto? If you make a decision, someone will be angry.
Personally: I'd pick the central route over Dumbarton Rail Bridge; bring the Central Valley line up as far as Modesto, and put in a three-direction junction ("delta junction", or "wye") so you can later extend to Stockton and Sacramento (and, maybe even later, Reno). Add an additional high-speed track pair to the CalTrain which the HSR track connects to after crossing Dumbarton, and run a Super-Baby-Bullet between SF and SJ. Trains from LA would alternate between SF and SJ. You could just catch whatever train leaves first and then transfer at Fremont if you prefer that to waiting in LA.
But the important thing is that you have to tunnel through the mountains, that tunnel will take several years to bore, and that's the longest part of the construction process, so you need to start it first. At the moment, all there is between Merced and San Francisco is lines on a map.
Working from here: I'd announce that we're electrifying the Livermore pass and the Valley subdivision and that trains will run from 4th and King to Los Angeles Union Station from day one, but will run at conventional speeds from SF4K to Merced and Bakersfield to LAUS until high-speed track is laid. I'd also announce that we're locking in all the designs between Merced and Bakersfield, because the delays involved in changing - even if to a cheaper and better design - would be more expensive than just getting on and building.
Next, I'd announce that we are reopening the routes into the cities, develop a mid-level plan for each possible route and then put them to a vote (either in the California State legislature or by referendum). The day after the vote result, I'd place the orders for the TBMs, because we'd have sufficient specificity on the routing to know how many TBMs we'd want for each route. Then I'd roll out detailed station designs for each of the stations on the route and enough detail on the route so people know exactly what land is going to be affected by eminent domain.
Finally, I'd work with people who have built one before, even if they don't speak English. The country of Spain has some of the best experts in the world high-speed rail design and manufacturing, half of California speaks Spanish. Why on earth aren't there a bunch of Spanish people being hired by CAHSR? Sure, it's a different Spanish, but not that different!
> They haven't made the obvious decision to spend a little bit of money electrifying the existing LA-Bakersfield and SF-Merced railroads so they can run CAHSR trains from LA to SF from day one (slowly on the existing lines, fast through the valley).
You clearly have no idea what the actual situation is. The freight railroads are extremely anti-electrification and the owner of the LA-Bakersfield line has refused to allow scheduled passenger service over the line since 1970.
A well-functioning public transportation system in California, especially one based on high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is exceedingly unlikely to happen, and if it does happen will send approximately the same message as the Apollo program - "this is wicked cool, but way too expensive and nobody should really try to do it again". Again, it's not worth Elon's time to sabotage the self-sabotaging.
Too complicated - Musk likes cars (i.e. he thinks they're "cool") and really really hates being in public transport due to all the people he'd be in close contact with.
That's why it's always "pods" with him and not trains.
A wise man once said, public transport goes from a place that isn't exactly where you are to a place that isn't exactly where you want to be, at a time that isn't exactly when you want to leave, and in the company of people you wouldn't choose to be with.
There is a reason that the rich people solution to transport is "have a driver". The choice of either having to drive or having to share with other people is the one that the rest of us deal with because we can't afford to take taxis everywhere or hire a chauffeur full-time.
Driving doesn't scale. It's nice to be the only one (if you have someone else driving you and a comfortable car, at least), but no one wants to be around other drivers and the net impact is negative
As a European, it seems to me that Americans dislike public transport much more than Europeans do.
Some of the problem you mention only exist if the public transport is underdeveloped. Within a city, taking the subway is great, when there are subway stations everywhere, and the subway comes every few minutes. Between cities, trains are great, much more fun than driving, assuming, again, that trains are frequent enough and that they can get you to every town.
The problem that's left is the people you have to ride with.
Which reminds me that I heard the theory that the real reason Americans don't like public transport is the racial division in the US. According to that theory, Americans of different races distrust each other and don't want to ride together.
Is there any truth to that? I'd like Americans to tell me whether that makes sense.
(Edit: I'm sorry that one person found that insulting. I didn't mean it that way. It is not *my* opinion.)
I just met someone in Shanghai for lunch. The meeting place was the mall over 打浦桥地铁站. (If you want to see it on a map, you can use google maps, but you might want to stick 上海市 at the beginning of the search. Baidu maps will also work.) I went by subway, from 延长路地铁站. And a friend arrived by taxi, but started out near 四平路地铁站.
Between the two of us, the distance to the site was fairly comparable. But I took more than twice as long to get there by subway as my friend did to get there by taxi. And this is actually being fairly generous to the subway system, since almost all of my travel time was done down the same line. (I did need to transfer once, and that's a long walk.)
It's true that there are subway stations everywhere and the train comes every few minutes. But it is nevertheless not a time-efficient way to go medium-to-long distances.
American public transport is dysfunctional in many ways. San Francisco's idea of a subway system reaches almost nowhere in San Francisco, though it does manage to hit the downtown office hub. ( https://www.bart.gov/system-map ) As you can see from the map, it is not conceived of as an intracity transport system at all - it is supposed to be a commuter aid. The lack of population in California means that the passengers put up strong resistance if you want to board when the train is more than about 30% full. This is less of a problem heading to San Francisco in the morning, but it's a severe problem trying to leave at the end of the day.
Apologies for off topic, but do you live in Shanghai? I live in Hangzhou, to my knowledge haven't noticed any other expats in China (if I'm not being too presumptuous on the basis of your name...) commenting here.
The issue is when your fellow passengers smell like they haven't showered in 2 weeks, or act like they're on drugs. If you want to experience this for yourself, try visiting LA and taking a bus and a subway.
Edit to be super clear: No, there is no truth to that claim, and it's pretty insulting to boot.
That is an epiphenomenon of the actual issue, which is that rich people don't want to hang out around poor people, and public transit is for poor people. Looking at the buses that pass my office multiple times a day, the ads on the side are clearly for poor people to look at: "don't commit welfare fraud," "how to quit vaping," etc. I would much rather ride on a multiracial rich bus than a monoracial poor bus.
Sure, but if the places and times are close enough to what you want then it can still beat the overhead of owning and operating a car - and a competent and adequately-funded transit planner can set the locations of stops and times of services so that they cover what most people want. And that's before you get into the positive feedback loop of homes and businesses being sited so they have good transit links...
(Context: currently waiting for my car to be fixed so I can sell it for more than the scrap value, because even as a hiker and mountaineer I don't use it nearly enough to justify the amount I spend on keeping it running.)
I live in Munich, and I vastly prefer public transportation over the car for going anywhere within the city limits.
Of course, public transportation is prone to downward spirals - once it has the reputation of "only for people who can't afford a car", it gets difficult. But it doesn't have to be that way - it's a choice.
A lot of cities have far-from-optimal mass transit, but even an optimal system has fundamental limits that (IMO) make it quite inferior to driving somewhere where driving is practical. If the future really is a mass transit future, I expect that that will correspond to a decrease in people's quality of life rather than an improvement in the experience of taking mass transit.
I would blame it on amount of red tape - public transit is ton of capital, ton of legal work, being an easy prey to any litigation and in case of success - likely slapped with regulation so you don't make too much profit
If you take a physics-based approach, Hyperloop is obvious (and, BTW, not invented by Musk - you can find vactrains in 50s sci-fi, and no doubt the idea is much older). The things that slow down trains are air resistance and rolling resistance - take them away and you can make a faster and more efficient train!
Yeah, but they are able to move how many orders of magnitude more freight than hyperloop would ?
(But maybe Hyperloop should - in most instances, not in this one where high speed boats are viable - be compared to air transport instead - would it be even big enough to fit a container ??)
Hyperloop, as proposed by Musk, would carry essentially no freight, not even an air-type container.
Hyperloop, if built as an evacuated maglev carrying a full-size train, would be able to carry lots of freight, but probably very expensively and passengers are generally better sources of revenue. Personally, I'd describe the second as "not Hyperloop" (because it abandons all the original ideas in Musk's Hyperloop proposal and goes back to pre-hyperloop vactrain ideas), but I suspect that Musk fans would not.
At any rate: Hyperloop, if built realistically, would provide airline-speed transportation, primarily for passengers (not for freight) with *enormous* capacity compared to an airline - 10,000 passengers per hour, which is comparable to flying an A380 every 4 minutes, would be a mid-level capacity.
The sensible way to do this is to have a small number of giant hub stations (the back of my envelope said that you'd need ten for the United States, but it might be nine or eleven or something) and then connect them via conventional high-speed rail to the entire surrounding area.
You'd have one station for California (located somewhere like Fresno). Catch a CAHSR to Fresno, leaving every 10 minutes, taking about 90 minutes from SF (a similar time from LA, Sacramento, SJ, about 110 minutes from San Diego). Transfer to Hyperloop, arrive in Trenton NJ five hours later, transfer to the Acela HSR and you're at Penn Station NYC, NY in another 30 minutes - or Philadelphia, PA about the same time; about an hour to Washington DC, a bit less to Baltimore MD; a bit over an hour to Boston, MA. Would people use that competing with flying? Well, that mostly depends on the quality and speed of the transfers at Fresno and Trenton. Overall SF to NY time-in-transit would be about seven hours, which is similar to flying. And that's from Transbay to Penn Station, much more central than SFO and JFK. If those services are, say, every ten minutes, then your worst-case scenario for transferring is 20 minutes hanging around. That's very competitive with flying. The smallest reasonable trains would have a capacity of 500 passengers; which would mean a minimum of 3,000 an hour, or 50,000 per day to sustain that frequency, which seems plausible if the fares are reasonable. You could easily step up to 10kpph or more frequency by running longer trains more frequently.
I have no idea what costs would be, but if you could keep the fares reasonable, I suspect a lot of people would choose that sort of route.
The killer with hyperloop is that it's a go-big-or-go-home gamble; you need a huge catchment area for one station (like: all of California), you need to build the connectivity for people to get from the catchment area to the station, you need to build at least two stations, you need to build an enormously long hyperloop line, and you'd have to do all of this before taking in a single cent in revenue. If it works, it could be enormously profitable. It could also lose every cent of a multi-trillion dollar investment. There just isn't enough money that is looking for that level of risk.
This article is worth it for the engraving alone ! :D
----
"thousandfold pressure difference"
That's not a fair way to present the issue - after all the difference is "only" ~1 atmosphere ! (Which is roughly that of a standing human being, IIRC ?)
The whole story of Musk's invention of the "Hyperloop" seems by and large to be badly misunderstood. Most people seem to believe that Musk's sole contribution to the centuries-old idea of running trains through evacuated tubes was his addition (literal and otherwise) of some modern "hype". Some further believe (perhaps by conflation with either the Boring Company or the various companies without ties to Musk that sprang up to explore this idea in the wake of the excitement generated by his announcement) that Musk himself attempted [in vain] to commercialize the technology.
None of this is even remotely true. In the first place, the key idea that Musk first dubbed Hyperloop and hyped as "a cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table” was not the basic idea of a vacuum train, but a clever refinement to this idea that would have indeed have been (to the best of my knowledge) an *engineering* innovation original to Musk.
You can still read the details of this original proposal in the white paper released to describe it, which is still up on Tesla's web site (https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf) (and gives due credit to the vacuum train forerunners of this proposal). Briefly, the key idea was to kill two birds with one stone by mounting a giant fan on the train cars with the dual purpose of reducing the degree of evacuation necessary to maintain within the enclosing tubes, and simultaneously, providing the levitation of the train within these tubes (necessary to avoid friction) without resort to expensive maglev technology.
Had this out-of-the-box idea panned out, it would have eliminated at a stroke two of the largest hurdles standing between this old idea and economic viability, and Musk would be deservedly acclaimed for it. Instead, it was quickly forgotten, for the simple reason that, while at least superficially plausible in theory (Musk having run his idea past engineers at his companies before airing it) it proved unworkable in practice, when tried by some competitors in the open competitions hosted by SpaceX to advance the idea of Hyperloop.
Those open competitions (for which SpaceX provided only the test track and the ground rules) constituted the only material effort that Musk himself ever made to develop his "hyperloop". He had an intriguing idea for making a hitherto-uneconomical concept economically viable, put it to the test at low cost, and abandoned it once it was found to be unworkable.
All of that strikes me as exactly how this sort of thing should go. It's hardly fair to lay the attempts by others to capitalize on the hype cycle surrounding "Hyperloop" to revive the concept of vacuum trains *without* adequately addressing the economic obstacles that had historically stymied their commercialization, and the ensuing failures of these attempts, at Musk's door.
Yeah, that's fair. Disclosure: I actually work at a startup that spun out of a university Hyperloop team (though we're several pivots down the line, and had already pivoted away from Hyperloop when I joined). According to my colleagues who were around at the time, the problems with mounting a jet engine directly in front of the passengers became apparent very quickly, whereas the technical challenges of building a vacuum maglev (while still very hard) at least seem possible to overcome.
I'd have to ask, but I think the basic answer is "safety". You'll note that not even military fast jets have the pilot directly in line with the whirring blades o'death.
To me the worst thing he's done at Twitter/X is elevate the blue checks to the top of the reply stream. Reading the top replies was my favorite part of the site. Now you have to wade through dozens, or hundreds of posts of nonsense to get to actual good posts. And since no one does that anymore, good posts don't get much replies or likes anyway.
My time spent on Twitter has dropped to almost zero for this reason. But on the flip side, my productivity and outlook on life have improved significantly. So maybe I should thank him.
So, I mostly avoid engaging with twitter, but I do engage with a bunch of people who engage with twitter quite a lot, and it sounds like "negative impact on the general user experience of twitter" has actually been a more or less continual subject of discussion since he took over. Some of that may be negative valence attached to Musk himself, but they're attached to concrete changes like this which actually do affect people's experience of the site.
There’s a script you could maybe cobble together with some chatgpt help you could run with Ublock which can likely fix this. I have a similar one running that deletes all tweets from my timeline that don’t have ArXiv links in them.
Yeah but like I said, few bother to wade down to find the good stuff anyway, so a) it doesn't bubble to the top based on number of replies and likes like it used to, which b) makes the good posters not bother as much. In the past I've gotten 100s of 1000s of views on replies to popular tweets. That will never happen again, even if I bought a blue check. There just isn't the engagement in the replies like there used to be.
I still don't understand why there are people *still* talking positively or even neutrally about Twitter/X a whole DECADE after the APIpocalypse that cemented Twitter as a (US!) platform. (And also the whole Trump era.)
And Elon's plans about transforming it into an "everything app" would make it even worse, will we soon have to change GAFAM to GAFAMX (ew) as the top companies to boycott ?
(The worst are the journalists still using it, you would think that their deontology should prevent them from touching it with anything but a "10 foot pole" ?)
On the desktop I've been moving from Windows to Linux for a while now, recently accelerated because while Windows 7 is still getting ~monthly security updates, big software libraries like Qt have started abandoning it.
On the smartphone side, I've started searching for alternatives a couple of years ago, when Google made it clear that you would be not treated like a first class citizen on Android if you didn't use Google Play and Google Services in general.
I actually expect to try the Arch Linux Pinephone this weekend ! (They also have a Pro version, and there's also at least Librem as another alternative.)
That sounds cool. I’ve looked into pinecone back when I was super into diy and open source, but it seemed like too high a price to pay, and too low a payoff. Interested in hearing your review once you get it, and if you remember & want to tell me about it!
Ah, well, there are probably people that already did this better than I can.
(Also, this comment thread has reminded me, *yet again*, of the software issues (and platform issues - with also the ongoing shitshow around Unity) with Substack's comments - why I have stopped engaging in them, especially for ACX - I will probably have to deliberately block them in my browser to not fall in this trap *yet again* - and for the extent that I am willing to tolerate Substack - sadly it *does* have real gems, like this one - should use the forums instead : https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php )
Recently the button to see who has quote tweeted a tweet was also removed (although it's still accessible from the three dots). That was awful as the best responses are often quote tweets.
Blue checks getting ready more (which also bumps down my chances of being read, since I'm unwilling to pay for one) has also gotten me over the hump to permanently abandon twitter, which is a net improvement for me. So I guess I should appreciate him for that?
He's also now paying certain blue checks for posts that get high engagement, which is basically monetizing trollery, like Ian Miles Cheong complaining about women who don't shave their legs, a bunch of marks getting mad about it and replying, Cheong getting a check for ten grand, etc. I scaled back my Twitter use a couple of years ago when I realized that it was mostly just people trying to make me mad in one way or another. Who needs that? It is just no fun.
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
This turns up a lot in Alon Levy's research on transit costs: government departments generally don't do the design (let alone the actual construction) themselves, but it still really matters that they have enough people to understand the engineering of the project and what they really need (and how much it should cost). One of the major problems in the anglosphere is that the top people with actual power tend to be lawyers and political appointments (who don't understand the technical issues, or care to) instead of engineers who rose up through the ranks and understand the physics of the problems.
Conversely the best transit project I know of (the Madrid metro, which built a citywide metro system in four years then doubled it in the next four, all for absurdly low costs) talks a lot about (a) the geology and engineering, but also (b) how they could get responses from the government within 24 hours when they needed a change of plans due to unexpected conditions.
I wonder what the history of this organization looks like. Companies do a similar thing I believe, where management knows much about managing but little about engineering. Militaries have a separate officer track. Maybe moral maze related
To what extent is civilization's story to be told in terms of a finite number of great men - as opposed to one of infinite impersonal socio-historical forces?.... would make a great study.
I first considered your question awhile back in the context of trying to make sense of Robert Moses' profound influence on NYC public infrastructure, but got stuck on credit assignment in a principled way (how and why to attribute major events in the long arc of history to great actors vs systemic forces). I'm used to thinking in RCT terms, but historical reading doesn't really let me do that (or at least I'm not bright enough to figure out how).
In some sense it depends on what you want the explanation to do for you (just sense-making? Predictive accuracy? Decision guidance, especially given limited resources + imperfect information + wicked problems?). As the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful...
"What you want the explanation to do for you". Good question. Purely curiosity in my case..... I'm a Big-picture type and so would like to paint this into my history picture.
Predictive no ... I've no time for those who think they know the future.
I suspect that many books addressing my question already exist...and was partly fishing for examples.
I'm pretty skeptical of the Robert Moses effect. We have a control group (every other city in the country) and we can see they all changed in roughly the same way.
(This isn't an entirely fair control group - NYC is an outlier among American cities in several ways - but it's pretty good).
The control group is imperfect because infrastructure planners in the rest of the country could look over Moses's shoulder and try to imitate what he was doing. Caro's biography of Moses, at least, makes it sound like an awful lot of them were doing just that.
Tolstoy's War And Peace is about this, despite being a novel - about 1% of it is essays about philosophy of history. He goes for your option B - Bonaparte thinks he's a Great Man but is really just an epiphenomenon on the tide of history.
Start about now and you'll be able to review it in next year's comp.
I started a while ago, but got kind of lost in all the french 19th century clothing names, compounded by what seems to be French <=> Russian translation errors ??
Thanks....I have, as it happens, read it twice - once as a young man doing the Russian Lit elective and then again in middle age. But - back to the question at hand - is Elon Musk a Great Man....or an epiphenomenon?
Without Napoleon, European history in the 19th century would have looked substantially different. Post-Revolutionary France might have wound up in some kind of war with its neighbours, but I'm sure it wouldn't have invaded Russia.
Tolstoy was a Great Man too, whether he believed in them or not. The history of the novel would look a lot different without him.
As for Musk, I feel reasonably safe in saying that without Musk we'd have electric cars in 2023 (albeit probably worse) but we definitely wouldn't have reusable rockets.
We would have dramatically less electric cars : consider the popularity of electric cars before Musk's Tesla (not going as far back as ~1900), and how the public discourse is only NOW starting to take resource depletion and climate change issues seriously, despite these issues having been widely known since the 1970s, and having been at the front of the scene again since 2010 at least...
I think it was battery tech, not Tesla, that is responsible for the 2010s electric car boom.
Pre-Tesla electric cars sucked because they ran on lead-acid or NiCad batteries, but the Tesla folks were the first to realise that lithium batteries were about to reach the point on the price-performance curve where it made sense to put them in a car and you could get a usable range for a non-insane price.
The big manufacturers would have realised this eventually too, though.
Ah yeah, you're right, looking at it, the tzero prototype was converted from Pb to Li in 2003, which is merely a decade after the explosion of Li publications, and around the explosion of the portable computing battery market.
So, yeah, lack of Tesla would have only postponed them by maybe a decade, and not 20-30 years like I was assuming in my previous post.
(Still, the adoption curves being what they are, a first Tesla-like in 2018 rather than 2008 *would* have still meant dramatically less electric cars in 2023.)
Interesting - I'd have thought Napoleon was *the* example of a Great Man who altered the course of history! Yes, it seems likely that *some* dictator would arise in the aftermath of the French Revolution, but not one capable of conquering such a large part of Europe, rewriting European law codes, etc.
The French Revolution created a reset situation in which the most capable ambitious man available would almost inevitably rise to the top and impose a hybrid of the old and new. How far behind Napoleon was the next most competent Frenchman? For Musk he seems to be an outlier by quite a distance (there's Bezos but he isn't much of an engineer).
"Ambitious" manifests in many ways, not just trying to conquer the world. And even if it does chose that form of expression, "capable" is multifaceted and the correlation between ability to become leader of one's own nation is only weakly correlated with the ability to conquer foreign nations.
I wouldn't say War and Peace is about this, actually. I vaguely remember that essay being something of a tangent - sure, it had its place in the narrative, but said narrative was at its core about the psychology of people that were neither Great Men, nor had any claims to being such, nor even had anything to do with the question, really.
It's not "that essay", it's 24 of them plus an appendix or epilogue. My approach has varied between very rapidly skimming them and omitting them altogether but presumably they do to some extent represent what Tolstoy thought his book was about, or he wouldn't have put them there. The fact that the actual characters are conspicuously not great men, is itself making a point about great men.
Important events tend to have a vast number of causally necessary inputs- things which, had they been different, would have prevented the event from happening.
Without Musk's unusual personality, SpaceX probably wouldn't have happened- but if you could go back far enough in a time machine, there are probably butterflies you could kill that would, through some enormously complicated chain of causality, also prevent SpaceX from happening. The reason we tend not to care about very distant causal factors isn't that they aren't important, but that we can't use them to make predictions- the tiny immediate impact that a butterfly has on the world will take so long to propagate out to a big impact that it's impossible to guess what that impact will look like, wheres the impact of a particularly driven businessman will tend to propagate out quickly in a relatively predictable way.
The problem with "infinite impersonal socio-historical forces" isn't that they aren't causally necessary, it's that they tend to be more like the butterfly- you can't use them to make predictions. If you could, we'd have some broad idea about what the future is likely to look like, which we don't and never have.
Describing history as the story of how important people shaped important events points out a kind of causal chain that we might have some hope of finding similar instances of elsewhere, and of using to improve our predictions- unreliably, but not uselessly. It's far from the only useful causal story you can tell- economics, sociology and so on can identify other chains of causality that can be used to make different kinds of prediction- but it's also not wrong. Reality is much too chaotic to expect big events not to be sensitive even to tiny factors like random individual human personalities.
Everything you say is true and - because it is true - it follows that a totally comprehensive historical narrative is an impossibility. So one is left with stories that are inevitably selective...great personage biographical; economic forces; butterflies wings etc etc.
I should stress that my original comment had no implicit agenda with regard to all this. Just curiosity (triggered by this book review) as to what others think. Every response has been a good one in my view.
The trajectory of any specific gas particle might be extremely chaotic, but we are still able to predict "impersonal forces" like pressure and temperature. (I would expect the effects of butterfly flight on *average* weather to be of the roughly same order, so Lorenz' metaphor might be a bit too misleading IMHO.)
OtoH, as Asimov had already pointed out in Foundation, you need an extremely large amount of particles for fluctuations to become negligible and prediction possible..?
And Napoleon or Musk are pretty big fluctuations !
I think each era produces its exemplars - people who end up at the top because they conform so perfectly to the constraints and incentives that thrir society has. In a way they are there because someone nearly exactly like them would always have been there. The fun bit is where it's their quirks outside of those parameters that actually lead to historical outcomes being different.
For example - Julius Ceasar was the perfect Roman for the late-Republican period, to the extent that if you went back in time and killed him at birth he would most likely have been replaced by someone with exactly the same characteristics and career. The quirk was his personal life, which was scandalous enough to contribute to his assassination down the line and materially affected how the Republic changed into the empire.
Similarly; Musk is a fairly sociopathic dude, with a background in programming, who views people as disposable units to be worked until they burn out and then discarded (ironically he's also incredibly thin-skinned and covetous of what he sees as his due). That's the exemplar - any alternate-world person in the same position would be that way.
The fact that he's also a space flight geek is the quirk.
We already have an alternate-world person in this one - Bezos. He's extremely similar, even down to implausible sci-fi pet projects, but less prone to being in the focus of the media circus.
Thinking about these people as exemplars of our age makes me a bit depressed, by the way. Because I'm in the camp that believes that the big conflict of this century will be in how automation (broadly speaking) reduces the power of labour, erodes the middle class and empowers the super-elites that own lots of capital. One of the possible outcomes of this is the idea that, at some point, the guys who own everything will realise that they don't need workers and consumers any more, and will impose some sort of new social order by fiat. And Musk and Bezos have a certain, shall we say, frivolous attitude with the lives of others that makes me imagine cramped ghettos and piles of emaciated corpses as part of our collective future.
Well, on the current trajectory another proletarian uprising seems pretty likely. Of course, AGI-style discontinuities also aren't ruled out, and it's anyone's guess who, if anybody ends up on top in those scenarios.
The difference is that Bezos' space pursuits are a dilettantish indulgence (as are Branson's), whereas Musk's is launching reusable rockets to orbit every few days.
I think the difference between the success of SpaceX and Blue Origin actually speaks to Musk's singularity here: without Bezos, there would be (and are) Amazon-likes, even if marginally worse, because Amazon is basically just a digital Sears-Roebuck catalogue and an admittedly-amazing logistics system (with a very impressive cloud computing company attached, too, but AWS isn't the only comparable offering in its space in the way that SpaceX is.). Without Musk, private spaceflight and reusable rockets basically don't exist (and electric cars are at a minimum held back by a decade or more) because in the world as it presently exists, neither corporate capital nor the space-industrial complex nor even *other billionaires interested in spaceflight* came anywhere close to replicating SpaceX's accomplishments, and the extremely numerous example of well-capitalized automakers hadn't done jack shit on electrification before the Roadster came out.
I think that's unfair to AWS, which basically invented modern cloud computing. It's an easier business to copy than reusable rocket launches, so Google, Microsoft, and lots of little guys have done so, but the tech world is very different pre- and post-AWS.
But being an easily replicable versus non-easily replicable business model is part of the point here: other billionaires and the space-industrial complex continue to accomplish nothing even close to SpaceX, and moderately competitive electric cars from anyone other than Tesla were nowhere until at least 2015 and more like 2020, AWS cloud computing seems to predate Azure by about two years and doesn't have any self-evident technological moats beyond capex requirements.
While I would argue that AWS was only moderately revolutionary (given the existence of proto-AWS analogs in the form of CDNs) in any event (and frankly less important to civilizational advancement than electric cars or cheap spaceflight), the bigger point is that the marginal contribution of coming from a Bezos-run company rather than Ballmer-run one doesn't seem to have been anything close to the disparity between coming from a Musk-run company rather than one run by someone else.
(Also the term "cloud computing" was definitely being tossed around as a buzzword prior to widespread AWS adoption - it was definitely a business idea that was "in the water supply" and given the lack of technological moat seems to me to have been much more inevitable than either private spaceflight or electric cars, which as the review notes were considered radioactive by private capital...) Again, I'm not saying AWS is a bad product, just that its above-replacement contribution to technological advancement seems way lower than those of Musk's industries.)
I consider Bezos to be at the very top of a long but basically continuous distribution of business savants, and Musk is more of a genuine black swan who discontinuously different than his competitors. To make a strained sports analogy: Musk is basically Wayne Gretzky whereas Bezos is more like Ken Griffey Jr.
I'd go with Bezos as Ty Cobb (evolutionary next step in baseball greatness: hit traditional line drives, just harder and more often than anybody before) vs. Musk as Babe Ruth (unexpected baseball revolutionary: hit huge numbers of home runs, which nobody before had ever thought was feasible).
I think the "history of making electric cars since 1947" seems kind of irrelevant -- nominal efforts at electric-car building date back to the 1880s without gaining any kind of commercial traction, meanwhile GM famously had its token EV1 program as a pure compliance measure after which it crushed its own cars. This appears to also reflect the case with Nissan's token-volume Alta and Hypermini offerings.
I don't mean to disparage the LEAF itself (and it post-dates the Tesla roadster by much less time than I'd thought, only two years, so I may have been unduly pessimistic about the counterfactual timeline for electric car development!) but it's weird to argue that it "was and still is THE electric car" when Tesla presently sells twice as many electric cars in a year as Nissan has...ever, and Nissan is reportedly unhappy with LEAF sales.
https://thedriven.io/2023/07/27/nissan-global-ev-sales-pass-1-million-mark-half-of-what-tesla-makes-in-6-months/ (see headline - I've looked at other sales volume figures and this appears to be basically accurate. It's tough to get the exact statistics I'd like here although in fairness there's a strong post-2017 bias for Tesla's hyperbolic sales growth versus Nissan's essentially linear 2010-sales, and for apples to apples we probably want to compare total Tesla sales to total Nissan EV sales, which at some point would maybe include the Ariya in addition to the LEAF?)
Wow, so things have been changing dramatically in the last few years, looks like Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi went from top (?) spot to 10th spot in 2022 (including hybrids, but looks to be roughly similar ?)
Also especially of note the meteoretic rise of the Chinese BYD, tripling (!!!) its sales last year and blowing past Tesla (themselves an impressive x1.4) on EV+hybrids, and probably on EV alone for 2023 ?
> nominal efforts at electric-car building date back to the 1880s without gaining any kind of commercial traction
This is just wrong, in the first decades of widespread use EVs have been much more successful than internal explosion engines (though a bit less successful than external combustion engines) :
Tons of books related to this, really....but have your read Norbert Elias' The Civilizing Process vol I and II? Elias can be considered the last of the four great macro-sociologists (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Elias) and the first volume in particular is (still) fantastic. It's more about how certain structures get "inside man" than the relationship between the dead hand of structures versus the living will of people, though.
Sorry, but this does nothing to alleviate my cognitive dissonance either, and I am not 100% willing to believe stories about Musk's brilliance, simply because he has pitched, and invested time and money, into so many ideas that were obviously daft and indeed turned out to be so - the "Loop" (digging tunnels for battery-powered sleds to transport cars under cities to "fix traffic") was hare-brained on so many levels I don't know where to start, and the "hyperloop" did not make sense on its own terms either, not to mention it's an engineering nightmare wrapped in impossibilities.
As for his psychology, I don't believe for a second that he's autistic. IMO, raging narcissism is a much better explanation for his behavior. Consider this: after the Suoerbowl, Elon was so enraged that his inane tweet had received less attention than that of the POTUS, so the next day he called in his engineers to come up with some way to give his tweets more reach, NOW. Autist or narcissist?
There's no contradiction between autism and narcissism (ie it doesn't have to be one or the other), although I would stress that narcissistic personality disorder is a really complicated diagnosis that can't be clinched by "he just sometimes does egotistical stuff".
Re. narcissicm/ sociopathy - right, you have to look at other manifestations as well. Like, open disregard for rules, constant legal trouble, shameless lying, multiple children from short-term relationships, temper tantrums, reputation for callousness... oh, wait...
Is it possible for hypomania, narcissism, and Aspergers/autistic traits all to coexist in the same personality? Hypomania and narcissism often seem to go together (for example, in Trump), but Aspergers/autism seems like an odd fit with them.
As long as we're getting into armchair psychology, this does raise the question of, to super-hyper-over-simplify, if autists aren't interested in people, and narcissists are only interested in themself, what rough beast is born of the two? Perhaps someone who identifies with their projects, and promotes and defends those projects with an unrealistic zeal.
While you have to be careful not to confuse overlapping symptoms, ASD and NPD aren't differential diagnoses per se, and it's not really accurate to say that people with ASD as a rule aren't interested in other people.
I know. That's what happens when you not just simplify, nor even over-simplify, nor yet hyper-over-simplify, but super-hyper-over-simplify. Although I'm curious what, say 7-word definitions someone who knows more about these things would actually use?
I've never met or interacted with Musk, but apart from my own social circle, I've also taught in social skills programs for people on the autistic spectrum, and I've seen plenty of weird social pathology in people with formal diagnoses which couldn't just be chalked up to "normal manifestation of autistic behavior." People on the autistic spectrum are just as free as people off it to be weird or dysfunctional in other ways.
I'm willing to believe Musk is brilliant in some ways, though I am reluctant to believe hagiographic accounts by people who do or hope to benefit from his wealth. At the same time, Musk is a public figure who has said many things that paint a picture of a person who just isn't very bright in a lot of domains. I don't think these are irreconcilable facts as even quite ordinary people can develop specialized insight while getting over their head on lots of subjects. What I do not buy into is the idea of Musk as a polymath tycoon that has likely played a role in the value of his stock holdings.
For those interested in further reading/hearing and don't want to jump into the new book, Lex Fridman just interviewed the author of the new book about Musk, Walter Isaacson, mostly about Musk but also about other things.
I will note that I found some important discrepancies between Scott's summary here and the interview (haven't read the book). Most noticeably, the childhood described by Isaacson is one of difficulty and abuse, and perhaps has a more profound impact on how Musk works and why he succeeds.
Oh good, (looking for the Lex Fridman/ Isaacson thread). It was a good interview. I would love Scott to read it and do another review. IMHO Musk is one of the greatest of our time. The one thing I remember from the interview is Isaacson saying that Musk doesn't multi-task, but that he has a (paraphrasing) serial laser focus task. He's all on one thing, and then all in on the next thing.
Reading some of these stories of Musk's focus reminds me of an anecdote I heard about Richard Feynman. A paper of his had been rejected and he came to the office of a colleague to address the concern. The topic of the paper was something obscure and not particularly important (something on 2D elastic theory as I recall). Feynman spent 8 to 10 hours working on the problem without break, but ultimately failed to fix the issue and went home. A few hours later the colleague received a call from Richard that he had finally solved the problem. He'd kept working on it even after he went home. The kicker? This all happened just a few days before Feynman was scheduled to undergo surgery to treat and aggressive form of rare cancer (the one that eventually killed him). The prognosis wasn't great and he literally didn't know if he would be alive at the end of the week. But his focus was so absolute that he could push everything else away to work on whatever task was at hand.
I think there are at least 2 components to 'focus':
1) the ability to do something for long periods without getting distracted
2) the ability to direct (1)
Nerds like me sometimes get nerdsniped (which looks like (1)), which my non-nerd friends admiringly imagine confers me the ability to will myself through any task required to succeed at something as long as what's needed is mostly willpower, or something. But since my (2) is low (mild executive dysfunction?), they're mystified when they find out I can't do seemingly basic grunt work.
Your anecdote about Feynman sounds like (1), not (2). I did my degree in physics, so predictably I love your anecdote. I now work in industry, mostly with non-nerds who seem to excel in their careers due to high (1) and (2), and who would find that quote troubling due to "misplaced priorities".
This is an important distinction. No one disputes that it takes a great deal of effort and discipline to master playing "Through the Fire and the Flames" on expert one-handed while solving a Rubik's cube with the other. But the fact that it takes a great deal of effort and discipline doesn't imply that it's a sensible or productive thing to devote one's time to.
Some choice quotes from the review, as posted on ACXD
> Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?
> A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.
> He excels at determining whether something is technically impossible or not. If it’s not, he hands it off to his employees as an implementation problem.
> Unlike in engineering, where he tries to do everything himself but is often right, in PR he tries to do everything himself, does a terrible job, and never learns
> a pleasure-pain, sadomasochistic vibe that comes with working for Musk. Numerous people interviewed for this book decried the work hours, Musk’s blunt style, and his sometimes ludicrous expectations. Yet almost every person—even those who had been fired — still worshipped Musk and talked about him in terms usually reserved for superheroes or deities.
Even his ex-wife who had a protracted divorce suit against him spent most of the interview trying to make excuses for his behavior.
> He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.
> people keep failing by not taking Musk literally
This review makes me inclined to bet *against* Twitter/X getting notably impressive results. Yes, he does seem to have a track record of beating the skeptics, but specifically in the domain of "hard engineering challenges that are clearly possible in principle but just require what looks like an unrealistically large amount of optimization effort". Twitter's problems, such as they are, seem totally different in character from that. Heck, even deciding what the problem is and how you want to solve it, at least if you're trying to do it in a civically-minded way like he says he is, seems like it leans primarily on the philosopher/intellectual skillset that he's not that good at. And if he's generally open about what his grand visions/master plans are, then his failure to articulate anything beyond the slogan "the everything app" would seem to suggest that he doesn't actually *have* a coherent vision for it.
(I do think the "engineering wizard" hypothesis has some explanatory power for how he was able to fire 90% of the workforce without creating obvious embarrassing outages for users, and if his goal was just to make Twitter *profitable* then I guess he can declare victory if/when the advertisers come back. But this would be a much less impressive achievement than Tesla or SpaceX, and he says he's thinking bigger.)
Also, the "people keep failing by not taking Musk literally" claim seems kind of at odds with the "the end result never quite reaches the original goal" claim.
I think this is easy to reconcile: "Musk partially succeeded for both space and EV vs his original goals, while people predicted he'd just fail outright like everyone else who's tried before"
The point here, as I understood it, is that Musk is apparently babbling about making Twitter "the everything app", and many people (including me) would have previously dismissed that as obvious marketing bla bla. I don't think I would even have really registered a comment like this before reading the article. I might have read about it before, and not even remembered. It would have been discarded before reaching the stage of conscious processing, by the same filter that fires on claims that drinking Red Bull will give me wings.
But Scott makes a pretty convincing case (to me) that Elon is probably just completely serious about this, like he's apparently been completely serious all the previous times he's claimed he'll build some ludicrously ambitious thing.
That doesn't mean he will succeed at making an everything app any more than he seems set to get a crewed mission to arrive on Mars by 2025, as was supposedly his target in 2014. But it does mean that the future and future business model of X might look very different from Twitter's, and thus might end up less reliant on Musk's anti-skill at PR and less adjacent to his apparent insanity triggers around culture wars and social media than Twitter maybe is. Which might bode well for its long term chances.
(I say, as if I believed in AGI timelines long enough for "long term" business developments to still be a thing of any real consequence)
I'm thinking of his first two startups, Zip2 and X (later Paypal). These were also software projects, Zip2 involved negotiating with clients (it was kind of Google Maps meets Yellow Pages), and X involved negotiating with banks and regulators. I think these suggest his skills aren't entirely limited to nuts-and-bolts engineering, although of course those two companies didn't do quite as well as Tesla and SpaceX, and he was accused of erratic mismanagement of both.
I think those were also easier problems, in the sense that a lot of the reward was for being in the right place at the right time. (This is my view of most 90s-era startups that were successful but not Google- or Amazon-level successful.)
I think this was true of Zip2, but a lot of PayPal was after the dot-com-crash, and Vance suggests that it was extra impressive it managed to succeed in that environment.
You might be able to tell a story where Musk succeeded at the first half of it because it was a good environment, and at the second post-crash half because Thiel was checking his excesses and doing the real work; I don't remember enough of the relevant chapter to know for sure if this was true.
The wikipedia article seems to say that Musk was fired from both X.com and Paypal in less than a year in each case. Is it really fair to consider his stint at Paypal as a success? In fact, doesn't the model of Musk as not that great at problems outside of engineering fit that evidence really well.
His management style, at least as reported, would lead to most companies firing him - including pre-success Tesla and SpaceX - if it had the ability. That doesn't make it the right choice, as the companies that couldn't fire him seem to have succeeded despite, or because of, his management style.
My thought is that he's mostly achieved his initial vision for Twitter, and is now moving onto later phases. Originally I got the impression that he liked using Twitter but found a bunch of things frustrating, not only with the technical side, but also with how it was putting its thumb on the scales of discourse in ways that he didn't like. And that went away now that he's in charge.
Nowadays Twitter's just a hobby where he can fiddle with minor technical details when he's bored, while pursuing his grand dream of a WeChat crossed with who-knows-what.
But I'm skeptical that it took a lot of engineering wizardry to cut 90% and keep the lights on. My assumption is that in most software organisations, if you only cared about keeping the current thing running as is and you didn't care about processes around quality, change management, moderation, current innovation direction or product plans, then you could make huge cuts without causing immediate downtime - the pain would come later as things change. And that's assuming that twitter was not unusually inefficient, which it probably was.
Not particularly relevant, but what kind of a parent is Musk? If he’s anything other than “completely absent” I want to know how he does it. Doesn’t he have like, nine kids? And they’re with how many women? Do they all live with him part time? Do they overlap? What’s a typical breakfast look like?
10. Five kids with Justine who are 16-18, three kids with Grimes that are all under 3, twins with Shivon Zilis that are under 2. Looks like little to no overlap between the kids with different mothers. There's been some recent drama between Grimes and Shivon where it came out that Grimes has never even seen pictures of Shivon's kids (which will apparently soon be remedied with a playdate), and I've also heard rumors that Shivon's kids came as a surprise to her generally.
I've also heard rumors that Amber Heard's daughter is his but I can't tell if there's any reliable evidence for that.
How…. does that work, biologically? For one woman to have five (!) kids in two years, she must have had triplets + twins or a singleton + two sets of twins. That’s super freaking hard on the body, and she did it while having zero hands-on support from her husband, who was off working 100-hour weeks.
I know this review is about Musk, but spare a thought for Justine, who comes across as a goddamn martyr. I hope she’s doing ok.
Vance suggests he is a good parent and talks about him doing fun things with his kids and trying to figure out how to raise them right (Justine has half-custody, but he has the other half). But I also don't understand this, and am worried that whatever good parenting he had in 2015 hasn't survived four more companies and five more children.
Unless you can make a good case that Grimes came up with those names and overruled Musk's objections, that's not much of an exculpation. A bit like "well, to be fair, Jeffrey Dahmer only murdered a small percentage of the people he met."
She's a semi-famous indie electronic artist, and pretty weird herself. I have no doubt she had plenty of input on the weird names. She also frequently trolls the media, for example by ostentatiously reading Marx in front of the paparazzi after she and Elon split, so unless we see birth certificates I wouldn't put my mortgage down on a bet that any of those names are legal.
Dahmer? Even restricting the comparisons to cannibals, Armin Meiwes is a far better example. He was harmless until he met up with someone who wanted to be eaten.
But more seriously, 100% of Grimes' children have these names. The only common factor is her. Occam's razor suggests that she is the cause.
On the other hand, here's a quote from her, about Elon: "I so need to be in love to make good art. The best is being heartbroken, or in a volatile relationship. My worst creative periods have been when I’ve just been in a stable relationship. In my current relationship, we’re both super alpha, crazy people. It’s just level ten all the time, which is great, even though it’s very crazy." Which suggests that it's the combination that does it.
Apparently I'm wrong, because you have to look at full names. What I thought were merely "Strider" and "Azure" are actually "Strider Sekhar Sirius" and "Azure Astra Alice". So, not as out-there as the Grimes names, but clearly Elon has an influence.
Thanks for the background. I do think that an exotic middle name that is easily hidden behind initials is not nearly as bad as an unpronounceable mess that could serve as a strong password, and it sounds like Grimes played a part in that, but I don't think it was all her doing (seeing how that mess starts with a telltale 'X').
He has one child who doesn't speak to him anymore...
<When asked about his relationship with his daughter in October 2022, he added that things could change, but that he has a good relationship with “all the others”.
4D is common, 5D is just taking it a step further. Astral Codex Ten needs to get ahead of the inflationary chess dimension curve: next time jump straight to 7D chess.
4D chess just sounds like regular real life chess, which admittedly is hard but the "4D" then becomes redundant. Saying "Elon Musk plays chess" also then becomes a slightly confusing comment.
Especially as he's not very good at actual chess. Mostly because becoming good involves a level of obsession at the expense of everything else and he didn't find it an interesting enough problem to become that obsessed
Not really. I'm not sure if anyone has ever come up with rules for 3D chess, but 3D chess would at least be easy enough to visualise.
4D chess requires you to visualise the board in four dimensions, which most people can't do.
This page puts forth a reasonable argument that really high dimensional chess would be a stupid game. In twelve dimensional chess you'd need at least 65 queens to checkmate a king. https://www.gilgamath.com/twelve_dimensional_chess.html
Alternatively, you need better high-dimensional generalizations of the standard chess pieces. Maybe an n-dimensional queen moves by picking any (n-1)-dimensional hyperplane whose normal vector has -1, 0, or 1 in each coordinate, and then moving to any space within that hyperplane that's not completely blocked off by other pieces. This would have the same behavior in 2D chess, but is much better at checkmating in 12D chess. In particular, with this definition of queen, a single queen (plus a king) can checkmate a king in any number of dimensions.
I once worked a bit on prototyping a 4d board game. It's tricky to imagine 4d space, but not that tricky. The weird thing is that 4d space is simultaneously massive and compact. The board I made had 576 total spaces but the furthest possible 2 points were only 12 spaces away from each other.
Math geeks would say that’s debatable. The board is 2D, but there’s a clear time axis (even if it’s in discrete turns), so regular chess is in fact 3D.
I wonder why Scott never mentioned Neuralink. If you believe that "He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.... people keep failing by not taking Musk literally" then Scott just fell into the same trap. Musk's claims about Neuralink are way more ambitious than anything he ever said about Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.
I think he has good instincts as to what it possible, but the society have a lot more power to prevent him from iterating, failing and succeeding with human volunteers. Maybe he will find an ingenious way to work around it, assuming he gives the company the attention it needs to succeed.
Maybe this is just my domain chauvinism, but I claim biology is harder than everything else, and people who are good at everything else might just totally fail in biology.
Biology is a graveyard for the careers of people who make it big in physical domains and then decide to show the poor idiot folk who work with living matter how it's done.
Fair enough - my comment doesn't refer to the (very real) contributions of physicists in biology. And physicists have provided plenty of the tools that biologists depend on to study living systems even when they haven't stepped foot into a lab with a cell culture room or laminar flow.
The issue I'm referring to here is noted in the same piece you've linked to - physics generally yields to a reductionist approach, while biology does not. So the history of the field is littered with physicists who come in, decide to solve some big problem, and then come up with a theory of everything/spherical cow example that just doesn't work in the field.
Unravelling any biological system is maddening this way, because it only has to work and isn't obliged to do so in any way that makes sense to the human mind. Look at DNA, for instance. We know what it is and how it works on a molecular level. But we still can't get the damned stuff to do anything for us on a systems level. So if I ask a biologist to come up with a novel protein to catalyze a chemical reaction, that's years worth of work. If I ask them to come up with a novel metabolic pathway, that's decades. And if I ask them to, say, make me a zebrafish that has air breathing organs, grows to the size of a carp and tastes like salmon, then I'll get thrown out of the lab.
Nitpick: we don't colonise Antarctica because of the Antarctic Treaty, which forbids commercial exploitation of the continent. There are a lot of mineral resources there, and I have seen suggestions that the Treaty will be quietly put aside once climate change makes mining a little easier. Also, a handful of children have been born in Antarctica in support of various countries' territorial claims.
I think it's still relevant that nobody cares enough about Antarctica to do anything other than make a treaty saying to leave it alone. But fine, central Greenland, or the Mojave Desert.
Actually, there's another way in which Antarctica is relevant - the Outer Space Treaty (which prevents nations claiming territory in outer space) is modelled on the Antarctic Treaty. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty#Applicability_in_the_21st_century it's unclear whether e.g. asteroid mining is prohibited by the OST; in Antarctica (I belatedly discovered) it's forbidden by the Madrid Protocol rather than the Antarctic Treaty proper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Environmental_Protection_to_the_Antarctic_Treaty). But either way, this is not a legal framework set up with "gonna build us a city on Mars and make a trillion dollars lfgggggggggg" in mind.
The Mojave Desert isn't exactly empty. It's home to Las Vegas, Palmdale, Victorville, St. George... literally millions of people live in the Mojave Desert.
I don't know about the others, but Las Vegas looks like more and more as a temporary occupation of land rather than a real colonization, considering their water issues...
I doubt you'd see Antarctic cities being put in place there, though, compared to rotating crews in like oil platforms.
That's the challenge with a Mars city - there's no reason for people to stay there, unless they really want to live in a Mars base. I could imagine you could find thousands of people from billions on Earth who would do that (especially for scientific research), but hundreds of thousands? Permanently? I'm not so certain. Cheaper and faster spaceflight makes it easier to rotate people back, too.
It's the same issue with free-floating space colonies, like O'Neill Cylinders. I don't think we'll hav any sort of meaningful "push" or "pull" factors on space colonization until we have hefty life extension or medical immortality.
I know the British Antarctic Survey staff do either six-month or eighteen-month tours (summer or summer-winter-summer) - the boat comes at the start and end of a summer season. I think Antarctic mining tours would similarly be measured in months rather than the weeks common in the North Sea oil industry, but who knows, maybe with enough money they could afford to rotate staff in and out more frequently.
There's one big pull for space colonies, light lag. The further your industrial operation is from Earth the longer any situation requiring an operator response affects production until you can get a message back. Having a group of trouble shooters on site would be extremely valuable, though whether that would be structured as a colony or more akin to an oil-rig would depend on location and surrounding technologies.
>Cheaper and faster spaceflight makes it easier to rotate people back, too.
So-called "Fast Transit" Mars missions usually have a nominal 4-month travel time, each way. And those are pretty close to the limit for current technology; the VASIMR people like to talk about 37-day trips, but those all have an "insert miracle here" step that basically calls for a fusion reactor - and not a plausible extrapolation of the ones people are promising to build Real Soon Now; a classic science-fiction handwavium fusion reactor.
Going to work on Mars isn't *necessarily* a lifetime commitment, but neither is it going to be an ordinary crew rotation like you see on oil rigs or arctic outposts. People are going to spend many years at a time there, which means you're going to have to build approximately the same support infrastructure that you'd need for permanent settlement, which means some of the people who go there will decide to settle.
As for reasons for people to live there, and for other people to pay to have them live there,
A: It's a *planet*, and one we've barely scratched the surface of exploring. Betting there will be nothing of significant value there, is not the smart move. Among other things, there's a fair chance of finding life there. If there's life on Mars, that's reason for a whole lot of biologists to take up residence. Not just government scientists on a quest for Pure Scientific Truth, but researchers for pharma and biotech companies.
B: There's definitely reason for people to want to do lots of stuff in Earth orbit. That's already a ~half-trillion-dollar-a-year industry even at today's still-excessive launch costs. And Low Earth Orbit is energetically closer to the surface of Mars than it is to the surface of the Earth. 6.8 km/s vs 8.9 km/s. So given the existence of a Mars settlement with even light industrial capability, and a reasonable Mars-Earth transportation system, an awful lot of stuff that people need to make a profit in proven Earth-orbit markets, will be most profitably produced on and delivered from Mars.
Well, OK, some of it will be produced on Phobos and Deimos.
I'm inclined to agree with the arguments that the Antarctic Treaty is likely to be renegotiated or set aside if and when Antarctic mining becomes economically viable. Moreover, similar restrictions (via the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty) exist for space colonization.
I think an app that incorporates chat and payments is an extremely good idea. I loved it when keybase did it. So I should probably predict that Musk will succeed, since pushing through the pain and delivering seems to be one of his super powers.
Still, it's hard to get away from how colossally he overpaid for twitter due to pure silliness, and I do wonder if it's a bit of a perfect trap for someone like him. He seems to have a high need for attention, and a low ability to moderate himself. If he's insisting that algorithms be changed in order to inflate his personal reach (https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter), then he's undermining the trust that the social aspect of twitter is built on and pulling effort away from actually achieving the vision. The nature of twitter is that there will be lots of opportunity for ego stroking at the expense of the mission.
Facebook tried to add payments via a crypto and it fell apart not because it was a bad idea but because Facebook are hated and Zuck is not trusted by the people who would have to be enthusiastic about it. Musk of 2008 might have been loved enough to pull the mission off, but I don't think Musk of 2023 is.
Did he overpay for Twitter? My impression was he paid a reasonable price (plus a little extra to incentivize them to say yes) for when he signed the contract, and then the stock market crashed and it was worth much less.
I remember it being high but not ridiculously so - IIRC he offered $54.20 a share when the share price was in the high $40s. But then the market tanked, taking down both the value of Twitter shares and the Tesla shares Musk was planning to borrow against to finance the deal.
In general people do due diligence before signing a contract. Musk later tried to claim he wanted out because of new things he found out (that he would've found out doing dd like a normal person), but this was transparently an excuse to get out of the deal that had gone bad due to general market factors. If he had taken time to do dd he would've paid less because he'd have waited to buy until after the downturn, but that was just a matter of luck.
I remember doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations on Twitter's profitability vs Musk's purchase price at the time. I don't remember the numbers and I'm too lazy to redo them at the moment, but I remembered the return on capital being pretty low unless Musk got a really good deal on interest rates for a leveraged buyout, which it doesn't sound like he did. But that only means he overpaid relative to existing profitability: the deal could still make sense if he managed to drastically cut costs (which he probably has, by way of firing 80-90% of the engineering staff) or rapidly growing the company (time will tell, but it doesn't sound like he's off to a great start).
I am now and was then pretty sure that Twitter was substantially overvalued in roughly the same way that Tesla was substantially overvalued. Market Cap well in excess of what any plausible revenue stream could justify in the inevitable blue-chip endgame, boosted by the hype and bigger-idiot factors.
It is true that at the time Elon made his offer, it was about what you'd expect for a buyout based on Twitter's nominal market cap at the time, But I'm not sure how Elon ever thought it was a good idea to borrow against one overvalued bubble stock to buy another overvalued bubble stock. That inevitably, once the bigger idiots are exhausted, results in your owing bankers real money well beyond what any of the underlying assets are worth.
OTOH, if his goal really was to Save Humanity from the Woke Mind-Virus, At Any Price, then at that time the price was going to be ridiculously high and who knows how many lives the Woke Mind-Virus will destroy while waiting for the price to go down.
Given that the chosen price was set by a 4/20 joke, I think it’s pretty clear he overpaid.
IIRC, Twitter was barely above $42 a share, which I honestly think is how the initial thought crossed Musks mind. Of course he had to pay above market, so he offered $54.20/share.
Unless someone can offer a pricing model where 4/20 jokes have significant returns, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t overpay.
"Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
This highlights another potential issue that was not really raised in this review, in that certain benefits of Musk's projects may be dependent on his personal whims or be lost as a result of him pursuing his own interests. While I've seen some Ukrainians speak very highly of Starlink and Musk himself, at other times it seems like he has prevented them from reaping its full benefits. There have also been reports that Musk's demands to Taiwan have prevented a Starlink deal being done with the government there.
Indeed, for someone who is so vocal about free speech issues in America, his willingness to cozy up to Xi's government in China is pretty notable; his apparent comfort with authoritarianism is not a trait I would hope for in someone with ambitions to shape the future. People are rightly impressed with the development of AI and rightly concerned about the way in which we mange its development, as well as worried about the implications for the far future. Colonization of space is a worthwhile goal, but shouldn't we be concerned about the way in which we do it and the implications for future people? A society on Mars would be a staggering achievement, however it doesn't seem crazy to hope that that society will not be designed according to Musk's vision.
As for making X the "everything app", I'm also skeptical, and skeptical it would necessarily be a good thing. He has mentioned WeChat many times and seems to take it as an inspiration. As someone who lives in China, the downsides to app dependence are pretty clear (especially during covid), without even getting into what happens when the government or Musk decide that you can't use the app anymore. I'm not an expert but I would guess Wechat has also benefitted from some pretty specific factors in attaining the success it did (e.g. China skipping straight from cash to mobile payments).
I’ve been living in Taiwan for quite a while, and smuggled in a Starlink business receiver about a year ago, registered to my US address and paid on a US card. The requirement from the Taiwan government is for them to be able to take operational control of “Starlink for Taiwan” in the event that the PRC attacks Taiwan. Asking for insurance against the political pressure to disable “Starlink service to Taiwan” is reasonable, but I think that Elon’s refusal to seed control to any government (even one that I like) is pretty sensible. It seems rather ridiculous for President Tsai’s team to have even asked for this.
But I share your concerns about Elon seemingly playing ball when Xi’s team requires this or that. It doesn’t seem to jibe with most anything he’s had to say that provides a window to his worldview/philosophy of human rights. IMO how Elon’s companies handle engagement with the PRC is far more important than anything he does with X.
This is from the new biography, just reported today, about a conversation he had with Bari Weiss:
"At one point during their two-hour conversation, she asked how Tesla’s business interests in China might affect the way he managed Twitter. Musk got annoyed. That was not what the conversation was supposed to be about. Weiss persisted. Musk said that Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened. China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, had two sides. Weiss was disturbed."
Both-sidesing the crimes against humanity in Xinjiang doesn't strike me as "well-intentioned, showing good instincts, or displaying deep insight". More like the amoral, post-hoc justifications of a ruthless businessman.
Nuanced: There are ‘two sides’ to what’s happened in Xinjiang, and to the Uighyurs.
In addition to what’s been published, I did business there in person in the mid 2000s, have stayed in touch during the 2010s, and have a Uighur on my team now (who does not live in the PRC, but has family in Xinjiang). Two sided perhaps, but not remotely evenly sided.
99.9% side: awful behavior that predated Xi, then crimes against humanity under Xi - in both periods affecting ooo 10M people.
0.1% side: there have in fact been small groups of rebellious people in Turkestan (ie currently called Xinjiang province) who want either to separate from the PRC and form their own new Turkestan, or be annexed by the Tajiks. And a handful of those people have, so it legitimately seems, killed people in a couple incidents from 2000 to now. From the coded and brief discussions on pre-2000 Xinjiang I’ve had with Uighyurs who have not ‘admixed’ with Han folks under forced/induced situations, there was more resistance post-Mao, and more incidents.
Why do I think Musk's comments should not be interpreted to mean something along the lines of uf911's 'nuanced' explanation? (genuinely want to confirm if this is what you mean, this isn't some rhetorical flourish)
I would say because when people say there are two sides to something very, very rarely would they mean 99.9% one side responsible to 0.01% the other side, often implies something much closer to 50-50, or, in this case, that the response of the government was something close to reasonable. Also, given Musk's other statements and actions regarding China and Taiwan, it seems pretty obvious he's just engaging in bog standard (albeit despicable) apologist rhetoric.
I think you're missing something substantial on the good side, which is that China has very real anti-poverty programs in Xinjiang which greatly benefit Uighurs in a purely economic sense. My impression (not an expert) is that the Chinese state is legitimately worried about the possibility for religiously-motivated Uighur separatism to cause social unrest and bloodshed, and is reacting to this with exactly the sort subtlety that you'd expect from an extremely self-confident and ruthlessly pragmatic authoritarian regime. On the economic front, they use jobs programs and government-led investment to drive out poverty and thus deprive separatists of a fertile political base. On the demographic front they are finally applying China's birth-control policies to the Uighur minority (who were exempt until recently) and providing cash incentives to interracial couples (plus weird "big Han brother"-style programs where Uighurs get paired up with fake Han "relatives"). On the religious front, the Chinese government is deciding who can and can't preach, and proselytizing against the pork taboo. And just for good old authoritarian measure, they've made gigantic reeducation camps and subjected something like 10% of the population to stays of various lengths (most short, some long).
Most of this is horrifying, but it's important to say that it is not a "genocide" in the sense that the Holocaust or Rwanda were genocides. The goal isn't to eliminate a group of people that the Hans in charge don't like. It's the carrot and (extremely heavy) stick approach of the PRC to a real and complicated social problem, which is that they find themselves in the awkward position of ruling a chunk of land of immense strategic importance, which happens to contain about 11 million Uighurs who are legitimately sympathetic to Muslim extremism and violent separatism. If Uighurs all became Chinese patriots tomorrow, (and they could convince the CCP that they had), the detention centers would disappear tomorrow.
<<I think you're missing something substantial on the good side, which is that China has very real anti-poverty programs in Xinjiang which greatly benefit Uighurs in a purely economic sense>>
Given all the horrifying stuff you seem to acknowledge is happening, I'm not sure that this really counts as "missing something substantial on the good side." Reliable data on XJ is hard to come by, but I would suspect the benefits of economic growth there aren't distributed evenly between Han and Uighur. There are major Chinese companies who refuse to hire Uighurs (or Muslims in general) and Tibetans, even when they have operations in those regions.
<<On the demographic front they are finally applying China's birth-control policies to the Uighur minority (who were exempt until recently>>
This seems to leave out some important context. While the policies in XJ may resemble the one child policy (which had many horrific consequences too), the intent is different; in XJ it's done as a tool to accelerate forced assimilation. It also doesn't align with the governments pivot to encouraging people in the rest of China to have more kids.
<<Most of this is horrifying, but it's important to say that it is not a "genocide" in the sense that the Holocaust or Rwanda were genocides. The goal isn't to eliminate a group of people that the Hans in charge don't like. >>
Yes, if you understand genocide to only mean "mass killings" then it is not that, which is what many people first think of when they hear the term. But looking at the UN Convention on Genocide....
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
....there's definitely a strong case to be made for b, d, and e, perhaps also c. So I don't think it's necessarily unfair to apply the label, although I generally don't because I don 't want to be sucked into a debate about definitions like I am now. But I do have to disagree with the second part of the statement, it seems like the CCP do want to eliminate Uighur culture (perhaps aside from a kind of cosplay, minstrel form of culture the CCP proscribes for ethnic minorities) and implement forced assimilation until they are pretty much indistinguishable from Han.
<<It's the carrot and (extremely heavy) stick approach of the PRC to a real and complicated social problem, which is that they find themselves in the awkward position of ruling a chunk of land of immense strategic importance, which happens to contain about 11 million Uighurs who are legitimately sympathetic to Muslim extremism and violent separatism. If Uighurs all became Chinese patriots tomorrow, (and they could convince the CCP that they had), the detention centers would disappear tomorrow.>>
I mean when you commit to having an empire, you often find yourself in awkward positions of ruling a group of people who would prefer you didn't, but those problems are of your own making, and don't excuse the awful things you do to try to maintain your empire. Perhaps consider decolonization. And there are not 11 million Uighurs sympathetic to Islamic extremism or violence.
"a couple incidents" appears to be a major understatement if this Wikipedia article is to be believed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China). Dozens or hundreds of incidents (largely bombings) and hundreds of deaths.
Aren't asteroids the main reason we should colonize Mars and not Antarctica? I mean, in case of any high-impact disaster that could destroy life on one planet but not the other, the two-planet system would save human kind. Isn't this what Musk has brought up as the main reason for making a Mars colony?
I think you can solve the asteroid threat more easily by tunneling underground on Earth and building a colony beneath the surface.
I don't even know if it has to be underground - what if you have self-sufficient domes in a few different places, so that if the asteroid strikes (eg) America, you've got a dome in Russia which isn't destroyed by the shockwave itself, and is able to sustain itself agriculturally for a few decades until you can go outside again?
Also, the chance of an asteroid strike is about 1/1 million in the next 100 years, so bringing a Mars colony forward by 100 years doesn't get you a lot of x-risk reduction.
Agreed - Any technology that allows you to live on Mars would also allow you to live in a vault, with the bonus that you could open the door at some point and expect to breathe the air.
The major problem from an asteroidal impact on the order of Chicxulub is the dust and soot in the upper atmosphere cutting off enough sunlight to make growing plants impossible for as long as a decade. No protective dome or underground bunker will make the upper atmosphere transparent enough to grow plants. And even if you've got enough preserved food, vitamin C has lousy shelf life. Hope you've got enough light bulbs and a solid enough supply of electricity to grow enough cabbage to make enough sauerkraut to ward off scurvy.
Not that it's logistically easier to maintain agriculture on Mars than set up survival bunkers with lots of grow lights around a nuclear power plant or something, but any major settlement on Mars will likely, simply as a matter of cost reduction, have substantial local greenhouses taking advantage of the natural sunlight on a reasonable day-night cycle, plus reasonable local supply of CHON elements. If Earth's atmosphere is rendered opaque, a large Mars colony might manage to keep humanity going.
Of course, that requires there to be some reason there's major settlement on Mars to begin with.
How much light is going to be blocked by dust in the atmosphere? A quick google search suggests that Mars gets ~1/3 the light that earth does. I am a bit skeptical that sunlight on earth will be reduced that much for very long.
Even if you have plenty of shelf-stable food, vitamin C itself is unstable, both from heat (so anything canned has effectively zero vitamin C) and time on the scale of years (at least at room temperature). So the issue is not that you need so much of certain preserved foods, but that you can't conveniently stockpile vitamin C.
The choices, then, for humans surviving a Chicxulub-type impact (assuming the estimates of sunlight blocking are accurate) are either inconvenient stockpiling (managing to keep vitamin C-rich foods continually frozen, requiring power and equipment) or ongoing production of vitamin C.
Ongoing production has three routes I've managed to think of. There's 1) power and equipment for growing plants with artificial light, 2) power and equipment for operating bacterial fermentation vats, and 3) hunt, trap, or raise (feeding from your food stockpiles) animals with working GULO genes, then eat them raw.
(Sauerkraut I only mentioned because making it out of fresh-grown cabbage has two advantages, increasing shelf life of the cabbage to months and potentially increasing the available vitamin C to as much as twenty times higher levels than in raw cabbage. It accordingly is a quite practical way of stretching any cabbage grown under artificial light to ward off scurvy. But it doesn't mean that "lay in a supply of sealed sauerkraut before the impact, eat some five years later" is going to work.)
As far as I can tell, Mars is worse than Earth would look like *after* pretty much any high-impact disaster one can think of, and a self-sustaining Mars colony is even more absurdly difficult than one that depends on regular supplies from Earth, so until and unless rocketry levels up multiple times in dramatic fashion, our efforts would be better spent preparing for surviving possible disasters on Earth, just as Scott suggests. (My gut feeling is that Musk's Mars visions are like someone pitching luxury cruises in the Carribean right after Columbus has returned from discovering Hispaniola - yeah, sure, maybe, but not anytime soon.)
Yeah, Mars colonization is a sort of memetic trap for space nerds. It's just earth-like enough to have major downsides, but without either the benefits (breathable air, radiation shielding, 1g) or a compelling resource that only it can provide.
Personally I'm of the view that we'd be better served by colonizing the moon and then moving to places with lots of resources or harvestable energy instead, maybe use Venus as a vacation home and keep Mars for a far-future terraforming project.
There's no point in colonising space unless it's going to be better than Earth. People aren't going to want to live on Mars, because Mars kinda sucks. People don't even want to live in Nuvanut.
Venus presents some very interesting possibilities. The challenges are well known (acidic atmosphere, crushing atmospheric pressure, so hot at the surface that lead melts) but it's those very features the make it a unique environment for industry. The atmosphere is highly reducing (with all the sulfuric acid) and is so dense that it's concentration of N2 is 4 times that of Earth's and even trace elements are fairly abundant. That's a lot of pieces in place for the building blocks of a chemical economy.
The really nice thing is that there's an area of the atmosphere at roughly earth temperatures and pressures, and where a blimp containing an earth-standard mix of gases can float. So your actual habitat could be held above the lead-melting hellscape of the surface, absorbing abundant solar power, and with rootlike structures dipping down to take up gases or mine.
The major issue with Venus (besides making blimp-cities work) is that its' pretty far down the gravity well. So it takes a lot of delta-V to ship stuff in. You win on shipping stuff out, though.
One underrated problem with Mars colonization (besides the well-known problem of long and expensive travel/shipping, rotten climate, thin atmosphere, etc) is that Mars is enough further from the sun than Earth to make it substantially harder to grow food even with climate-controlled greenhouses. Mars gets about 40% as much sunlight as the Earth, meaning that Mars's tropics get about as much sunlight as some of the islands off the northern coasts of Canada or Siberia. It's not an absolute dealbreaker, but crops that need full sun are either going to grow a lot slower than they do on Earth or they'll need some combination of sunlight concentration (reflectors, etc) or artificial lighting.
I view it as the civilizational equivalent of a shut-in going outside, breathing fresh air, and meeting people. Sure, there's more immediate practical benefit in refinishing the attic, and it's unlikely that the house will burn down any time soon. But there's an entire life of experience out there, entire literal horizons that are inconceivable if one stays in a place one doesn't even realize is tiny and cramped.
Asteroid impacts capable of planetary level devastation are extremely rare, in addition to what the others have pointed out. And they can be redirected.
Aside from the fact that, as already noted, mineshafts are cheaper than Mars colonies, asteroids are not an extinction risk any time in the few centuries, and comets are an extinction risk (modulo mineshafts) of P~1e-9/year. And we could probably knock that down to P~1e-11/yr with a JWST-equivalent telescope dedicated to comet-hunting (or, alternately, P~2E-8, find out that there's one comet we need to knock a wee bit off course sometime in the next couple decades).
There are good reasons to expect that settling Mars will be a rewarding enterprise some time in this century, but extinction risks are not one of them.
Right, these arguments are all good. What about engineered plagues? Maybe the Martians will not catch a 100% lethality rate bacterium created in the Evil Labs? This is the only remaining existential risk I can think of that multi-planet lifestyle might help against.
OK I now feel I am over-flogging a trivial point, but the anecdote is incoherent because it is trying to make 2 different contrasts: $120,000 vs $3,900, and 9 months of Davis's time and 3 hours drafting a description, vs Musk's response "OK". "Davis spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device ... Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt." That sounds a reasonable amount of time and effort to dedicate to what sounds like an absolutely critical component, but it only looks like $3,900 because it is done in-house. Senior engineer design time costs money, and outside contractors want mark-up. And this only has to be done once. So if you accepted the $120,000 bid you'd do so on the basis that you got the IP for the design, or that second and subsequent actuators were $10,000 apiece.
Why, incidentally, cannot substack link you to a reply to a post at the same time as it tells you about it? Or put a find in page function in the app?
Yup, it's the standard crafting/maker/DiYer scenario of "If you do it yourself, you can save a ton of money, assuming you already own all of the tools and also assuming that your time is worth nothing".
Substack comment system is bad (for one it requires JavaScript even to display them, also sluggish), also why would you use an app instead of a real browser, which also has many features like in-page search.
Those were the early years of SpaceX, presumably before Falcon 1's first flight in 2006. Davis most likely wasn't a "senior project director" back then, but a single engineer – Musk hardly would have tasked an entire team with developing what he deemed a "garage opener".
Yeah, the first level savings may not have been as much as the anecdote makes out, but being the kind of place where you take control and responsibility for large parts of the things you depend on will have a bunch of longer term benefits too. Many of the bigger companies try to integrate vertically to give themselves more control and ability to innovate quickly.
If you're going to think about it that way then you need to determine the $ value of the next best project the director would have worked on. Of course that's assuming the actuator is the only thing the director did
I assume that the $5k "budget" and the $3.9k cost, both refer to the non-recurring unit cost once the item is in production.
In which case, if this is an engine gimbal actuator of which there are I think 20 per Falcon 9, then you pay that guy's salary twice over on the first launch, and amortizing his salary over all the Falcon 9 launches per date puts the effective total cost per actuator at $4,550.
He is a polymathic engineer of rare but not unparalleled breadth, and the **sequence of areas** he attained expert-level knowledge in, and hands-on skill, are a first-order factor in the probability of success of the *series* of companies.
- Software first.
- Off the shelf hardware in parallel (the datacenters) with scaling
- Hand-built maximally esoteric hardware second (Falcon 1)
- Then hand-built medium-complexity hardware with a firm eye on eventually manufacturing at scale (Roadster).
- Then medium-complexity manufacturing at scale (Model S).
Assertions:
1. Building expert level skill creating software takes longer, and is less likely to occur than any other skill required in any of the industries that Elon‘s companies operate in. It is basically impossible to become a world-class software developer if you start after you’ve achieved career success in another industry.
- 1 is hardest, and most important
2. Hands-on expertise in spaceflight physics, metallurgy and fabrication, rad-hardening, rocket engine design, spacecraft structures, NDE/NDT fixturing: the physics and builder-level skills for these can be learned on the job and with intense solo study by a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, if given a free hand to roam/rotate.
- 2 & 3 are harder than all that follow
3. Space tech is nearly maximally esoteric, engineering and construction-wise. (Only the largest multi billion $ physics/astrophysics projects have a larger design envelope than space tech). Building expertise in space tech makes terrestrial engineering and fabrication challenges like car parts and solar panels seem pedestrian by comparison.
4. The techniques for manufacturing macro scale components (everything larger than 1mm) at scale, and subcomponent assembly at scale, etc etc - these can also be learned on the job a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, and some mfg folks to absorb knowledge from.
5. Learning supply chain optimization is something 1/4 of humans can lead to do well, 1/20 can learn to do well in their spare time, and is slightly more than a triviality for anybody who can handle items 1-4.
I’m making these positions from a position of having some experience in all five of these areas, for satellites, rockets, cars and other vehicles, but starting with software. Biased but also have trod the path in the same sequence, just not nearly at the same level of success, and I firmly believe that the sequence matters.
Well, the most typical skill shared among the founders of most of the most successful companies during the last 30 years: being rather good, personally, at software development. I’ll need to find a citation for that, but I don’t think it’s too difficult to track down.
Ok, it makes sense that a ambitious, motivated person with strong software development skills who also has a T-shaped composite skill set is more likely than someone who does not have that, to form a highly successful software business. But what about a different type of business?
There are two three dimensions on this part. First, a founder in any industry who has had a successful exit is going to find it easier to attract investors another start up. And being able to efficiently and successfully raise money is one of the most challenging things to do in business. Building a “ business empire” beginning with a software exit, is probably an optimal starting point if for no other reason than fundability.
Second, practically every business that could scale to $Bs in revenue relies on in-house software for at least some key parts of delivering the value proposition to the customer. And a whole lot of non-software businesses rely on in-house software for their secret sauce. A would-be business magnate who can sort the wheat from the chaff on their software teams is, in my opinion, nearly a necessary condition.
Third and last, it’s become pretty typical for software engineers since....von Neuman... to expand their T into adjacent areas, oftentimes repeatedly so they end up becoming polymathic.
30 years is a very short timeframe - it's just historical coincidence of having been at the right place at the right time, when a new giant market was opening up.
That you would think that software, especially in-house and even consumer software, would be the hardest of all of them, strikes me as preposterous.
(Also Musk has degrees in Physics and Economics, not software engineering, but he dropped out out of his materials science PhD to jump on the dot-com bubble.)
Sure, the late 90s were a uniquely good time to start a web business. And there are a lot of software founders with 20x+ exits who would fail at 2-5. The question is whether an alt-Elon with equivalent drive but a different skillset could have plausibly formed and made successful this same set of companies. I believe the answer is yes, but that the probability is at most 10% for someone who has not first mastered building software at scale in a demanding env, vs someone who has.
My primary assertion is that the sequence of skill-building matters, a lot, in the probability of outsized success in a series of different atom-based (rather than purely digital) businesses.
Had he gone from PayPal to Tesla, or Zip2 to Solar City without learning the lessons from doing hands-on space tech, I believe the probability of success with anything post-PayPal would’ve been lower. He would not have had the ability to make many, many roughly valid decisions on feasibility envelopes for all the little bits of those less esoteric businesses, from which all those “impossible” directives came.
Think about the other possible sequences for starting these companies where SpaceX doesn’t follow first, for example:
- Zip2/PayPal
- a nice long intellectual vacation from 2001-2004
- Tesla
- Neuralink
- SpaceX
The chance of Tesla being successful in this sequence is, I assert, much lower without the SpaceX education coming first. And anything after Tesla probably doesn’t happen in this scenario.
Re: software is hardest being preposterous:
Within the realm of commercial engineering, from personal experience hiring and managing a total of nearly 1000 technical folks in the auto industry, in the space/defense industry, and in pure software, the arrow of skill growth across domains goes from software-outward, and in many cases across domains - but basically never from ME/EE/Chem/any engineering field into software (and rock it within software as a dev). The sole exceptions I’ve seen are highly motivated, entrepreneurial physicists who leave academia and become devs and/or found software companies - but they had already built skill writing code during or before grad school.
If we’re talking about pure research, then no, the people meaningfully advancing knowledge face harder core challenges in their work than software developers do. The first time I lived in the Bay, I was doing pure research at Sandia-LLNL, and I dropped out to focus on software. But we’re talking about businesses that are heavy on commercial engineering where new science isn’t being done. I’ve shipped a car, and spaceflight equipment, and plenty of code. Within that realm, there is no area that is more difficult for a mid-career person to become proficient in than development. From firsthand experience, I can say it is literally easier for a dev to become a rocket scientist than it is for a rocket scientist to become a decent software developer.
The first issue here though is that Musk is reportedly *bad* at developing software, at least according to the first developers he hired at zip2, who aggressively refactored his code.
I'm pretty sure he still personally reviews approves the hiring packet of every new hire at SpaceX, maybe Tesla too.
On him being an engineer-ceo. I once read that there is a lot of benefit to him having effectively combined the financial and engineering decisions of the company where usually these are separate. So he can quickly approve and fund designs or shut down projects.
In the Everyday Astronaut interview, Tim makes some comment about the rocket and Elon realizes that he should change the design of the rocket on the spot. So it's sort of like the chief PR person also being the chief engineer. It just seems like once you put in the intensity and evwrything else then all new kinds of feedback loops emerge.
When I was at Google a bit over a decade ago, they kept making a big deal (in various trainings and orientations) that Larry Page personally reviewed all of the company's hiring packets, which always bothered me because 1) by that point, Google was far too large and expanding far too quickly for it to be reasonable for the CEO to personally review every single hire in terms of workload, and 2) it seemed like a sign of something terribly broken if the CEO needed to personally review routine hiring packets for a company that size: i.e. if thing were working properly that's something that should be fully delegated except for senior management and maybe a few key high-impact ICs.
My suspicion was and still is that Larry's review was a pure formality in almost all cases, retained as a symbolic nod towards Google's pretense that the company was still a plucky little startup in spirit if not in substance (as also evidenced by rituals like the weekly all-hands meeting you could attend in person if you wanted to). In order to test this, I started raising my hand whenever we were told about this and asking how often Larry vetoed a hiring packet. The one time I got a straight answer to this (I think during the HR training on how to give interviews), the trainer said that as far as he knew, when Larry's review had substantive input it was mostly for specialized roles that Google didn't hire often enough for there to be a well-established process for deciding what compensation package to offer, and Larry's input was mostly adjusting the comp package.
"he famously read lots of rocketry textbooks before starting SpaceX, including old Soviet manuals nobody else had heard of"
Heh, just a couple days ago I was watching the series "Young Sheldon" for the first time, in one of the first episodes rocket equations are discussed, and I was surprised to see Musk pop up as a guest star in an after-end-credits scene, reading Sheldon's notes !
(Only somewhat surprised, since he's done that before, and the plot was an *obvious* callout to the future SpaceX, even specifically mentioning landing rockets.)
Re: "Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
Starlink is very easy for authoritarian governments to censor: don't allow the import of the transceivers, make owning one illegal, make paying for Starlink services illegal. Voila, no Starlink in your country, at least not on a scale that matters. If your government can't do this, it is probably not that authoritarian.
Yeah, maybe a better way of putting this would be that countries lose the choice to skirt the edges of authoritarianism and censor their internets without doing obviously hostile things like banning Starlink transceivers.
> He fired 80%-90% of the workforce [of Twitter] without any clear change in user experience. This was bad for the fired people and bad for PR. But it makes him look more competent than whoever was there before him and hired 5-10x more people than they needed.
Two things to remember about this:
1. Twitter's revenue is mostly advertising.
2. Per Musk, advertising revenue is down 60% since the acquisition.
Musk says the lost revenue is primary due to pressure by the Anti-Defamation League (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907), but I feel like "there are now a tenth as many people working there" is also a plausible hypothesis.
Sure, but do we have any reason to believe that a significant proportion of the people let go from Twitter/X were responsible (even indirectly) for attracting advertisers to the platform? My impression (based on e.g. this article https://www.joe.ie/news/3700-twitter-employees-elon-musk-758450) is that a large proportion were employed in content moderation.
And even if it was the case that a significant proportion of those let go were responsible for attracting advertisers - if advertisers are flat-out refusing to do business with your company, all of those people are essentially getting paid to sit on their hands (through no fault of their own, of course). So letting them go (or perhaps furloughing them for the duration of the boycott) might still be a sensible business decision.
I also disagree with conflating "firing lots of people who work in content moderation" with "a systematic weakening of content moderation". As Scott notes, the user experience of Twitter hasn't declined significantly since Musk took over despite a massive decrease in headcount, suggesting that there were a lot of people (including, presumably, many who worked in content moderation) who were effectively dead weight.
A lot of users do report that their experience has declined, not necessarily on the technical side (well, there was that rate limiting thing) but in terms of how in order to read tweets they like they have to wade through a bunch of tweets by paid subscribers. Josh Barro wrote about this, for instance, with examples of prominent people like Mark Cuban finding that their ability to engage in productive dialogue was being hurt: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/elon-wont-make-money-by-making-twitter
> It appears that the advertiser boycott commenced almost immediately after Musk bought Twitter in response to his comments regarding free speech, and was reported on as early as November 2022
I feel like calling this a "advertiser boycott" is assuming your conclusion; what the advertisers are _saying_ is that they think Twitter ads, and Twitter brand presence, are less valuable than they used to be. Media Matters tried to get advertisers to boycott, but they try that all the time and it usually doesn't work. Why should I believe that they were causal this time? November is (for example!) when Twitter verified that fake Eli Lily account; maybe the ad execs really care about stuff like that.
> Additionally, in June it was reported that advertisers are already starting to return to Twitter/X, in spite of the headcount cut in the content moderation department
Per this article, Elon Musk did say in June that “Almost all of the advertisers have said that they’ve either come back or they’ve said they will come back". But then in September he said that advertising is 60% down. Those aren't both true.
> As Scott notes, the user experience of Twitter hasn't declined significantly since Musk took over
Wait, what did Musk do to piss off "an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in the United States that specializes in civil rights law and combats antisemitism and extremism", and why would that organization I've never heard of before be so ridiculously impactful ?!?
EDIT : Oh, never mind, FionnM at least partially answered that, thanks ! (Still, why so impactful ?!)
Also his public attacks on the ADL are predictably getting a lot of antisemites to gleefully join in, which hurts Twitter’s PR even more and gives advertisers even more reason to stay away.
A month ago Twitter's CEO reported that they're pretty close to break-even (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/10/ceo-says-x-formerly-twitter-is-close-to-break-even/), in part, apparently, because advertisers are starting to return to the platform. It sounds like you may be overstating the impact of a few very online neo-Nazis on the decisions made by advertisers.
In June of this year, the NYT reported that Twitter made $88 million in ad revenue in the five-week period commencing April 1. That's not based on CEO reports but internal documents NYT sourced from Twitter.
In the space of three months, Twitter apparently went from 41% of the ad revenue they were making at the same time last year, to nearly at a break-even point. I don't know exactly how much ad revenue they'd need to break even, but given that they'd laid off 80% of their staff, it seems reasonable to assume they wouldn't need as much ad revenue as they needed the year prior. No part of the CEO's narrative sounds implausible to me, personally.
"Close to break even" itself is a weasel word (well, weasel phrase), depending on what one considers "close." It does in fact seem implausible to me that Twitter filled that shortfall in three months, but without actual numbers on the current situation there's no way to be sure.
>without actual numbers on the current situation there's no way to be sure.
Right, so unless you have a good reason to believe that she's lying in a public interview, I think you should assume she's telling the truth. "Her boss is notorious for responding badly to bad news" is a fully general counter-argument which can be used to dismiss any public declaration made by any employee of SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, The Boring Company etc. which strikes me as rather conspiratorial.
Right but I don't think she's going to give good news to him and then bad news to the press, do you? But leave aside the Musk part—*any* CEO has the job of making the company seem like it's going great, so a specifics-free claim about how things are going in the right direction shouldn't really influence our picture of the company's true performance.
This seems to have the causality reversed. The ban the ADL movement was started by gleeful anti-Semites, which got *Musk* to join in as he is heavily networked with various alt-right personalities and accounts who naturally overlap heavily with anti-Semitic themes and interests. He didn't start something they picked up on as a dog-whistle to use for their own ends. They started a dog-whistle campaign that he joined in on, first promoting it by piggy-backing an account into neo-Nazi ideas. I'm not sure if it is more or less generous to assume he is oblivious to the subtext. One path makes him, a person who has increasingly got into boosting race realism accounts while speed-running "red-pill" content, now sliding into promoting an anti-Semitic campaign intentionally. That's ugly. The other path makes him someone almost comically oblivious, and not at all the "120 IQ" person Scott describes him as. That's unflattering.
Twitter was also marginal to begin with as an advertising location for companies, especially compared to Facebook or Instagram. Not useless, but they're not going to stick around if it reflects badly on them.
I don't think Musk is as bad as PR as you (and Vance) are saying. Some of his moves have been very good at attracting attention and building hype about what his companies do. SpaceX rockets are fitted with high quality cameras, which stream footage of the launches. The landings were all filmed, and they were happy to make compilation of their failed attempts. When he talks about SpaceX he doesn't talk about the mundane business of launching small satellites, he talks about Mars and building an interplanetary civilization. These are all things that have helped build hype and excitement about his projects, and its things that few other businessmen do well.
I suppose... I don't give a **** about what kind of videos he posts; I just notice that he's reliably doing something that was thought impossible before he tried. An AI could cook up a fake video of NASA landing on Mars, but it wouldn't mean anything, because there would be no reality behind it.
And in my opinion, talking about Mars and interplanetary civilization is standard behavior for anyone who cares. But I think many of the rest of us had given up hope on this happening in even our grandchildren's lifetimes, until he decided to do it. In terms of convincing people who didn't previously care, there had been lots of people making the same mouth noises for decades, but in the absence of any progress, no one paid attention.
Why I don’t think he will succceed with ”X”: Building a good rocket or a good car is ultimatel6 a question of engineering - you _can_ bore down to the physics. But a social media site isn’t - the engineering is social and when you bore down, you end up at psychology, not physics. And this clearly isn’t Musk’s strength.
This isn’t to say he won’t be able to get costs down and restore value for the existing property, but the “everything app” strikes me as nonsense. For instance, if you want to do banking or run your own currency, the challenge isn’t technical - it’s _legal_.
Agreed, but PayPal faced the same run-your-own-currency legal challenges, and Tesla and SpaceX were also more legal than you'd think (a lot of rocketry is navigating the FAA, getting rated for humans or whatever you're doing, and getting launch permits). I think Musk is very used to dealing with regulatory challenges by now and must be good at them.
How do you propose we measure social engineering ability? To me it doesn't seem obvious that Zuckerberg is better at it than Musk, yet Zuckerberg was able to build Facebook. Surely Musk must get some credit for Tesla's high P/E, and for having the most Twitter followers in the world (unsure if this was pre/post Twitter purchase tbf). Plus, Twitter already has a huge network, so he doesn't necessarily have to figure out how to grow the platform
Technically, social engineering is a physics problem, just one with a lot more variables and moving parts than rocket science. Still, the human mind almost certainly deterministic enough to get a fairly accurate model of it, and even if humans can't figure it out, AI can definitely do it. The one thing they're good at already is managing huge amounts of data and getting valuable info out of it; sprinkle some actual intelligence in there, and you might have something that can "solve" social manipulation. Of course, actual advances in neuroscience would help as well, but that's probably not gonna happen unless we start doing lots of ethically questionable testing.
One other thing that doesn't seem to fit with this review, but that I'm not sure how to think about. Musk famously gets into a lot of fights with the US government, for example around SEC enforcement and the covid response. But we don't see him criticize China much -- maybe never publicly since covid? From a business perspective that seems smart: the Chinese government has a lot of ways to retaliate against Musk through Tesla, and it seems believable that they would if he criticized them publicly too much. But the review paints a picture of a guy who couldn't maintain that amount of message discipline on subjects he was really passionate about.
Maybe the fights with USG are more tactical than deeply-felt? Maybe China is just intimidating in a way that America isn't? I don't have a conclusion here, just a vague sense that I'm missing something.
He has a Gigafactory in China to manufacture Tesla cars. I assume that is targeting the Chinese car market, which must be one of the largest in the world. SpaceX cannot work easily with China due to US national security restrictions (it is very hard to do any kind of space collaboration between the US and China), so there are no contracts there.
I think 1) he isn't politically coherent 2) he has the same 'mostly focuses on things that are salient to him instead of important' problem everyone has 3) he's selfish and knows Xi will ban Tesla the moment he takes on China.
Quick hit, long before I've finished the article. Musk's hands-on learn-how-it's-done practice reminds me a bit of Walt Disney, of all people. Do you know how Disneyland came about? During WWII Walt became interested in (obsessed with) model railroads. So he went into the company's machine shop and learned how to use the equipment to build his own models from scratch. Then, after the war, he had the idea that his employees needed a park where they could relax with their families. That much I learned from two biographies, a thick tome by Neal Gabler, and a somewhat more sympathatic one by Mike Barrier (and, I believe, a bit deeper). So, you merge the idea of a park with the skill of building model trains and out comes Disneyland, the world's first theme park and, some have said, a masterpiece of urban planning.
Disney, too, has been a controversial figure, very.
And then there's factory-floor lever micromanagement. When Walt and his brother Roy started their company in 1923, Roy handled the business and Walt was the creative. He did the drawing and animation himself for a couple of year. But after hiring some animators, Walt stepped back a level, but still micromanaged every cartoon up through the first five feature-length films (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi). He had to approve everything that went on the film and on the soundtrack. Only when WWII hit and changed the business, drastically (to making propaganda and training films) did Walt loosen up a bit. But then he turned his attention elsewhere.
Walt Disney has some parallels - was a technology innovator and pushed workers beyond what they imagined their creative limits. He also had his very sensible brother Roy handling the finance side. (The company was called Disney Bros. until Walt decided it sounded better with just his name.) The usual pattern was that Walt would push the company the point of bankruptcy on a dream project, Roy would call in favors to get a bunch of bankers in a room to hear about it, then Walt’s incredible pitching ability would convince the skeptical bankers it was worth keeping them solvent a little longer. When all else failed they would make a princess movie. What I take away from the Walt biographies is that Roy was working hard behind the scenes to keep everything afloat and that with him (and genius Ub Iwerks), Walt would have flamed out many times.
Well, it's not quite that simple. But, yes, there are parallels and Walt would have failed without Roy keeping business affairs more or less in order. But there was more to the creative side than princess movies. Only one of the first five major features – the one's that made film history – could be considered a princess movie, Snow White. And after those films, Walt stepped back from the cartoon business just a bit (though he voiced Mickey Mouse through 1947). The company went on to do nature documentaries, live action films (shot in England because they couldn't take their UK profits out of the country), and then something really different, Disneyland. At the very end of Walt's life the company had bought up a bunch of Florida real estate and was deep in plans from what became Disney World. But Walt died before they broke ground. His vision for the project was quiet different. He really did want to build an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), but that never really happened, not as he'd imagined it.
Thanks for the comment. You're certainly right about tech innovation. Walt loved technology.
One noticeable difference between Twitter and Musk's other companies is that it is straightforward to articulate what the other companies are for, but it's not really clear what Twitter is for. "Connecting the world" doesn't cut it; everyone can claim to do it and not everyone even agrees if it's a good thing. It's hard to be in hyper-focused mode for a longer time if there is no clear-cut goal.
Out of everything Musk has done to Twitter, Birdwatch (Community Notes) is the only feature that shows genius. Pissing off the schoolmarms was a good thing, but any unwoke leadership would have had the same effect. Changes to the UI were questionable, and his forays into rate limiting and closing off the timeline to non-registered users (forcing everyone to use nitter and the likes) look self-defeating to me.
Clicking on the footnotes numbers from the text opens a popup that cuts out and shows text from mid-sentence on Android for me, forcing me to skip reading them.
It cuts off the first line of footnotes for me and locks my computer (if I wait a minute, my computer unfreezes, and then I can scroll up and see the first line) . And the comments barely work for me when there are several hundred of them, since that also freezes my computer (I have a newish laptop with decent specs and no issues with any website but Substack, so I'm thinking Musk should buy Substack and fire their engineers)
I have a problem with biographies, they're almost all far too long. I just don't care enough about anyone else's life to spend that much of my own reading about it.
I think there's a hole in the market market for 100-200 page biographies. Tell me all the interesting things about Pliny the Elder without boring me with every scrap of detail known about his life.
I pitched the idea of short biographies written by famous writers not doing original research to a guy at Penguin around 1989. A few years later, Penguin started publishing exactly what I had asked for. (I don't know if my idea was what inspired them or if they came up with it on their own.)
Right, reading the review of this biography made me update towards the direction that Musk isn't just an incompetent struck by blind luck a few times in a row, and then just coasting on the ill-deserved reputation (star engineers wanting to work on SpaceX/Testla, getting the government contracts, etc). I can well believe that cutting through the red tape and ACTUALLY doing whatever it takes (the sort of heroic responsibility Eliezer talks about) is a recipe for success, because I already believe it.
It didn't shift my belief in that Musk is an utterly despicable human being.
Whenever I read about Musk, I have only a single thought: he's a Heinlein's character. To be fair, many other writers with varying libertarian bend wrote 4D-chessmaster-technical-and-business-genius- characters - Neal Stehpenson and Michael Flynn come to mind among the more recent ones ("Firestar" series has "Musk-in-a-drag" obsessed female space company CEO with a childhood trauma), but all his talk about Mars makes me think about Heinlein specifically.
I've yet to see him do anything particularly villainous, so I don't see him this way. He's not even building giant lasers in Earth orbit. And does he even own a single shark?
Almost completely by accident, I once came into possession of a set of paper construction documents for Garriot's never-completed second castle here in Austin.
The most notable feature was a circular bed which was also an elevator. It went from the observatory on the roof, through several floors worth of bedrooms, down to the dungeon.
There was also a circular feature called a "tokamak". It seemed like a large amphitheater thing, or it might have been, y'know, a tokamak.
I think the fairer and more obvious comparison is to Peter Thiel, and I think it's not even close.
Hm, sounds promising! These satellites are not big enough by themselves, but if SpaceX launches a system of mirrors to focus them all on a single point - THAT might have some impact, maybe!
"If I’m stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically. If there’s nothing left to lose, that’s actually a really fun idea to me. I think it has freed me artistically. The best part of the movie is the Joker. Everyone loves the villain. Everyone fucking loves Thanos. Let’s make some Thanos art."
This is something I think Scott's review didn't emphasize enough about Musk and how to understand his persona. You can look at nearly everything Musk does up to the 2015 book with an eye toward building a colony on Mars. Something like SpaceX is easy to make the connection. Tesla and their solar subsidiary also make sense. But what about the others?
The Boring Company is exactly the kind of infrastructure project you'd need on Mars, where digging tunnels is basic infrastructure.
The same goes for the hyperloop. How do you travel long distances on the red planet? Are you going to have airplanes? There are no fossil fuels, and the atmosphere is thin. A few years back, Musk said he thinks it's technically possible to build electric planes with very long ranges (on Earth), but he's not interested in the project. Probably because it's not practical for Mars. Meanwhile, a hyperloop would be technically much easier to maintain in the Mars atmosphere, and would probably be better than planes for long-distance travel.
More recently, I think he has tempered his expectations on Mars. He talks about it less, and seems to be doing more that isn't obsessively focused on a Martian colony, like buying Twitter and focusing on AI x-risk. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see him make a new push in a few years to build out some kind of space exploration company that everyone thinks will fail.
And this is the part where I think understanding Musk really takes shape. Elon doesn't seem to be driven by a desire to build companies so he can make more money than anyone else on the planet. I'm sure he enjoys that, based on some comments he has made. The book mentions his intense partying, but I don't get the sense that he's working 100+ hour weeks for the money.
Sometimes he doesn't even seem to be driven by whether the companies nominally succeed. Yes, he cares, but when asked what odds he gave SpaceX and Tesla of succeeding, he said about 10%. The obvious follow-up question is "Why do them?" Why sink his ENTIRE fortune into companies that combined don't look like a good bet for making money? Because, he explained, even if they failed they would accelerate rocket ship development and adoption of electric cars. And to Elon that was worth the price.
Maybe Elon's "secret sauce" is that he's not laser-focused on profitability. He doesn't measure success in EBITDA, stock price, or any of the other metrics people use to gauge success. I'm sure he still stresses over these metrics, but users gained/lost doesn't cause him to change course or abandon a new project. He simply says, "I guess I'll have to adjust my expectations about market share" and pushes onward in his quest to make the Everything App. You think reusable rockets are a waste of money on an impossible dream? Elon doesn't care, because you're not going to get routine space flight without them and his goal is routine space flight, not making a bunch of money building rockets. So he's going to make the rockets reusable if it costs him the company. Because to Elon, it's the idea that drives him.
Yes, this is also a feeling I get from Musk. His utility function is just not the same. I think Daniel Suarez based his space-crazed millionaire character in "Delta-V" on Elon Musk. In the book, he does everything - including lying to his investors and committing fraud - to get his asteroid-mining project off the ground, so to speak.
I wonder where Twitter fits into this picture, though. A tool for controlling narrative? "Mars-say-yes" kind of ploy (from Asimov's "Battle-Hymn")?
I don't think the Twitter acquisition was aligned with his laser focus on Mars. If you follow his tweets, it's obvious he just really likes the platform. I honestly think he bought it because he saw signs they were messing with his favorite toy/pastime and since he had the money he figured he could prevent that from happening.
There are other complications to that narrative. I think buying Twitter was multicausal. He wanted to make the Everything App, but he could have bought something cheaper to do that with. He probably chose Twitter because he likes to use it so much. There's also the free speech concerns, which I think we can take at face value. But then when you hear him defend free speech, he clearly doesn't understand it at a more nuanced level. I don't agree with Scott's assessment that he's just not as smart in that area. I think it's just that he's really good with subjects he cares deeply about and reads deeply about.
I get the sense that he cares about free speech, but in a more shallow sort of way. He's not going to buy a dozen books and hunt down Supreme Court justices to hound them for their knowledge. "But he BOUGHT Twitter!" Like I said, I think he did that for many reasons, but the free speech aspect seems to be more defensive than vision-based.
In the end, he financed much of his Twitter acquisition. Why do that when you have tons of money? Because most of that money is in stocks and equity in Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has often said he's first-in, last-out for Tesla, and he felt that going public was a mistake he wouldn't repeat with SpaceX. There are clear signs he still deeply cares about those two companies, otherwise he would have been more willing to cede more control/ownership of them to buy Twitter, as opposed to financing the purchase. I agree with Scott that Twitter/X will likely be successful in ways unpredicted by prognosticators, but I don't think Musk sees it as mission-critical.
Some of the remarks about how it's realyy Musk's employees doing all the work make me think more of Nick van Rijn in Poul Anderson's 'The Man Who Counts'.
I knew a guy in 1981 who wanted to make his fortune off shooting rockets into space. I humored him because I'd read a lot of Heinlein books too. But I knew better: only the government could afford to do anything in outer space.
Years later, I found myself sending a firm he founded $25 per month for satellite radio.
Another example about getting himself into a lucky position is buying Twitter and now being able to use that data for an LLM project, he didn't anticipate that but considered it a nice bonus.
The main thing I took away from this review is that you can buy an emerald mine in Zambia for fifty thousand dollars.
For the price of an Audi you can have an emerald mine in Zambia, and if you can find a way to drop it into conversation that you own an emerald mine in Zambia then it sounds way more impressive than owning an Audi.
" I think when he’s tried to form philosophical/intellectual opinions, they’ve been well-intentioned, shown good instincts, and sometimes displayed deep insight, but also often been unsophisticated or messed up key points.... IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes." This seems like a very generous description considering his output on twitter...looking admiringly at Andrew Tate the first example that comes to mind.
A popular online macho influencer, currently on trial for sex trafficking in Romania. Someone who seems to view people, especially women, as mere tools to be used (or abused) as he pleases.
This derailed my train of thought badly enough that I had to comment on it before reading the rest of the post. Sorry if it's elaborated on later, I might feel silly if it is.
> I like this story but find myself dwelling on Musk’s request - why shouldn’t he be allowed to read his own biography before publication and include footnotes giving his side of the story where he disagrees? That sounds like it should be standard practice!
I understand this moral impulse on a 'nice-to-have' level comparable to the notion that it's nice (and standard practice!) for a journalist writing an article about someone to reach out for comment, and we consider it an obvious dick move when they "reach out" at 2am for an article that's running at 5. But the implementation can be so variable and the specifics given here so unworkable (and hypocritical?) that I've lost the plot on how obligatory this "should" is supposed to be.
A commitment to include material from someone hostile to the project is a nightmare, both editorially and legally. Am I allowed to make changes to their input, at a minimum editing for length or shuffling it around in the book? Either a yes or no is a headache. Am I allowed to make changes to *my* work after they've seen an advance copy? (It's not unusual for sweeping changes to come in at the last minute - or even after publication, in digital!) Heck, can I even respond to their footnotes without requesting another round of commentary?
> If I ever write a post about any of you and you disagree with it, feel free to ask me to add a footnote giving your side of the story (or realistically I’ll put it in an Open Thread).
Specifically: there is a *huge* difference sending a work to someone for their inclusion in the published copy, and sticking some commentary in what is functionally Author's Notes sold separately. If I'm to take this footnotes idea seriously, I want Scott to take seriously the notion that he's obligated to withhold posting until adding (unlimited?) the commentary from subjects within the same piece. This is not a small ask!
Yeah, I think the custom is that unless it's an "authorised biography" (which often is a puff-piece by other name), the biographer doesn't give the subject right of reply like this. Because you want to tell the story as truthfully as you can, and even though we all have biases, letting the subject give only their side of the story and tidy inconvenient or unpleasant facts under the carpet means a worse job in the end.
There absolutely have been biographers who made their name by doing hit jobs and being unpleasant muck rakers, but in the end you do need the balance: a popular and beloved public figure may have skeletons in the closet that the immediate hagiography after they die doesn't cover, and which is necessary to get a sense of the whole person. Same way with biographies and studies that have been critical of someone, and maybe years down the line a new writer or researcher revisits that and balances out the 'official' condemnatory line with new facts or a reappraisal of what happened.
People have tried to exercise control over biographers in the past by withholding information, particularly literary estates or executors who hold on to relevant material and won't let the biographer see it unless they agree to toe the party line, or won't let them see it at all.
+1. I don't see an issue with a literary ecosystem that includes both puff pieces, hit jobs, autobiographies both ghostwritten and legitimate. Let writers write and judge them by the fruits of their labors.
If the subject wants to reply, they absolutely have the right to release their color commentary in the form of their choosing. I see no obligation for the publisher to bundle it together and only sell the package deal.
This reminds me of the MacDonald-McGinniss controversy, where Jeffrey McDonald (accused and later convicted of killing his family) hired Joe McGinniss to write a book about the case. McGinniss decided at some point that he was guilty but didn’t tell him, then wrote a book that concluded he was guilty, which MacDonald only found out after publication.
MacDonald didn't "hire" McgGinniss to write a book about his case. Mcinniss signed a book contract with Signet Books like any other professional author. Originally, McGinniss was open to MacDonald's version of what happened and MacDonald cooperated with the project by providing access. McGinniss eventually concluded that MacDonald was guilty, but withheld this opinion from MacDonald who continued to cooperate thinking McGinniss was on his side. After the book came out, MaDonald sued McGinniss for securing his cooperation on false pretenses.
MacDonald was looking for a writer to write about the case, he met McGinniss and proposed that he write a book. They signed a contract dividing up the proceeds and giving McGinniss exclusive access to the defense team. MacDonald signed a release to protect McGinniss's freedom to write what he saw fit. McGinniss was made an official member of the defense team, to prevent him from being subpoenaed by the prosecution. After publication, MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract.
"Hired" isn't completely accurate, but MacDonald proposed the idea to McGinniss and they had a formal agreement about it.
There's just a huge difference between being paid by a publisher and being paid by the subject of the book. And, in fact, it was McGinniss' publisher, Phyllis Grann, who basically pushed him into committing to the he's-guilty line. McGinniss was a lot less sure than he makes himself out to be in Fatal Vision until she insisted that he had to come to some kind of conclusion.
I occasionally withhold posting until I've run it by a relevant person. More often I don't because it would take a while, I'm lazy, I have a 2+-post-a-week schedule, and it's intimidating to ask famous people to read stuff about them.
I assume Vance spent years on this biography. Musk seems like the sort of person who gets things done quickly - I don't see why he couldn't wait a week to get his comments. Probably he went through many rounds of editing that each took more than a week, and Musk's feedback seems more important than an editor's.
If it were my project, I'd send Musk a first draft, let him know there might be minor stylistic changes afterwards, and include his comments as footnotes, edited slightly for readability, while explaining all of this to him.
Moral issues aside, I would be terrified to publish a Musk biography without Musk's input. What if I got something really wrong? What if it started an international incident (like the part about Starlink Crimea in Isaacson's bio which Isaacson is now sort of walking back)? What if Musk sues me, as he is known to do often, and he wins because I did accidentally defame him? If nothing else, "Musk read this and said it was fine" would be a great defense against accidental errors.
I think the idea of half biography half autobiography is a great idea. Imagine if there were occasional chapters written by Musk “despite what Vance has written there, I don’t think I’m that single minded”.
> I occasionally withhold posting until I've run it by a relevant person. More often I don't because it would take a while, I'm lazy, I have a 2+-post-a-week schedule, and it's intimidating to ask famous people to read stuff about them.
As I see it, you, Scott Alexander, are something like +2~3 SD above the journalistic median in terms of the melange of conscientiousness/curiosity/integrity that would be relevant on this metric. That's a good thing, one of the defining elements of your writing! It also has implications for any proposed practice.
You occasionally write pieces that have a strong focus on living individuals; you often include footnotes in your work. Can you point to an example where those footnotes are in the subject's own voice, directly and systematically responding to the less flattering parts of your writing?
I want to see what this would look like in reality. If it can't be done, woe for the rule rather than thee.
> I assume Vance spent years on this biography. Musk seems like the sort of person who gets things done quickly - I don't see why he couldn't wait a week to get his comments. Probably he went through many rounds of editing that each took more than a week, and Musk's feedback seems more important than an editor's.
I see a sharp line between 'there are a number of good reasons for an author writing a focused piece to get input from the subject' and 'an author has a moral/ethical/professional obligation to yield the final cut privilege to the subject'. Musk's feedback is certainly "more important" than any given email from Vance's editor, but it is not in the slightest guaranteed to be aligned with Vance's goals in writing a biography. Deiseach makes an excellent point - authorized biographies exist, and they typically aren't better than the inverse.
> Moral issues aside, I would be terrified to publish a Musk biography without Musk's input.
I'll skip the fisking, but the short version is: good lord, would including Musk's input seem like a singularly bad way to address concerns of liability or accuracy! Unless Hollman gets the really-final cut, legal's gonna have nightmares.
But the wider point is that to the extent to which professional biographers think these are meaningful worries, they have an existing toolbox of approaches to mitigate them. To the extent that they're not dutifully relaying the subject's words, that's a choice. I object to the idea that there ought to be an additional imperative that is justified on the grounds that authors don't know what's good for them.
And above all else - there's no amount of footnotes that addresses what happens when what the subject wants is something *removed*.
There are plenty of despots and criminals in the world who would quickly kill you over a beer. And you choose to avoid two people who haven't killed anyone. I bet both have considered it, though, who hasn't?
Dennis DiTullio is the OP of the thread, but I still don't get it. Having singled out Trump and Musk as the only two people in the world with whom he wouldn't share a beer, he would surely *agree* that one of Purpleopolis's three (that is, Putin) is not like the others.
I didn't say no one died under their watch, I said they never killed anyone. I don't know whether or not the Musks were complicit in apartheid, but i do know that Elon never killed anyone.
I wrote a piece for Foriegn Policy about why the vision of an 'Everything App' in the US market is essentially impossible. WeChat was created in a very specific Chinese context that simply doesn't translate to the US
We actually *do* have an "everything app" in the West : the Minitel.
(Or rather did, it was basically smothered by the Internet, and especially the Web, though at least one infocom oligarch did use it as a stepping stone : Xavier Niel.)
Yes, it was still evil because a platform (GAFAMs have been nicknamed "Minitel 2.0"), but at least it could be kept in check because owned by the government.
(Notably, IIRC it also solved payments, by having them integrated into the connection bills. AFAIK the small businesses were all over it.)
Ashlee Vance is a terrific journalist and his book will likely be far superior to whatever fluff piece Isaacson has come out with.
Muggles just don’t understand what motivates engineers, and why they will knowingly and willingly work for abusive bosses like Jobs or Musk, or in an earlier era Adm Hyman Rickover or Howard Hugues. It’s about achievement more than even the mission.
As for his foibles, that reminds me of Inspector Lestrange in the BBC series Sherlock: “I do it because I believe Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and he may someday be a good one”.
As Musk has become richer and more powerful, and probably more in his own bubble, the risk is that his trajectory is going to be towards becoming a worse man, not a better one.
Sadly likely. The opportunity cost of Musk's attention wasted on something utterly useless like Twitter is horrific. The sooner he runs it into the ground, digests the $44B loss and moves on, the better. After all, didn't his co-founder Peter Thiel say "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" (https://som.yale.edu/blog/peter-thiel-at-yale-we-wanted-flying-cars-instead-we-got-140-characters)
The calculation does have to take into account the anticipated utility (positive or negative) of Twitter if counterfactually left to follow its pre-Musk course.
I'm a pretty successful engineer by any measure and would not touch Tesla or any other Musk-run companies with a 10-ft pole (and yes I have been asked). Never had an abusive boss in my life and not going to start, thanks.
> He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.
You write further down about people making the mistake of misunderstanding Musk because they dismiss what he says and don't take it literally. Well, what did Musk literally say about taking over Twitter? He said that people pushing toxic identity politics caused one of his children to become estranged from him, and Twitter was so deep in the toxic identity politics camp that he was literally not allowed to talk about the harms it was causing, so he took over in order to clean up the cesspool that Twitter had become.
That's my take on it too. Right or wrong about whether he's succeeded in running Twitter, he absolutely got what he wanted out of it. And managed to expose some government involvement and problematic censorship at the same time.
What does "literally not allowed to talk about..." mean in this context? I'm pretty sure Must was allowed to talk about any damn fool thing he wanted on any platform he wanted that wasn't Twitter, and reasonably sure he was allowed to talk about alleged Twitter-harms on Twitter as long as he wasn't completely bonkers in his phrasing.
It means exactly what it sounds like: speaking against the prevailing orthodoxy was a good way to get the posts in question censored and perhaps even to get your account suspended.
I've seen no shortage of people "speaking against the prevailing orthodoxy" on Twitter, specifically includng high-profile individuals speaking about how Twitter was causing harms and that these harms were linked to Twitter's left-leaning editorial and moderation policies. Twitter, pre-Musk, did *not* automatically censor anyone who tried to talk about the harms it was causing. So I'm skeptical that Elon Musk was on some special secret list where *he* was not allowed to talk about these things even though most everyone else was.
Read what I wrote more carefully; you are rebutting a claim that was never actually made. And furthermore, I'm not the one making it. This was the reason Elon Musk gave. If you think it's not real, take it up with him.
"One of his worst moments came after a prototype Falcon 1 failed halfway through the launch. Musk immediately blamed key engineer Jeremy Hollman. This was a reasonable assumption - he had been the last person to work on the rocket before liftoff - but instead of waiting for the investigation, Musk went straight to publicly accusing him."
That's probably his biggest way of shooting himself in the foot - he won't back down from what he perceives as a challenge to his authority, or rather, his *rightness* about something.
"This happened, it must be somebody's fault, you're the guy holding the hot potato at the time, it was your fault!"
Look at the absolutely stupid fight he got into with the cave diver in Thailand - yes, Elon, your submarine idea was cute but it wouldn't work. Doubling down and implying the guy was a paedophile (because why else would he be an ex-pat in Thailand if not for cheap young sex workers?) was not edifying and I think probably cost him a lot of credit with the public.
That's the kind of thing comes back to bite you in the behind later, e.g. when taking over Twitter, a lot of ordinary people were "Oh, isn't that paedo-guy?" and discounted what he was trying to do. And were more easily convinced that he was a crypto-fascist or whatever. Blood emeralds!
Musk is a net positive to society imo and admittedly I may be mistaken as to why(Pascal) but to say he "never changes" and "a paradox" smacks of hero worship.
I think the move to X will work because the social media giants can't grow exponentially forever. At some point they need to shift into being utility companies - regulated monopolies that make plenty of cash, enough to support some interesting research, but not growing at 20%/year forever. But this is horrible and scary for their investors, so you get crazy ideas like the Metaverse instead of just improving the core model. Twitter needed to be slashed. The product, basically, worked, and hadn't changed much in years. But the investors never would have accepted "OK, that's enough growth, now we cut costs and profit" without some huge disruption to blame it on.
“He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.”
I don’t think this is fair; he’s been exceedingly clear and consistent about his philosophical reasons for buying Twitter.
His actions haven’t fit his free speech rhetoric, though--he’s throttled traffic both to competitors like Substack and to sites he just dislikes like the NY Times; he went through employees’ Twitter history and fired anyone who had been critical of him personally (before he was their boss), etc.
Shortly after he took over twitter there was a wave of leftwing journalists and activists who were suspended or banned under flimsy pretexts, none of which involved them breaking any laws. This was less than a year ago. People just sometimes lie about caring about free speech in order to thwart attempts to deplatform speech they want people to hear while they themselves are quite censorious. Rhetoric about free speech is just instrumental, and the actual underlying belief just that power should be used to promote their interests and thwart their enemies. This is a trait that is notorious of the crowd of people Musk spends most of his time agreeing with on Twitter, and you have to engage in a lot of contortions not to see Musk as just being cut from the same cloth.
Musk unambiguously bought twitter for one reason - to ensure he can never be banned from it. Not simply because he loves attention for attention's sake (he does), but because his twitter account is his primary marketing tool and has literally made him billions of dollars. I'm sure he is genuinely, albeit modestly, in favor of free speech all things being equal, but it's definitely not why he bought it.
There are other answers to that interview question. You could be a distance from the south pole such that if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the earth becomes 0.5 miles (or 1/n miles, for any positive integer n).
More to the point (well, my point anyway): that problem's been known to smart 12-year-olds for decades. If somebody asked me this in an interview I'd wonder if the "real" test was seeing if I'd admit I knew it.
My favorite answer is that you're on a train that runs along an east-west route with stops a mile apart. You start on one train, walk three sides of a one-mile square, and at the end of the last leg you step onto another train on the same route, one station earlier than where you started. You stay standing still on the train until it reaches your original stop.
Really enjoyed the review, its been ages since I read this book so it was a good refresher.
I do disagree with your stance on Twitter/X on a couple of fronts. In terms of Twitter Blue, I don't see it as successful or on the path to success because it is kind of a half-measure. Twitter should either be primarily subscription model that basically operates on "FOMO" for its addicted users or rely strictly on advertising and be the town square. Twitter Blue is in this weird in-between where there are benefits to membership but its not needed to use Twitter, and so it becomes just a poor enough experience for non-subscribers that I think over time they will start losing users as the site becomes less useful (Like seeing subscriber tweets and comments before the people you actually want to read).
The second issue I have is with the idea advertisers need Twitter instead of vice versa. There are plenty of social media options for advertisers to go to, I just don't believe Twitter is essential there. Especially when Twitter isn't really associated with buying things as a consumer. No one shops on Twitter. I can see this actually being a major problem if advertisers stay away and realize their bottom line isn't actually hurting, so might as well just make this decision permanent since its all downside being in the Elon Musk business from a PR perspective (As your own review noted in terms of how he handles PR and drives folks nuts).
I find Twitter Blue confusing. Why would someone pay to provide a social media platform with its product? No other platform works this way. The product is the attention of the users, sold to advertisers. If you adopt a program like Blue that elevates the posts with the least value--that is, posts by people who have to pay to get anyone else's attention--you're going to lose everyone but those users eventually because the overall quality of the content will degrade. You end up with nothing but people paying for the attention of a group that consists entirely of the kind of people who have to pay to get other people's attention. I used to check Twitter once a day. Now I barely look at it once a week, and I'm not alone. It's mostly coasting on the inertia of the network effect.
As you said, the main advantage of subscription is your comments get promoted in visibility, which is the product some people want. Not a lot of people, as it turns out, but definitely some. One of the problems this creates is the people who pay for this tend to be dull and obnoxious, and so it degrades everyone else's experience to have exposure to them prioritized. It also associates the the brand of subscription with uninteresting and nasty content. The war between those people wanting to be seen and others wanting to avoid seeing said people has led to a countermeasure of making it easier to hide that status. I'm not sure this coup and countrecoup is over, and it's not clear where it ends up.
It's pretty clear there is a vulnerability for Twitter in that there's a widely felt desire for a Twitter-clone that doesn't have this (and a few other) issue(s), but network effects are very strong and all the current alternatives have failed to be a clone in at least some key respect up to this point. We'll see if that remains true forever.
All true, and the big question is "promoted in visibility" to whom? Just anybody, or to the famous and/or influential who are one of the reasons a lot of people read the site? Musk's problem is that the same people (journalists, celebrities, politicians) who annoy him are the people whose presence attracts a lot of users to the site and those people don't want to pay for Twitter or even to be seen as paying for Twitter. That's why he stealthily gave Stephen King a blue check for free and then King publicly said, "No, thanks!" If Threads were more developed, I think it could be a serious rival, but I also think there's some outrage-exhaustion with the whole engagement-driven model of social media. People who leave X might just start using social media in a different way.
Not to be banal, but I think the answer to your question is "it varies." Depends on the motives of the specific blue check. Some just want to be near the top of replies to anyone they might reply to. Others care specifically about being promoted to more famous people. There's a contingent of people who are seeking more visibility to try to be more effective at spreading their (typically, though not necessarily, far right) politics to others. Some are running straight up scams. They key point in which they are united is what they are paying for is promotion to other people's eyeballs.
Scott in his article mentions that anecdotally he sees a lot more people using Twitter blue lately despite subscription numbers not exploding, and I wonder if he's being naive about why he might be seeing that a lot more often these days.
"Seeing a lot more people using Twitter Blue" could mean "People I know weren't subscribing before have now become subscribers" or it could mean, "When I look at Twitter, I see a higher proportion of posts with blue checks than I have before." The latter could just mean that people with blue checks are posting more while people who don't subscribe aren't using the platform much anymore. That's certainly the case with me!
Two other possibilities. One, he's seeing more Twitter blue subscribers because they are vaulted to the top of the content he looks at, including his own replies, and he's oddly unaware that's how the algorithm works now.
Two, Scott's audience and interests has a pretty sizeable overlap with exactly the sort of person who subscribes to twitter blue - alt-right curious, would-be intellectuals who see SV types as visionaries - and he hasn't taken this fact into account when evaluating his personal experience. The interests and community around SSC/AC10 strikes me as a honeypot for your most stereotypical example of subscribers.
The current blue check isn't something invented out of the whole cloth, it's an evolution of the blue check that existed under previous management.
The previous version started out as a verification that you're definitely the person of that name that most people think about when they hear that name. But then it evolved somewhat in the direction of "... and also, Twitter staff approve of you". It became a mark of status among a certain breed of twitter users, so it made sense to monetise that status mark rather than removing it.
It verified that if you were using the name of somewhat well-know person, you were in fact that person. Much like Wikipedia will only let you make an entry about yourself if you are "notable" enough. That caused it to become status symbol of a sort. Now it is the opposite of a status symbol because all you need to get it is $8 and the people considered notable won't do that.
There was a whole right wing discourse, one that sometimes made it into the comments of this site, that supposed that people who were verified under the old blue check system highly valued that as a status symbol. The problem is that this wasn't true. That was their envy of other people as noteworthy clouding their thinking. This led to an idea that lots of people would value purchasing the same check as a status symbol and this would drive the old verified people wild with jealousy. They, for the most part, did not. At the end of the day, it was just verification and the check's value was largely in the fact that it could assure users that the people they were reading really were the celebrity, journalist, scientist, etc. they thought they were. This is what people had been saying, but some just wouldn't listen.
Things have moved so far from that not-that-long-ago time that some people now actively try to hide their check so others don't try to avoid them on sight.
Steve Davis, director of advanced projects at SpaceX, describes his experience:
"He got a quote back for $120,000 ... Davis spent nine months building the actuator ... The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space."
Presumably the 'director of advanced projects' gets at least a six-figure salary, which should be included in the calculation? Of course, as mentioned, there are benefits to in-housing etc, but this particular example doesn't really seem to carry the argument.
Most of that $120,000 was probably non-recurring engineering and qualification testing costs amortized over a small initial run of units. The nuts and bolts cost of the two units probably is not wildly different. It’s not all just profit and overhead for the subcontractor.
SpaceX also lost a rocket because they didn’t unit test a critical structural component and they got a bad one that failed mid flight. Individual testing is extremely expensive, but it certainly can be the difference between 90% and 99% reliable sometimes.
We're reading the anecdote very differently, I think. The text says Davis "went out to find some suppliers who could make an electromechanical actuator for him. He got a quote back for $120,000." If it was just $120,000 for the first actuator but future ones would cost wildly less, then the story in the book is misleading. That's not impossible, but it's not a very charitable reading.
It's also not the way such things are usually priced in the aerospace industry. Nobody charges bignum for the very first unit and 10% over marginal cost of production for everything after; they amortize all the fixed costs over the entire projected production run and charge that figure for each.
It's possible that the manufacturer expected Elon was only going to buy a couple dozen gimbal actuators and charged accordingly, and if Elon had convinced them he was genuinely going to be buying thousands then the price would have come down. But, A: probably not to anything like $5K, because if you expect the contract to be say $2.4 million for 20 items then there's a bunch of ~$1K cost reductions that you don't engineer in at the start and will have a hard time adding later. And, B: there's probably no way Elon can convince anyone that SpaceX/2008 or whenever was going to be launching many dozen medium-lift launch vehicles a year any time soon. The manufacturer would reasonably assume "OK, ten Falcon 1s and them SpaceX is kaput; I have to sell for $120K each to make a profit". And then a few years later, "Hey, this is great, SpaceX is locked in to buying my actuators and they're accustomed to paying $120K each; now that they're up to 500 units a year and I've long since amortized the fixed costs that's $60 million a year gross at 50% margins, and nothing they can do about it unless they want to shut down for nine months".
They only ever built five Falcon 1s. I guess the question is whether the component made it into the Falcon 9.
It doesn't really matter anyway; we're talking about one of thousands of trade-offs that must be made using incomplete information during a huge project like this. Looking at a single decision in isolation and admiring or condemning it is silly; any project like this will have hundreds of good decisions and hundreds of bad decisions made along the way.
Napoleon Bonaparte reminds me of this. Or rather, reading about Napoleon reminded me of Elon Musk - particularly the terrifying intensity and emphasis on speed, the micromanaging, the ability rapidly to suck information out of people's skulls via conversation, the incredibly bold bets.
Unless they died in that bet or did something incredibly destructive, my guess would be not that many. Losing a company and getting a bad reputation are recoverable, and I would expect the kinds of people with this level of drive to recover far more often than most.
I hear of people who failed on the first company (or sometimes multiple) before eventually making it big. The guy who made McDonalds apparently had *many* failures before his big success.
Hitler failed the first time too. Not trying to Godwin the thread, it was just the first example that came to mind of someone who tried something massively ambitious, failed miserably, and then succeeded wildly a decade later. Most Hitlers give up after the Beer Hall Putsch.
Good example, as he seems to have been an extremely driven person and fits the description.
Now I'm wondering how many extreme dictators in history have been people like Musk - very driven, with additional talents that make it possible for them to do what other people wouldn't or couldn't.
I think about this a lot - along with all the folk who could be Julius Caesar but are working checkout counters. And all the folk who could be Einsten, but are working in rice paddies.
I have a friend who is like this - a man out of time. In another age he'd have been the head man of his village - big, strong, shrewd and gregarious. But here and now he's working a blue collar job, smoking too much weed and becoming socially isolated.
I think on that tier ability there's no way - unless they get *killed* - that they fuck up so bad that don't at least get a wikipedia page. But there's a huge dropoff in name recognition after the top tier, so they may lose 99% of the fame going from Napoleon to Louis-Nicolas Davout, or Musk to RJ Scaringe
To get a generic replacement mouse, my current employer required 3rd level management approval for the expenditure. Yes, it was for about $20. Too much middle-management is absolutely a thing.
Thank you! Hopefully it came across from the writing, but I really enjoyed the book. I was really impressed by it, I can't imagine how much work it took to figure all of that out and organize it into a sensible timeline. I also liked the appendices at the end dealing with controversial issues in more depth, that was a great touch.
I didn't realize you had a Substack, I'll have to check it out.
It's a really sweet moment for me to see this intro between my favourite writer of all time, and the author of one of my favourite books of all time! <3
You've probably gained a deep understanding from researching Musk from the book, and having observed him for years.
What is your opinion, if you don't mind sharing it, of him helming some of the most pressing projects involving humanity's future? Are you glad that somebody of his caliber is single-handedly creating and challenging entire industries and paradigms, or do you think it's dangerous that one man has so much power and influence?
It's interesting to read all this with an inversion of the question in mind: not, "what is Musk's true nature such that he has been so successful?", but "what is the nature of society such that someone like Musk could be one of it's most successful individuals?"
Not giving up or taking the various soft "No" answers (or sometimes the emphatic, hard "NO!") has been a cheat code in most societies for a long long time. It's a regular feature of business, especially in sales. The key is to have something people want from you, in addition to what you want from them. It sounds like Musk has managed to do that in multiple industries, with multiple workforces.
Most people give up the first time they fail or get told off.
Not to mention a sociopathic streak and a fragile ego. Being thin skinned and willing to climb over the bodies of others gets you far in today's world.
I think it worked even better in the past, when there were fewer merit-based or earned opportunities. Think Ebenezer Scrooge-type landlords or some king starting a war because he felt snubbed by his neighbor. Now there are far more checks and balances on that kind of behavior, making it less successful than it used to be.
If anything, Musk is a huge step up (because he is actually really smart and capable, in addition to his shortcomings) from most kings in history. Talk about sociopathic with a fragile ego - which describes a significant percentage of most hereditary rulers I can think of.
Agreed - I'd rather have our elites selected on the basis of some sort of outstanding characteristics than it simply being a lottery of whoever came out of the right vagina first.
I agree that " in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made", but he also benefited more from privilege than I think you're acknowledging. If he'd gone bust in his early efforts, family money could've come to the rescue; he was never risking not having enough to get by.
There's a reason tightrope walkers who go between skyscrapers with no net do much less impressive stunts than circus performers who have one, even though I've never seen the circus performers fall.
What I'm trying to say is that it wouldn't have been risky. I'm no Elon Musk but I am a software developer. If I tried to found a startup and it failed, I would have:
1) My own savings - I would have set aside enough to get by for a few months even if I invested all the rest into the (failed) company.
2) My human capital. I think I would be able to find a software-developer job within those few months.
3) My middle-class relatives. I don't think what they have is what is usually meant by "family money" but I can still move back in with my dad even if he isn't rich.
3) My friends. I'm sure that three or four of the people I know would be willing to help me get back on my feet.
4) My ability to get a working-class service job on short notice. I look respectable, I speak eloquently, I'm able to reliably follow directions, and I'm not too proud to do physical labor. I think I could get hired within a few days.
So overall, founding a startup and failing would delay my retirement but it wouldn't put me at risk of "not getting by".
Yup. And that's a level of privilege not everybody has. It means those resources Musk never touched and which don't count in that "self-made" story of arriving in Canada with only $2500 gave him an advantage over people from poor backgrounds. (For that matter, so did his Canadian citizenship - getting started in Canada would be a lot harder for most South Africans.)
His accomplishments are genuine, and genuinely his, but there are obstacles he didn't face because of his family, so yes, he's a child of privilege. These statements do not contradict one another.
Scott uses the fact that he really seems to have done it largely on his own to dismiss the idea that he's a child of privilege. The point is that he is, and responding to that fact with something else which doesn't contradict it at all feels like a non-sequitur.
Of course, and being born with a high IQ gave him advantages over most people, who are born with lower IQs. We are all born in massively different positions with massively different personal qualities, and nobody succeeds without a bunch of things on their side.
You aren't born with a high IQ, any more than you are born tall. It takes significant resources to feed, care for and train a mind to perform difficult or complex tasks.
Elon was definitely a child of privilege in this regard as well (despite his father's general awfulness).
The vast majority of people without this base level of 'privilege' do not possess the intellect to ever be in a position to be a wildly successful entrepreneur.
Musk's background level of affluence is about average for a Famous Rich Guy: less rich than Howard Hughes or Donald Trump, about the same as Bill Gates, a little better off than Jeff Bezos, quite a bit richer than Steve Jobs (but from a much worse location to become a tech tycoon than Jobs, who went to school in the heart of Silicon Valley with Steve Wozniak's little brother). Sam Walton's dad was a ne'er-do-well, but his dad's brother was a discount store tycoon.
In general, to make it to the top of the world takes more than one generation.
Do we have a rough estimate over how much those resources amounted to and what fraction was realistically accessible by Musk? Or are we just assuming the answer is Bignum because Musk is a Rich White Dude and can thus be assumed to be Privileged from birth?
The original review estimates Errol Musk's net worth as being in the neighborhood of $10M in 1970s money - not astronomical, but more than the vast majority of people in the developed world.
I can attest to this. I come from an upper-middle-class family background. I tried setting up a startup to commercialize my thesis while I was in grad school. I came pretty close to picking up a small-business defense research contract a couple of times (the closest was three of the five reviewers wanting to fund our proposal, but one of the other two giving us a low enough rating to put the average below the cutoff), but never actually got funding. And a former manager who had been coaching me advised me that I was unlikely to be able to get VC or Angel funding in the short-to-medium-term.
I pretty much fell back on 1-3. When my lease on my college apartment ran out and I didn't have enough savings to renew it without income, I moved back in with my father and started looking for a regular software developing job. And despite a crappy economy (this being 2003) and limited work experience (two internships plus my failed proto-startup), I had a job within a couple of months.
Yeah, it's hard to start a successful business without connections, training and resources to fall back onto.
Not to say that Musk's success was inevitable or something, but he was already playing in a fairly rarefied field to begin with. Some person wandering in from poverty to try and sell their payment software scheme has very little chance of succeeding, and gets to eat an existential risk of poverty if they want to take their shot at all.
This feels like an isolated demand for rigor. It seems like people would only grant musk "self-made status" if he came from deep third-world poverty and drug addiction and was 100% self-taught from the three moldy phone books his decaying local one-room schoolhouse had?
I mean, he has several siblings who are also pretty successful but not to the degree he is. The generic very smart physics PhD student will never achieve anything close to what Musk has, and they tend to be kids of professors themselves (at least from anecdotal experience).
Except that I explicitly *do* agree he's self-made, to a degree almost no other billionaire is. My entire point is that being from a privileged background doesn't conflict with that! Read my damn comment, it's in the first sentence!
Per your point that Musk might not be playing 4D chess but more like stumbling into it by being in the right place at the right time:
>[on Starlink] He just happened to be in the exact right place to make it happen.
> [on self-driving cars]Musk wasn’t expecting this to happen. But by doing things bigger and faster than anyone else, he must have put himself in a place where something was going to right for him.
In my observation, that's basically how chess masters beat you too. For the most part, they only rarely think more than a couple of moves ahead (especially when playing non-masters). They just have a really good idea of roughly where the pieces need to go to get a good position and then "the tactics tend to favor the side with the better position."
But largely, they don't know ahead of time which tactics exactly are going to win, but they have high confidence that they've put themselves in a position where something will work out well for them.
This does sort of sound like exactly what Musk is doing, so maybe he is playing some 4D chess? But then again, even masters blunder sometimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK5QdJ715zw
I think that in common parlance, "playing 4D chess" means that you're executing some complex stratagem that others haven't guessed at. Usually it means you appear to be doing something stupid, but actually you have correctly predicted that this stupid move will actually massively pay off.
I doubt this happens all that often in chess. High level players understand the game well enough that they can't be bamboozled by each other, and while a high level player could probably bamboozle a low level player they are unlikely to bother because they can win anyway with less effort by playing normally.
Sounds like this "4D chess" is a trope that is there to make a story exciting, but wouldn't work in real life ? (On average : the definition of "unusual" being that it rarely happens !)
For what it's worth, both Tesla and SpaceX do amazing things with much less money and time than you'd expect them to. But some of these amazing things come with trade-offs that are invisible to the average consumer. For example, Tesla batteries have amazing charge density and recharge speed; however, their lifetimes are slightly worse than other comparable batteries even at slower charge speeds. Tesla's current top-of-the-line batteries have a lifespan of 1000 cycles at C/3 per their patent (three hours to charge, three hours to discharge.) This is well below the 800 at C (one hour to charge) that Apple's current top-of-the-line batteries have. These issues come from high charge density with a fairly low Li transference number due to the electrolyte used, which leads to lithium dendrite growth between the anode and cathode, and once they meet, short circuits (which, in the worst cases, may lead to (in Apple's phrasing) "fire or burning"). It's uncommon for lifespan and stability to be sacrificed in batteries in this way, but if you do such a thing, you can certainly make them cheaper and higher-energy on initial sale.
This sort of thing is pretty common among Tesla and SpaceX projects and is generally why I'm not so optimistic about SpaceX's push towards reusable launch platforms- Musk's companies are fantastic at making things that work very well exactly once. I'm not so sure he can make the push towards something that works moderately well repeatedly, especially with the concerning lack of redundancy we're seeing.
Comparing these batteries is literally like comparing apples and oranges (or maybe even apples to steaks) : different use, different tradeoffs. How do they compare on this to other electric cars of similar pricing ?
It really isn't! Li-ion batteries across the industry are made with similar goals in mind- it's just as bad if your phone catches on fire as if your car battery pack catches on fire. The Hyundai Ioniq 6's batteries (similar distance on one charge and price to the Tesla Model 3) are also rated for about 800 cycles at C (1 hr charge, 1 hr discharge). I used Apple's batteries as a comparison because they're also optimizing for high charge density (you need to do that to keep phones small) and are a luxury brand. Note I say "rated for" because these are the claims on the patent; it's certainly possible that you can get specific cells to last longer and publish that in papers (hell you can get complete garbage to last 1000 cycles at C if you try enough times) but these are the claims that each company is willing to stake a patent on. It's possible that Tesla is simply being exceptionally modest with their patent claims, as well- but I don't see the benefit for them in doing so by that much. For what it's worth, empirical testing (people using their cars on an everyday basis) shows about 1200 cycles' worth for the Ioniq and 900 for the Tesla Model 3 (at who knows what cycle rate) so the difference doesn't seem to be that much in the field, but you'd expect there to be a significant positive difference in favor of Tesla considering their market cap and the claims in the papers that their R&D department publishes. Hyundai isn't a specialized electric car company!
(Final note: if you want a really unfortunate example of a Tesla battery, the Model S's 100 kWh battery hits the degradation threshold at 60k miles on the odometer or just over 200 cycles. Most of Tesla's batteries aren't like that, though, so I picked a more reasonable high-charge-density comparison in the 75 kWh Model 3 batteries. This is in comparison to the Ioniq's 77 kWh battery, and is the same formulation as the lower capacity Model S batteries. If they can work out the kinks in the 100 kWh one, I'll be much more confident in Musk's ability to make things that last.)
I really have to give Musk credit for is just embodying the kind of arc-of-history techno-optimism that seems to have been a hallmark of the space age and just abandoned for blinkered, ultimately transient concerns that are just less inspiring and less long-term relevant than the kind of challenges Musk has taken off.
At a certain level, "Why should we go to Mars?" has to be a question that answers itself, and I think Musk is the primary counterweight against various forces that would pose it. Pose it in a manner that makes short-term sense but at the cost of any sort of long-term vision for human advancement. Perpetual local optimizations can generate a tremendous amount of value but it is not a total replacement for an overarching teleology. Wisdom is slave to the passions -- let us have our damn passions back.
Telos is humanity reaching out into the uncaring universe and wresting meaning from the void by force of will. It's worth going to Mars *because it's fucking going to Mars.*
I love Tolkien’s work, and, oddly, when I was reading this, my mind turned to Feanor in The Silmarillion.
Feanor was the most gifted of the elves. His was unbelievably brilliant, talented, and determined, and “his spirit burned like a bright flame.” He would work obsessively hard and he achieved many great things, including making the three Silmarils, the magnificent jewels after which the story is named.
He was also arrogant and quick to take offense, and he made some catastrophic errors in judgment that cost both him and his people dearly. He was very charismatic when getting people to follow him, but had zero kindness or understanding of others.
He had seven children, so not as many as Musk but still a large number, and he and his wife became “estranged “ due to his bad choices. Bear in mind that this is in a culture where divorce didn’t exist and true love was forever, so becoming estranged from your spouse was a really huge deal and a sign of something being deeply broken and wrong.
In one of the very early drafts of the Silmarillion material, Tolkien linked some of the characters to established figures in Germanic/Scandinavian mythology. Feänor is identified with Wayland the Smith. Looking over Wayland's wikipedia article, the connection seems pretty tenuous, apart from both being master smiths who had adventures and made a bunch of stuff that shows up in later stories. In particular, Wayland sounds like a guile hero, while Feänor's more of a "May Eru have mercy upon those who stand in my way, because damn well won't" type.
I get a distinct impression while reading the Silmarillion that Feanor is, at least in some ways, an exploration of Tolkien's own flawed character. I think it's telling that it's Feanor whom Tolkien credits with creating Tengwar, the Elven writing system. And that his chief sins were pride and stubbornness (particularly regarding his creations), things Tolkien himself struggled with throughout his life. Tolkien was famously particular and stubborn, which caused significant tensions with his beloved wife and made him difficult to work with. And then you have Tolkien's extensive discussions about why creating an explicitly pagan fantasy world isn't blasphemous - at the risk of psychoanalyzing a man who's been dead for 50 years, he clearly had some Catholic guilt regarding his "playing God," and Feanor definitely seems to be an exploration of those feelings and something of a critical self portrait.
FWIW, I have a few friends who work at the gigafactory and they have a picture of Elon in their front room as a saint and call him daddy. They also work 6-7 days a week
Elon's personality appears amusingly similar to that of Napoleon (at least, as related in Andrew Roberts' 'Napoleon the Great').
Both boast/boasted near-perfect recall (Napoleon could recognise and name common soldiers he'd met two decades prior), a widely remarked-upon ability to rapidly master the complex details of processes at every level of thier operations (+esoteric topics of interest), a tendancy towards obsessive micromanagerial interventions, and reputation for meeting timelines conventional wisdom deemed impossible, though a combination of belligerence and highly motivated employees. Both worked their way out from initial training in maths/engineering, were/are obsessed with the frontiers of technology, and think/thought in terms of archs of history. The megalomaniac box also probably gets a tick in both cases.
Is Napoleon what happens when would-be tech bros lack silicon?
Key differences between the two are that Napoleon had a habit of being (often unjustifiably) trusting of long-time colleagues, built rapport with his low-level employees, and was exceedingly charismatic.
After decades of risk-taking, Napoleon's luck eventually ran out. It will be interesting to see if Musk meets his own proverbial early Russian winter.
I had assumed a major part of the reason for renaming Twitter something so generic was thinking that it was well-known enough to get away with being one of the main associations of a whole letter. If he previously named a startup (which necessarily wasn't already famous) the same thing, that's an argument against this, but I guess Musk's extreme optimism about his projects makes that still possible.
I mean, he might succeed in creating "X, the everything app", but I would not describe this as "okay" insofar as "X, the everything app" sounds dystopian and evil. (In particular, it sounds like combing Twitter with PayPal would involve going forward with the noises he's made about banning anonymity/pseudonymity, which I think would be a bigger blow to freedom of speech, and human freedom in general, than a thousand old-school Twitter censors…)
Now now, haven't you watched "Everything Everywhere All At Once"? The Everything Bagel could destroy the multiverse! …In all seriousness, if "everything app" remains silly marketing hyperbole for something that's still basically just a new social media app, fine. But that part of Scott's post was saying that we need to take Musk's stated aims literally, rather than as hyperbolic marketing gimmicks. A single, privately-owned app that *literally* fulfills all functions does in fact sound quite dystopian (in much the same way as an "Everything Bagel" that was literally supposed to act as a substitute for every foodstuff, and had as its aim to drive all other food-producers out of business with its superior homogenous everything-food).
My personal theory is that 1) PR doesn't matter, but PR people have convinced us it does 2) many of the cited mistakes Musk has made, were indeed mistakes, but they were things that matter less than we might think 3) making mistakes in general matters less than people think. If you keep taking bets where you can win 1000x more than you can lose, it doesn't take long to end up the world's richest person. If you're paralyzed by the possibility of failure, then you're an internet commentor.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere before, I'll note that SpaceX almost certainly needs Starlink for internal use. If you're going to launch dozens/hundreds of people into space every week on Super Heavys, or build out any kind of significant human presence in space, you're going to need to be able to communicate with them. The existing NASA ground station network and things like TDRSS are insufficient for the scale, or for providing communications infrastructure to people who live in space but aren't working for a government 24/7. Even if somebody else had the "idea" for Starlink first, it was going to become an obvious necessity at some point in the long-term planning process for "I want to put lots of people into space".
He'll probably want a Starlink equivalent on Mars, and some sort of interplanetary interconnection between the two. I can't imagine he'll want to pause deliveries to Mars just because there's a conjunction.
It's important to remember that the world is filled with countless examples of people who took risky bets and lost. It's easy to look at the winners and attribute good fortune to their personal genius, but you risk engaging in a form of counting the hits and ignoring the misses. The business world is filled with would-be megalomaniacal obsessives taking risky bets. Corporate ladders likewise are filled with psychopaths in the Hare sense whose amoral machinations fly close to the sun. It inevitably works out for some, and it's not always easy to tell how much of that comes down to anything special about them over the fallen.
>but in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made
The idea of 'self-made' is a myth. Musk had plenty of employees and business partners who were indispensable in getting him where he is. This is like the Great Man Theory of Business.
Okay, there's literally no reason for you to set this bar besides having some ideological axe to grind. Nobody else reads the phrase 'Musk is a self-made man' and literally infers this as meaning that Musk never had any employees or investors. So again, your reason for insisting it has to mean this is because you feel it has negative implications based on your political ideology.
"Self-made" just means "he worked his way up from not having too much money to having lots of money, without anyone directly giving him the money". Although your definition reminds me of Peter Bleackley on the English: "They consider themselves a self-made nation, thus relieving the Almighty of a terrible responsibility".
You have to remember that the default way of getting rich throughout almost all of history was to inherit. The term "self-made" comes from an era when going from not-that-rich to really rich was truly exceptional.
With the massive creation of wealth over the past couple of centuries, the vast majority of rich people are now "self made", so people think it should mean something different, but it doesn't. Nowadays most of the richest people in the US are self made, except for the Waltons, the Marses, and Julia Koch.
It’s about as justified as using the phrase “very contrived” as opposed to “not what I would have thought that phrase meant based on the literal meaning of its component words”.
**especially** : having achieved success or prominence by one's own efforts
This is a weird thing on the Internet, people not really understanding common and dictionary usage and believing that they themselves get to define words or idioms.
You could say anybody with any kind of success is self-made by this definition. Human beings are not puppets on strings, we take actions and these actions have results, that's just a trivial part of the human condition.
If I recall my Catholic theology correctly, God is described as eternally existing, not created, and Jesus is explicitly "begotten, not made". Perhaps there are other theologies out there, though; I can think of a few ones from fantasy universes that would count.
A 'made man' is a Mafia term, meaning your family ties made you important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_man So a "self-made man" would be important without their family's influence.
If you want it changed you'll have to argue terminology with the mafia.
Description of Elon really reminds description of Stalin from Mikoyan diaries
Very alike idea of ruthlessly appointing and firing people, same treating people like cogs, same very deep micromanagement where he both knew ton about ton and also faked a lot of it
He even did that very aggressive examining of his subordinates that for many looked like brutal test, but actually it was him figuring out
One anecdotal story tells how Stalin that Germans use electric melting of steel, so he drove right to home of minister responsible for the newest steel factory and accused him of sabotage for using coal
For the next hour a minister afraid of his life was proving and explaining all details of steel industry and why on certain mill the coal was preferable
The same was near-endless work stamina and also charm, for some reason people believed he was a great person no matter what Stalin did to/with them
Being pro-Putin is the default Republican position these days of course, but that doesn't seem like it would automatically influence Musk. Routine contrariness could be another explanation?
He simply didn't want his company being involved directly in offensive operations on Russian controlled territory, which is the most reasonable thing in the world. Again, you have to believe that supplying Starlink in the first place was part of a grand conspiracy to hurt Ukraine by cutting it off later, even though there wasn't a good alternative and its not clear that Ukraine could have possibly been made worse off overall by Starlink being turned off compared to never having access to it in the first place.
Good god, this again? Musk's decisions around Starlink pretty much mirror the US Government's foreign policy regarding support for Ukraine (allow for defense on Ukrainian territory and limit offense, to the extent possible, from Russian territory to avoid escalation of the conflict). Go complain about the slow-rolling of weaponry the US and the entire western alliance has inflicted upon Ukraine if you want a real target.
It's been controlled by Russia for almost a decade. For the sake of what we're talking about here (avoiding offensive operations in Russian territory), then Crimea is absolutely Russian territory and the US aiding an attack on Crimea is functionally equivalent to aiding an attack on any "real" Russian territory.
But the American position is to not escalate on many dimensions, with a significant one (but not the only one) to limit US-provided arms capable of attacking Russian territory. The defacto Russian control of Crimea and the heavily signalled red-line Russia has drawn around it in this regard are of relevance, even if you discount the fact that an agreement did exist (Kharkiv pact) to lawfully base the Russian fleet in Sebastopol (though this was technically voided after the little green men operation in 2014).
It's worth noting US weaponry provided to Ukraine is artificially range-limited in some cases (ATACMS) and other weaponry. Finally, Blinken refused to criticize Musk for this Starlink decision when asked about it recently...who knows who in the State Dept may have spoken to Musk about this. I don't think we can be confident we have all of the facts.
He gave the Ukrainians access to starlink last year, something that’s pretty much essential to their war effort. This isn’t supporting Russia. It’s supporting Ukraine.
Originally he was donating Starlink, at some point he signed a contract with the US DoD after which he has presumably been doing whatever the US DoD tells him to do. Which may not be that different to what he was doing before, since the USG is also concerned about managing escalation risk.
So when he provided them with Starlink in the first place, this was some 4d big brain move to pull the rug out at the last minute? And how does Musk's agreement he signed with the US DoD help Russia, exactly?
The first time isn't in doubt - it's been admitted by Musk, and only the details are in question: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264 "Escalation" is of course whenever the West tries to help Ukraine, and parroting Russian talking points..
Musk also of course supports China to the hilt over Taiwan, but that's more immediately understandable - it may cost him money if he doesn't. The Russia thing is something else, though, as is his anti-semitism.
Thanks, but both of your articles literally contradicts your previous statement.
(Also, how low has the BBC fallen that they are reporting on tweets, *especially* Medvedev's ?)
It was probably not a coincidence, and indeed sounds a lot like Musk "pressing the big red button", knowing his volatility, but then Starlink has been very clear for *at least* half a year (and more if we believe their statements about their discussions with the Ukrainian government) that (inter-personnel, military ?) comms are "ok", but "offensive purposes" are not :
I don't think that I agree with their position, and (with hindsight !) it was naive of them to think it wouldn't happen, but then we needed to react fast, and you don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
A book written in 2015 would obviously not have anything specific on that one. But IIRC the sequence of events was:
1. Musk gives Ukraine lots of essentially free Starlink terminals and access as A: good marketing and B: the right thing to do when the Armies of Darkness are on the march.
2. The Ukrainians make good use of Starlink, integrate it into every aspect of their operations, and speak favorably of Musk.
3. Elon tweets without thinking and says basically "It's stupid for Ukraine to expect they will reclaim Crimea; Putin will nuke them if they try that. They should negotiate a ceasefire and lock in their partial win". Which is a defensible position that seems to be shared by a significant part of the US national security apparatus, but it really calls for more than 140 characters and it doesn't really help Elon (or Ukraine) for Elon to be the one saying it.
4. Lots of Ukrainians and Ukrainian sympathizers high on the victories of Autumn 2022 say "Fuck you Elon, we thought you were on our side but clearly you are either a Putin apologist or a fool who doesn't understand geopolitics, we're totally taking back Crimea!", and again often in a 140-character format that disallows nuance.
5. Elon instinctively responds the way most people do when someone says to them "Fuck You", and being Elon, never revistis that decision. He's got enough PR savvy to know that just cutting Starlink service to Ukraine outright would not be a good move, but he can shut down Starlink over Crimea and maybe over Russian-occupied territory in general, so that the Ukrainians are less likely to provoke a nuclear war, and so that if they do provoke a nuclear War it will be Not Elon's Fault, and so that he can say "Fuck you" right back at the Ukrainians.
6. Elon also hints to Kyiv and DC that it's really time for *someone* to start actually paying for all this tech, because SpaceX isn't a charity and because see above, Fuck Ukraine.
So, not pro-Putin in his intentions, but also not pro-Ukraine any longer.
The "1 in 1,000 level intelligent" estimate seems quite low. The Space-X engineers he's talking to are probably already 1 in 10,000: it takes about 1 in 100 intellect to get into Stanford, plus they're at the top of their class in one of the hardest majors to get to Space-X, and then are promoted at least once to be speaking with Musk. And these 1 in 10,000 folks are amazed by his intelligence. So shouldn't we estimate Musk at least at 1 in 1,000,000? (A 1 in 10,000 person might recognize that a 1 in 100,000 person is a bit smarter than them, but would not yet be amazed.)
To Scott's other point in that section, I agree that his intensity is why he's the richest man in the world, instead the other ~1,000 people or so at his level of intellect.
Can you think of any other reasons why graduates of elite universities might describe their famously vain and petty boss as very intelligent on the record other than assuming he must be a 1 in a million intellect?
I was debating saying 1/1000 vs. 1/10,000 (for reference, these correspond to IQs 147 and 156). I don't think the average SpaceX engineer is 1/10,000 - that would suggest Musk employs ~1/3 of all the IQ 150+ people in the country, but I think there are some tech companies, Wall Street firms, and colleges that have a lot of these people too, and many of them are entrepreneurs in their own right, and many others are weird and never find stable work.
I also don't know if SpaceX engineers are truly amazed by his intelligence in the sense of "he's smarter than me" or just "even though he's the boss he understands everything as well as I do".
I could probably be convinced up to 1/5,000 or 1/10,000, and maybe 1/100,000 if we're talking about engineering in particular. I'm nervous saying anything about 1/1,000,000; I don't think I have a good enough sense of what that's like.
I similarly debated between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 10,000 for Space-X engineers. I was thinking, "Space-X employees in technical roles who are senior enough to talk to Musk" as opposed to all 12,000 employees, but I think you're right that I should lower that estimate somewhat.
My argument for amazed is that Musk is understanding like 100 different roles as well as the person focusing solely on their own role, but I am speculating.
I was thinking engineering in particular with my high estimates. I liked your point about different types of intelligence being correlated but only at 0.2-.04 and it seems useful for understanding Musk.
I also don't have a good sense of 1/1,000,000 either, but there are 7,800 of those people in the world and I don't have a good guess at what they're all doing if they're all better at engineering than Musk.
I believe one of them made a very successful YouTube channel: Stuff Made Here.
He was the former Head of Engineering at Form Labs so he has the achievements as well as passing the eye test. If anyone knows of any other public engineer that's at this level or better I would love to hear it.
The ability to synthesize multiple different areas of expertise is so rare that most people would be amazed at someone doing it well even at a fairly low level. "I didn't have to explain it to him like a toddler, and he still knows about finance!" is likely enough of a bar. Musk clearly exceeds that bar, but the anecdotes don't necessarily mean they were impressed by his raw intelligence or thought he was operating at their level within their individual domains.
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
> Part of the answer must come from that story above about him taking over people’s jobs. His strategy is to demand people do seemingly impossible things, then fire them if they fail. To pull that off, you need to really understand the exact limits of impossibility.
I agree with this, and would add that it's not specific to his strategy of micromanaging folks and taking over their audaciously-scoped tasks if they can't complete them. For any tech company, a technical CEO has superpowers compared to a non-technical one (but are predisposed to a fairly standard set of weaknesses too).
Even beyond just the CEO role, in the tech industry there is a very widely discussed challenge of "technical vs. non-technical managers". The engineers doing Individual Contributor (IC) work can grow to resent non-technical managers if they don't have a sense for how hard a given ask will be to implement, and a common anti-pattern is for the non-technical product, marketing, sales, and scheduling decisions to be made without a deep understanding of the actual feasibility as it bottoms out in the technical implementation. At worst this can lead to myopic leadership ("MBA management" etc.).
At the end of the day, a non-technical manager/CEO must be good at synthesizing the team's estimates and opinions, and knowing when to defer to concerns about tactical considerations, vs. take a tactically more difficult path which will advance strategic aims. (Aluminum chassis is a great example of this kind of tactically-painful but strategically visionary decision where a non-technical leader might struggle.) In a normal tech org the CEO has to trust the CTO, and then the CTO works through layers of managers to enact their technical vision, so there are multiple hops where the CEO's vision can be lost in translation. At Tesla Musk is collapsing both CEO-CTO and CTO-manager-IC communication down to him directly talking to ICs, which (while having other obvious organizational issues) allows him to make bold technical bets and stay very aligned on what is actually possible for his ICs to do.
Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".
Having said all that, why not just use technical managers? The answer is that it's usually not the best use of a strong IC's time; managing is very hard, requires strong empathy, is hard to teach, and training is criminally underfunded and under-appreciated. Managing is very different than IC work; it's meetings and interrupt-driven communications and performance management, whereas ICs usually thrive on "Maker Time" where they (optimally) get long blocks of uninterrupted time to get into the flow state and think about one problem. So while a good senior IC starts to get involved in communications and scheduling and other "outwards-facing" non-technical activities, there isn't an obvious universal progression from IC to manager. It used to be quite standard to have "senior IC" as the pinnacle of technical career progression, and the only way to get promoted further was to become a manager; this turns your best ICs (technical leads, mentors, or whole-system generalists) into normally-distributed managers (i.e. some good some bad, with no expectation for them to be better-than-average). Now at least in software it's more common to have a strong IC progression track that's parallel to managers, but you still see some degree of "strong IC -> mediocre manager" career paths.
The reasons you'd favor non-technical managers also apply to why non-technical CEOs are usually better at their jobs; in most organizations, the technical work is one or maybe a handful of roles in the C-suite (you might have a CTO and a Chief Scientist, say), while there are more non-technical roles (Sales, Operations, Marketing, Legal, HR, fundraising, and so on), and the CEO needs to be something of a jack-of-all-trades between all of those; in aggregate, non-technical skills are required more than technical ones. Musk's successful companies are outliers in that they benefit from being heavily technology-focused; they are applying tech company style iterative innovation and experimentation to historically non-software/non-"tech" domains, which I believe increases the importance of the CEO->CTO->IC chain, and is why Musk's strength in that area is disproportionately impactful. Having a Musk-style technical CEO would not be useful in a traditional car company, or a sales-driven enterprise software company like SAP.
This is an excellent summary and description of the problem and why Musk stands out.
I am a non-technical-manager, and I'd say quite good at it. I work with ICs and non-technical management a lot, and there's always a rub that's hard to fix. Technical people rarely make great managers, and great managers rarely know enough about the details to make the hard decisions. What I've found that works best is either an IC fairly early in their career that can be turned towards management - and thereby learn the management skills before they ossify into technical, or someone who is good at management and is willing and able to learn enough about the technical to understand at least what the ICs are telling them.
Most managers end up some kind of hybrid, which generally works but results in lots of inefficiency and missed opportunities. The most common solution is meetings between IC-centric managers and non-technical managers in front of a decision-maker, who they each have to explain their perspective to. There's a lot of lost efficiency in this process, highly contingent on the ability of the decision-maker to synthesize the information received and correctly identify an appropriate course of action.
Leslie Groves (head of the Manhattan Project) is such a fascinating case - he was surrounded by the premier geniuses of his age, many of them quite quirky, and they could have quite rightly thought that that he wasn't on their level with either technical knowledge or pure intelligence (it's not that Groves was a stupid man or anything, and he wasn't untechnical generally, but can you just imagine the context?).
But he was good at management and good at recruiting people (he personally selected Oppenheimer) and came out of it successful and generally respected. That takes some managerial skill and vision.
Paul, I loved your quote about the SpaceX engineer drawing a direct connection between the mission and his operational tasks. Do you recall the source of that quote/interview? Any clue would be most appreciated.
My big question here is if Grimes is the instigator for the weird names, or if Musk wanted weird names for all of his kids but Grimes is the only one of his partners who didn't veto it.
Bad, but not the worst thing he's done. Not very relevant to the question of whether or not he's been good at running his businesses or will succeed at some future endeavor.
If you put any stock on myers-briggs theory stuff, this article shows that Musk is the definition of the strengths and weaknesses of extraverted thinking vs introverted thinking. Probably an ENTJ.
Very much a side note to the thrust of the review, but it was a trip to see Andy Beal mentioned. I had an internship at Beal Aerospace in the long ago, have always been saddened that it full-stopped so soon.
On the subject of Beal, as I understand it Beal did not so much fail, as Andy Beal simply gave up. He saw the creation of ULA and the associated block procurements that the United States Government intended to subsidize and protect its favorite contractors to the point where they would always be able to undercut any domestic competition, and he didn't think he could win in that rigged game.
I believe that he has since acknowledged that this decision was a mistake and that the underlying fear was illusory. I don't think his rocket was ever going to be as broadly capable and transformative as the Falcon, so it's not a huge loss, but I don't think it was a technical failure.
Yeah, the BA-1 was never trying for reusability (the computing tech available in 1998 wouldn't've been up to the task), just much less expensive expendables. They were definitely pushing the envelope on composite main structures.
He might even have been correct originally that the path they were pursuing couldn't've cut costs enough to get past the existing government-contractor relationships, and I don't think his pockets were nearly deep enough to hang on long enough to pivot to something that would; hell, even Bezos hasn't actually managed to get something to orbit.
Don't over-estimate the significance of mistakes in business. You don't have to make zero mistakes. You just have to make fewer mistakes than the other guy. In the sorts of ambiguous business situations that Musk puts himself in, the other guy will make plenty of mistakes.
"Grimes was furious when she found out later and wasn’t at all sure whether she would ever allow her Musk babies (a boy named X and a girl named Y and a new baby boy named Techno Mechanicus) to hang out with Zilis’s Musk babies (a boy named Strider Sekhar Sirius and a girl named Azure Astra Alice)."
He sounds like a smart, intense guy - but also one that has gotten very, very lucky. Musk has not managed to piss off the wrong employee at the wrong time in a way that does irreparable damage to one or more of his businesses, or maybe those employees have become fully adept at avoiding that to save themselves.
As for Twitter/X, I'm more skeptical. He wants to make Twitter into WeChat for America, but WeChat only became that in China because of good timing and their connections with the Chinese government. Twitter does not have good timing on getting into mobile payments, and it's insanely competitive.
The only positions that are irreplaceable are ones where the owner/ceo has allowed themselves to be convinced by the employee that no one else could do it. In practice, the closest I've seen are the legacy mainframe type guys at major banks who run systems they themselves rigged up over a career and wrote out no documentation.
Even they are replaceable, and are being replaced (as they retire, or die). If a company is willing to pay top dollar for the best experts, they will get solid replacements for anyone. That Musk does this faster may be a cost concern and may delay projects, but maybe not. Identifying the right people to be on an A++ team may require cutting the A+ people or the A++ people that don't fit.
Musk is a genius in some ways, but in others he's merely average. I wrote in 2022:
"Musk's biography should be titled "the everyman." He gets married and then gets divorced. His second wife is an actress, exactly what an everyman would pick if he were rich and famous and too dumb to notice that Hollywood marriages never last. He gets divorced, then remarries the same woman, then divorces again. Then he decides to not bother with marriage and have some kids out of wedlock with a musician. The relationship shockingly does not last. He was accused of offering to buy sex from a masseuse. He's denied it, but if it happened it would have been a very everyman story. "Hey, I thought "massage" was a code word for sex! What, you mean some of you don't give happy endings?" He initially refused the COVID vaccine as he thought he was "not at risk of COVID" as a 49-year-old man. He always voted Democrat, but recently became a Republican. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was when one of the kids he has scattered around decides he's "transgender." Like a lot of everymen, he has this funny idea that his son cutting his d*** off is a negative util hit."
"The only good answer to this question I’ve ever heard is that maybe it’s some sort of grand charter city proposal, and the benefit is that Earthly governments can’t touch it. As I explain later, I don’t think Musk is enough of a 4D chessmaster to think of this and keep it secret, although maybe he’s just so good a chessmaster that he hides it."
It is completely obvious and heavily signaled that Mars is about liberty/independence as far as Musk is concerned.
"Starlink's terms of service include a Mars clause: Users must agree that Mars is a free planet unbound by the authority or sovereignty of any Earth-bound government."
Zubrin's Mars Society was an early influence on Musk, and Zubrin's whole thing is that Mars is a new America, free from the old world's stultifying influence. "No EPA on Mars is one of the major reasons we have to go there" among other quotes.
It's somewhat annoying that people act like the Mars thing is out of pocket. It's the only planet besides Earth where you can sit on the surface and get as much CO2 as you want. It has readily available water ice. You can launch a single stage rocket from Mars to anywhere in the solar system because of the shallow gravity well and thin atmosphere. It is the only planet where independent survival is possible with near-term tech. Living on another planet can't be compared to Antarctica.
This review/book seems to presume that he has random obsessions and just happened to make electric cars and rockets -- it's pretty clear that rocketry needed major improvements and that those improvements were technically possible, same with clean energy/electric cars. Those were also at the burning core of America's national interest. This is a man who loves sex, video games, and porn - an accomplished womanizer who jets around including with Hollywood actresses. He's ravenous for all that life has to offer and takes a big bite out of everything. Yet he'll still buckle down and work day and night on what he thinks is important -- sacrificing an AAA class lifestyle long periods of time. How many people have "made it" and kept swinging in that manner? None of the other major tech people seem to have that fight in them - they shoot their shot and then move on to their foundation. Where's Jeff Bezos? Where are Larry and Sergei? Where's Bill Gates?
Yet more than any of the other tech billionaires, who "hit it and quit it," or who knock one thing out of the park and whiff thereafter, he has gone back to bat time and time again, and each time for something incredibly important. Yet despite being the most admirable and principled tech magnate in this most important of regards, he has by far the worst reputation because, essentially, of his vibes.
Maybe his irreverence for norms should reflect badly on the norms, not on him.
So, an eternal teenager, raised on the Golden (?) Age of science fiction ?
Sure, there are aspects to admire in this, and *eventually* we might need to colonize other planets, but what about our more immediate priorities/obligations as a species ?
(A big reason why he's so much in a rush is likely because he desperately wants to see humans walk on Mars before he dies, maybe even go there himself ! Which is an impressive dream, if it wouldn't be for its inherent egoism...)
We need to colonize space yesterday. Earth is a bunch of crabs in a bucket pulling each other down. Every increase in wealth on Earth is paired with an increase of obligations. People are desperately confused about this; the reason for homeless people is that as soon as we get richer and more capable of affording homes, the minimum standard to which homes must be built simply rises. The same hideous fools are trying to do this with food as well; anything can be made arbitrarily expensive by wailing about subjective things like "ethics" and "wholesomeness." Even more pernicious is the notion of a "rip off." If someone is able to provide something mega cheap and make mega profit, then new suppliers flood in and drive the price down. If as soon as you do that you are mobbed by leftist freaks for "price gouging" -- there is no point in driving the price radically down, just go with the insane inflation of standards like everyone else.
Space is much harder to police. It's the eternal Age of Sail in space, a truly boundless ocean. The murderously imbecilic busybody freaks who sabotage literally everything will be forced to torture each other instead of a captive audience.
The Age of Sail happened because the still relatively poor West was entranced by the (of course exaggerated) tales of immense riches of the Indias.
There might be *some* parallels to that for space, but it's not Mars then, but asteroid mining (and maybe Helium-3 mining on the moon ??).
But as long as we haven't found a way to make a civilization that is not self-destructive (in the worst case : an oxymoron ?), any increase in wealth brings even more destruction, faster.
If it's about some kind of Lebensraum (which, let's not forget, can't even be compared because the lands captured could be very profitably settled by anyone with farming / hunting / pastoral skills, and only the most minimal of capital !), then, as already been pointed out, Mars seems much worse than, say, Antarctica. (Also this is just can-kicking before these are filled again.)
Also, human nature doesn't change because you're in space, in fact I would say that it gets worse when you cannot flee your miserable environment on foot, (almost) naked.
I have seen several interviews with Musk and in none of them does he come off as being >120 IQ. Second-hand reports claim that he is very smart but I don't believe second-hand reports. Does anyone have any unfalsifiable proof that Musk is highly intelligent, like a video of him giving an unscripted talk about numerical methods for control systems or something? If he is able to meaningfully interrogate his employees about their work he should be able to lecture about various aspects of aerospace engineering. Where are the videos of him clearly demonstrating a genius-level IQ?
120 IQ isn't a terribly high standard. (top 9%). For instance he got into a Physics PhD program at Stanford which is something that not that many <120 IQ people can achieve.
Musk's interview on youtube with The Everyday Astronaut is the best video I've seen of him discussing heavily technical subjects without dumbing them down for a general audience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E and it convinced me he's pretty smart. Is he any smarter than the average Stanford physics PhD student? Not necessarily, but those are high standards to begin with.
He's smart enough that IQ is no longer a useful measurement anyway. The tails come apart and all that.
I have been interested in EVs since the 2000s when the price of oil kept increasing and most people believed in “peak oil”…I was the only person critical of him in the comment sections of EV blogs because I found his arrogance off putting. SBF made a very telling comment when he said something along the lines of Musk’s competitive advantage is the price of Tesla stock. So it’s almost like SBF doesn’t believe Tesla should have that valuation and it gives Musk an unfair advantage. So basically SBF believed he should be allowed to control a company with the valuation of Tesla and it didn’t really matter what the company did or if it was really worth what it was valued at but SBF would have done the most to make the world better with a company with an overpriced stock…so everyone should just make SBF’s stock price valuable and make him the world’s wealthiest man and he will solve all the world’s problems.
Honestly watching that interview I get the impression he's more of an engineering manager with 120-130 IQ who works with engineers 2SD above him. He clearly has a knack for attracting incredible engineering talent, but I don't get the impression he could actually do any of this himself. If he didn't have a media hype apparatus and a carefully crafted cult of personality I don't think he would be of any particular note among CEOs. Compared to Robert Playter the CEO of Boston Dynamics, (watch the Lex Fridman interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVdsZ3I5os) Playter comes off as more intelligent and like he could have actually contributed to the real engineering work that goes on.
Less, I consider that he has had praise heaped upon him for the accomplishments of others, like principal investigators that do little actual bench or theory work but still get their names put on the actually groundbreaking work of the scientists who work in their lab.
It sounds like you're a resentful engineer who thinks the smart guys "deserve" to be the rich ones, even though these smart engineers are vastly more replaceable than the Elon Musks of the world.
Perhaps all these big brain engineers should have been smart enough to start their own company - think of all the money they would be saving by not having to pay assholes like Musk to be CEO!
There are different ways of theorizing about what may be influencing the perspective of Liminal. I feel llike you chose the intellectual character attack route, so I'm not surprised they didn't reply to you.
For what it's worth, I have read Liminimal's comments over a decent period of time as they are active here, and I have never gotten the impression that they are a resentful engineer.
Allegedly Richard Feynman's IQ was "only" 125. That "smartest kid in the class but not the whole grade" intelligence, combined with incredible curiosity, work ethic, and love of games and puzzles, combined to make him a giant.
Feynmann got the highest score i. The country on the Putnam (the most prestigious math competition for undergrads). He most certainly was not just the smartest kid in the class. It's more likely that the IQ test he took didn't accurately measure his immense mathematical talent
I wonder whether the reports of Feynman's IQ being 125 fall into the same category as the tales of young Einstein being considered a slow learner - quite possibly fabrications to boost the self-esteem of actual slow learners.
There's almost no chance his actual IQ was 125. There's no proof that he scored that other than him saying so, we don't know what test he actually took (if any), and the apparent pride he has in his "low" IQ means there's a good chance he didn't take it seriously or is lying about it.
>Compared to Robert Playter the CEO of Boston Dynamics, (watch the Lex Fridman interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVdsZ3I5os) Playter comes off as more intelligent and like he could have actually contributed to the real engineering work that goes on.
What Musk is good at is vastly more valuable than 'contributing to the actual engineering work'.
I think this is true, but I also think that developing the kind of cult of personality Musk has comes from just having a critical mass of support that ends up being self-perpetuating. Once you accumulate enough, a vast apparatus becomes available to you that endures regardless of your personal skills. You might even get hagiographic biographies written about you that otherwise intelligent readers are oddly credulous about. Musk has ridden a snowball downhill for quite some time now.
Very early on, there were plenty of people warning that Elizabeth Holmes was a conwoman because she quite obviously was a conwoman, but she lasted anyway for quite some time. I don't think this is because she was particularly skilled at selling confidence games, but rather because she convinced the right crowd early enough on that it just steamrolled enough people's natural skepticism to keep it going for awhile. Eventually, this snowballed to the point that she got access to that vast apparatus too. Getting that initial crowd requires *some* skill, but also involved dumb luck. It is tempting to look at the people who won the lottery and assume they're just really good at playing lotto, but sometimes people just get lucky.
What Musk does is not remotely comparable to what Holmes did. Musk convinces actual technical geniuses to dedicate their lives Musk's companies working directly on massive technical projects. Holmes convinced a bunch of dumb rich boomers to hand over cash for some make believe product and feminist friendly journalists to blow smoke up her ass. Musk didn't need to lie because he was able to build actual companies.
Everyone keeps claiming Musk got so lucky or had it so easy, but never ever can they explain why people with more wealth, power, prestige, intelligence and anything else were somehow not able to get anywhere near as "lucky" as Musk or why they had apparently things so much harder in the 'become a billionaire business leader' game.
I'm not sure if you're under the belief that Theranos didn't have highly educated employees working on complex technical problems, but it did.
The point of the comparison is just in how both are able to cultivate a self-perpetuating mythology around them that brings in investors and a cult of personality apologetics. It is to suggest that doesn't mean they are particularly skilled at doing this so much these are processes that involve some social momentum that feeds on itself. That said, the list of investors in Theranos was impressive. Now that she is disgraced, it's easy to say this was obvious all along - and in a sense it was - but that didn't stop the rather substantial run up. Her false promises and fake it until you make it routine just ran out of runway. You need some hits before the music stops.
Anyway, people keep telling me that lottery winners are "lucky" but if that's true, then how come everyone doesn't win the lottery? If people were the beneficiaries of random happenstance, then everyone would be lucky. That's how it works.
Somewhere around IQ 120-130 you can do anything except perhaps theoretical physics and math, and other personal factors start to become more important than raw cognitive ability. For instance the sense and judgment that Musk seems to lack in much of his interaction with the non-technical world. Or the ridiculous work-ethic that he _does_ have (a lot of more sensible people might right decide that they should take more time to enjoy themselves, and you already have virtually all your material needs fulfiled once you're at merely the top 0.1%).
I seriously dropped my estimation after Python script saga when allegedly AI-interested guy and former programmer didn't even comprehend what is Python script
I blow a whole foghorn in attention when a guy who looked smart for me fails precisely at point I know about
So if I understand the story Palmer told in some interview how Elon complained about spammers and Palmer sent him this script, which Elon failed to run
Later in discussion Elon called that script garbage and that his kids would write it better (by any means the script is short and clear)
120 is nowhere near genius level - its less than half of one standard deviation above the average US college graduate, and the implied IQ (from SAT scores) of the average person admitted to Stanford (which Musk was) is substantially above this. With an IQ below 120, he would have only gotten in if they had erroneously assumed he was black based on being born in Africa or something.
Yeah I remember the days when SpaceX was really ramping up university recruitment. They were the table at the career fair everyone wanted to give their resume to. Naturally, SpaceX sent a spectacular a-hole who yelled at and belittled most of the students applying. It got so bad they actually apologized about it when they held a talk at the next career fair. Turned quite a few folks off, it was a real embarrassment. Took a couple of years to wash that one out.
I sometimes think about the people that knew the type of behavior going on and still stood in line and applied. I think a large part of why all those ex Musk employees and etc. still excuse various behaviors and defend him so fervently is that there is approximately no one who goes to work at one of his companies just to work a job. No one would put up with that crap for a 9-5, and now that it's so well known, no one would apply for it. It's all starry-eyed (mostly recent college grad) true believers. And the turnover rates speak pretty well for themselves.
Some more thoughts after sleeping on this review. It's very strange... so being an automotive engineer for several of those "staid, evil" Big3 companies, one gets a very direct view of Tesla and how they have been over the years.
Something that probably ought to get talked about more: for large companies, we are among the first few hundred to buy the newest hotness from our competitors. I saw a Model X Founders' Edition fully disassembled on tables, with the welds drilled out and sectioned so we could see every single part. I've done side-by-sides with Teslas and various other vehicles, where we literally will put our part and the competitor part next to each other in a giant warehouse (all of them for a series of vehicles) and do side-by-sides. When you do that, abstract questions of genius kind of fade to the background, and you get to actual real world questions like "is this part good? Is it better than mine? What is it trying to do? How does it try to do them? What does this say about the engineer's constraints? What does this say about the company organization behind it? Where are the organizational seams? Where are the hard points that could not be changed? How do those reflect on my company, my program, what we're trying to do and the things we have to work around?"
This isn't just idle navel-gazing. Akins' Law about system interfaces is quite relevant here. Where you draw organizational and system boundaries and the restrictions you put on certain hard points can drive significant differences in a component on a table.
But out of all of that, my biggest take-away was that Teslas..... just aren't very good? Their structures up to the Model 3 are quite inefficient and don't have great rigidity. The dimensional variation is shocking (far beyond even SBU, IYKYK). The hang-on parts are generally relatively poorly performing on their own. They can't touch our structural or powertrain durability tests. Rate and handling is bad, ergonomics fails to meets package targets, NVH and sound quality are poor, and we pay JD Power far too much to find out just how bad the quality numbers are (hilariously bad). I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most other OEMs can't make a Tesla, because our systems and processes prevent us from releasing something that half-baked.
It really makes you question the customer sometimes, because if we put out a touchscreen that failed like that, we'd rightly be ridiculed. CEOs have lost their jobs over far less.
I think Musk's genius is in two very closely related areas: getting investors to give him an unlimited checkbook, and in getting customers to believe they're doing something new, novel, and important, in a way that lets him walk past screwing up things that legacy players get right as an inevitability. The technical side? Most engineers I've met can probably accomplish it.
I found your comment in the "selections" post and the touch screen interface piqued my interest. I haven't used a Tesla screen, but I have used them on other cars, notably a 2021 Cherokee, and I must say, the user experience makes me absolutely sure the people who designed the interface never ever actually used it. XM radio loses a signal? Pretty clear when the sound cuts out, I don't need a giant dialog box that says "Lost satellite signal" to cover up nearly the entire screen (often including the navigation right before a turn) to tell me. I also really like, coming home at night with my eyes well-adjusted to the darkness, how the screen dimming is directly a function of the headlight status so it blasts me in the face with full brightness as soon as they go off. Or when it rains in the day time, and the headlights come on (as recommended) with the wipers, and the screen all but disappears because it isn't actually dark outside. Keyboard disabled while in motion? Real helpful for the passenger to punch in a destination. I could go on, but you get the point.
Elon Musk notably drives a Tesla. He owns several. Based on his history of responding to customer feature requests on Twitter/X, he is able to get things changed purely because he wants them changed, and fast. If his user experience is half as annoying as mine, and nobody is allowed to tell him "no," as is so often reported, I can't see how the touch screen can be anywhere near as bad as what Chrysler puts out.
Y'know, once upon a time, U-Connect was considered the best UI out there! Might be more of a commentary on stuff like old versions of My Ford Touch - the pre Android Auto / Apple Carplay days were wild.
This comment actually does kind of dovetail with my previous one though - why does the XM Radio throw up a sign? The XM radio team needed a way to indicate that signal had been lost. Split the functionality up into functional teams (auto headlights, dimming dash, rain sensing wipers, nav) and the organizational and system seams become obvious. (that keyboard disabling screams "the safety office and general counsel lost their shit after testing a prototype")
Re: why the gauge cluster blinds you when you turn the headlights turn off, it's probably tied to a light sensor that gets turned off right at key-off to hit a target 12V battery life.
You point out all the things that Tesla does wrong that the legacy players do right, but this is completely missing the point. What you need to look at are what are the things that Tesla does right that the legacy players do completely wrong! These are the areas of differentiation and the consumers don't care about individual part quality, panel gaps or any of that stuff.
I own a Tesla and have owned Hondas, Acuras, BMWs and Porsches before too. Those are all great engineered cars, but nothing rivals the simple daily easy usability of Tesla. What does Tesla do right?
- It's electric and has usable real world range
- There's a real charging network that actually works
- It's relatively affordable (Model 3 at least)
- It's much simpler mechanically and cheaper to maintain / repair than an internal combustion car
- The user interface is lightyears ahead of any electronics from the existing players. It just works like an iPhone
- The integrated electronics under the hood are impossible for any of the legacy manufacturers to copy because they're not software or electronic hardware companies.
- Tesla can actually make these cars at scale and make money (which is more than you can say about Ford and GM!)
My post was mostly intended to show the flip side of what's sometimes a bit of a silicon valley echo-chamber on this substack. It's pretty easy to find pro-Tesla stuff on the internet! But let's get into the bullet points.
Points 1, 2, and 4 are being (slowly) addressed by the mainstream OEMs getting into the mainstream EV space and adopting NACS now that Tesla updated and standardized it as SAE J3400. Future vehicles from most mainstream OEMs will have access to the Supercharger network.
Points 3 and 7 are largely a function of market entry timing, vehicle feature set, and volume - which the mainstream OEMs are currently working through, in their various ways with varying levels of success.
Point 5 is somewhat of a taste thing, and though the proliferation of Android Auto and Apple Carplay is making it less relevant today than in the past, I would expect the mainstream OEMs to continue to make improved infotainment that lags Tesla's latest.
Point 6 is the interesting one here: if you're referring to what I think you are, the monolithic controller architecture is a tradeoff vs. a distributed controller architecture. The latter is a more common legacy architecture due to high feature differentiation across the range (think cheapest $30k 2-door pickup vs. $100k+ 4-door pickup) and the ability to lego a car out of microcontrollers. The same controller can be used across a dozen vehicles (and with some software tweaks the supplier can sell it to multiple OEMs). A monolith is custom, must contain the vast majority of the featureset (cost and complexity) with it at all trim/feature levels, and is a bigger lift to alter vehicle line to vehicle line and for new features. Remember, these are full-lineup companies with a dozen+ models. There are also ASIL implications to monolithic architectures that really shouldn't be discounted. It's looking like big compute is getting cheap and reliable enough (thanks cellphones!) that fewer, larger controllers are becoming more fashionable. You'll hear rumblings about it from various OEMs. But I wouldn't call a fully monolithic architecture either the clearly superior choice or uncopyable.
I agree that mainstream automakers are catching up, but the fact that they'll all be using Tesla's standard tells you something about who is really driving innovation in the space and who is following.
I think your "Teslas..... just aren't very good?" point was just kind of triggering for me (as a product person by training) because it's very much the point of view of an automotive engineer taking it apart piece by piece rather than a consumer evaluating the whole package that just works better (my subjective opinion as a driver). Questioning the intelligence of customers is the classic fallback of failed product/design/engineering projects. The market judges cars on the customer experience (what do people buy and like) rather than the opinions of the engineers building them. Tesla has nailed the end product, the pricing, the marketing and the market timing and thus they have the business results to show for it. This may be dissatisfying to the engineers building other cars, but the results speak for themselves.
This is the state of play as of today, but given the track records for execution in the last 5 years there's a reason investors are betting on Tesla's model working better.
I had a similar reaction to the idea that Big 3 vehicles are “better”.
Personally, I want to like my Bolt, but:
A) The fit and finish is terrible! And the GM dealerships didn’t fix any of the many cosmetic issues worth a damn! The pumps for the windshield fluid have now failed three times, for example. I’ve given up on paying the dealership to fix it
B) The Bolt software is THE WORST SOFTWARE I HAVE EVER USED
My wife’s Tesla… just works. And when there were fit and finish problems, Tesla came to our house and fixed them.
It seems plausible that GM’s engineering approach on things I, as a non-car-person, don’t care about, is more solid than Tesla’s. But that’s classic innovator’s dilemma; GM is overserving some audience I don’t care about, but really not satisfying me on the dimensions I care about.
I do miss CarPlay in the Tesla, though. If they’d add that, it’d be great. Of course GM is taking that away, not that I’d ever buy another GM car.
So I bought a new car about six months ago. I didn't go into the process intending to buy a Tesla, but after looking at ~6 different manufacturers (five of them legacy) I ended up with a Model Y. The combination of general usefulness/convenience and `fun to drive' just couldn't be beat - none of the others came close. [I could have matched it with e.g. a BMW at double the price, but I'm not going to pay an extra 60k just for a BMW badge]. And I also see that e.g. Tesla's get top of class safety ratings from every ratings agency I checked, and Hertz says their maintenance costs are less than half those for their ICE fleet etc... So I'm surprised to hear you say Tesla's are not very good, because from my (ordinary consumer) perspective they blew the competition out of the water. I'm sure you know what you are talking about, but maybe the metrics on which you are evaluating cars just...aren't the right ones? I don't claim to be a car expert, so maybe you are selling Linux while Tesla is selling Mac OS, and maybe (compared to Linux) Mac OS just isn't very good (on metrics that an expert would care about), but then again, J random consumer will almost certainly prefer Mac OS.
When people evaluate Teslas by the metrics of a traditional manufacturer (panel gap uniformity, inefficient structural design etc.) then they may not stack up. But that's kind of the whole point people are missing when they use those metrics. Customers could care less about panel gaps or inefficient structural designs if the UX is qualitatively way better. And for the non car people I know who test drive a Tesla, I uniformly hear them rave about the simplicity and ease of use.
Let's say I am a tech entrepreneur and engineer who reads this bio of Elon Musk. My takeaways are that you should search for radically innovative solutions grounded in materials science expertise, relentlessly seek to drive down costs of components, ignore or fire any experts who tell you it can't be done, and generally seek to be a bold and contrarian visionary who succeeds by knowing when to break the rules about how things are "normally" done. Now, for my first project, I decide to build a low-cost deep sea submersible to disrupt the ocean tourism industry...
If the lesson you take away from a bio of Elon Musk is "do these five simple things and you'll b successful" then you haven't been reading it very carefully. Execution and detail are the key.
I got nerdsniped by Elon's interview question: "You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
I'm not reading through all the comments in case someone already mentioned this, but by this reasoning aren't there a ton of other places you could be near the south pole? For instance, if you walk one mile south and the circumference becomes 0.5 miles you just do 2 circuits of the circumference and then go north to your original point. If you're initially 1 mile north of the 0.1 mile circumference you just go 10 times around the circumference of the earth, etc. Am I missing something?
The footnotes say "The other answer is somewhere close to the South Pole where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile."
That makes it sound like there's a single second answer, but anywhere that is 1 mile north of a spot where 1 mile can be divided by the earth's circumference with an integer answer and no remainder works as well, correct?
Perfect, ty! I'm surprised Musk didn't mention that as well, (seems like the sort of detail that he would explain) or maybe Vance decided it wasn't worth including.
Feels weird talking about Musk, since his biggest impacts are fuzzier ones on x-risk (cofounding OpenAI and also the Ukraine Starlink non-activation event). AI risk and global geopolitical/nuclear risk. So far, what he's done in those areas is questionable at best and unusually terrible at worst.
Taking near-term extinction risk seriously, even getting to Mars wouldn't necessarily outweigh nudging the AGI field in a more dangerous direction (i.e. if OpenAI has contributed more to capabilities than alignment, or if X.ai does anything big).
IMHO these are the 3 things (X.ai, openai, and Ukraine) that matter most about Musk, and so far he seems net negative. The other massive things are rounding errors in the face of that, yet get more attention. (The extreme case: Twitter/X is a rounding error *on those other rounding errors*, and ofc that gets discussed 1000x more than everything else.)
If you believe that Starlink should have been activated for the Ukrainians in Crimea, I don't understand your conclusion that the net impact of creating Starlink and making it available to them except in Crimea is negative. The alternative without Musk's impacts on the world would not be Starlink activated in Crimea but no Starlink at all.
I meant the specific event where he didn't activate it despite the US government (iirc) asking him to.
This also sounds kinda like... not separating the good impacts from the bad ones? Yeah yeah, the whole discussion is "Musk personality = high-variance = mayhaps le good requires le bad????", but he laready had Starlink up in Ukraine before and after that one decision!
I could be wrong on the object-level, maybe he did, as he claimed, "avert nuclear war". It'd be more productive to debate that claim. We could also wonder about his subconscious-policy-of-impulsiveness and which arenas that works well and poorly in. (E.g. it could work poorly w.r.t. AI risk)
I don't recall reading any suggestion that he declined a U. S. government request to activate Starlink in a specific region, but I wasn't trying to challenge the validity of your judgment on the specific event. You're entitled to that.
What I didn't and don't understand was how your conclusion about his broader impact followed from your judgment on the specific event. I'm sorry for not having quoted the points I was asking about (I hadn't realized quite how bad Substack was about showing the context of a reply), but I'll rectify that now. In the OP I was replying to, you wrote:
"...his biggest impacts are fuzzier ones on x-risk (cofounding OpenAI and also the Ukraine Starlink non-activation event). AI risk and global geopolitical/nuclear risk. So far, what he's done in those areas is questionable at best and unusually terrible at worst.
"IMHO these are the 3 things (X.ai, openai, and Ukraine) that matter most about Musk, and so far he seems net negative."
Yet your argument for his negative impact in Ukraine, in the specific event you cite, seems to directly imply a *positive* impact in Ukraine overall, since *not* activating Starlink in Crimea did no more than lessen the impact of activating Starlink in Ukraine overall. I also don't understand how you can list "the Ukraine Starlink non-activation" as one of his biggest impacts without counting the creation of Starlink as, *ipso facto*, a bigger one.
I honestly don't see how to make sense of these things. What am I missing?
- "your argument... seems to directly imply a *positive* impact" --> I don't see why you read it this way. I noted that maybe the non-activation increased nuclear war risk, Elon maintains it was to avoid one. In the hypothetical of [it causes a nuclear war], I'd call that the biggest impact of the whole Starlink-in-Ukraine program! I'm open to something like "the fact that nuclear war didn't happen, proves that Elon's choice was right / good-EV", then we'd end up in discussing "was it a bad or good decision if it was only good in hindsight, and more careful analysis at time-of-decision would have called it bad?".
- "I also don't understand how you can list "the Ukraine Starlink non-activation" as one of his biggest impacts without counting the creation of Starlink as, *ipso facto*, a bigger one." --> See the hypothetical above. Additionally to that, this logic seems like it'd assign high impact to earlier actions, rather than ones that could have been counterfactually different. Like, "This historical figure was impactful, but they wouldn't have been born without their parents, ergo their parents have *ipso facto* more impact".
- My whole larger point is that different specific actions, even when related to each other or grouped together as the "same project", can have different impacts on their own.
- I was probably biased by media into a more-critical initial view of the non-activation event.
- In hindsight, I probably should have solely mentioned the 2 AI companies, since their impacts are both larger (negative or positive, large either way), and because we have way more public evidence (mainly about OpenAI) to make a better decision about whether it raised or lowered AI extinction risk. I kinda just want to learn more about what X.ai is doing, if anyone here knows.
- I don't want to continue getting bogged down here; If my above explanations don't work, I apologize for not [writing more clearly AND/OR thinking more clearly], but I don't expect to have much better explanations beyond further rewordings/hypothetical-examples/re-explaining of the above points.
I'm sorry for the bogginess. I'm afraid I contributed to that, so I'd like to pose my question more concisely before giving up on the conversation. No need to respond again unless you are so inclined.
I believe:
1. Elon's *net* impact = the set of differences between our world as it is and as it would be had Elon never existed.
2. The inaccessibility of Starlink in Crimea is not one of these differences.
3. Therefore, it cannot contribute to Elon's *net* impact.
4. Yet you seem to take it into your consideration of said *net* impact. This is what I don't understand.
So this led me to a 3rd(?) reason/way I was wrong: The "non-activation event" was actually Starlink not-expanding-coverage-to-Crimea (occupied by Russia at the time), despite Ukraine asking them to do so, despite Starlink being provided in Ukraine and the military using it but also being discouraged from using it but also (maybe?) not being kept-off-it in consistent or reliable-as-in-you-can-build-strategy-around-knowing-if-you-can-use-it-or-not-but-in-either-case-you-can-rely-on-that-being-the-case-consistently ways.
I wrote most of the below section before learning those details. My below logic only holds (and still holds) to the extent the Ukrainian military was (for lack of a shorter word) "rugpulled" on using Starlink in Crimea. This includes the following factors:
- If Starlink was already allowed to be used for defense, would the Ukrainian military have been reasonable in using it in Crimea, which was (in a complicated way that I am *not* going to discuss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Republic_of_Crimea#History) a Ukrainian territory until 2014?
- Since SpaceX is (among other things) a US government/military technology contractor, and the US has sent spare weapons as aid to Ukraine, and SpaceX was already letting Ukraine use Starlink upon Ukraine requesting activation of the service... what reasonable expectation, if any, was there for Starlink to be usable by the Ukrainian military ?
- How short-notice was this decision used? Was Ukraine e.g. *just* about to land some drones in Crimea, then they suddenly lost connection, and *then* Musk said "oh btw don't use this in occupied territories"?
- Should any such decisions be up to the contractor in general and Elon Musk in particular? (Of note: the timeline of when SpaceX was funding Starlink out-of-pocket VS being funded by DoD contract. This would logically drastically change which expectations the Ukrainian military should've reasonably had.)
-----------Initial section--------------
OK I think I see the crux(?): Your point #2 is that [Starlink being not-activated in Crimea] is literally the same as [Starlink having never been available in Crimea].
My "the [non-activation event that people talked about in the news for a few day], was net negative" claim relies on point #2 being false, in this specific way:
Building a service, and then allowing the military, only to not-turn-it-on at a specific strategically relevant time (or in a location they're asking you to turn it on in), has a different effect on the larger strategic picture than if you hadn't given that service to the military to begin with.
The key here is that I didn't consider the effects in a complete vacuum, but neglected to write them out more explicitly:
- Practically speaking, losing something you were previously relying on, can cause
- Giving something with few conditions, then adding in a previously-not-accounted-for restriction at-whim, can under many circumstances cause net problems for the recipient.
A contrived example: you give someone Super Bowl tickets, they spend the money and time to fly out to the Super Bowl to use the tickets, then right before they get to the ticket stand you cancel their ticket (using some software backdoor, let' say). You have now caused a net loss for the ticket recipient, and put them in a worse situation than if you'd never "given" them the tickets.
This is not 100% analogous to the Crimea non-activation, but it's the broad shape of what the situation seems/seemed like with little but recent news articles to go on, and if the situation *is* that way, then that's what would cause my potentially-net-negative judgement.
I have to thank you for this piece. I was (embarrassingly) taken by the rumor that his accomplishments were thanks to financial advantages. I ought to have researched.
Elon Musk is frankly good looking and has a charming perceived generosity of trust that accompany his intellectual pursuits.
I think regarding X, it will take a very quick response to be more than a break-even effort to "save free speech." Where at first he was optimistic about renewed interest he is now releasing profit statistics that reveal extreme losses the value of the company. Regarding freedom of speech, is he really so passionate about it? That is important to how hard he tried. My instinct is that he is not extremely in favour of free speech. As in he holds some views that could easily be debunked if he really had to open his ears. Ie 'two genders no trans" or something like "im pro socialism but not in terms of helping unproductive."
I don't think it is impossible to make people want to pay money for online only things. I know about a website that people pay money in irrational spurts. The product is "fg" aka "forum gold" and it is exchanged for diablo 2 items. (ie. person x buys fg with real currency, Person x xfer fg to person y and person y joins the same room as person x to give them in game loot that otherwise takes hours. It's called d2jsp. I'm not sure how this principle could help Musk monetize x exactly but maybe it could. That said he valued twitter really highly for what the profit might be.
Good write-up. The ability to sell his vision to investors (including retail investors) is a big deal too, reducing the cost of capital and making it more likely he succeeds. It is not just great engineers he attracts.
I feel like this overhypes musks successes a great deal. For example, aluminum has a long history in auto manufacturing, with the first all aluminum production car being the nsx from 1989.
This reads, to me, like Elon is a smart man who routinely bullies his employees, often with his intelligence. Now most are afraid to tell him that some of his ideas are just bad. Even the smartest among us are bound to come up with an outright lousy idea every once in a while. And if one knows that the consequences of telling their boss that the idea is lousy is at best a very long assignment of having to prove that down to fundamental physics, and also likely to get one fired, why would anyone bother? "You want to put a nitrogen tank in your roadster and make it fly? Sure thing. Why not."
Removing oneself from negative feedback has rather predictable results.
I wonder what Musk's Dunbar number is. With his enormous memory for detail, it's possible that he's running the world's biggest small business, with the owner/manager directly supervising every worker.
This is a terrible review. The most egregious issue: it is impossible to distinguish what the book actually says vs. the review author pulling out bits to support said reviewer's views.
The reviewer has also done a terrible job of not reading their own review. Someone who can memorize a list of 80 technical items and track them (along with running a couple of companies and micromanaging tens of thousands of employees) is somehow only 1/1,000 smart? Who can grill a subject matter expert and get to 99% of said SME's knowledge in a few weeks? Puh-lease.
There is also a very clear case of "Musk is bad" syndrome going on here - one which I strongly suspect was "Musk was good" when he was the darling of the liberals because of Tesla and his stance on Marijuana etc. - before COVID in other words. In every case, if the choice is Musk is <good> vs. Musk is <lucky, persistent, a super trudger etc>, the latter choice is the answer 90%+ of the time.
"Musk seems IQ 150+ when he’s thinking about the interactions of well-behaved physical laws, and IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes."
I think this combo of multi-modal performance in those 2 domains is a competitive advantage when aiming for instrumental rationality.
I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more successful founders in the EA / LW spaces. There are a lot of successful founders of course (a higher rate than any other group I think probably - eg. Stanford students), but I think there should be even more, given the raw talent, IQ, first principles thinking in the movements.
I’ve occasionally discussed the differences between instrumental and epistemic rationality. Modern LW style rationalism (eg. Elieizer / Zvi) is very focused on epistemic rationality whereas in some ways I think it can confer an instrumental advantage towards success in startups if you're a bit crazy (instrumentally rational, but not necessarily maxing out on epistemically rationality).
I think the fact that Scott was interested in and read RAW / Crowley / Giurdjieff / the first wave psychedelicists etc. in his uni days makes him a uniquely interesting rationalist writer. Because both epistemic and instrumental rationality forked out from Korzybski’s map-territory distinction, but are distinct now.
Anyway - a joy to read one of the best writers and thinkers of our generation, analyzing the original biography of one of the most successful business people of all time. Looking forward to your review of the Isaacson one ;)
BTW there’s a "Paris in the the spring” typo in that original sentence I quoted
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
I find that exceedingly impressive. I couldn't do that in a million years. It is hard enough to keep track of the major questions in one area of a technology. Keeping track of them across all the relevant technologies for multiple companies is mind-boggling.
Re. "Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?"
Because middle managers AREN'T great engineers, but most of them want to make decisions over the objections of the engineers.
Re. Steve Jobs as a designer: His main design contributions to the Apple were:
- Integrate the keyboard into the computer (a terrible design)
- Have no network connectors (a terrible decision)
- Integrate the monitor into the Mac (a terrible design)
- Make that monitor black and white instead of color (a terrible decision)
- Insist that the mouse have only 1 button (a terrible design)
The black and white Mac graphics not only looked great, but in the days before color printing was cheaply available, probably played a large part in making the Mac such a go-to for artists and designers.
The black and white was sharp, but it was one of the most-common complaints about the Mac. Every other serious computer on the market had color graphics by then. I think Jobs only did it to be different from the Apple 2, which he hated, because everyone knew Woz was the genius behind it.
What about Steve Jobs monomaniacal focus on design resulting in the iPhone being wildly successful, even though it was not only not the first smartphone (the first iPhone wasn't one for like a year, because no 3rd party apps), but not even the only competitor at the time with a full frontal touchscreen and no keyboard ?
I read Walter Isaacson's bio on Steve Jobs. And I notice a parallel that Jobs also set wildly unreasonable expectations. He had the drive, charisma, and sociopathy to simply will the impossible into existence.
Jobs supposedly had a keen eye for design, aesthetic, and marketing. The techne, however, was outsourced to colleagues.
Isn’t this the exact opposite of conventional wisdom in this area? Software, not rocket science, is the field with many bootcamp programs teaching people core skills for quick career transfer without a degree or major experience… the “private job skills bootcamp” model seems to be flourishing in coding, data science, and basically nowhere else — though maybe it’s doing well in other areas I haven’t heard of? Arguably self-sponsored police academy training counts as something like this?
I'm sure rivers have been written about this, but the Model S and X's UX was like going from a flip phone to an iPhone. Their software, charging network, and 0-60 times were game-changers. Tesla isn't for hardcore car fans.
When the Model S came out, its UX felt like an iPhone compared to flip phones on other cars in the same price range. Legacy still has not caught up. Whenever asked about the car, I'd say it's great, but not for people who care about cars too much.
The "expert at software engineering", AFAICT, wasn't musk but Max Levchin. Most of his decisions that I've read about at PayPal and at Twitter regarding software engineering specifically were not world class.
The obvious response to whether Musk will succeed or not with X/Twitter is "what counts as success"? This is not just a clever retort, it gets to the essence of the issue – why Musk bought the company, and what he hopes to achieve with it.
Suppose we take seriously _What's Our Problem?_ , the new book by your nemesis/doppelganger Tim Urban; then it's not unreasonable to see the closing of the American mind (and in particular the closing of places where free speech can be practiced in America) as THE most important problem of our time, the problem that has to be solved otherwise nothing else matters. If you take that seriously, then almost everything Musk has been doing around X/Twitter makes sense. He doesn't care if the DEIist's leave the platform – it's there to allow other voices to be heard. It's not exactly that he doesn't care if advertisers leave the platform, it's more that he wants to create one example showing that you can stand up to SJFs as a company and be just fine; he will welcome any other company that wishes to join his advertising platform, but he absolutely will not compromise the platform to allay their SJF-driven "concerns".
Most of the complaints being made against X/Twitter look a lot more self-serving when you understand this point. Getting rid of departments that claimed to be weeding out misinformation? Well, who exactly decides what counts as misinformation? Consider something as supposedly medical (ie science) based as large gatherings during covid. We have run the experiment, and we know the results – plenty of politicians and doctors said, loudly, that it was unacceptable to form such large groups – right up until the BLM protests, at which point we had always been fighting EastAsia.
Musk has presumably decided (correctly IMHO) that letting a thousand flowers bloom, and relying on people's exposure to all of them to come on a consensus (ie the way we did things up until about 2010) is, for all its flaws, vastly preferable to the alternative of an unaccountable Department of Goodthink that shuts down anything that even hints of disagreement with DEIist theology.
In other words, for Musk success for X/Twitter IMHO would probably be something like "Remains a vibrant platform for sharing ideas of all sorts, basically a more visible publicly version of the supposed 'Intellectual Dark Web'". This is very different from other metrics that people are going to use, like "retains as many users as in 2020" or "makes more money than in 2020" or whatever.
All the inevitable crowing around the "failure" of Twitter, which will only get louder as the next election approaches (along with the demonization of Musk) need to be understood in this context. Almost none of this is about people caring about the truth; it's about people driven furious by the fact that someone is willing to stand up to them and call them bullies – and that more than half the country agrees, but is cowed into being afraid to say so, except on Twitter.
Why shouldn't authors be obligated to include text by Elon Musk in any book they write about him, if that's what Elon Musk wants? Because it's their book, not his, and the author and publisher are not obliged to spend their money to publish Musk's views.
What they could do is say, "After the book is published, you're free to publish your own book giving your own side of the story." That would be nice of them. Oh, but wait, Musk could already do that anyway.
I haven't read that book since the day after it came out, but from my foggy recollection, I'm pretty sure this review is better.
A comparison of Vance and Isaacson’s books would be interesting. Eventually I'll get around to reading the latter...
One point in favor of X succeeding: personal social skills don’t seem to be required for building a social media giant. Case in point: Mark Zuckerberg, who is ten times more awkward and less inspiring than Musk. Yet Meta still manages to be the industry leader, dumb metaverse decisions included.
I think the bottleneck is less "personal skills" than "PR skills". If Congress subpoenas Zuck to decide whether to regulate him, I bet Zuck prepares really hard and has well-thought-out, reassuring-sounding answers for them. And if the media tries to accuse Zuck of spreading misinformation, he builds some kind of connection to friendly journalists and anti-misinformation groups and has respected people say good-PR things that soothe people's worries. Musk is just going to tell these people to go f*** themselves.
I see what you mean, but I also think you underestimate his PR skills. If I had to summarize Elon’s “magic sauce” it’s that he is good at building a narrative that he’s a genius, working on incredible projects, etc. This is his true skill, not being an engineering wizard. Most of the people that dislike him intensely in government and media are themselves disliked by the majority of the population.
"If I had to summarize Elon’s “magic sauce” it’s that he is good at building a narrative that he’s a genius, working on incredible projects, etc."
I'm not sure of this - is the "Musk's projects are incredible" narrative stronger than would be expected from the actual incredibleness of his projects? I think maybe a little stronger, but not so much I'd call it a real exceptional talent of his. It's crazy how much more advanced SpaceX is than anything else that any of its much larger competitors or big national governments were able to do.
There was a huge media push about a decade ago to frame Elon as this genius engineer guy saving the world. He was even in Iron Man. It was everywhere.
There are plenty of people doing just as amazing things that aren’t nearly as famous, largely because I argue they don’t understand the power of marketing and storytelling as well as Elon does.
Again this isn’t saying that their accomplishments aren’t real, or that he’s just faking expertise, but that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. He gets the best people and the best government contracts because he understands this power of PR and narrative. A whole lot of people seem to think he’s running these companies entirely on his own, which is patently absurd. He’s very very good at getting good people to work for him.
To paint him as someone oblivious to this is a naive view IMO.
I could be reenacting my own trauma here, but "he's very very good at getting good people to work for him" is IMHO his real secret sauce. Hiring good technical people is *hard*, especially when you're trying to hire people more expert than you. That he can do this at companies which are widely known for their terrible working conditions is impressive.
Also a talent that Steve jobs had.
Who else is doing equally amazing things and is less well known?
Vance says that the Iron Man people approached Elon rather than vice versa. They were filming in Los Angeles, someone told Robert Downey Jr there was an impressive space magnate with a factory nearby, and RD thought it would be a good acting project to study him.
Literally everyone that has a high level position in all of his companies? How many people working at space x or Tesla other than Musk are household names?
He’s also the richest man in the world, which brings its own PR benefits.
From what I've heard, it was Downey's idea in the first place. When producing the first movie, the director didn't really know how to portray the larger-than-life comics persona of Tony Stark as a realistic human character, and after some brainstorming, RDJ said "we need to talk with Elon Musk." This is why Musk got a cameo in the sequel: Tony Stark's personality was based on him.
Artist Tyrant is not arguing in good faith, so you're wasting your time engaging with them.
Like many people, the starting point is not "Musk is interesting, what can I learn"; the starting point is "Musk is evil because he will not accept DEI hegemony", everything subsequent flows from that axiom.
I'm curious how you would distinguish a "media push" from "a bunch of people independently spread a meme, and once it takes off enough, traditional media desperately echoes it to seem hip and cool and with-it". I feel like I've seen examples of both, but am ill-equipped to tell the difference, other than the rare cases where I'm there to see it start.
Perhaps it's the very scale of his projects that makes people remember the big successes. This review never brought up The Boring Company, for instance; a proposal that made me go "what the hell?" when I first heard it and which seems or does not seem to be making progress, depending on what coverage I'm reading when. Ditto NeuraLink.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/8/23498861/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnels-finished
Now, I know Vox is a little sour on Musk, but the big visionary project seems to have stalled for various reasons (one being that the self-driving cars aren't good enough yet). I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to instead revolutionise how large tunnels are dug or the likes, but that's not at all the same as "you'll be ferried in your car on a moving walkway in a tunnel and then raised up by elevator to the very front door of wherever it is you want to go".
EDIT: I seem to have conflated The Boring Company with the Hyperloop, apologies, they're both basically tunnels so far as I can tell but if The Boring Company is about "digging tunnels better, faster and cheaper" I think that is a lot more achievable than whatever the Hyperloop was/is supposed to be doing.
The political switch has an awful lot to do with the coverage, I think, as well as the simple passage of time and reality hitting the ambitious projects on the head. When he could be seen as at least liberal, with some genuflection in the direction of progressivism, then he was the Tony Stark of our days.
Now he's next thing to Orange Man Bad and is ushering in fascism in America. (The amount of *seething* over Twitter before he bought it, with the appeals to stop him in order to preserve democracy, and the gloating over perceived losses once he did buy it was amazing. The 180 on what a blue check mark meant was also amazing - the same people who were smugly repeating what a blue check mark said as 'the expert has spoken, shut up idiot conservative' were now 'all it means is that you're verified as a subscriber, it doesn't mean anything else and nobody ever at all used it as meaning the right opinion because it was an expert saying it')>
I have much the same view of him as I do of Trump: he's not as marvellous as his fans make out, and he's not as terrible as his detractors make out. He's smart and driven and ambitious, and part of that is sometimes when he shoots for the moon, he hits it and sometimes he misses.
I don't understand your point about the blue checkmark. What it signified *did* change, didn't it? From a "we've checked that this vaguely-famous person really is who they say they are" which doubled as a kind of Official Acknowledgement Of Being A Public Person, to something any old dick and harry can buy even if they are in no way a Public Person (Semi-Officially-Acknowledged or otherwise). People being annoyed at people who bought their blue checkmarks as a pure transaction, while respecting the people who'd been *awarded* a checkmark in the old regime, seems entirely unsurprising, and in no way hypocritical.
(If the US government began selling Medals of Honor for a thousand bucks, I expect people who currently kowtow to medal-wearing vets would start hissing and booing at the "fakes" — how is this different? In both cases, maybe the kowtowing to the original group is excessive, but the signifier has plainly changed meaning, and its original salience or lack thereof is irrelevant to the legitimacy of complaining that whatever meaning there may have been earlier has been completely washed out.)
Hyperloop was just a tech whitepaper that Elon and some engineers at Tesla released. It was not ever one of Elon's companies, although he did find some design contents.
> is the "Musk's projects are incredible" narrative stronger than would be expected from the actual incredibleness of his projects?
There's a pretty well-known argument about this wrt Tesla. If we look at current market capitalization, Ford (stock ticker: F) is worth $50 billion. That is the price of owning all of Ford if you could buy all of the stock at current prices, which you can't do.
Meanwhile, Tesla (ticker: TSLA; this makes me wonder if Elon Musk is trying to get T) is worth $840 billion by the same metric, or just under 17 times as much. I am much less confident in the sales figures I pulled off the internet just now than I am in the market capitalization numbers, but they tell me that last year Ford "sold" 4.2 million cars and Tesla "delivered" 1.3 million, or 0.31 times as many cars as Ford. (I'd really like to compare number of cars manufactured, but good luck figuring that out.)
If neither company had outstanding stock and therefore they both had a market capitalization of zero, how likely would you be to conclude that owning Ford would be 17 times worse than owning Tesla?
If you buy Ford you also have to pay off it's debt which makes the ratio a little less crazy. "Ford Motor long term debt for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $93.895B, a 10.45% increase year-over-year." vs. "Tesla long term debt for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $0.872B, a 69.91% decline year-over-year."
Using debt + market cap we get a ratio of ~6 instead of 17 (which is of course still substantial, but quite as crazy). Also the trends in sold/delivered debt/profitability definitely favor Tesla over Ford which is prob. worth something (though whether it's 6x or not is another question).
I assume that your average Ford is still quite a bit less expensive than your average Tesla, though of course not by a factor of 55 ?
Whereas Ford is a mature company founded 120 years ago, Tesla was founded 20 years ago and has been growing torridly ever since. The difference is very material to any valuation of the two companies.
Telsa has all the signs of being a bubble stock, but the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent, as they say. In its non meme form, you can see a more grounded high valuation being a bet on Tesla's ability to control a huge % of the electric market share as that inevitably takes over the auto market.
Sure but IIRC for Tesla's value relative to make sense relative to other car manufacturers you'd have to expect them to be owning basically the entire current car market if not more. That seems like an awful lot of growth to be plausible.
"Torridly" is a reach. The company has been aggressively slashing costs on their cars to keep sales up in the face of competition, eating hard into their margins.
A lot of the expectation of future value with Tesla seems to be the belief or hope that it will become a "network effect" company: that Tesla charging networks will become the de facto US national charging network, and that the Tesla car OS will become the Windows of EV/Self-Driving cars. Both seem rather unlikely in the long run.
If I was a professional trader, quite likely, if the market price is any judge.
If the people making this argument think that market price is totally wrong, then by all means, go ahead and short TSLA. If they're right, it's a great deal!
I mean, rational people also look at the price of gold, or the price of Bitcoin, and are perfectly aware that valuation and logic are not always closely linked.
And as others have said: the market can stay irrational longer than you stay solvent.
It is largely because of stuff like this I have to disagree with Musk being bad at PR. I understand what's meant here (basically lots of people dislike him and he doesn't care that much to placate them) but he is the richest man in the world rather than another merely rich and successful company founder because of his PR skills.
Musk is the richest man in the world not because he has a lot of money in the bank but because of what he owns, specifically lots and lots of very valuable Tesla stock. Now, Tesla is a fine company that can even turn a profit these days, but at a market cap of ~$860 billion it is the world's seventh most valuable company; the stock price is quite high relative to current business fundamentals (A better comparison than Ford is Toyota, the world's largest carmaker and a pretty solid business, which has a market cap of under a third of Tesla's with roughly 4 times Tesla's annual revenue). So if you buy Tesla shares at a high price and thus help make Musk the world's richest man, you do it either because 1. you believe that Tesla will, in the future, be worth a lot more because of self-driving or incredible growth prospects whatever, or 2. you intensely love Elon Musk and Tesla and want to support them. Both of these things are probably the most important factors driving Tesla's share price up, and are entirely dependent on marketing and PR done largely by Elon Musk personally.
It is only a little hyperbolic to say that Musk's many stunts have created a kind of technophile cult of personality around him that he has leveraged into becoming the world's richest man. This is not someone who is bad at PR! It is just a different skillset than making everyone blandly accept him. There's lots more to say on this topic, but probably you get the idea. I'd say Musk is bad at PR in the same way as e.g. Donald Trump, who lots of people hate but did manage to become President of the United States through a combination of strong media skills and personal charisma. Musk went for getting rich instead, which is probably for the best because a lot of the profile of him here reminded me strangely of descriptions of Napoleon[1].
[1] Incidentally I remember seeing an Elon Musk tweet where he strongly endorsed the Age of Napoleon podcast, so consciously or not there might be some real affinity there.
> Musk went for getting rich instead
"Instead" seems like the wrong word; Donald Trump has been rich for a long time.
"is the "Musk's projects are incredible" narrative stronger than would be expected from the actual incredibleness of his projects?"
It depends which narrative and which facts you compare/contrast. If you consider the self promotion and public image he's cultivated and the cottage industry of Tesla/SpaceX bulls and Musk click-bait content, then compare that to a more skeptical or jaded view of Tesla and SpaceX, yes. It's a bit like Jobs/Apple and consumer tech - one of the great things Tesla did was turn an appliance into a gadget, which has the benefit of being judged in a different way.
(Sidenote: Anyone know how close we are to rocket launches being frequent enough for having both rocket building and rocket refurbishing operations to make a lot of business sense? Not to minimize the achievement of implementing lower-stage landing as well as SpaceX has, a lack of use-case is the reason the old proofs-of-concept weren't further developed, prior to them.)
Did Vance write about fraud and production problems at Tesla? I read "Ludicrous," by Edward Niedermeyer and it's worse than the headlines, according to him.
Are you sure the Zuck approach described above is better than the Musk one hypothesised?
I'm not sure it is.
Can you explain more? If Congress is threatening to shut you down, isn't it better for business to say nice reassuring things to Congress that make them like you, than to tell them to f**k off?
(regardless of whether you secretly think Congress should f**k off and he is morally in the right)
The idea is that having the love of the people will allow you to stand up to Congress after having told them to f**k off.
Worked for Caesar, kinda.
... or would stomp him out of existence very hard.
But, yes, Caesar did not rely solely on the love of the mob to try and crown himself King...
I think it's more complicated than that. I'm combining "placating Congress" with "placating the media", because I think they're basically the same skill of placating-the-broad-political-cultural-regime. If you offend the media too badly, they can . . . well, they can do what they're doing to Elon now. I don't know how well it's working; it seems to be working very well, but part of their strategy is to make you think that. But it can't be great for him. It's definitely not as easy as "you tell Congress to f**k off, the media reports on this fairly and accurately, and you are hailed as a hero by the common man."
That "kinda" is hiding a lot!
I wasn't necessarily suggesting it was a good idea/strategy, just what I understood of Jack Johnson's comment - though he's now replied directly so...
But as to your own reply - I think the media IS reporting fairly on Elon Musk i.e. he's turned alt-right (or always was alt-right, just was hiding it better) and that is burning a lot of the goodwill liberals/leftists had for him given he's more or less single handedly created the EV sector as a viable car segment (with the obvious impact on climate change).
Obviously, liberals and left leaning folks like myself aren't going to be too fond of Elon Musk new/revealed alt right tendencies. I tend to be forgiving, and most of us are but terminally online leftists... well, not so much. Kinda goes with the terminally online aspect.
Some companies may decide it's best avoiding advertising on X but, I dunno, Fox managed to make money out of old scared/outraged right wingers. Maybe X can do the same with younger right wingers?
I'm definitely not making a moral point, more of a Danegeld point ("That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld. You never get rid of the Dane" with apologies to Danish readers).
Once you've bowed and placated them once, they are incentivised to do it again.
I'm not an expert in US politics or social media, but I think in other situations where someone has power over you it isn't always the right solution to say nice reassuring things to them.
This position on tribute is kinda silly, though. There were all _kinds_ of good reasons to pay tribute, such as the Danegeld historically. For one thing, if you pay it, you get at least a chance to reconstitute after being beaten or harassed by an insurmountable force.
Paying tribute is a bit like paying protection money - no-one does it because they like it, but depending on the context, it might be a lot better than the alternative.
It's a political tool that's been used all over the world for literally millennia.
I'm not espousing "never pay protection money" I'm saying there are arguments against it. In Scott's original comment it seemed taken as obvious that the "rational" Zucklike actor should always pay the protection money. I don't think that's true, and I don't think it's true in the situation described.
Right, I think it's less about skills and more about willingness to play the game. Zuck is willing to roll over and show his belly when he's threatened by power, whereas Musk wants to exert power of his own. Zuck can be relied upon to do what the various organs of power within the United States want him to do, but Musk wants to make his own decisions like he's the goddamn player character.
I've previously expounded here on my theory that there's five independent power centres in the United States: Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the news media (which lacks a geographical metonym). I might modify that to say there's really five and a half, and the 0.5 is Elon Musk.
Half of Congress WILL massively respect someone who tells them to go f*** themselves...
This is (one of) the lessons of Trump – in a world where you can NEVER make the complaining classes happy, you might as well at least earn the respect of everyone else who also has contempt for the complaining classes.
Certainly better than kowtowing to them as Zuck did – has that improved Meta's image any amongst the Left? While not at all impressing the Right.
I somewhat disagree with the framing here -- the first job that Zuckerberg had was building a social network from scratch (in a very different competitive landscape to the current one), which was well-suited to a move-fast hacker, and did not require any PR or much social skills; it was predominately a technical problem. By virtue of the company's growth rate and various political and economic accidents of history, Zuckerberg is still the controlling shareholder of Meta, and so he's managed to keep the job of CEO and has hired a great team around him. The job of running Meta now is very different than his original job, and does require PR, leadership, and interpersonal skills.
The job that Musk has today with X is a very different one than Dorsey had when he built Twitter or that Zuckerberg had when he built Facebook; it's more like the new job Zuckerberg happens to have now as CEO of a major social network. Twitter already had a robust network of users, and also had a lot of regulatory baggage (FCC consent decrees), global legal commitments around content moderation, election integrity, anti-terrorism, etc., and a large existing org.
Musk's task at Twitter was not to "build a social media giant"; that was already done, it's what he paid $42B for. The challenge for Twitter was more of a typical MBA textbook "how do we fix this broken, rudderless, unprofitable company?" which is very much a socio-political organizational challenge. I'm sure in addition there is a big technical component like "why can't we run this company with 10% of the technical staff?" but that is a mundane technical challenge that many CTOs would feel comfortable stepping into, not requiring a revolutionary/visionary invention that nobody has pulled off before.
To be fair Musk has brought in a CEO at Twitter, but I'm skeptical that Yaccarino actually has authority; can you imagine her bringing Musk to heel on anything? I suspect she's more of a glorified COO, when it comes down to it. (This last part is fairly idle speculation on my part, to be clear.)
In short, impressive as his portfolio is, I don't think Musk has demonstrated a track record with the sort of problem that Twitter faced at the time of his takeover. And his superpower on hiring doesn't seem to translate well either; "colonize Mars" is a unique mission that people are willing to work late nights to advance even at risk of being fired on the spot, "build a free-speech social media platform" has less of a ring to it. Employees must be asking themselves why work at X and not at Facebook, where they have zero chance of being arbitrarily fired? I think Twitter has so much regulatory, technical, and organizational debt that it's going to be very hard to succeed at iterating as quickly as he wants to.
"free speech platform" is an oxymoron (as Musk already has shown by nudging the software so it shows his own tweets more often ?)
I think the https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be argument applies here.
I think that I've spotted a flaw in your logic ?(!)
> You're admitting there are people worse than you - [lazy cousin Larry,] Alex Jones, the fossil fuel lobby, etc.
One of these is not like the others.
We owe compassion (among other things) to other fellow human beings (including Alex Jones). We do NOT owe this to non-human entities (including groups of humans).
When we say that platforms are fundamentally evil, it's because there are fundamental reasons, coming from what is involved in their very definition, that make them be a net negative for human flourishing.
A recent example (which in some ways just repeats old arguments, but in his usual brilliant way) would be Cory Doctorow coining the term "enshittification [of platforms]" :
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
More specifically, and what prompted my first reaction : the closed, proprietary nature of platforms is incompatible with the practice of free speech. (Compare with the liberal governments being banned from engaging into censorship.)
Now of course, there probably *might* be a way to rein in platforms with an extremely heavy legal framework, where most of their damage would be minimized... but why bother ?
(Also reminds me how allowing privately owned press (opposed to journalist-association press) after WW2 might have been a mistake that we are now paying for.)
Again, they aren't human beings, we don't owe them anything, not even a right to exist, why tolerate them, especially when we can just use protocols (or even something else) instead ?
(The reason why the USA and China tolerates them, is likely because they give them a lot of power : respectively internationally, and against their own citizens.)
P.S.: I've left out potential discussions of limits (what about a group of only two humans ?), and of what we owe to non-human living entities...
https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1676598397489250304
"Today I learned that Cory fucking Doctorow is being given credit for coining 'enshittification'. In 2022. I used it in 2013, and I'm probably not the first."
Yeah, I agree. What Twitter really needs in a leader is a boring management guy to come up with a way of monetizing their product without either: bankrupting the company, pissing of their entire client base, destroying their technical base or being destroyed by the government. Musk is not that guy.
Zuck also was operating in a very different marketplace when he founded FB than today. FB's contined if wavering success is mostly for legacy reasons, not because of Zuck's continued wise leadership. If Zuck never worked in social media but became a billlionaire in some other space and then bought twitter in 2022, I don't expect he would have any chance of significantly growing the company.
As somebody who also worked on getting humans to Mars (the Orion project, which now only going to the moon after a large demotion), yeah having good ideas at those companies is soul crushing.
Getting trivial changes done to anything takes 6-12 months. I’m talking 1 hour fixes. Because they weren’t planned for already, so they can’t even be planned in this 3 month cycle.
And on the workload front I used to put in 70+ hour weeks every once in a while, so working for SpaceX would be a large step up in quality of getting things done and getting to build the cool stuff, while not being a horrendous downgrade in the other dimensions (though 75 hour weeks eat you alive. It’s basically 6 hours of sleep per night and every other moment is reserved to working or getting ready for work / commuting).
Wow you worked on the Orion project? Can you say more? I basically only know what's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft) which of course leaves out all the fun anecdotes.
So, whose idea was it to name it just like another mildly infamous spaceship project ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
The most entertaining possibility would be "it's the same project, just 1000000 pivots and de-scopings later".
What eventually gets shipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Orion
Hilarious ! XD
I understand the frustration... but my impression is that space exploration is one of the fields where very thorough, very systematic planning with very conservative change cycles is the most promising approach to get something that works at the first attempt - even if it takes longer and costs more than planned. Compare the JWST to the most recent "Starship" launch for illustration.
Yes, but space flight is not AI alignment – you don't have to get it right the first time. Building lots of starship prototypes and letting some of them fail is still cheaper and faster than whatever the people running SLS are doing.
I would withhold judgment on that until one of those prototypes has done what SLS has done. So far, Starship has not even reached LEO, and there are some ridiculously high hurdles before it even attempts to go farther.
Starship 2nd launch is imminent:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/starship-is-stacked-and-ready-to-make-its-second-launch-attempt/
The third launch is expected until years end, maybe there will be even two. IThe project is iterating quickly.
Keep in mind that government money is much more closely tracked than business money. Unless you have an Apollo-project situation where the president is backing you every step of the way and Congress wants to beat the damn Russki's, no one is going to take kindly to millions of tax payer dollars blowing up a bunch of times when it could be done more slowly but right at once.
A thousand times this. US Government money is tracked to the cent.
Has the FAA approved it? I don't doubt that Musk is ready to blow up the next one ASAP, but last I read, the FAA had a long list of to-dos for SpaceX.
No, not how mishap reports work. SpaceX leads the mishap report for the April 20 launch (IFT 1), they compile the list in collaboration with FAA, and then they turn it in for review. SpaceX turned in the mishap report on Aug 21, and FAA reviewed it and closed the case however many days ago. It's in the mishap report where you find the 63 items which SpaceX themselves listed, and they've spent the last 5 months fixing them. Elon just reported that SpaceX are done with all 57 items that are required for the upcoming flight (IFT 2), with the exception of 6 items that are required for later flights (IFT 3, 4 etc). What they're waiting for now is a launch license, which gets issued by FAA. It's currently unclear if we're waiting for SpaceX to apply for the license or if FAA are currently reviewing the license. Regardless, launch license is expected in the next few days or weeks.
But SpaceX is also Musk's most incredibly successful project so far, so I would NOT bet against it. (Well, for mildly outrageous goals like first stage landing and recovery, Mars colonization is something else...)
Yea, SpaceX is the company that's the farthest ahead of the competition. Like we're talking monopoly level dominance. SpaceX has launched 80% of all payload to orbit in the whole world in 2023, and they've steadily increased launch cadence by 40% year-on-year for the last 6 years. The closest competitors are probably 10 years behind in terms of technology.
You are just grossly unfamiliar with the topic.
SLS is like 5x the development cost so far and has been in development since 2011 (6 years delay). And they only have 5 scheduled flights at a marginal launch cost of $4.5B per launch. Meanwhile the Starship flight of April (IFT 1) was literally just a telemetry gathering event that had about a 50% chance of even reaching orbit. The primary goal was to just clear the launch tower. They're using a fundamentally different development approach. In IFT 2 in the coming days or weeks, SpaceX are testing hot staging, which is a new approach to staging, which again has downgraded their odds for success. Once again they're putting probability of reaching orbit at 50%. These exploding rockets are not "failed missions". They're literally expected to blow up, the same way the Falcon boosters when they worked on figuring out booster reuse.
Starship may turn out to be a bust, but Falcon Heavy reached LEO and beyond, five years ago. And unless you have a conniption any time someone says the words "on-orbit assembly", anything you can do with a ginormous NASA SLS, you can do with three Falcon Heavies at maybe a quarter of the cost.
The SpaceX way is faster, better, and cheaper than the NASA way, or the LockMart/Boeing/Grumman way. So much so that the NASA way is increasingly "hey let's just pay SpaceX to do it for us".
Honestly, I am not sure. I have worked in space engineering for years and my impression is that the big space agencies and companies have a lot of inertia and reluctance to consider new ideas and change. A lot of the processes have been built up in response to past failures, but they also stifle a lot of innovation. When people come in with a fresh approach and the resources to implement them, they have tended to get quite far. You can look at how SpaceX has done, but also the early days of the space program at NASA were a lot more open to innovation than today. Its true the JWST worked, whereas Starship hasn't (at least not yet) but the way in which these projects work is different. The JWST was a very expensive, one-off space telescope that pushed the limits of what was possible - and by, the way, despite its success it has come at the cost of a lot of other possible astronomical projects - Starship is not a one-off, it has been designed from the beginning to be mass produced. Of course, whether Starship will ever meet its goals is another thing, but even if it doesn't I don't think the approach to building it will be the fatal flaw.
You can do that - and 17 billion dollars and 20 years later you might launch the first one, which will likely reach orbit on the first try.
Or you can build and blow up a bunch of much cheaper ones, and 20 years later you're launching 60+ rockets a year - and recovering a large portion of them so you can re-launch them again later. And you've spent about 5% as much money.
SLS runs into the problem that so much effort has been put into the rocket that it cannot fail. If it blew up, there would be calls (more calls that is) to cancel the whole thing as a bad job. Which is also why they ran into problems with e.g. replacing the batteries meant they needed to wheel it back into the shed, because they're buried 6 layers deep - the thing is a jeweled watch, so changing anything, even obviously replaceable parts like batteries, is an enormous production.
This, although with the caveat that the larger the rockets have gotten, the slower the testing and prototyping. Something like a Falcon 9 blowing up on the pad sucks, but it's not a huge disaster - whereas a fully stacked Starship Superheavy blowing up on the pad is like setting off a small nuke, and even the last failure from April set them back by almost six months. You have to start doing more "linear" development style testing because of that.
Maybe it would be different if they had some kind of offshore launch platform where they could take more explosive risks, but not where they are in Boca Chica.
Uh, for an engineering task like this, building rockets quickly to observe all the ways in which they fail catastrophically seems like the default right thing to do to me?
Slow feedback cycles are death. To me, that's a core anchor in planning research projects. I work on AI science and math, not rocket engineering, but this very much seems to me like something which would carry over to almost all types of projects where you're attempting very novel things. You're trying to do things that will yield the most bits of relevant information per time and resources invested possible as quickly as possible.
Actually building a version of the rocket to observe how exactly it will blow up seems excellent for that, if this is an option you have. Direct contact with reality, tons of high dimensional data. Many answers to research questions you didn't even necessarily realise you needed to be asking.
Charlie Stross (no friend of Musk) has pointed out that it's how we used to test military aircraft in the US in the 1950s. The way SpaceX is doing it now is actually better, since there's no risk of killing dozens of test pilots.
Really? Observing all the ways in which a rocket filled with 5000 tons of fuel can catastrophically fail seems the smart thing to do? Your intuition is obviously different from mine...
The first thing you do is set off maybe 50 tons of rocket fuel in the middle of some desert, see how big the kaboom is, and calculate how far away you need to keep people and valuable property from the 5000 ton rocket before you see what happens. Then, yes, you probably do find a sufficiently remote site to launch a bunch of 5000 ton rockets and see what happens.
If anyone heard a loud kaboom out near Dugway, UT yesterday morning, well, I'm not sure I can comment on whether that might be relevant here, but I'm definitely not saying it's *not* relevant.
Or at AFRL at Edwards AFB both in the past and in the not to distant future.
We asked; Edwards would have been much more convenient, but they said "No". So Dugway it is, for the foreseeable future.
This was also the reason I had a much better time overall working at citadel than at Google (despite the downsides).
It's such a pity because it used to be that it was quite easy to do crazy idea innovation at Google even for people at the bottom (20% time and stuff). I know, I was there and I did it.
Uh-uh. You don't get to call anything "the Orion project" unless it involves nuking Heaven. You worked on the utterly lame, international-law-compliant pseudo-Orion "project."
I worked on ISS early in my career. My very first software fix took 18 months from “writing” it (about 2 hours) to it launching on the ISS. This bug was to help prevent ammonia leaks into the station atmosphere! 18 months of potential failure waiting to happen… crazy.
“Writing” is in quotes because it was done in this control system application, MatrixX, that let you build logic blocks with drag and drop.
Small note: Community Notes existed before Musk and I don’t think he’s improved it in any meaningful way. He did change its name from Birdwatch.
I read this book when it came out - thanks for review will have to reread I think.
It's seemed much more common and better the past few months; I could be convinced that this was an illusion, but I'm not convinced yet.
It was in beta when he bought it. Or it had just been rolled out or was in the process of being rolled out. I’m sure he likes it and has supported it!
I do believe the main change has been a broader rollout.
Did Birdwatch ever question tweets from the White House?
I think that is your answer as to whether it’s improved in any meaningful way.
I never saw Birdwatch but I regularly see Community Notes. It seems to at least have become much more popular during Musk's reign. The average quality of the notes is also surprisingly high.
The vetting system for people who can write Community Notes is pretty well-designed - you have to have used Twitter/X for a period of time, then you sign up and then all you can do is vote up/down notes. If you vote for a hidden note that later becomes unhidden (they are unhidden when they reach net +5 votes), then you get one point. You have to score five points before you can write notes. Once you start writing notes, you get points based on the votes for and against your notes, and you can lose note-writing privileges if your score drops below five. You can't score more than +5 per note (so you can't get +500 for a really good note and then write as much crap as you like).
When you vote for/against a note, there are a list of categories and you tick which ones the note is good/bad in. I'm assuming there is both an automated consensus system and some manual vetting of these.
What is obvious about the CN vetting system is that it takes a long time to build up a large pool of CN writers - it's pretty plausible to me that it's being used much more now more because there are now a large pool of people writing notes and it took a long time to vet the people in that pool, rather than it being anything Musk has specifically done.
If Musk has done anything, it's more that his own tweets get community noted from time to time, screenshots of those go viral, and this publicises community notes so more people sign up.
If anyone is interested in the details, Vitalik wrote up a really good post going into how the algorithm works
https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html
Fascinating how similar this is to Slashdot's meta-moderation, an approach to quality that I would love to see adopted more widely. Make that digital reputation Black Mirror episode real again!
Yes, it reminded me of that too.
I remember seeing a talk by the UK rapper Akala a couple years back. A (paraphased) line that stood out to me:
"You spend your 20s reading about how to become successful and think you know it all. Then, later, when you actually try and build something yourself, you realize just how difficult it is to make anything even moderately successful, and your respect for people who have done so grows exponentially".
I think a lot about this when I hear the weird sub cult of people who hand wave away Elon Musk's accomplishments and dismiss him.
You don't have to like Musk, he is absolutely a massive tool on a regular basis. But he is, by any reasonable metric, an outlier and an exceptional human being, who's achievements speak for themselves.
We shouldn't conflate politics with recognition of the above.
But allowing crazy billionaires to do whatever they want is by itself a political stance, one that's rapidly becoming unpopular.
False dichotomy. Saying you have respect for Elon's accomplishments is not the same thing as thinking he should have carte blanche to do whatever he wants.
It is a kind of endorsement. Politics is war, arguments are soldiers etc etc. I don't say that I personally think this way, but I'm sure many do.
They should try thinking differently, then.
Sure. But they won't.
That's no reason to grant their opinions any legitimacy.
Dangerous mindset because you can ascribe whatever implications you like to someone's statements. Unless there is a weight of context to suggest otherwise I'd lean on assuming people mean what they say.
Speaking of context, this is one reason why Twitter/X is such a garbage fire : navigating the tree of tweets (to get a better sense of context) is so cumbersome that I'm suspecting it's hard by design...
This is all very well said
The thing is, Musk's brand has always included a significant moral dimension. He's always pitched himself as the cool tech visionary trying to save humanity. Certainly in my social circles this seems to have been an early motivation for people to join the not-so-weird sub-cult of people who think Musk is the apex of homo sapiens.
I like the phrasing you've used. And I agree, there's definitely a moral element intertwined when someone is trying to "save" humanity, but through their own means.
That only worked as long as you didn't notice that he was just repeating what other philosophers said, WITHOUT GIVING THEM CREDIT.
This is where I feel most disappointed by Musk's Trump-esque turn -- I'm shocked at his consistent lack of courage. His speaking truth to power clams up real fast when it comes to, say, China torturing prisoners.
Re "everyone always thinks Musk companies will fail but then they succeed", worth noting that he has also had some flops (e.g. the boring company or the Hyperloop). He still has a pretty good batting average in tough businesses, but it's far from guaranteed.
(also, most likely outcome seems to be "twitter keeps working about as well as before but he still loses money on the deal because of the general tech downturn". Is that success or failure?)
The book talked about Hyperloop a little. It suggests Musk originally made it as a throwaway comment to make fun of California's high-speed-rail boondoggle, sort of "if you were going to do a COOL high-speed train system, here's how I would actually do it". Then everyone got excited about it, Musk himself got caught up in the general excitement, but it's not clear he took it seriously as a company (I don't know what the relationship between that and Boring Company is).
I'm not sure what to think about Boring Company. It doesn't feel very exciting right now, but it did get a contract to dig lots of tunnels in Las Vegas and is valued at $6 billion. If anyone else had created a $6 billion startup that was digging exciting infrastructure five years after being founded, they'd be world-famous. I don't know how much we should discount Musk for being so famous that it's easy for his companies to get publicity and resources.
Re. the last sentence: a lot. Who else would have had the clout to bamboozle officials into funding another doomed-to-fail project after the first was so underwhelming?
Which was the first?
The "loop" under the LV convention center.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A
I mean, it's a tunnel.
The job of The Boring Company is not to make tunnels better, it's to make tunnels cheaper. Building tunnels currently costs something like a billion dollars a mile, which seems to just be a manifestation of cost disease because nobody can figure out why it should be so expensive.
AFAICT, the Boring Company has made tunnels cheaper by making them smaller and skipping all the parts that make them safe to use.
Building tunnels doesn't cost a billion dollars a mile. There was a single subway tunnels that cost that, *including* stations (which are a majority of the cost), which also had to be much bigger to be able to contain subways. We already know how to get tunnels for orders of magnitude less than we pay for them. The bottleneck is competent government planners, not contractors.
You have to move a bunch of earth out of the way, stop the tunnel from falling in on itself, and (for passenger tunnels) devise some way of getting everyone out if there's a fire. And then you've got to maintain an underground structure for decades. While I absolutely concede that we could probably build safe tunnels for much less than we currently spend (particularly in the Anglosphere), I think there are good fundamental reasons to think that surface infrastructure is always going to be cheaper.
That said, there's definitely money to be made here if you can figure out how to, say, build an underground power transmission cable for merely 2x the cost of an overhead line rather than 10x, because a lot of people seem to really hate looking at pylons and they're holding up a lot of necessary grid expansion.
" Who else would have had the clout to bamboozle officials into funding another doomed-to-fail project after the first was so underwhelming?"
Judging from the COVID kickbacks, an awful lot of people, at least in NY.
You're really failing to convince me here that the boring company is a flop
My recollection at the time was Elon dumped a white paper on the internet and said, "Someone else do this, I don't have the time." Those calling that a 'failure' for Musk seems a little off. Sure, he suggested it, but mostly his involvement in the project seems to be cheerleading. (E.g. holding an annual hyperloop competition seems to be exactly this kind of hands-off approach.)
> I'm not sure what to think about Boring Company.
I think the way to think about the Boring Company is that it's mostly a joke company that he founded for the lulz; it's where he launches his joke products like the flamethrower. He was initially bullish that they would somehow be able to get a 10x cost improvement in tunnel boring machines, claiming to have found room for 4x improvement in speed from a thermodynamic first principles analysis, but he does not seem to have achieved much. (I was fairly skeptical that there would be that much free lunch, but he did manage a 10x cost improvement with SpaceX so I felt a strong inclination to defer to him at the time.)
Regarding the valuation, as the Twitter acquisition showed, he can text his buddies and raise billions. I don't index too much on Boring's $6b valuation; it just means he persuaded VCs to pay $675m for ~11% ownership stake during the zero-interest rate period, it doesn't say much about the company's ultimate profitability. For non-Musk founders I'd say that's a strong signal, but I think we've established that there's billions of dollars available for whatever project he's working on, with sparse due diligence, based on his reputation earned with Tesla and SpaceX.
Neuralink is another one to put in the "not a home run" bucket. Seems more like an excuse for him to get involved in speculative neuroscience stuff and hang out with neuroscientists, which to be fair is fun.
IIUC each of these companies are something like 1-2% of his time so it's also plausible that these are just fun relaxing meetings for him, not his primary focus.
I have my conspiracy theory Musk meant Boring to be Rapid Underground
1) He builds totally not rapid transit tunnels for cars to cut every corner he couldn't cut as transit company
2) Makes some legal-technical compromise to make it work like subway, like Tesla-Bus that is totally not a train cart of modular train
3) Uses his popularity to bend elected politicians into being lenient on red tape
When it didn't happen I actually calibrated my view on him a lot
This is the exact type of comment that confuses me. Background: I'm a tunnelling engineer in California, very pro-public transit, very anti-Musk for about 8 years now.
The California High Speed Rail project will be the fastest train speed anywhere in the US. In my view it's an exciting new type of project we haven't built before. But in public opinion it's panned as a disaster or "boondoggle" project. Yes I admit it has schedule problems and cost overruns, and this is a legitimate gripe about the project. But this is unfortunately normal for a construction project in California, or the US in general.
The Boring Company Las Vegas system is tunnelling a ~14 ft diameter tunnel that can fit 1 lane of car traffic, and it's light on some safety features like ventilation, exit walkways, or fire suppression systems. It will use Tesla cars, driven by Tesla employees. In my view this is basically an underground Uber system, but it will probably have more expensive fares to regain the capital costs of building the tunnel (Boring Company is paying for the tunnels, and casinos are paying for the stations, they do NOT have funding from City of Las Vegas AFAIK). But this expensive Uber system is exciting??
I think some observers see the situation as "The City of Las Vegas agrees that this company is legitimate" when really it's more like "okay, sure, we give you permission to build us a bizarre gadgetbahn system on your own dime, good luck".
Maybe California HSR fails, maybe Boring Company fails, maybe California HSR succeeds, maybe Boring Company succeeds. But I feel that the public is putting points on the scoreboard before the projects are completed.
Also, on a more abstract level, why would anyone trust a private company to make good public transit? If your transit system can make 20-30% of its revenue from fares, that's considered a win. Most of the budget is funded with tax dollars because transit is considered a public good. I agree that private companies can be more efficient than government, but public transit seems like an especially bad industry for a private company - they would need to charge sky high fares to regain capital costs, and they don't have eminent domain powers either. (Eminent domain probably isn't needed in Las Vegas - the casino owners, with large properties all along a single line, will probably be on board. But the plan doesn't scale to other cities.)
The fact that Musk chose to put his weight and efforts behind putting more cars on the road, ostensibly to solve climate change is what ultimately gave me pause and brought me to my present position that Musk is not necessarily good for humanity (although I'm not necessarily convinced he's a menace for humanity either). Before this I was a huge fan and thought he was going to propel humanity forward, kicking and screaming.
It appears that if he really wanted to make a massive dent in climate change, he would have worked his miracles to fix the US's car addiction and road-brained design, and create massive public transit systems that would be doing for them what Tesla is doing for EVs. The simplest explanation for why he didn't do this is that he's more interested in winning capitalism (although he is undoubtedly a nerd at heart), rather than serving humanity. This also aligns with his other efforts, although I would classify some of them as well-intentioned but flawed and possibly dangerous (e.g. AI alignment).
He might just have thought that convincing USians to abandon their car-centric culture was a losing proposition in the short term. (Especially with Bush Jr. infamous "The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.")
In the medium term, economies of scale for battery making and much better know how in electric vehicle production would open up alternatives.
That doesn't seem like a satisfactory answer considering how much he seems to relish going against the grain. I think profitability and building something cool seemed to be his primary motivations here.
Nothing wrong with that, it just doesn't seem like the actions of somebody who is more concerned with ensuring an egalitarian thriving future for humanity.
Oh yeah, but one does not necessarily prevent the other...
As a successful businessman he probably has a sense, to parallel the review, of what is just outlandish but possible (in the relevant time period), and what is guaranteed to fail ?
"worked his miracles to fix the US's car addiction and road-brained design, and create massive public transit systems that would be doing for them what Tesla is doing for EVs."
I don't think this is the kind of miracle that Musk can pull off. Maybe he knows this, and went for something more feasible?
I think Hyperloop and The Boring Company perfectly illustrate his approach and its limitations - both ideas arise out of considering physical limits and rounding off everything else to zero. Except it turns out that the obstacles to commercial feasibility lie elsewhere in those cases. You can't reduce transit economics or subway OPEX factors to applications of physical laws, so it's hard to get Elon to care about or even notice them.
To my knowledge the boring company (unlike SpaceX) hasn't successfully reduced tunneling costs (beyond just building smaller tunnels, which do come with lower capacity). Even on the purely technical side, he failed to improve TBMs like he did rockets.
Yeah, and this is what I mean - from a physics-based best-case analysis, "build smaller tunnels" jumps out at you, but it turns out there are a bunch of operational reasons not to do that.
even aside from that, it's not really a huge improvement - price scales with tunnel diameter (which determines capacity for car tunnels). It makes more sense to do it for subway tunnels (which often are built too big, e.g. in Bart) but musk doesn't want to do those.
To be fair, the bull case for the project is compelling - if tunnels are small, then we can dig more of them and have smaller stations, which could reduce the overall difficulty of those projects. If you just buy a building, and dig an elevator down into the basement and then dig horizontally to connect to the loop network, that is potentially much easier to construct and much less work to plan, vs. a major subway station that's a huge multi-year construction project.
So even if you need to build 10x as many stations to maintain throughput, you might be able to do so for cheaper than 1/10 the cost of a subway station.
The bear case of course is just that all of the existing research on public transport seems to point to the idea that to get high throughput you need lots of large train cars, and the hypothetical throughput of the Loop systems is way, way lower than equivalently-priced subways, so you'll need to build way more stations than if you were building subways even controlling for the smaller tunnel/station size.
So I think the bull case is reasonable (well, the details don't quite work out, but I could be wrong in my calculations), but it's also not something new he contributed - we already know how to dig smaller tunnels, the arguments against depend on local politics (and occasionally fire safety). With rockets or EVs he could successfully solved previously-unsolved engineering challenges, with tunnels he didn't (it'd be different if he'd invented a vastly better TBM or something).
Another important difference here: With aerospace and car manufacturing, the US is at the technological forefront, so he could start at the peak and hire a lot of top experts to work with him. With infrastructure though, the US is pretty behind many other countries - Spain already know how to build tunnel projects for 3% of American costs. So it's inherently less likely that someone could reduce costs by being a really good engineer.
He originally hypothesized that he could reduce the per-unit-area cost of digging as well, this doesn't seem to have panned out yet.
"Failed to improve TBMs like he did rockets" - huh? SpaceX builds and launches the most successful rocket in human history.
Failed to (improve TBMs like he did rockets). I'm saying he didn't replicate his rocket success to tunneling.
Oooooooooh hahahaha. Notice how you can read that same sentence in two different ways!
the somewhat conspiratorial take is that Hyper loop was pushed to stop some public transport funding from going through, which then conveniently went away as the hyper loop failed. The guy does run a car company after all. It’s demonstrably against his interests to support public transport.
It was the California high-speed rail. "Trying to stop that from going through" is superfluous and no reasonable person would waste time on it. Also, if it succeeded it would decrease the amount of driving in one state by ~5% ten years down the line. This isn't worth Elon's time to sabotage and he probably hates it for the same reason everyone in California hates it.
I don’t agree with most of what you wrote there. California is a huge leader when it comes to regulations, technologies, culture, etc. A well-functioning public transportation system in California is a HUGE beacon for other places to do the same. More importantly it pushes a vision of a future world that is car free. This is absolutely worth his effort to sabotage. Seeing it only as this single thing with 5% of the population using it is missing the bigger picture.
The state of California is dysfunctional and terrible at building infrastructure and has been for many years (look at the SF subway or the San Jose Bart extension). Blaming Elon Musk for sabotaging it is kinda like blaming him for making the Washington Generals lose a baseball game.
Losing a baseball game would be a new low for the Generals.
I believe in them.
> A well-functioning public transportation system in California is a HUGE beacon for other places to do the same.
It certainly would be. But conversely, building a tremendously expensive boondoggle of a high speed rail project that runs from Motherfucking Bakersfield to Motherfucking Merced, doesn't touch the major cities, certainly isn't integrated with any other transport system, and which burns assloads of money while carrying tiny numbers of passengers per day... that will be a beacon for other places not to bother.
Which is a shame because there's at least one place in the US where high speed rail actually makes a lot of sense (DC to Boston) but it certainly isn't California as anyone with a map could have told you at any point in the past.
Interestingly it looks like Florida is busy demonstrating how to actually build a useful train system.
SF to LA is a not-unreasonable third or fourth project for a veteran HSR-building agency to take on as a bigger challenge. It's a wholly possible project, but has some significant barriers.
The through-NY project (DC to Boston) should be project two or three, as the NYC tunnelling is a tricky problem and you need some experience.
Since the first project is likely to be a bit of a disaster as you build experience, my recommendation for the hypothetical "US National High-Speed Rail Building Agency" would be
1. Chicago-St Louis. This is the easiest possible project. Two large cities, nothing big enough to be worth stopping at in between (though an out-of-town stop for Springfield would be fine and would buy off some politicians), largely flat terrain.
2. Chicago-ORD-Milwaukee-Minneapolis/St Paul (possibly with a stop as MSP). This one should be a home run for an agency that has got its feet under the table. There are some harder technical challenges (airport-area construction), the terrain is less flat (you go through the Wisconsin Dells) but manageable, and you connect to the other service
3. Boston-Washington. You're in a much more densely populated area; you have to get into and out of New York (which probably requires a new Hudson River tunnel and then either crossing the East River twice, or bringing a tunnel under the whole of Manhattan), you have to deal with the political arguments between cities in New England over the route (Providence or Worcester), you have to run through Philadelphia and Baltimore, you have to get into the centers of Boston and DC. But these are the normal sorts of problems.
4. Either Chicago-NYC or LA-SF. Both have far worse terrain than anything you've looked at before. Both have many plausible routes (e.g. Chicago-Fort-Wayne-Columbus-Pittsburgh-Harrisburg-Philadelphia-NYC vs Chicago-Toledo-Cleveland-Pittsburgh vs Chicago-Toledo-Cleveland-direct to NYC; in California, while Bakersfield-Merced is shared by any route, there are at least four ways into LA and three into SF) - which cities you pass through generates a lot of lobbying/politics, so you have to be able to manage that.
The problem is that CAHSR is a brand new agency that is doing "brand new agency" mistakes, and California has dysfunctional politics that means that it can't make decisions.
Like: they've overspending on the Bakersfield-Merced section because they've stolen the entire budget for the LA and SF tunneling to use to buy off farmers in the central valley.
They can't make up their minds over the routes into LA and SF (they have officially picked routes, but you can tell they haven't really picked them because the politicians who favour the other routes are still lobbying for changes and the sorts of technical decisions like ordering TBMs haven't yet been made).
They haven't made the obvious decision to spend a little bit of money electrifying the existing LA-Bakersfield and SF-Merced railroads so they can run CAHSR trains from LA to SF from day one (slowly on the existing lines, fast through the valley). This is because they won't admit that the SF and LA bits aren't going to be finished "soon", and that the temporary solution will be in place for a decade or more meaning it's well worth doing.
Also CAHSR is doing a really bad job of actually building and is overspending even above what the overdesigned route should cost.
LA-SF should be about three hours with HSR all the way, if they'd just wire the track so the HSR train can run at normal speed into the cities, it would be about six hours - about the same as driving. Not great, but it would get far more passengers than Bakersfield-Merced, and they could then dig tunnels into the two cities and speed things up as they go. But that would involve having an agency that is interested in running trains, rather than one that is interested in making Gavin Newsom cut ribbons. If no-one uses it, no-one complains about the service.
It's not exactly the same topic, but this should be of interest to you :
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-the-car-came-to-la
(A lot of which is actually about electric streetcars.)
Just as a clarification - the last and third-from-last paragraphs in that comment are about how a competent organisation would rescue the project even now, not about what CAHSR should have done, but what CAHSR, if their senior management were all replaced by competent people, would do now.
What they should have done in the first place is identified the most politically or technically difficult bits and then done those first, because they will take the longest. In both cases, they are the crossing of the mountains from the Central Valley to the city and the entry-route to the city station.
Just as an illustration (there's more to this, plenty of which I'm not expert enough to comment on), there are three obvious possible routes into San Francisco from Merced, one is to cross the mountains from Merced to approximately Gilroy, then come up Silicon Valley to San Jose and connect to CalTrain and use Caltrain up to San Francisco. The second is to continue up the valley as far as Modesto or Manteca, then cross the mountains to Fremont and rebuild the Dumbarton Rail Bridge to connect to Caltrain (between Menlo Park and Redwood City stations). The third is to carry on up the valley all the way to Stockton, then come around the northern edge of the East Bay (through places like Antioch and Martinez) and then cut a new tunnel under the Bay and then have underground platforms under the Caltrain terminus.
The further north you go in the valley, the better the connection to Sacramento from SF (if you have to go via Merced, then it's useless; via Stockton is very reasonable). If you have a station in the East Bay (either at Fremont or in the Richmond/Berkeley area) then that's serves a different group of people. Crossing south of San Jose serves the area south of San Jose (Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy, etc). Using Caltrain track (well, new track along the same ROW) serves both San Jose and San Francisco. Using the Dumbarton Bridge means that trains from LA can't serve both SJ and SF, so they each get half the overall service (which should still be adequate) but that also means that SF-SJ passengers need a separate train: you could run a "super-Baby Bullet" on the HSR track doing SF-SJ non-stop if you want. Running only from SF means passengers from SJ have to use the Baby Bullet and transfer at 4th and King or at Transbay (depending where the HSR terminates).
So what do you prioritise? East Bay residents not having to go into SF? San Jose? SF-Sacramento? the Valley south of SJ? Stockton and Modesto? If you make a decision, someone will be angry.
Personally: I'd pick the central route over Dumbarton Rail Bridge; bring the Central Valley line up as far as Modesto, and put in a three-direction junction ("delta junction", or "wye") so you can later extend to Stockton and Sacramento (and, maybe even later, Reno). Add an additional high-speed track pair to the CalTrain which the HSR track connects to after crossing Dumbarton, and run a Super-Baby-Bullet between SF and SJ. Trains from LA would alternate between SF and SJ. You could just catch whatever train leaves first and then transfer at Fremont if you prefer that to waiting in LA.
But the important thing is that you have to tunnel through the mountains, that tunnel will take several years to bore, and that's the longest part of the construction process, so you need to start it first. At the moment, all there is between Merced and San Francisco is lines on a map.
Working from here: I'd announce that we're electrifying the Livermore pass and the Valley subdivision and that trains will run from 4th and King to Los Angeles Union Station from day one, but will run at conventional speeds from SF4K to Merced and Bakersfield to LAUS until high-speed track is laid. I'd also announce that we're locking in all the designs between Merced and Bakersfield, because the delays involved in changing - even if to a cheaper and better design - would be more expensive than just getting on and building.
Next, I'd announce that we are reopening the routes into the cities, develop a mid-level plan for each possible route and then put them to a vote (either in the California State legislature or by referendum). The day after the vote result, I'd place the orders for the TBMs, because we'd have sufficient specificity on the routing to know how many TBMs we'd want for each route. Then I'd roll out detailed station designs for each of the stations on the route and enough detail on the route so people know exactly what land is going to be affected by eminent domain.
Finally, I'd work with people who have built one before, even if they don't speak English. The country of Spain has some of the best experts in the world high-speed rail design and manufacturing, half of California speaks Spanish. Why on earth aren't there a bunch of Spanish people being hired by CAHSR? Sure, it's a different Spanish, but not that different!
Where's Tangier-Casablanca on the list?
> They haven't made the obvious decision to spend a little bit of money electrifying the existing LA-Bakersfield and SF-Merced railroads so they can run CAHSR trains from LA to SF from day one (slowly on the existing lines, fast through the valley).
You clearly have no idea what the actual situation is. The freight railroads are extremely anti-electrification and the owner of the LA-Bakersfield line has refused to allow scheduled passenger service over the line since 1970.
When you say California is a huge leader in regulations, I think this is true, but not in the positive way you seem to intend.
A well-functioning public transportation system in California, especially one based on high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is exceedingly unlikely to happen, and if it does happen will send approximately the same message as the Apollo program - "this is wicked cool, but way too expensive and nobody should really try to do it again". Again, it's not worth Elon's time to sabotage the self-sabotaging.
Too complicated - Musk likes cars (i.e. he thinks they're "cool") and really really hates being in public transport due to all the people he'd be in close contact with.
That's why it's always "pods" with him and not trains.
Doesn't everybody?
A wise man once said, public transport goes from a place that isn't exactly where you are to a place that isn't exactly where you want to be, at a time that isn't exactly when you want to leave, and in the company of people you wouldn't choose to be with.
No, most people hate driving.
There is a reason that the rich people solution to transport is "have a driver". The choice of either having to drive or having to share with other people is the one that the rest of us deal with because we can't afford to take taxis everywhere or hire a chauffeur full-time.
Driving doesn't scale. It's nice to be the only one (if you have someone else driving you and a comfortable car, at least), but no one wants to be around other drivers and the net impact is negative
https://youtu.be/j4s9WDDRE2A?si=vOmXfRpoXba2AkE0
If only someone was working on a self-driving car...
I don't think that's true. I personally would far rather drive for half an hour than ride a subway for half an hour, and it's not even close.
As a European, it seems to me that Americans dislike public transport much more than Europeans do.
Some of the problem you mention only exist if the public transport is underdeveloped. Within a city, taking the subway is great, when there are subway stations everywhere, and the subway comes every few minutes. Between cities, trains are great, much more fun than driving, assuming, again, that trains are frequent enough and that they can get you to every town.
The problem that's left is the people you have to ride with.
Which reminds me that I heard the theory that the real reason Americans don't like public transport is the racial division in the US. According to that theory, Americans of different races distrust each other and don't want to ride together.
Is there any truth to that? I'd like Americans to tell me whether that makes sense.
(Edit: I'm sorry that one person found that insulting. I didn't mean it that way. It is not *my* opinion.)
> Within a city, taking the subway is great
I just met someone in Shanghai for lunch. The meeting place was the mall over 打浦桥地铁站. (If you want to see it on a map, you can use google maps, but you might want to stick 上海市 at the beginning of the search. Baidu maps will also work.) I went by subway, from 延长路地铁站. And a friend arrived by taxi, but started out near 四平路地铁站.
Between the two of us, the distance to the site was fairly comparable. But I took more than twice as long to get there by subway as my friend did to get there by taxi. And this is actually being fairly generous to the subway system, since almost all of my travel time was done down the same line. (I did need to transfer once, and that's a long walk.)
It's true that there are subway stations everywhere and the train comes every few minutes. But it is nevertheless not a time-efficient way to go medium-to-long distances.
American public transport is dysfunctional in many ways. San Francisco's idea of a subway system reaches almost nowhere in San Francisco, though it does manage to hit the downtown office hub. ( https://www.bart.gov/system-map ) As you can see from the map, it is not conceived of as an intracity transport system at all - it is supposed to be a commuter aid. The lack of population in California means that the passengers put up strong resistance if you want to board when the train is more than about 30% full. This is less of a problem heading to San Francisco in the morning, but it's a severe problem trying to leave at the end of the day.
Apologies for off topic, but do you live in Shanghai? I live in Hangzhou, to my knowledge haven't noticed any other expats in China (if I'm not being too presumptuous on the basis of your name...) commenting here.
The issue is when your fellow passengers smell like they haven't showered in 2 weeks, or act like they're on drugs. If you want to experience this for yourself, try visiting LA and taking a bus and a subway.
Edit to be super clear: No, there is no truth to that claim, and it's pretty insulting to boot.
Hmm, I wonder why this is an issue for subways, but not tramways ?
How dare you sir, I am a classist not a racist!
If there's no truth to that claim, why does the Atlanta mass transit system have a widely-known racist backronym?
I'm sorry if that claim is insulting. I apologize.
That is an epiphenomenon of the actual issue, which is that rich people don't want to hang out around poor people, and public transit is for poor people. Looking at the buses that pass my office multiple times a day, the ads on the side are clearly for poor people to look at: "don't commit welfare fraud," "how to quit vaping," etc. I would much rather ride on a multiracial rich bus than a monoracial poor bus.
Sure, but if the places and times are close enough to what you want then it can still beat the overhead of owning and operating a car - and a competent and adequately-funded transit planner can set the locations of stops and times of services so that they cover what most people want. And that's before you get into the positive feedback loop of homes and businesses being sited so they have good transit links...
(Context: currently waiting for my car to be fixed so I can sell it for more than the scrap value, because even as a hiker and mountaineer I don't use it nearly enough to justify the amount I spend on keeping it running.)
I live in Munich, and I vastly prefer public transportation over the car for going anywhere within the city limits.
Of course, public transportation is prone to downward spirals - once it has the reputation of "only for people who can't afford a car", it gets difficult. But it doesn't have to be that way - it's a choice.
It will get better with time, as "people who can afford a car" becomes similar to today's "people who can afford an helicopter / private jet".
A lot of cities have far-from-optimal mass transit, but even an optimal system has fundamental limits that (IMO) make it quite inferior to driving somewhere where driving is practical. If the future really is a mass transit future, I expect that that will correspond to a decrease in people's quality of life rather than an improvement in the experience of taking mass transit.
And Munichs system is not even one of the good ones.
I prefer whichever option is more convenient. At rush hour, often that's public transit. Most other times, it's my car.
I would blame it on amount of red tape - public transit is ton of capital, ton of legal work, being an easy prey to any litigation and in case of success - likely slapped with regulation so you don't make too much profit
Well, for instance in Ukraine, the Hyperloop failed for obvious reasons.
https://yuzhmash.com/en/yuzhmash-will-take-part-in-the-hyperloop-project/
(The Southern Machine-making Plant is back to making rockets/missiles, just like in USSR era.)
Though it puzzled me : why would you want Hyperloop when you can have as cool (and probably more efficient) hydrofoils ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voskhod_(hydrofoil)
If you take a physics-based approach, Hyperloop is obvious (and, BTW, not invented by Musk - you can find vactrains in 50s sci-fi, and no doubt the idea is much older). The things that slow down trains are air resistance and rolling resistance - take them away and you can make a faster and more efficient train!
Low capex is part of the efficiency of water transport, that's why it kept being used even after the rail revolution.
Modern ports are not that low on capex. But river transport doesn't need something as big as ocean transport.
Yeah, but they are able to move how many orders of magnitude more freight than hyperloop would ?
(But maybe Hyperloop should - in most instances, not in this one where high speed boats are viable - be compared to air transport instead - would it be even big enough to fit a container ??)
Hyperloop, as proposed by Musk, would carry essentially no freight, not even an air-type container.
Hyperloop, if built as an evacuated maglev carrying a full-size train, would be able to carry lots of freight, but probably very expensively and passengers are generally better sources of revenue. Personally, I'd describe the second as "not Hyperloop" (because it abandons all the original ideas in Musk's Hyperloop proposal and goes back to pre-hyperloop vactrain ideas), but I suspect that Musk fans would not.
At any rate: Hyperloop, if built realistically, would provide airline-speed transportation, primarily for passengers (not for freight) with *enormous* capacity compared to an airline - 10,000 passengers per hour, which is comparable to flying an A380 every 4 minutes, would be a mid-level capacity.
The sensible way to do this is to have a small number of giant hub stations (the back of my envelope said that you'd need ten for the United States, but it might be nine or eleven or something) and then connect them via conventional high-speed rail to the entire surrounding area.
You'd have one station for California (located somewhere like Fresno). Catch a CAHSR to Fresno, leaving every 10 minutes, taking about 90 minutes from SF (a similar time from LA, Sacramento, SJ, about 110 minutes from San Diego). Transfer to Hyperloop, arrive in Trenton NJ five hours later, transfer to the Acela HSR and you're at Penn Station NYC, NY in another 30 minutes - or Philadelphia, PA about the same time; about an hour to Washington DC, a bit less to Baltimore MD; a bit over an hour to Boston, MA. Would people use that competing with flying? Well, that mostly depends on the quality and speed of the transfers at Fresno and Trenton. Overall SF to NY time-in-transit would be about seven hours, which is similar to flying. And that's from Transbay to Penn Station, much more central than SFO and JFK. If those services are, say, every ten minutes, then your worst-case scenario for transferring is 20 minutes hanging around. That's very competitive with flying. The smallest reasonable trains would have a capacity of 500 passengers; which would mean a minimum of 3,000 an hour, or 50,000 per day to sustain that frequency, which seems plausible if the fares are reasonable. You could easily step up to 10kpph or more frequency by running longer trains more frequently.
I have no idea what costs would be, but if you could keep the fares reasonable, I suspect a lot of people would choose that sort of route.
The killer with hyperloop is that it's a go-big-or-go-home gamble; you need a huge catchment area for one station (like: all of California), you need to build the connectivity for people to get from the catchment area to the station, you need to build at least two stations, you need to build an enormously long hyperloop line, and you'd have to do all of this before taking in a single cent in revenue. If it works, it could be enormously profitable. It could also lose every cent of a multi-trillion dollar investment. There just isn't enough money that is looking for that level of risk.
Apparently, the idea is some 200 years old, but it has never gone anywhere, for lots of good reasons. https://spectrum.ieee.org/hyperloop-is-hyper-old
This article is worth it for the engraving alone ! :D
----
"thousandfold pressure difference"
That's not a fair way to present the issue - after all the difference is "only" ~1 atmosphere ! (Which is roughly that of a standing human being, IIRC ?)
The whole story of Musk's invention of the "Hyperloop" seems by and large to be badly misunderstood. Most people seem to believe that Musk's sole contribution to the centuries-old idea of running trains through evacuated tubes was his addition (literal and otherwise) of some modern "hype". Some further believe (perhaps by conflation with either the Boring Company or the various companies without ties to Musk that sprang up to explore this idea in the wake of the excitement generated by his announcement) that Musk himself attempted [in vain] to commercialize the technology.
None of this is even remotely true. In the first place, the key idea that Musk first dubbed Hyperloop and hyped as "a cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table” was not the basic idea of a vacuum train, but a clever refinement to this idea that would have indeed have been (to the best of my knowledge) an *engineering* innovation original to Musk.
You can still read the details of this original proposal in the white paper released to describe it, which is still up on Tesla's web site (https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf) (and gives due credit to the vacuum train forerunners of this proposal). Briefly, the key idea was to kill two birds with one stone by mounting a giant fan on the train cars with the dual purpose of reducing the degree of evacuation necessary to maintain within the enclosing tubes, and simultaneously, providing the levitation of the train within these tubes (necessary to avoid friction) without resort to expensive maglev technology.
Had this out-of-the-box idea panned out, it would have eliminated at a stroke two of the largest hurdles standing between this old idea and economic viability, and Musk would be deservedly acclaimed for it. Instead, it was quickly forgotten, for the simple reason that, while at least superficially plausible in theory (Musk having run his idea past engineers at his companies before airing it) it proved unworkable in practice, when tried by some competitors in the open competitions hosted by SpaceX to advance the idea of Hyperloop.
Those open competitions (for which SpaceX provided only the test track and the ground rules) constituted the only material effort that Musk himself ever made to develop his "hyperloop". He had an intriguing idea for making a hitherto-uneconomical concept economically viable, put it to the test at low cost, and abandoned it once it was found to be unworkable.
All of that strikes me as exactly how this sort of thing should go. It's hardly fair to lay the attempts by others to capitalize on the hype cycle surrounding "Hyperloop" to revive the concept of vacuum trains *without* adequately addressing the economic obstacles that had historically stymied their commercialization, and the ensuing failures of these attempts, at Musk's door.
Yeah, that's fair. Disclosure: I actually work at a startup that spun out of a university Hyperloop team (though we're several pivots down the line, and had already pivoted away from Hyperloop when I joined). According to my colleagues who were around at the time, the problems with mounting a jet engine directly in front of the passengers became apparent very quickly, whereas the technical challenges of building a vacuum maglev (while still very hard) at least seem possible to overcome.
Curious, what are these problems ?
I'd have to ask, but I think the basic answer is "safety". You'll note that not even military fast jets have the pilot directly in line with the whirring blades o'death.
Thanks, I had forgotten that I read it - I like his writing style, it's such a shame he's wasting so much time on Twitter/X...
At first I thought this was part of the Dictator Book Club series!
It isn't now, but no telling what the future might bring.
If he wasn't constitutionally ineligible I wouldn't put it past him to run for President at some point. Maybe he'll settle for Governor of California.
To me the worst thing he's done at Twitter/X is elevate the blue checks to the top of the reply stream. Reading the top replies was my favorite part of the site. Now you have to wade through dozens, or hundreds of posts of nonsense to get to actual good posts. And since no one does that anymore, good posts don't get much replies or likes anyway.
My time spent on Twitter has dropped to almost zero for this reason. But on the flip side, my productivity and outlook on life have improved significantly. So maybe I should thank him.
I didn't realize he did that!
So, I mostly avoid engaging with twitter, but I do engage with a bunch of people who engage with twitter quite a lot, and it sounds like "negative impact on the general user experience of twitter" has actually been a more or less continual subject of discussion since he took over. Some of that may be negative valence attached to Musk himself, but they're attached to concrete changes like this which actually do affect people's experience of the site.
There’s a script you could maybe cobble together with some chatgpt help you could run with Ublock which can likely fix this. I have a similar one running that deletes all tweets from my timeline that don’t have ArXiv links in them.
Yeah but like I said, few bother to wade down to find the good stuff anyway, so a) it doesn't bubble to the top based on number of replies and likes like it used to, which b) makes the good posters not bother as much. In the past I've gotten 100s of 1000s of views on replies to popular tweets. That will never happen again, even if I bought a blue check. There just isn't the engagement in the replies like there used to be.
Ah, yes. Ye cursed network and broken-network effects.
I ddin't know that was possible to do, wow, thanks for the life improvement hack.
You're welcome! The script I use is `twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Your Home Timeline"] article:not(:has-text(/arxiv.org/i))`.
Just click on Ublock, then on the gears which when hovered over say "Open the dashboard", paste it on any new line, then click 'apply the changes'.
I still don't understand why there are people *still* talking positively or even neutrally about Twitter/X a whole DECADE after the APIpocalypse that cemented Twitter as a (US!) platform. (And also the whole Trump era.)
https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/9/3135406/twitter-api-open-closed-facebook-walled-garden
And Elon's plans about transforming it into an "everything app" would make it even worse, will we soon have to change GAFAM to GAFAMX (ew) as the top companies to boycott ?
(The worst are the journalists still using it, you would think that their deontology should prevent them from touching it with anything but a "10 foot pole" ?)
How are you boycotting GAFAM? Where do you get your phone & computer if not from Google or Apple or Microsoft?
Glad that you asked !
On the desktop I've been moving from Windows to Linux for a while now, recently accelerated because while Windows 7 is still getting ~monthly security updates, big software libraries like Qt have started abandoning it.
On the smartphone side, I've started searching for alternatives a couple of years ago, when Google made it clear that you would be not treated like a first class citizen on Android if you didn't use Google Play and Google Services in general.
I actually expect to try the Arch Linux Pinephone this weekend ! (They also have a Pro version, and there's also at least Librem as another alternative.)
That sounds cool. I’ve looked into pinecone back when I was super into diy and open source, but it seemed like too high a price to pay, and too low a payoff. Interested in hearing your review once you get it, and if you remember & want to tell me about it!
Ah, well, there are probably people that already did this better than I can.
(Also, this comment thread has reminded me, *yet again*, of the software issues (and platform issues - with also the ongoing shitshow around Unity) with Substack's comments - why I have stopped engaging in them, especially for ACX - I will probably have to deliberately block them in my browser to not fall in this trap *yet again* - and for the extent that I am willing to tolerate Substack - sadly it *does* have real gems, like this one - should use the forums instead : https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php )
Recently the button to see who has quote tweeted a tweet was also removed (although it's still accessible from the three dots). That was awful as the best responses are often quote tweets.
I don't think anyone I follow has a blue check, or is ever replied to by anyone with a blue check, so it doesn't matter.
Blue checks getting ready more (which also bumps down my chances of being read, since I'm unwilling to pay for one) has also gotten me over the hump to permanently abandon twitter, which is a net improvement for me. So I guess I should appreciate him for that?
He's also now paying certain blue checks for posts that get high engagement, which is basically monetizing trollery, like Ian Miles Cheong complaining about women who don't shave their legs, a bunch of marks getting mad about it and replying, Cheong getting a check for ten grand, etc. I scaled back my Twitter use a couple of years ago when I realized that it was mostly just people trying to make me mad in one way or another. Who needs that? It is just no fun.
BlueSpruce check replies are like cigarette butts in the public square.
Also of note, a mini-biography (related to the new book ??) from the New Yorker, discussed here :
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/168m7me/elon_musks_shadow_rule_the_new_yorker/
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
This turns up a lot in Alon Levy's research on transit costs: government departments generally don't do the design (let alone the actual construction) themselves, but it still really matters that they have enough people to understand the engineering of the project and what they really need (and how much it should cost). One of the major problems in the anglosphere is that the top people with actual power tend to be lawyers and political appointments (who don't understand the technical issues, or care to) instead of engineers who rose up through the ranks and understand the physics of the problems.
Conversely the best transit project I know of (the Madrid metro, which built a citywide metro system in four years then doubled it in the next four, all for absurdly low costs) talks a lot about (a) the geology and engineering, but also (b) how they could get responses from the government within 24 hours when they needed a change of plans due to unexpected conditions.
https://tunnelbuilder.com/metrosur/edition2pdf/page2.pdf
I wonder what the history of this organization looks like. Companies do a similar thing I believe, where management knows much about managing but little about engineering. Militaries have a separate officer track. Maybe moral maze related
To what extent is civilization's story to be told in terms of a finite number of great men - as opposed to one of infinite impersonal socio-historical forces?.... would make a great study.
I first considered your question awhile back in the context of trying to make sense of Robert Moses' profound influence on NYC public infrastructure, but got stuck on credit assignment in a principled way (how and why to attribute major events in the long arc of history to great actors vs systemic forces). I'm used to thinking in RCT terms, but historical reading doesn't really let me do that (or at least I'm not bright enough to figure out how).
In some sense it depends on what you want the explanation to do for you (just sense-making? Predictive accuracy? Decision guidance, especially given limited resources + imperfect information + wicked problems?). As the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful...
"What you want the explanation to do for you". Good question. Purely curiosity in my case..... I'm a Big-picture type and so would like to paint this into my history picture.
Predictive no ... I've no time for those who think they know the future.
I suspect that many books addressing my question already exist...and was partly fishing for examples.
"RCT" ?
"Randomised Controlled Trial".
I'm pretty skeptical of the Robert Moses effect. We have a control group (every other city in the country) and we can see they all changed in roughly the same way.
(This isn't an entirely fair control group - NYC is an outlier among American cities in several ways - but it's pretty good).
The control group is imperfect because infrastructure planners in the rest of the country could look over Moses's shoulder and try to imitate what he was doing. Caro's biography of Moses, at least, makes it sound like an awful lot of them were doing just that.
Tolstoy's War And Peace is about this, despite being a novel - about 1% of it is essays about philosophy of history. He goes for your option B - Bonaparte thinks he's a Great Man but is really just an epiphenomenon on the tide of history.
Start about now and you'll be able to review it in next year's comp.
I started a while ago, but got kind of lost in all the french 19th century clothing names, compounded by what seems to be French <=> Russian translation errors ??
Thanks....I have, as it happens, read it twice - once as a young man doing the Russian Lit elective and then again in middle age. But - back to the question at hand - is Elon Musk a Great Man....or an epiphenomenon?
Without Napoleon, European history in the 19th century would have looked substantially different. Post-Revolutionary France might have wound up in some kind of war with its neighbours, but I'm sure it wouldn't have invaded Russia.
Tolstoy was a Great Man too, whether he believed in them or not. The history of the novel would look a lot different without him.
As for Musk, I feel reasonably safe in saying that without Musk we'd have electric cars in 2023 (albeit probably worse) but we definitely wouldn't have reusable rockets.
We would have dramatically less electric cars : consider the popularity of electric cars before Musk's Tesla (not going as far back as ~1900), and how the public discourse is only NOW starting to take resource depletion and climate change issues seriously, despite these issues having been widely known since the 1970s, and having been at the front of the scene again since 2010 at least...
I think it was battery tech, not Tesla, that is responsible for the 2010s electric car boom.
Pre-Tesla electric cars sucked because they ran on lead-acid or NiCad batteries, but the Tesla folks were the first to realise that lithium batteries were about to reach the point on the price-performance curve where it made sense to put them in a car and you could get a usable range for a non-insane price.
The big manufacturers would have realised this eventually too, though.
Ah yeah, you're right, looking at it, the tzero prototype was converted from Pb to Li in 2003, which is merely a decade after the explosion of Li publications, and around the explosion of the portable computing battery market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_Propulsion_tzero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_battery#Precommercial_development:_1977-1990
So, yeah, lack of Tesla would have only postponed them by maybe a decade, and not 20-30 years like I was assuming in my previous post.
(Still, the adoption curves being what they are, a first Tesla-like in 2018 rather than 2008 *would* have still meant dramatically less electric cars in 2023.)
Interesting - I'd have thought Napoleon was *the* example of a Great Man who altered the course of history! Yes, it seems likely that *some* dictator would arise in the aftermath of the French Revolution, but not one capable of conquering such a large part of Europe, rewriting European law codes, etc.
The French Revolution created a reset situation in which the most capable ambitious man available would almost inevitably rise to the top and impose a hybrid of the old and new. How far behind Napoleon was the next most competent Frenchman? For Musk he seems to be an outlier by quite a distance (there's Bezos but he isn't much of an engineer).
"Ambitious" manifests in many ways, not just trying to conquer the world. And even if it does chose that form of expression, "capable" is multifaceted and the correlation between ability to become leader of one's own nation is only weakly correlated with the ability to conquer foreign nations.
I wouldn't say War and Peace is about this, actually. I vaguely remember that essay being something of a tangent - sure, it had its place in the narrative, but said narrative was at its core about the psychology of people that were neither Great Men, nor had any claims to being such, nor even had anything to do with the question, really.
That's mainly what I took from it too.
It's not "that essay", it's 24 of them plus an appendix or epilogue. My approach has varied between very rapidly skimming them and omitting them altogether but presumably they do to some extent represent what Tolstoy thought his book was about, or he wouldn't have put them there. The fact that the actual characters are conspicuously not great men, is itself making a point about great men.
Important events tend to have a vast number of causally necessary inputs- things which, had they been different, would have prevented the event from happening.
Without Musk's unusual personality, SpaceX probably wouldn't have happened- but if you could go back far enough in a time machine, there are probably butterflies you could kill that would, through some enormously complicated chain of causality, also prevent SpaceX from happening. The reason we tend not to care about very distant causal factors isn't that they aren't important, but that we can't use them to make predictions- the tiny immediate impact that a butterfly has on the world will take so long to propagate out to a big impact that it's impossible to guess what that impact will look like, wheres the impact of a particularly driven businessman will tend to propagate out quickly in a relatively predictable way.
The problem with "infinite impersonal socio-historical forces" isn't that they aren't causally necessary, it's that they tend to be more like the butterfly- you can't use them to make predictions. If you could, we'd have some broad idea about what the future is likely to look like, which we don't and never have.
Describing history as the story of how important people shaped important events points out a kind of causal chain that we might have some hope of finding similar instances of elsewhere, and of using to improve our predictions- unreliably, but not uselessly. It's far from the only useful causal story you can tell- economics, sociology and so on can identify other chains of causality that can be used to make different kinds of prediction- but it's also not wrong. Reality is much too chaotic to expect big events not to be sensitive even to tiny factors like random individual human personalities.
Everything you say is true and - because it is true - it follows that a totally comprehensive historical narrative is an impossibility. So one is left with stories that are inevitably selective...great personage biographical; economic forces; butterflies wings etc etc.
I should stress that my original comment had no implicit agenda with regard to all this. Just curiosity (triggered by this book review) as to what others think. Every response has been a good one in my view.
The trajectory of any specific gas particle might be extremely chaotic, but we are still able to predict "impersonal forces" like pressure and temperature. (I would expect the effects of butterfly flight on *average* weather to be of the roughly same order, so Lorenz' metaphor might be a bit too misleading IMHO.)
OtoH, as Asimov had already pointed out in Foundation, you need an extremely large amount of particles for fluctuations to become negligible and prediction possible..?
And Napoleon or Musk are pretty big fluctuations !
I think each era produces its exemplars - people who end up at the top because they conform so perfectly to the constraints and incentives that thrir society has. In a way they are there because someone nearly exactly like them would always have been there. The fun bit is where it's their quirks outside of those parameters that actually lead to historical outcomes being different.
For example - Julius Ceasar was the perfect Roman for the late-Republican period, to the extent that if you went back in time and killed him at birth he would most likely have been replaced by someone with exactly the same characteristics and career. The quirk was his personal life, which was scandalous enough to contribute to his assassination down the line and materially affected how the Republic changed into the empire.
Similarly; Musk is a fairly sociopathic dude, with a background in programming, who views people as disposable units to be worked until they burn out and then discarded (ironically he's also incredibly thin-skinned and covetous of what he sees as his due). That's the exemplar - any alternate-world person in the same position would be that way.
The fact that he's also a space flight geek is the quirk.
We already have an alternate-world person in this one - Bezos. He's extremely similar, even down to implausible sci-fi pet projects, but less prone to being in the focus of the media circus.
Good point.
Thinking about these people as exemplars of our age makes me a bit depressed, by the way. Because I'm in the camp that believes that the big conflict of this century will be in how automation (broadly speaking) reduces the power of labour, erodes the middle class and empowers the super-elites that own lots of capital. One of the possible outcomes of this is the idea that, at some point, the guys who own everything will realise that they don't need workers and consumers any more, and will impose some sort of new social order by fiat. And Musk and Bezos have a certain, shall we say, frivolous attitude with the lives of others that makes me imagine cramped ghettos and piles of emaciated corpses as part of our collective future.
Well, on the current trajectory another proletarian uprising seems pretty likely. Of course, AGI-style discontinuities also aren't ruled out, and it's anyone's guess who, if anybody ends up on top in those scenarios.
The difference is that Bezos' space pursuits are a dilettantish indulgence (as are Branson's), whereas Musk's is launching reusable rockets to orbit every few days.
I think the difference between the success of SpaceX and Blue Origin actually speaks to Musk's singularity here: without Bezos, there would be (and are) Amazon-likes, even if marginally worse, because Amazon is basically just a digital Sears-Roebuck catalogue and an admittedly-amazing logistics system (with a very impressive cloud computing company attached, too, but AWS isn't the only comparable offering in its space in the way that SpaceX is.). Without Musk, private spaceflight and reusable rockets basically don't exist (and electric cars are at a minimum held back by a decade or more) because in the world as it presently exists, neither corporate capital nor the space-industrial complex nor even *other billionaires interested in spaceflight* came anywhere close to replicating SpaceX's accomplishments, and the extremely numerous example of well-capitalized automakers hadn't done jack shit on electrification before the Roadster came out.
I think that's unfair to AWS, which basically invented modern cloud computing. It's an easier business to copy than reusable rocket launches, so Google, Microsoft, and lots of little guys have done so, but the tech world is very different pre- and post-AWS.
But being an easily replicable versus non-easily replicable business model is part of the point here: other billionaires and the space-industrial complex continue to accomplish nothing even close to SpaceX, and moderately competitive electric cars from anyone other than Tesla were nowhere until at least 2015 and more like 2020, AWS cloud computing seems to predate Azure by about two years and doesn't have any self-evident technological moats beyond capex requirements.
While I would argue that AWS was only moderately revolutionary (given the existence of proto-AWS analogs in the form of CDNs) in any event (and frankly less important to civilizational advancement than electric cars or cheap spaceflight), the bigger point is that the marginal contribution of coming from a Bezos-run company rather than Ballmer-run one doesn't seem to have been anything close to the disparity between coming from a Musk-run company rather than one run by someone else.
(Also the term "cloud computing" was definitely being tossed around as a buzzword prior to widespread AWS adoption - it was definitely a business idea that was "in the water supply" and given the lack of technological moat seems to me to have been much more inevitable than either private spaceflight or electric cars, which as the review notes were considered radioactive by private capital...) Again, I'm not saying AWS is a bad product, just that its above-replacement contribution to technological advancement seems way lower than those of Musk's industries.)
I consider Bezos to be at the very top of a long but basically continuous distribution of business savants, and Musk is more of a genuine black swan who discontinuously different than his competitors. To make a strained sports analogy: Musk is basically Wayne Gretzky whereas Bezos is more like Ken Griffey Jr.
(This seems to basically jibe with Scott's view as expressed here) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability
I'd go with Bezos as Ty Cobb (evolutionary next step in baseball greatness: hit traditional line drives, just harder and more often than anybody before) vs. Musk as Babe Ruth (unexpected baseball revolutionary: hit huge numbers of home runs, which nobody before had ever thought was feasible).
Come on, Nissan Leaf was and still is THE electric car since 2010 and Nissan has a story of making electric cars since 1947
Tesla positions itself as innovation-pusher not because it has better R&D than Nissan, but because Tesla doesn't have the actual performance
I think the "history of making electric cars since 1947" seems kind of irrelevant -- nominal efforts at electric-car building date back to the 1880s without gaining any kind of commercial traction, meanwhile GM famously had its token EV1 program as a pure compliance measure after which it crushed its own cars. This appears to also reflect the case with Nissan's token-volume Alta and Hypermini offerings.
I don't mean to disparage the LEAF itself (and it post-dates the Tesla roadster by much less time than I'd thought, only two years, so I may have been unduly pessimistic about the counterfactual timeline for electric car development!) but it's weird to argue that it "was and still is THE electric car" when Tesla presently sells twice as many electric cars in a year as Nissan has...ever, and Nissan is reportedly unhappy with LEAF sales.
https://thedriven.io/2023/07/27/nissan-global-ev-sales-pass-1-million-mark-half-of-what-tesla-makes-in-6-months/ (see headline - I've looked at other sales volume figures and this appears to be basically accurate. It's tough to get the exact statistics I'd like here although in fairness there's a strong post-2017 bias for Tesla's hyperbolic sales growth versus Nissan's essentially linear 2010-sales, and for apples to apples we probably want to compare total Tesla sales to total Nissan EV sales, which at some point would maybe include the Ariya in addition to the LEAF?)
Thanks, seems I remembered situation some years ago
Wow, so things have been changing dramatically in the last few years, looks like Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi went from top (?) spot to 10th spot in 2022 (including hybrids, but looks to be roughly similar ?)
Also especially of note the meteoretic rise of the Chinese BYD, tripling (!!!) its sales last year and blowing past Tesla (themselves an impressive x1.4) on EV+hybrids, and probably on EV alone for 2023 ?
https://www.ev-volumes.com/
> nominal efforts at electric-car building date back to the 1880s without gaining any kind of commercial traction
This is just wrong, in the first decades of widespread use EVs have been much more successful than internal explosion engines (though a bit less successful than external combustion engines) :
https://longreads.com/2019/06/13/we-could-have-had-electric-cars-from-the-very-beginning/
(Yes, the title contradicts the article, in at least two ways.)
( The mentioned 1909 Puck centerfold, “Privileged Sport,” : https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ed/81/b0/ed81b005d07b06b5674f2414d2ed5185.jpg )
Tons of books related to this, really....but have your read Norbert Elias' The Civilizing Process vol I and II? Elias can be considered the last of the four great macro-sociologists (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Elias) and the first volume in particular is (still) fantastic. It's more about how certain structures get "inside man" than the relationship between the dead hand of structures versus the living will of people, though.
Thanks....I'll look it up.
Sorry, but this does nothing to alleviate my cognitive dissonance either, and I am not 100% willing to believe stories about Musk's brilliance, simply because he has pitched, and invested time and money, into so many ideas that were obviously daft and indeed turned out to be so - the "Loop" (digging tunnels for battery-powered sleds to transport cars under cities to "fix traffic") was hare-brained on so many levels I don't know where to start, and the "hyperloop" did not make sense on its own terms either, not to mention it's an engineering nightmare wrapped in impossibilities.
As for his psychology, I don't believe for a second that he's autistic. IMO, raging narcissism is a much better explanation for his behavior. Consider this: after the Suoerbowl, Elon was so enraged that his inane tweet had received less attention than that of the POTUS, so the next day he called in his engineers to come up with some way to give his tweets more reach, NOW. Autist or narcissist?
Comment on Hyperloop at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk/comment/40005433
There's no contradiction between autism and narcissism (ie it doesn't have to be one or the other), although I would stress that narcissistic personality disorder is a really complicated diagnosis that can't be clinched by "he just sometimes does egotistical stuff".
Re. narcissicm/ sociopathy - right, you have to look at other manifestations as well. Like, open disregard for rules, constant legal trouble, shameless lying, multiple children from short-term relationships, temper tantrums, reputation for callousness... oh, wait...
You make a convincing case, although I hate the NPD diagnosis in general.
He also seems to have hypomanic traits, including the telltale reduced need for sleep
Is it possible for hypomania, narcissism, and Aspergers/autistic traits all to coexist in the same personality? Hypomania and narcissism often seem to go together (for example, in Trump), but Aspergers/autism seems like an odd fit with them.
As long as we're getting into armchair psychology, this does raise the question of, to super-hyper-over-simplify, if autists aren't interested in people, and narcissists are only interested in themself, what rough beast is born of the two? Perhaps someone who identifies with their projects, and promotes and defends those projects with an unrealistic zeal.
While you have to be careful not to confuse overlapping symptoms, ASD and NPD aren't differential diagnoses per se, and it's not really accurate to say that people with ASD as a rule aren't interested in other people.
I know. That's what happens when you not just simplify, nor even over-simplify, nor yet hyper-over-simplify, but super-hyper-over-simplify. Although I'm curious what, say 7-word definitions someone who knows more about these things would actually use?
I'd be narcissistic too if I were the richest man in the world and had banged a young Talulah Riley.
Grimes has said Musk often wonders if he's the PC in a simulation, and honestly, if you had his life wouldn't you wonder that too?
Imagining yourself as the PC in a simulation is a narcissism giveaway. TLP would see it
For almost anyone else, sure, but for Musk? He's one of the main characters of our cultural discourse, if not our period of history.
Are the two necessarily in conflict?
I've never met or interacted with Musk, but apart from my own social circle, I've also taught in social skills programs for people on the autistic spectrum, and I've seen plenty of weird social pathology in people with formal diagnoses which couldn't just be chalked up to "normal manifestation of autistic behavior." People on the autistic spectrum are just as free as people off it to be weird or dysfunctional in other ways.
At any rate, he does seem very grandiose, which I think is often advantageous for convincing people that he is brilliant and his plans will succeed.
I think “high functioning autism” is seen everywhere nowadays in anyone who is a bit odd, I am usually skeptical about it.
>Autist or narcissist?
Por que no los dos?
Because it was always bothering me as to what this was about, so I finally looked it up :
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have-both
I'm willing to believe Musk is brilliant in some ways, though I am reluctant to believe hagiographic accounts by people who do or hope to benefit from his wealth. At the same time, Musk is a public figure who has said many things that paint a picture of a person who just isn't very bright in a lot of domains. I don't think these are irreconcilable facts as even quite ordinary people can develop specialized insight while getting over their head on lots of subjects. What I do not buy into is the idea of Musk as a polymath tycoon that has likely played a role in the value of his stock holdings.
For those interested in further reading/hearing and don't want to jump into the new book, Lex Fridman just interviewed the author of the new book about Musk, Walter Isaacson, mostly about Musk but also about other things.
I will note that I found some important discrepancies between Scott's summary here and the interview (haven't read the book). Most noticeably, the childhood described by Isaacson is one of difficulty and abuse, and perhaps has a more profound impact on how Musk works and why he succeeds.
YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOV5R7M1Js (Childhood part pretty much the first thing they discuss)
Vance agrees he had a childhood of difficulty and abuse, I just didn't write about that because it wasn't too relevant to the questions I had.
A psychiatrist who doesn't believe a childhood of difficulty and abuse is relevant? Freud's ash is spinning in his urn.
Probably a result of a repressed desire to be sperm in a centrifuge
Oh good, (looking for the Lex Fridman/ Isaacson thread). It was a good interview. I would love Scott to read it and do another review. IMHO Musk is one of the greatest of our time. The one thing I remember from the interview is Isaacson saying that Musk doesn't multi-task, but that he has a (paraphrasing) serial laser focus task. He's all on one thing, and then all in on the next thing.
Reading some of these stories of Musk's focus reminds me of an anecdote I heard about Richard Feynman. A paper of his had been rejected and he came to the office of a colleague to address the concern. The topic of the paper was something obscure and not particularly important (something on 2D elastic theory as I recall). Feynman spent 8 to 10 hours working on the problem without break, but ultimately failed to fix the issue and went home. A few hours later the colleague received a call from Richard that he had finally solved the problem. He'd kept working on it even after he went home. The kicker? This all happened just a few days before Feynman was scheduled to undergo surgery to treat and aggressive form of rare cancer (the one that eventually killed him). The prognosis wasn't great and he literally didn't know if he would be alive at the end of the week. But his focus was so absolute that he could push everything else away to work on whatever task was at hand.
I think there are at least 2 components to 'focus':
1) the ability to do something for long periods without getting distracted
2) the ability to direct (1)
Nerds like me sometimes get nerdsniped (which looks like (1)), which my non-nerd friends admiringly imagine confers me the ability to will myself through any task required to succeed at something as long as what's needed is mostly willpower, or something. But since my (2) is low (mild executive dysfunction?), they're mystified when they find out I can't do seemingly basic grunt work.
Your anecdote about Feynman sounds like (1), not (2). I did my degree in physics, so predictably I love your anecdote. I now work in industry, mostly with non-nerds who seem to excel in their careers due to high (1) and (2), and who would find that quote troubling due to "misplaced priorities".
This is an important distinction. No one disputes that it takes a great deal of effort and discipline to master playing "Through the Fire and the Flames" on expert one-handed while solving a Rubik's cube with the other. But the fact that it takes a great deal of effort and discipline doesn't imply that it's a sensible or productive thing to devote one's time to.
Some choice quotes from the review, as posted on ACXD
> Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?
> A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.
> He excels at determining whether something is technically impossible or not. If it’s not, he hands it off to his employees as an implementation problem.
> Unlike in engineering, where he tries to do everything himself but is often right, in PR he tries to do everything himself, does a terrible job, and never learns
> a pleasure-pain, sadomasochistic vibe that comes with working for Musk. Numerous people interviewed for this book decried the work hours, Musk’s blunt style, and his sometimes ludicrous expectations. Yet almost every person—even those who had been fired — still worshipped Musk and talked about him in terms usually reserved for superheroes or deities.
Even his ex-wife who had a protracted divorce suit against him spent most of the interview trying to make excuses for his behavior.
> He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.
> people keep failing by not taking Musk literally
And, of course, the concluding sentence.
This review makes me inclined to bet *against* Twitter/X getting notably impressive results. Yes, he does seem to have a track record of beating the skeptics, but specifically in the domain of "hard engineering challenges that are clearly possible in principle but just require what looks like an unrealistically large amount of optimization effort". Twitter's problems, such as they are, seem totally different in character from that. Heck, even deciding what the problem is and how you want to solve it, at least if you're trying to do it in a civically-minded way like he says he is, seems like it leans primarily on the philosopher/intellectual skillset that he's not that good at. And if he's generally open about what his grand visions/master plans are, then his failure to articulate anything beyond the slogan "the everything app" would seem to suggest that he doesn't actually *have* a coherent vision for it.
(I do think the "engineering wizard" hypothesis has some explanatory power for how he was able to fire 90% of the workforce without creating obvious embarrassing outages for users, and if his goal was just to make Twitter *profitable* then I guess he can declare victory if/when the advertisers come back. But this would be a much less impressive achievement than Tesla or SpaceX, and he says he's thinking bigger.)
Also, the "people keep failing by not taking Musk literally" claim seems kind of at odds with the "the end result never quite reaches the original goal" claim.
I think this is easy to reconcile: "Musk partially succeeded for both space and EV vs his original goals, while people predicted he'd just fail outright like everyone else who's tried before"
The point here, as I understood it, is that Musk is apparently babbling about making Twitter "the everything app", and many people (including me) would have previously dismissed that as obvious marketing bla bla. I don't think I would even have really registered a comment like this before reading the article. I might have read about it before, and not even remembered. It would have been discarded before reaching the stage of conscious processing, by the same filter that fires on claims that drinking Red Bull will give me wings.
But Scott makes a pretty convincing case (to me) that Elon is probably just completely serious about this, like he's apparently been completely serious all the previous times he's claimed he'll build some ludicrously ambitious thing.
That doesn't mean he will succeed at making an everything app any more than he seems set to get a crewed mission to arrive on Mars by 2025, as was supposedly his target in 2014. But it does mean that the future and future business model of X might look very different from Twitter's, and thus might end up less reliant on Musk's anti-skill at PR and less adjacent to his apparent insanity triggers around culture wars and social media than Twitter maybe is. Which might bode well for its long term chances.
(I say, as if I believed in AGI timelines long enough for "long term" business developments to still be a thing of any real consequence)
I'm thinking of his first two startups, Zip2 and X (later Paypal). These were also software projects, Zip2 involved negotiating with clients (it was kind of Google Maps meets Yellow Pages), and X involved negotiating with banks and regulators. I think these suggest his skills aren't entirely limited to nuts-and-bolts engineering, although of course those two companies didn't do quite as well as Tesla and SpaceX, and he was accused of erratic mismanagement of both.
I think those were also easier problems, in the sense that a lot of the reward was for being in the right place at the right time. (This is my view of most 90s-era startups that were successful but not Google- or Amazon-level successful.)
I think this was true of Zip2, but a lot of PayPal was after the dot-com-crash, and Vance suggests that it was extra impressive it managed to succeed in that environment.
You might be able to tell a story where Musk succeeded at the first half of it because it was a good environment, and at the second post-crash half because Thiel was checking his excesses and doing the real work; I don't remember enough of the relevant chapter to know for sure if this was true.
The wikipedia article seems to say that Musk was fired from both X.com and Paypal in less than a year in each case. Is it really fair to consider his stint at Paypal as a success? In fact, doesn't the model of Musk as not that great at problems outside of engineering fit that evidence really well.
His management style, at least as reported, would lead to most companies firing him - including pre-success Tesla and SpaceX - if it had the ability. That doesn't make it the right choice, as the companies that couldn't fire him seem to have succeeded despite, or because of, his management style.
My thought is that he's mostly achieved his initial vision for Twitter, and is now moving onto later phases. Originally I got the impression that he liked using Twitter but found a bunch of things frustrating, not only with the technical side, but also with how it was putting its thumb on the scales of discourse in ways that he didn't like. And that went away now that he's in charge.
Nowadays Twitter's just a hobby where he can fiddle with minor technical details when he's bored, while pursuing his grand dream of a WeChat crossed with who-knows-what.
I'm struggling to find good data about whether twitter has more outages after all the firings or not. Certainly there have been reports that it has: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/08/spike-in-twitter-outages-since-musk-takeover-hint-at-more-systemic-problems
But I'm skeptical that it took a lot of engineering wizardry to cut 90% and keep the lights on. My assumption is that in most software organisations, if you only cared about keeping the current thing running as is and you didn't care about processes around quality, change management, moderation, current innovation direction or product plans, then you could make huge cuts without causing immediate downtime - the pain would come later as things change. And that's assuming that twitter was not unusually inefficient, which it probably was.
Not particularly relevant, but what kind of a parent is Musk? If he’s anything other than “completely absent” I want to know how he does it. Doesn’t he have like, nine kids? And they’re with how many women? Do they all live with him part time? Do they overlap? What’s a typical breakfast look like?
10. Five kids with Justine who are 16-18, three kids with Grimes that are all under 3, twins with Shivon Zilis that are under 2. Looks like little to no overlap between the kids with different mothers. There's been some recent drama between Grimes and Shivon where it came out that Grimes has never even seen pictures of Shivon's kids (which will apparently soon be remedied with a playdate), and I've also heard rumors that Shivon's kids came as a surprise to her generally.
I've also heard rumors that Amber Heard's daughter is his but I can't tell if there's any reliable evidence for that.
“Five kids with the same woman who are 16-18”
How…. does that work, biologically? For one woman to have five (!) kids in two years, she must have had triplets + twins or a singleton + two sets of twins. That’s super freaking hard on the body, and she did it while having zero hands-on support from her husband, who was off working 100-hour weeks.
I know this review is about Musk, but spare a thought for Justine, who comes across as a goddamn martyr. I hope she’s doing ok.
Indeed :
2004 : 1 child, sudden infant death
2006 : twins
2008 : triplets !
Vance suggests he is a good parent and talks about him doing fun things with his kids and trying to figure out how to raise them right (Justine has half-custody, but he has the other half). But I also don't understand this, and am worried that whatever good parenting he had in 2015 hasn't survived four more companies and five more children.
We recently learned of a 10th (surviving) kid called...
Techno "Tau" Mechanicus
(Tau is a greek letter derived from the Phoenician letter "taw" that looks like an X.)
I had to look this up to determine that you were serious, and that this wasn't a WH40K joke.
Same !
Surprising he didn't go for "Chi". Perhaps he's saving that for the next one.
> Tau is a greek letter derived from the Phoenician letter "taw" that looks like an X.
OK, but why do we care what taw looks like? Tau looks like a T.
We don't, but Musk might, with his faXination...
The kind of parent that names his son "X Æ A-Xii". How much else do you need to know, really?
If you look at all 11 of his children's names, all but the 3 with Grimes have fairly normal names, at least for American kids these days.
Unless you can make a good case that Grimes came up with those names and overruled Musk's objections, that's not much of an exculpation. A bit like "well, to be fair, Jeffrey Dahmer only murdered a small percentage of the people he met."
Are you just not familiar with Grimes at all?
Actually, no.
She's a semi-famous indie electronic artist, and pretty weird herself. I have no doubt she had plenty of input on the weird names. She also frequently trolls the media, for example by ostentatiously reading Marx in front of the paparazzi after she and Elon split, so unless we see birth certificates I wouldn't put my mortgage down on a bet that any of those names are legal.
Dahmer? Even restricting the comparisons to cannibals, Armin Meiwes is a far better example. He was harmless until he met up with someone who wanted to be eaten.
But more seriously, 100% of Grimes' children have these names. The only common factor is her. Occam's razor suggests that she is the cause.
On the other hand, here's a quote from her, about Elon: "I so need to be in love to make good art. The best is being heartbroken, or in a volatile relationship. My worst creative periods have been when I’ve just been in a stable relationship. In my current relationship, we’re both super alpha, crazy people. It’s just level ten all the time, which is great, even though it’s very crazy." Which suggests that it's the combination that does it.
Apparently I'm wrong, because you have to look at full names. What I thought were merely "Strider" and "Azure" are actually "Strider Sekhar Sirius" and "Azure Astra Alice". So, not as out-there as the Grimes names, but clearly Elon has an influence.
Thanks for the background. I do think that an exotic middle name that is easily hidden behind initials is not nearly as bad as an unpronounceable mess that could serve as a strong password, and it sounds like Grimes played a part in that, but I don't think it was all her doing (seeing how that mess starts with a telltale 'X').
He has one child who doesn't speak to him anymore...
<When asked about his relationship with his daughter in October 2022, he added that things could change, but that he has a good relationship with “all the others”.
“Can’t win them all,” Musk said.>
This child is trans, and the estrangement seems to be a major impetus in his anti-wokeness crusade at Twitter
Yes, I suspect that played a big role in him spending $44 billion on Twitter so he could have a way to help change the culture.
https://youtu.be/B2wRvhbJIQQ
this is hilarious, thanks for sharing
You want to find+replace "4D" with "5D".
Do I? I originally had 5D, then I got confused because 4D chess already sounds pretty hard, then I Googled it and 4D had more search results.
But my instinct was also towards 5D so I'll take your comment as a concurring vote and do that next time.
4D is common, 5D is just taking it a step further. Astral Codex Ten needs to get ahead of the inflationary chess dimension curve: next time jump straight to 7D chess.
He can be more ambitious than that!
Clearly the solution is to just replace it with “nD-chess for a sufficiently big n”, but it doesn’t read that nicely
Why ?
4D chess just sounds like regular real life chess, which admittedly is hard but the "4D" then becomes redundant. Saying "Elon Musk plays chess" also then becomes a slightly confusing comment.
Especially as he's not very good at actual chess. Mostly because becoming good involves a level of obsession at the expense of everything else and he didn't find it an interesting enough problem to become that obsessed
Regular real-life chess is 2D.
In that case you should be able to impress people by saying you play 3D chess 🙂
Sure, and you can impress them *even more* by saying 4D chess. Hence the "Trump/Musk is playing 4D chess" meme.
Bah, these puny minds cannot compare with my mastery of jillion-D chess !
Not really. I'm not sure if anyone has ever come up with rules for 3D chess, but 3D chess would at least be easy enough to visualise.
4D chess requires you to visualise the board in four dimensions, which most people can't do.
This page puts forth a reasonable argument that really high dimensional chess would be a stupid game. In twelve dimensional chess you'd need at least 65 queens to checkmate a king. https://www.gilgamath.com/twelve_dimensional_chess.html
Alternatively, you need better high-dimensional generalizations of the standard chess pieces. Maybe an n-dimensional queen moves by picking any (n-1)-dimensional hyperplane whose normal vector has -1, 0, or 1 in each coordinate, and then moving to any space within that hyperplane that's not completely blocked off by other pieces. This would have the same behavior in 2D chess, but is much better at checkmating in 12D chess. In particular, with this definition of queen, a single queen (plus a king) can checkmate a king in any number of dimensions.
I once worked a bit on prototyping a 4d board game. It's tricky to imagine 4d space, but not that tricky. The weird thing is that 4d space is simultaneously massive and compact. The board I made had 576 total spaces but the furthest possible 2 points were only 12 spaces away from each other.
There is a video game about "5d" chess you might be interested to check
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_Chess_with_Multiverse_Time_Travel
Math geeks would say that’s debatable. The board is 2D, but there’s a clear time axis (even if it’s in discrete turns), so regular chess is in fact 3D.
4D chess is common internet slang
https://www.5dchesswithmultiversetimetravel.com/
Maybe even “6D”
I wonder why Scott never mentioned Neuralink. If you believe that "He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.... people keep failing by not taking Musk literally" then Scott just fell into the same trap. Musk's claims about Neuralink are way more ambitious than anything he ever said about Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.
It wasn't in the book, which was written in 2015.
I know I said I don't want to bet against Musk, but biology is really hard and he hasn't yet proven that his good instincts extend to it.
I think he has good instincts as to what it possible, but the society have a lot more power to prevent him from iterating, failing and succeeding with human volunteers. Maybe he will find an ingenious way to work around it, assuming he gives the company the attention it needs to succeed.
Maybe this is just my domain chauvinism, but I claim biology is harder than everything else, and people who are good at everything else might just totally fail in biology.
I hope you are wrong... But I am not holding my breath.
Biology is a graveyard for the careers of people who make it big in physical domains and then decide to show the poor idiot folk who work with living matter how it's done.
Is that a prediction ?
Didn't seem to be like this, at least until recently (?), more like the reverse ?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/physicists-in-biology-and-other-quirks-of-the-genomic-age/
Fair enough - my comment doesn't refer to the (very real) contributions of physicists in biology. And physicists have provided plenty of the tools that biologists depend on to study living systems even when they haven't stepped foot into a lab with a cell culture room or laminar flow.
The issue I'm referring to here is noted in the same piece you've linked to - physics generally yields to a reductionist approach, while biology does not. So the history of the field is littered with physicists who come in, decide to solve some big problem, and then come up with a theory of everything/spherical cow example that just doesn't work in the field.
Unravelling any biological system is maddening this way, because it only has to work and isn't obliged to do so in any way that makes sense to the human mind. Look at DNA, for instance. We know what it is and how it works on a molecular level. But we still can't get the damned stuff to do anything for us on a systems level. So if I ask a biologist to come up with a novel protein to catalyze a chemical reaction, that's years worth of work. If I ask them to come up with a novel metabolic pathway, that's decades. And if I ask them to, say, make me a zebrafish that has air breathing organs, grows to the size of a carp and tastes like salmon, then I'll get thrown out of the lab.
Well so far he's killed a bunch of monkeys, so...
But how many QALY were lost?
For the monkeys?
He’s killed a bunch of monkeys….
…repeating experiments other’s had already demonstrated, so effectively for PR reasons.
Nitpick: we don't colonise Antarctica because of the Antarctic Treaty, which forbids commercial exploitation of the continent. There are a lot of mineral resources there, and I have seen suggestions that the Treaty will be quietly put aside once climate change makes mining a little easier. Also, a handful of children have been born in Antarctica in support of various countries' territorial claims.
I think it's still relevant that nobody cares enough about Antarctica to do anything other than make a treaty saying to leave it alone. But fine, central Greenland, or the Mojave Desert.
Actually, there's another way in which Antarctica is relevant - the Outer Space Treaty (which prevents nations claiming territory in outer space) is modelled on the Antarctic Treaty. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty#Applicability_in_the_21st_century it's unclear whether e.g. asteroid mining is prohibited by the OST; in Antarctica (I belatedly discovered) it's forbidden by the Madrid Protocol rather than the Antarctic Treaty proper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Environmental_Protection_to_the_Antarctic_Treaty). But either way, this is not a legal framework set up with "gonna build us a city on Mars and make a trillion dollars lfgggggggggg" in mind.
The Mojave Desert isn't exactly empty. It's home to Las Vegas, Palmdale, Victorville, St. George... literally millions of people live in the Mojave Desert.
I don't know about the others, but Las Vegas looks like more and more as a temporary occupation of land rather than a real colonization, considering their water issues...
I doubt you'd see Antarctic cities being put in place there, though, compared to rotating crews in like oil platforms.
That's the challenge with a Mars city - there's no reason for people to stay there, unless they really want to live in a Mars base. I could imagine you could find thousands of people from billions on Earth who would do that (especially for scientific research), but hundreds of thousands? Permanently? I'm not so certain. Cheaper and faster spaceflight makes it easier to rotate people back, too.
It's the same issue with free-floating space colonies, like O'Neill Cylinders. I don't think we'll hav any sort of meaningful "push" or "pull" factors on space colonization until we have hefty life extension or medical immortality.
I know the British Antarctic Survey staff do either six-month or eighteen-month tours (summer or summer-winter-summer) - the boat comes at the start and end of a summer season. I think Antarctic mining tours would similarly be measured in months rather than the weeks common in the North Sea oil industry, but who knows, maybe with enough money they could afford to rotate staff in and out more frequently.
There's one big pull for space colonies, light lag. The further your industrial operation is from Earth the longer any situation requiring an operator response affects production until you can get a message back. Having a group of trouble shooters on site would be extremely valuable, though whether that would be structured as a colony or more akin to an oil-rig would depend on location and surrounding technologies.
>Cheaper and faster spaceflight makes it easier to rotate people back, too.
So-called "Fast Transit" Mars missions usually have a nominal 4-month travel time, each way. And those are pretty close to the limit for current technology; the VASIMR people like to talk about 37-day trips, but those all have an "insert miracle here" step that basically calls for a fusion reactor - and not a plausible extrapolation of the ones people are promising to build Real Soon Now; a classic science-fiction handwavium fusion reactor.
Going to work on Mars isn't *necessarily* a lifetime commitment, but neither is it going to be an ordinary crew rotation like you see on oil rigs or arctic outposts. People are going to spend many years at a time there, which means you're going to have to build approximately the same support infrastructure that you'd need for permanent settlement, which means some of the people who go there will decide to settle.
As for reasons for people to live there, and for other people to pay to have them live there,
A: It's a *planet*, and one we've barely scratched the surface of exploring. Betting there will be nothing of significant value there, is not the smart move. Among other things, there's a fair chance of finding life there. If there's life on Mars, that's reason for a whole lot of biologists to take up residence. Not just government scientists on a quest for Pure Scientific Truth, but researchers for pharma and biotech companies.
B: There's definitely reason for people to want to do lots of stuff in Earth orbit. That's already a ~half-trillion-dollar-a-year industry even at today's still-excessive launch costs. And Low Earth Orbit is energetically closer to the surface of Mars than it is to the surface of the Earth. 6.8 km/s vs 8.9 km/s. So given the existence of a Mars settlement with even light industrial capability, and a reasonable Mars-Earth transportation system, an awful lot of stuff that people need to make a profit in proven Earth-orbit markets, will be most profitably produced on and delivered from Mars.
Well, OK, some of it will be produced on Phobos and Deimos.
Thanks for pointing out the delta-v's, that's a huge deal, even if not the only consideration...
I'm inclined to agree with the arguments that the Antarctic Treaty is likely to be renegotiated or set aside if and when Antarctic mining becomes economically viable. Moreover, similar restrictions (via the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty) exist for space colonization.
Fortunately, no one who matters cares about the Moon Treaty other than to wipe their ass with it.
I think an app that incorporates chat and payments is an extremely good idea. I loved it when keybase did it. So I should probably predict that Musk will succeed, since pushing through the pain and delivering seems to be one of his super powers.
Still, it's hard to get away from how colossally he overpaid for twitter due to pure silliness, and I do wonder if it's a bit of a perfect trap for someone like him. He seems to have a high need for attention, and a low ability to moderate himself. If he's insisting that algorithms be changed in order to inflate his personal reach (https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter), then he's undermining the trust that the social aspect of twitter is built on and pulling effort away from actually achieving the vision. The nature of twitter is that there will be lots of opportunity for ego stroking at the expense of the mission.
Facebook tried to add payments via a crypto and it fell apart not because it was a bad idea but because Facebook are hated and Zuck is not trusted by the people who would have to be enthusiastic about it. Musk of 2008 might have been loved enough to pull the mission off, but I don't think Musk of 2023 is.
Did he overpay for Twitter? My impression was he paid a reasonable price (plus a little extra to incentivize them to say yes) for when he signed the contract, and then the stock market crashed and it was worth much less.
You might be right. My memory at the time was thinking it was way overpriced, but now you've triggered me into looking back at it, it seems like it was within the realm where reasonable people might differ on the valuation rather than something cut and dried. Still, a lot of people at the time agreed with me, e.g. from Fortune https://archive.ph/IVzkB, and Musk himself https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-deal-purchase-overpaying-excited-takeover-lawsuit-tesla-2022-10
I remember it being high but not ridiculously so - IIRC he offered $54.20 a share when the share price was in the high $40s. But then the market tanked, taking down both the value of Twitter shares and the Tesla shares Musk was planning to borrow against to finance the deal.
This is true.
In general people do due diligence before signing a contract. Musk later tried to claim he wanted out because of new things he found out (that he would've found out doing dd like a normal person), but this was transparently an excuse to get out of the deal that had gone bad due to general market factors. If he had taken time to do dd he would've paid less because he'd have waited to buy until after the downturn, but that was just a matter of luck.
I remember doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations on Twitter's profitability vs Musk's purchase price at the time. I don't remember the numbers and I'm too lazy to redo them at the moment, but I remembered the return on capital being pretty low unless Musk got a really good deal on interest rates for a leveraged buyout, which it doesn't sound like he did. But that only means he overpaid relative to existing profitability: the deal could still make sense if he managed to drastically cut costs (which he probably has, by way of firing 80-90% of the engineering staff) or rapidly growing the company (time will tell, but it doesn't sound like he's off to a great start).
I am now and was then pretty sure that Twitter was substantially overvalued in roughly the same way that Tesla was substantially overvalued. Market Cap well in excess of what any plausible revenue stream could justify in the inevitable blue-chip endgame, boosted by the hype and bigger-idiot factors.
It is true that at the time Elon made his offer, it was about what you'd expect for a buyout based on Twitter's nominal market cap at the time, But I'm not sure how Elon ever thought it was a good idea to borrow against one overvalued bubble stock to buy another overvalued bubble stock. That inevitably, once the bigger idiots are exhausted, results in your owing bankers real money well beyond what any of the underlying assets are worth.
OTOH, if his goal really was to Save Humanity from the Woke Mind-Virus, At Any Price, then at that time the price was going to be ridiculously high and who knows how many lives the Woke Mind-Virus will destroy while waiting for the price to go down.
Given that the chosen price was set by a 4/20 joke, I think it’s pretty clear he overpaid.
IIRC, Twitter was barely above $42 a share, which I honestly think is how the initial thought crossed Musks mind. Of course he had to pay above market, so he offered $54.20/share.
Unless someone can offer a pricing model where 4/20 jokes have significant returns, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t overpay.
It would be a terrible idea for antitrust reasons.
Also Twitter/X wouldn't be the dumpster fire that it is if it was "chat"... I guess because it has just *slightly* more permanence than chat ?
"Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
This highlights another potential issue that was not really raised in this review, in that certain benefits of Musk's projects may be dependent on his personal whims or be lost as a result of him pursuing his own interests. While I've seen some Ukrainians speak very highly of Starlink and Musk himself, at other times it seems like he has prevented them from reaping its full benefits. There have also been reports that Musk's demands to Taiwan have prevented a Starlink deal being done with the government there.
Indeed, for someone who is so vocal about free speech issues in America, his willingness to cozy up to Xi's government in China is pretty notable; his apparent comfort with authoritarianism is not a trait I would hope for in someone with ambitions to shape the future. People are rightly impressed with the development of AI and rightly concerned about the way in which we mange its development, as well as worried about the implications for the far future. Colonization of space is a worthwhile goal, but shouldn't we be concerned about the way in which we do it and the implications for future people? A society on Mars would be a staggering achievement, however it doesn't seem crazy to hope that that society will not be designed according to Musk's vision.
As for making X the "everything app", I'm also skeptical, and skeptical it would necessarily be a good thing. He has mentioned WeChat many times and seems to take it as an inspiration. As someone who lives in China, the downsides to app dependence are pretty clear (especially during covid), without even getting into what happens when the government or Musk decide that you can't use the app anymore. I'm not an expert but I would guess Wechat has also benefitted from some pretty specific factors in attaining the success it did (e.g. China skipping straight from cash to mobile payments).
I’ve been living in Taiwan for quite a while, and smuggled in a Starlink business receiver about a year ago, registered to my US address and paid on a US card. The requirement from the Taiwan government is for them to be able to take operational control of “Starlink for Taiwan” in the event that the PRC attacks Taiwan. Asking for insurance against the political pressure to disable “Starlink service to Taiwan” is reasonable, but I think that Elon’s refusal to seed control to any government (even one that I like) is pretty sensible. It seems rather ridiculous for President Tsai’s team to have even asked for this.
But I share your concerns about Elon seemingly playing ball when Xi’s team requires this or that. It doesn’t seem to jibe with most anything he’s had to say that provides a window to his worldview/philosophy of human rights. IMO how Elon’s companies handle engagement with the PRC is far more important than anything he does with X.
This is from the new biography, just reported today, about a conversation he had with Bari Weiss:
"At one point during their two-hour conversation, she asked how Tesla’s business interests in China might affect the way he managed Twitter. Musk got annoyed. That was not what the conversation was supposed to be about. Weiss persisted. Musk said that Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened. China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, had two sides. Weiss was disturbed."
Both-sidesing the crimes against humanity in Xinjiang doesn't strike me as "well-intentioned, showing good instincts, or displaying deep insight". More like the amoral, post-hoc justifications of a ruthless businessman.
Overall: that’s lame af.
Nuanced: There are ‘two sides’ to what’s happened in Xinjiang, and to the Uighyurs.
In addition to what’s been published, I did business there in person in the mid 2000s, have stayed in touch during the 2010s, and have a Uighur on my team now (who does not live in the PRC, but has family in Xinjiang). Two sided perhaps, but not remotely evenly sided.
99.9% side: awful behavior that predated Xi, then crimes against humanity under Xi - in both periods affecting ooo 10M people.
0.1% side: there have in fact been small groups of rebellious people in Turkestan (ie currently called Xinjiang province) who want either to separate from the PRC and form their own new Turkestan, or be annexed by the Tajiks. And a handful of those people have, so it legitimately seems, killed people in a couple incidents from 2000 to now. From the coded and brief discussions on pre-2000 Xinjiang I’ve had with Uighyurs who have not ‘admixed’ with Han folks under forced/induced situations, there was more resistance post-Mao, and more incidents.
As someone somewhat out of the (hyper(link))loop - why ?
Why do I think Musk's comments should not be interpreted to mean something along the lines of uf911's 'nuanced' explanation? (genuinely want to confirm if this is what you mean, this isn't some rhetorical flourish)
I would say because when people say there are two sides to something very, very rarely would they mean 99.9% one side responsible to 0.01% the other side, often implies something much closer to 50-50, or, in this case, that the response of the government was something close to reasonable. Also, given Musk's other statements and actions regarding China and Taiwan, it seems pretty obvious he's just engaging in bog standard (albeit despicable) apologist rhetoric.
I think you're missing something substantial on the good side, which is that China has very real anti-poverty programs in Xinjiang which greatly benefit Uighurs in a purely economic sense. My impression (not an expert) is that the Chinese state is legitimately worried about the possibility for religiously-motivated Uighur separatism to cause social unrest and bloodshed, and is reacting to this with exactly the sort subtlety that you'd expect from an extremely self-confident and ruthlessly pragmatic authoritarian regime. On the economic front, they use jobs programs and government-led investment to drive out poverty and thus deprive separatists of a fertile political base. On the demographic front they are finally applying China's birth-control policies to the Uighur minority (who were exempt until recently) and providing cash incentives to interracial couples (plus weird "big Han brother"-style programs where Uighurs get paired up with fake Han "relatives"). On the religious front, the Chinese government is deciding who can and can't preach, and proselytizing against the pork taboo. And just for good old authoritarian measure, they've made gigantic reeducation camps and subjected something like 10% of the population to stays of various lengths (most short, some long).
Most of this is horrifying, but it's important to say that it is not a "genocide" in the sense that the Holocaust or Rwanda were genocides. The goal isn't to eliminate a group of people that the Hans in charge don't like. It's the carrot and (extremely heavy) stick approach of the PRC to a real and complicated social problem, which is that they find themselves in the awkward position of ruling a chunk of land of immense strategic importance, which happens to contain about 11 million Uighurs who are legitimately sympathetic to Muslim extremism and violent separatism. If Uighurs all became Chinese patriots tomorrow, (and they could convince the CCP that they had), the detention centers would disappear tomorrow.
<<I think you're missing something substantial on the good side, which is that China has very real anti-poverty programs in Xinjiang which greatly benefit Uighurs in a purely economic sense>>
Given all the horrifying stuff you seem to acknowledge is happening, I'm not sure that this really counts as "missing something substantial on the good side." Reliable data on XJ is hard to come by, but I would suspect the benefits of economic growth there aren't distributed evenly between Han and Uighur. There are major Chinese companies who refuse to hire Uighurs (or Muslims in general) and Tibetans, even when they have operations in those regions.
<<On the demographic front they are finally applying China's birth-control policies to the Uighur minority (who were exempt until recently>>
This seems to leave out some important context. While the policies in XJ may resemble the one child policy (which had many horrific consequences too), the intent is different; in XJ it's done as a tool to accelerate forced assimilation. It also doesn't align with the governments pivot to encouraging people in the rest of China to have more kids.
<<Most of this is horrifying, but it's important to say that it is not a "genocide" in the sense that the Holocaust or Rwanda were genocides. The goal isn't to eliminate a group of people that the Hans in charge don't like. >>
Yes, if you understand genocide to only mean "mass killings" then it is not that, which is what many people first think of when they hear the term. But looking at the UN Convention on Genocide....
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
....there's definitely a strong case to be made for b, d, and e, perhaps also c. So I don't think it's necessarily unfair to apply the label, although I generally don't because I don 't want to be sucked into a debate about definitions like I am now. But I do have to disagree with the second part of the statement, it seems like the CCP do want to eliminate Uighur culture (perhaps aside from a kind of cosplay, minstrel form of culture the CCP proscribes for ethnic minorities) and implement forced assimilation until they are pretty much indistinguishable from Han.
<<It's the carrot and (extremely heavy) stick approach of the PRC to a real and complicated social problem, which is that they find themselves in the awkward position of ruling a chunk of land of immense strategic importance, which happens to contain about 11 million Uighurs who are legitimately sympathetic to Muslim extremism and violent separatism. If Uighurs all became Chinese patriots tomorrow, (and they could convince the CCP that they had), the detention centers would disappear tomorrow.>>
I mean when you commit to having an empire, you often find yourself in awkward positions of ruling a group of people who would prefer you didn't, but those problems are of your own making, and don't excuse the awful things you do to try to maintain your empire. Perhaps consider decolonization. And there are not 11 million Uighurs sympathetic to Islamic extremism or violence.
> Turkestan (ie currently called Xinjiang province)
You mean Zungaria?
"a couple incidents" appears to be a major understatement if this Wikipedia article is to be believed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China). Dozens or hundreds of incidents (largely bombings) and hundreds of deaths.
Aren't asteroids the main reason we should colonize Mars and not Antarctica? I mean, in case of any high-impact disaster that could destroy life on one planet but not the other, the two-planet system would save human kind. Isn't this what Musk has brought up as the main reason for making a Mars colony?
I think you can solve the asteroid threat more easily by tunneling underground on Earth and building a colony beneath the surface.
I don't even know if it has to be underground - what if you have self-sufficient domes in a few different places, so that if the asteroid strikes (eg) America, you've got a dome in Russia which isn't destroyed by the shockwave itself, and is able to sustain itself agriculturally for a few decades until you can go outside again?
Also, the chance of an asteroid strike is about 1/1 million in the next 100 years, so bringing a Mars colony forward by 100 years doesn't get you a lot of x-risk reduction.
Agreed - Any technology that allows you to live on Mars would also allow you to live in a vault, with the bonus that you could open the door at some point and expect to breathe the air.
The major problem from an asteroidal impact on the order of Chicxulub is the dust and soot in the upper atmosphere cutting off enough sunlight to make growing plants impossible for as long as a decade. No protective dome or underground bunker will make the upper atmosphere transparent enough to grow plants. And even if you've got enough preserved food, vitamin C has lousy shelf life. Hope you've got enough light bulbs and a solid enough supply of electricity to grow enough cabbage to make enough sauerkraut to ward off scurvy.
Not that it's logistically easier to maintain agriculture on Mars than set up survival bunkers with lots of grow lights around a nuclear power plant or something, but any major settlement on Mars will likely, simply as a matter of cost reduction, have substantial local greenhouses taking advantage of the natural sunlight on a reasonable day-night cycle, plus reasonable local supply of CHON elements. If Earth's atmosphere is rendered opaque, a large Mars colony might manage to keep humanity going.
Of course, that requires there to be some reason there's major settlement on Mars to begin with.
How much light is going to be blocked by dust in the atmosphere? A quick google search suggests that Mars gets ~1/3 the light that earth does. I am a bit skeptical that sunlight on earth will be reduced that much for very long.
Sauerkraut (or similar) lasting a decade hardly seems to be a challenge ?
Even if you have plenty of shelf-stable food, vitamin C itself is unstable, both from heat (so anything canned has effectively zero vitamin C) and time on the scale of years (at least at room temperature). So the issue is not that you need so much of certain preserved foods, but that you can't conveniently stockpile vitamin C.
The choices, then, for humans surviving a Chicxulub-type impact (assuming the estimates of sunlight blocking are accurate) are either inconvenient stockpiling (managing to keep vitamin C-rich foods continually frozen, requiring power and equipment) or ongoing production of vitamin C.
Ongoing production has three routes I've managed to think of. There's 1) power and equipment for growing plants with artificial light, 2) power and equipment for operating bacterial fermentation vats, and 3) hunt, trap, or raise (feeding from your food stockpiles) animals with working GULO genes, then eat them raw.
(Sauerkraut I only mentioned because making it out of fresh-grown cabbage has two advantages, increasing shelf life of the cabbage to months and potentially increasing the available vitamin C to as much as twenty times higher levels than in raw cabbage. It accordingly is a quite practical way of stretching any cabbage grown under artificial light to ward off scurvy. But it doesn't mean that "lay in a supply of sealed sauerkraut before the impact, eat some five years later" is going to work.)
After looking it up, while a decade seems to be a challenge indeed, you're plain wrong about "zero vitamin C" :
(for instance) https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/canning/items/show/101
Sounds like it might still make a difference between mild scurvy and death ?
As far as I can tell, Mars is worse than Earth would look like *after* pretty much any high-impact disaster one can think of, and a self-sustaining Mars colony is even more absurdly difficult than one that depends on regular supplies from Earth, so until and unless rocketry levels up multiple times in dramatic fashion, our efforts would be better spent preparing for surviving possible disasters on Earth, just as Scott suggests. (My gut feeling is that Musk's Mars visions are like someone pitching luxury cruises in the Carribean right after Columbus has returned from discovering Hispaniola - yeah, sure, maybe, but not anytime soon.)
Yeah, Mars colonization is a sort of memetic trap for space nerds. It's just earth-like enough to have major downsides, but without either the benefits (breathable air, radiation shielding, 1g) or a compelling resource that only it can provide.
Personally I'm of the view that we'd be better served by colonizing the moon and then moving to places with lots of resources or harvestable energy instead, maybe use Venus as a vacation home and keep Mars for a far-future terraforming project.
I'm all in on giant space stations.
There's no point in colonising space unless it's going to be better than Earth. People aren't going to want to live on Mars, because Mars kinda sucks. People don't even want to live in Nuvanut.
Venus presents some very interesting possibilities. The challenges are well known (acidic atmosphere, crushing atmospheric pressure, so hot at the surface that lead melts) but it's those very features the make it a unique environment for industry. The atmosphere is highly reducing (with all the sulfuric acid) and is so dense that it's concentration of N2 is 4 times that of Earth's and even trace elements are fairly abundant. That's a lot of pieces in place for the building blocks of a chemical economy.
The really nice thing is that there's an area of the atmosphere at roughly earth temperatures and pressures, and where a blimp containing an earth-standard mix of gases can float. So your actual habitat could be held above the lead-melting hellscape of the surface, absorbing abundant solar power, and with rootlike structures dipping down to take up gases or mine.
The major issue with Venus (besides making blimp-cities work) is that its' pretty far down the gravity well. So it takes a lot of delta-V to ship stuff in. You win on shipping stuff out, though.
Yep. Floating cloud cities are not only possible, but easily the most practical means of colonizing Venus.
One underrated problem with Mars colonization (besides the well-known problem of long and expensive travel/shipping, rotten climate, thin atmosphere, etc) is that Mars is enough further from the sun than Earth to make it substantially harder to grow food even with climate-controlled greenhouses. Mars gets about 40% as much sunlight as the Earth, meaning that Mars's tropics get about as much sunlight as some of the islands off the northern coasts of Canada or Siberia. It's not an absolute dealbreaker, but crops that need full sun are either going to grow a lot slower than they do on Earth or they'll need some combination of sunlight concentration (reflectors, etc) or artificial lighting.
I view it as the civilizational equivalent of a shut-in going outside, breathing fresh air, and meeting people. Sure, there's more immediate practical benefit in refinishing the attic, and it's unlikely that the house will burn down any time soon. But there's an entire life of experience out there, entire literal horizons that are inconceivable if one stays in a place one doesn't even realize is tiny and cramped.
Asteroid impacts capable of planetary level devastation are extremely rare, in addition to what the others have pointed out. And they can be redirected.
Aside from the fact that, as already noted, mineshafts are cheaper than Mars colonies, asteroids are not an extinction risk any time in the few centuries, and comets are an extinction risk (modulo mineshafts) of P~1e-9/year. And we could probably knock that down to P~1e-11/yr with a JWST-equivalent telescope dedicated to comet-hunting (or, alternately, P~2E-8, find out that there's one comet we need to knock a wee bit off course sometime in the next couple decades).
There are good reasons to expect that settling Mars will be a rewarding enterprise some time in this century, but extinction risks are not one of them.
Right, these arguments are all good. What about engineered plagues? Maybe the Martians will not catch a 100% lethality rate bacterium created in the Evil Labs? This is the only remaining existential risk I can think of that multi-planet lifestyle might help against.
The $3,900 actuator cost $1m minimum if it took 9 months of the time of a senior project director.
I was wondering about that, but it might be worth it if you use it on every Falcon rocket.
At $0.1m vs $0.01m, it doesn't take many Falcon rockets before you've saved >$1m.
OK I now feel I am over-flogging a trivial point, but the anecdote is incoherent because it is trying to make 2 different contrasts: $120,000 vs $3,900, and 9 months of Davis's time and 3 hours drafting a description, vs Musk's response "OK". "Davis spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device ... Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt." That sounds a reasonable amount of time and effort to dedicate to what sounds like an absolutely critical component, but it only looks like $3,900 because it is done in-house. Senior engineer design time costs money, and outside contractors want mark-up. And this only has to be done once. So if you accepted the $120,000 bid you'd do so on the basis that you got the IP for the design, or that second and subsequent actuators were $10,000 apiece.
Why, incidentally, cannot substack link you to a reply to a post at the same time as it tells you about it? Or put a find in page function in the app?
Yup, it's the standard crafting/maker/DiYer scenario of "If you do it yourself, you can save a ton of money, assuming you already own all of the tools and also assuming that your time is worth nothing".
Substack comment system is bad (for one it requires JavaScript even to display them, also sluggish), also why would you use an app instead of a real browser, which also has many features like in-page search.
Those were the early years of SpaceX, presumably before Falcon 1's first flight in 2006. Davis most likely wasn't a "senior project director" back then, but a single engineer – Musk hardly would have tasked an entire team with developing what he deemed a "garage opener".
Yeah, the first level savings may not have been as much as the anecdote makes out, but being the kind of place where you take control and responsibility for large parts of the things you depend on will have a bunch of longer term benefits too. Many of the bigger companies try to integrate vertically to give themselves more control and ability to innovate quickly.
If you're going to think about it that way then you need to determine the $ value of the next best project the director would have worked on. Of course that's assuming the actuator is the only thing the director did
I assume that the $5k "budget" and the $3.9k cost, both refer to the non-recurring unit cost once the item is in production.
In which case, if this is an engine gimbal actuator of which there are I think 20 per Falcon 9, then you pay that guy's salary twice over on the first launch, and amortizing his salary over all the Falcon 9 launches per date puts the effective total cost per actuator at $4,550.
Is Musk trying to turn Twitter, I mean X, into Weibo? Weibo is an all-in-one app where you can also make payments. Seems like an ambitious idea.
He is a polymathic engineer of rare but not unparalleled breadth, and the **sequence of areas** he attained expert-level knowledge in, and hands-on skill, are a first-order factor in the probability of success of the *series* of companies.
- Software first.
- Off the shelf hardware in parallel (the datacenters) with scaling
- Hand-built maximally esoteric hardware second (Falcon 1)
- Then hand-built medium-complexity hardware with a firm eye on eventually manufacturing at scale (Roadster).
- Then medium-complexity manufacturing at scale (Model S).
Assertions:
1. Building expert level skill creating software takes longer, and is less likely to occur than any other skill required in any of the industries that Elon‘s companies operate in. It is basically impossible to become a world-class software developer if you start after you’ve achieved career success in another industry.
- 1 is hardest, and most important
2. Hands-on expertise in spaceflight physics, metallurgy and fabrication, rad-hardening, rocket engine design, spacecraft structures, NDE/NDT fixturing: the physics and builder-level skills for these can be learned on the job and with intense solo study by a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, if given a free hand to roam/rotate.
- 2 & 3 are harder than all that follow
3. Space tech is nearly maximally esoteric, engineering and construction-wise. (Only the largest multi billion $ physics/astrophysics projects have a larger design envelope than space tech). Building expertise in space tech makes terrestrial engineering and fabrication challenges like car parts and solar panels seem pedestrian by comparison.
4. The techniques for manufacturing macro scale components (everything larger than 1mm) at scale, and subcomponent assembly at scale, etc etc - these can also be learned on the job a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, and some mfg folks to absorb knowledge from.
5. Learning supply chain optimization is something 1/4 of humans can lead to do well, 1/20 can learn to do well in their spare time, and is slightly more than a triviality for anybody who can handle items 1-4.
I’m making these positions from a position of having some experience in all five of these areas, for satellites, rockets, cars and other vehicles, but starting with software. Biased but also have trod the path in the same sequence, just not nearly at the same level of success, and I firmly believe that the sequence matters.
Can you talk more about 1? I’m intrigued by the idea that someone wanting to start a business empire should begin by learning how to code.
Well, the most typical skill shared among the founders of most of the most successful companies during the last 30 years: being rather good, personally, at software development. I’ll need to find a citation for that, but I don’t think it’s too difficult to track down.
Ok, it makes sense that a ambitious, motivated person with strong software development skills who also has a T-shaped composite skill set is more likely than someone who does not have that, to form a highly successful software business. But what about a different type of business?
There are two three dimensions on this part. First, a founder in any industry who has had a successful exit is going to find it easier to attract investors another start up. And being able to efficiently and successfully raise money is one of the most challenging things to do in business. Building a “ business empire” beginning with a software exit, is probably an optimal starting point if for no other reason than fundability.
Second, practically every business that could scale to $Bs in revenue relies on in-house software for at least some key parts of delivering the value proposition to the customer. And a whole lot of non-software businesses rely on in-house software for their secret sauce. A would-be business magnate who can sort the wheat from the chaff on their software teams is, in my opinion, nearly a necessary condition.
Third and last, it’s become pretty typical for software engineers since....von Neuman... to expand their T into adjacent areas, oftentimes repeatedly so they end up becoming polymathic.
30 years is a very short timeframe - it's just historical coincidence of having been at the right place at the right time, when a new giant market was opening up.
That you would think that software, especially in-house and even consumer software, would be the hardest of all of them, strikes me as preposterous.
(Also Musk has degrees in Physics and Economics, not software engineering, but he dropped out out of his materials science PhD to jump on the dot-com bubble.)
Sure, the late 90s were a uniquely good time to start a web business. And there are a lot of software founders with 20x+ exits who would fail at 2-5. The question is whether an alt-Elon with equivalent drive but a different skillset could have plausibly formed and made successful this same set of companies. I believe the answer is yes, but that the probability is at most 10% for someone who has not first mastered building software at scale in a demanding env, vs someone who has.
My primary assertion is that the sequence of skill-building matters, a lot, in the probability of outsized success in a series of different atom-based (rather than purely digital) businesses.
Had he gone from PayPal to Tesla, or Zip2 to Solar City without learning the lessons from doing hands-on space tech, I believe the probability of success with anything post-PayPal would’ve been lower. He would not have had the ability to make many, many roughly valid decisions on feasibility envelopes for all the little bits of those less esoteric businesses, from which all those “impossible” directives came.
Think about the other possible sequences for starting these companies where SpaceX doesn’t follow first, for example:
- Zip2/PayPal
- a nice long intellectual vacation from 2001-2004
- Tesla
- Neuralink
- SpaceX
The chance of Tesla being successful in this sequence is, I assert, much lower without the SpaceX education coming first. And anything after Tesla probably doesn’t happen in this scenario.
Re: software is hardest being preposterous:
Within the realm of commercial engineering, from personal experience hiring and managing a total of nearly 1000 technical folks in the auto industry, in the space/defense industry, and in pure software, the arrow of skill growth across domains goes from software-outward, and in many cases across domains - but basically never from ME/EE/Chem/any engineering field into software (and rock it within software as a dev). The sole exceptions I’ve seen are highly motivated, entrepreneurial physicists who leave academia and become devs and/or found software companies - but they had already built skill writing code during or before grad school.
If we’re talking about pure research, then no, the people meaningfully advancing knowledge face harder core challenges in their work than software developers do. The first time I lived in the Bay, I was doing pure research at Sandia-LLNL, and I dropped out to focus on software. But we’re talking about businesses that are heavy on commercial engineering where new science isn’t being done. I’ve shipped a car, and spaceflight equipment, and plenty of code. Within that realm, there is no area that is more difficult for a mid-career person to become proficient in than development. From firsthand experience, I can say it is literally easier for a dev to become a rocket scientist than it is for a rocket scientist to become a decent software developer.
Yes, but why - is it because of the infamous "tree swing" project development being a *particularly* gnarly issue in software ?
https://www.techwell.com/techwell-insights/2018/09/tester-s-role-requirements-exploration
I guess I need to get out of software development a bit more if it's as easy as you claim ! :D
(Now that I think of it, I guess that the figure of "90% of projects are failures" is probably not as high outside software ?)
The first issue here though is that Musk is reportedly *bad* at developing software, at least according to the first developers he hired at zip2, who aggressively refactored his code.
I'm pretty sure he still personally reviews approves the hiring packet of every new hire at SpaceX, maybe Tesla too.
On him being an engineer-ceo. I once read that there is a lot of benefit to him having effectively combined the financial and engineering decisions of the company where usually these are separate. So he can quickly approve and fund designs or shut down projects.
In the Everyday Astronaut interview, Tim makes some comment about the rocket and Elon realizes that he should change the design of the rocket on the spot. So it's sort of like the chief PR person also being the chief engineer. It just seems like once you put in the intensity and evwrything else then all new kinds of feedback loops emerge.
When I was at Google a bit over a decade ago, they kept making a big deal (in various trainings and orientations) that Larry Page personally reviewed all of the company's hiring packets, which always bothered me because 1) by that point, Google was far too large and expanding far too quickly for it to be reasonable for the CEO to personally review every single hire in terms of workload, and 2) it seemed like a sign of something terribly broken if the CEO needed to personally review routine hiring packets for a company that size: i.e. if thing were working properly that's something that should be fully delegated except for senior management and maybe a few key high-impact ICs.
My suspicion was and still is that Larry's review was a pure formality in almost all cases, retained as a symbolic nod towards Google's pretense that the company was still a plucky little startup in spirit if not in substance (as also evidenced by rituals like the weekly all-hands meeting you could attend in person if you wanted to). In order to test this, I started raising my hand whenever we were told about this and asking how often Larry vetoed a hiring packet. The one time I got a straight answer to this (I think during the HR training on how to give interviews), the trainer said that as far as he knew, when Larry's review had substantive input it was mostly for specialized roles that Google didn't hire often enough for there to be a well-established process for deciding what compensation package to offer, and Larry's input was mostly adjusting the comp package.
"he famously read lots of rocketry textbooks before starting SpaceX, including old Soviet manuals nobody else had heard of"
Heh, just a couple days ago I was watching the series "Young Sheldon" for the first time, in one of the first episodes rocket equations are discussed, and I was surprised to see Musk pop up as a guest star in an after-end-credits scene, reading Sheldon's notes !
(Only somewhat surprised, since he's done that before, and the plot was an *obvious* callout to the future SpaceX, even specifically mentioning landing rockets.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpSzEKUcGnM
Re: "Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
Starlink is very easy for authoritarian governments to censor: don't allow the import of the transceivers, make owning one illegal, make paying for Starlink services illegal. Voila, no Starlink in your country, at least not on a scale that matters. If your government can't do this, it is probably not that authoritarian.
Yeah, maybe a better way of putting this would be that countries lose the choice to skirt the edges of authoritarianism and censor their internets without doing obviously hostile things like banning Starlink transceivers.
> He fired 80%-90% of the workforce [of Twitter] without any clear change in user experience. This was bad for the fired people and bad for PR. But it makes him look more competent than whoever was there before him and hired 5-10x more people than they needed.
Two things to remember about this:
1. Twitter's revenue is mostly advertising.
2. Per Musk, advertising revenue is down 60% since the acquisition.
Musk says the lost revenue is primary due to pressure by the Anti-Defamation League (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907), but I feel like "there are now a tenth as many people working there" is also a plausible hypothesis.
How would fewer people working in a company cause it to have less revenue?
As a simple example, if I have a company with ten competent salespeople and I fire half of them, I will presumably have less revenue.
Sure, but do we have any reason to believe that a significant proportion of the people let go from Twitter/X were responsible (even indirectly) for attracting advertisers to the platform? My impression (based on e.g. this article https://www.joe.ie/news/3700-twitter-employees-elon-musk-758450) is that a large proportion were employed in content moderation.
And even if it was the case that a significant proportion of those let go were responsible for attracting advertisers - if advertisers are flat-out refusing to do business with your company, all of those people are essentially getting paid to sit on their hands (through no fault of their own, of course). So letting them go (or perhaps furloughing them for the duration of the boycott) might still be a sensible business decision.
You don't think that a systematic weakening of content moderation can lead to advertisers turning their back on a platform?
It appears that the advertiser boycott commenced almost immediately after Musk bought Twitter in response to his comments regarding free speech, and was reported on as early as November 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/technology/twitter-advertisers.html). It appears Musk began letting people go fairly early on, but he hadn't completed letting go of 80% of Twitter staff until March/April of 2023 (https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html). At the time the boycott was instated I presume the majority of the content moderation team was still employed.
Additionally, in June it was reported that advertisers are already starting to return to Twitter/X, in spite of the headcount cut in the content moderation department (https://digiday.com/marketing/elon-musk-says-the-twitter-advertiser-exodus-is-all-but-over/).
I also disagree with conflating "firing lots of people who work in content moderation" with "a systematic weakening of content moderation". As Scott notes, the user experience of Twitter hasn't declined significantly since Musk took over despite a massive decrease in headcount, suggesting that there were a lot of people (including, presumably, many who worked in content moderation) who were effectively dead weight.
A lot of users do report that their experience has declined, not necessarily on the technical side (well, there was that rate limiting thing) but in terms of how in order to read tweets they like they have to wade through a bunch of tweets by paid subscribers. Josh Barro wrote about this, for instance, with examples of prominent people like Mark Cuban finding that their ability to engage in productive dialogue was being hurt: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/elon-wont-make-money-by-making-twitter
> It appears that the advertiser boycott commenced almost immediately after Musk bought Twitter in response to his comments regarding free speech, and was reported on as early as November 2022
I feel like calling this a "advertiser boycott" is assuming your conclusion; what the advertisers are _saying_ is that they think Twitter ads, and Twitter brand presence, are less valuable than they used to be. Media Matters tried to get advertisers to boycott, but they try that all the time and it usually doesn't work. Why should I believe that they were causal this time? November is (for example!) when Twitter verified that fake Eli Lily account; maybe the ad execs really care about stuff like that.
> Additionally, in June it was reported that advertisers are already starting to return to Twitter/X, in spite of the headcount cut in the content moderation department
Per this article, Elon Musk did say in June that “Almost all of the advertisers have said that they’ve either come back or they’ve said they will come back". But then in September he said that advertising is 60% down. Those aren't both true.
> As Scott notes, the user experience of Twitter hasn't declined significantly since Musk took over
Cloudflare claims twitter usage declined from January to July (https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1678065025750294532) so I'm not sure how true this is in general.
"Weakening."
Thanks, this is a good point.
See above comment by FionnM.
Wait, what did Musk do to piss off "an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in the United States that specializes in civil rights law and combats antisemitism and extremism", and why would that organization I've never heard of before be so ridiculously impactful ?!?
EDIT : Oh, never mind, FionnM at least partially answered that, thanks ! (Still, why so impactful ?!)
You've never heard of the ADL before today? They're among the most influential NGOs in the world.
Because they're a civil rights organization willing to say things that the media wants to report.
Also his public attacks on the ADL are predictably getting a lot of antisemites to gleefully join in, which hurts Twitter’s PR even more and gives advertisers even more reason to stay away.
A month ago Twitter's CEO reported that they're pretty close to break-even (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/10/ceo-says-x-formerly-twitter-is-close-to-break-even/), in part, apparently, because advertisers are starting to return to the platform. It sounds like you may be overstating the impact of a few very online neo-Nazis on the decisions made by advertisers.
It seems a little credulous to take the CEO at her word here, especially since she works for someone who we know has no patience for hearing bad news.
In June of this year, the NYT reported that Twitter made $88 million in ad revenue in the five-week period commencing April 1. That's not based on CEO reports but internal documents NYT sourced from Twitter.
https://digiday.com/marketing/elon-musk-says-the-twitter-advertiser-exodus-is-all-but-over/
In the space of three months, Twitter apparently went from 41% of the ad revenue they were making at the same time last year, to nearly at a break-even point. I don't know exactly how much ad revenue they'd need to break even, but given that they'd laid off 80% of their staff, it seems reasonable to assume they wouldn't need as much ad revenue as they needed the year prior. No part of the CEO's narrative sounds implausible to me, personally.
"Close to break even" itself is a weasel word (well, weasel phrase), depending on what one considers "close." It does in fact seem implausible to me that Twitter filled that shortfall in three months, but without actual numbers on the current situation there's no way to be sure.
>without actual numbers on the current situation there's no way to be sure.
Right, so unless you have a good reason to believe that she's lying in a public interview, I think you should assume she's telling the truth. "Her boss is notorious for responding badly to bad news" is a fully general counter-argument which can be used to dismiss any public declaration made by any employee of SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, The Boring Company etc. which strikes me as rather conspiratorial.
She wasn’t telling him. It was an interview.
Right but I don't think she's going to give good news to him and then bad news to the press, do you? But leave aside the Musk part—*any* CEO has the job of making the company seem like it's going great, so a specifics-free claim about how things are going in the right direction shouldn't really influence our picture of the company's true performance.
This seems to have the causality reversed. The ban the ADL movement was started by gleeful anti-Semites, which got *Musk* to join in as he is heavily networked with various alt-right personalities and accounts who naturally overlap heavily with anti-Semitic themes and interests. He didn't start something they picked up on as a dog-whistle to use for their own ends. They started a dog-whistle campaign that he joined in on, first promoting it by piggy-backing an account into neo-Nazi ideas. I'm not sure if it is more or less generous to assume he is oblivious to the subtext. One path makes him, a person who has increasingly got into boosting race realism accounts while speed-running "red-pill" content, now sliding into promoting an anti-Semitic campaign intentionally. That's ugly. The other path makes him someone almost comically oblivious, and not at all the "120 IQ" person Scott describes him as. That's unflattering.
Well, I definitely don't think his SQ is 120.
Twitter was also marginal to begin with as an advertising location for companies, especially compared to Facebook or Instagram. Not useless, but they're not going to stick around if it reflects badly on them.
I don't think Musk is as bad as PR as you (and Vance) are saying. Some of his moves have been very good at attracting attention and building hype about what his companies do. SpaceX rockets are fitted with high quality cameras, which stream footage of the launches. The landings were all filmed, and they were happy to make compilation of their failed attempts. When he talks about SpaceX he doesn't talk about the mundane business of launching small satellites, he talks about Mars and building an interplanetary civilization. These are all things that have helped build hype and excitement about his projects, and its things that few other businessmen do well.
I suppose... I don't give a **** about what kind of videos he posts; I just notice that he's reliably doing something that was thought impossible before he tried. An AI could cook up a fake video of NASA landing on Mars, but it wouldn't mean anything, because there would be no reality behind it.
And in my opinion, talking about Mars and interplanetary civilization is standard behavior for anyone who cares. But I think many of the rest of us had given up hope on this happening in even our grandchildren's lifetimes, until he decided to do it. In terms of convincing people who didn't previously care, there had been lots of people making the same mouth noises for decades, but in the absence of any progress, no one paid attention.
Why I don’t think he will succceed with ”X”: Building a good rocket or a good car is ultimatel6 a question of engineering - you _can_ bore down to the physics. But a social media site isn’t - the engineering is social and when you bore down, you end up at psychology, not physics. And this clearly isn’t Musk’s strength.
This isn’t to say he won’t be able to get costs down and restore value for the existing property, but the “everything app” strikes me as nonsense. For instance, if you want to do banking or run your own currency, the challenge isn’t technical - it’s _legal_.
Agreed, but PayPal faced the same run-your-own-currency legal challenges, and Tesla and SpaceX were also more legal than you'd think (a lot of rocketry is navigating the FAA, getting rated for humans or whatever you're doing, and getting launch permits). I think Musk is very used to dealing with regulatory challenges by now and must be good at them.
How do you propose we measure social engineering ability? To me it doesn't seem obvious that Zuckerberg is better at it than Musk, yet Zuckerberg was able to build Facebook. Surely Musk must get some credit for Tesla's high P/E, and for having the most Twitter followers in the world (unsure if this was pre/post Twitter purchase tbf). Plus, Twitter already has a huge network, so he doesn't necessarily have to figure out how to grow the platform
Technically, social engineering is a physics problem, just one with a lot more variables and moving parts than rocket science. Still, the human mind almost certainly deterministic enough to get a fairly accurate model of it, and even if humans can't figure it out, AI can definitely do it. The one thing they're good at already is managing huge amounts of data and getting valuable info out of it; sprinkle some actual intelligence in there, and you might have something that can "solve" social manipulation. Of course, actual advances in neuroscience would help as well, but that's probably not gonna happen unless we start doing lots of ethically questionable testing.
Since we're nowhere _near_ reducing psychology to physics, this doesn't matter even if true.
One other thing that doesn't seem to fit with this review, but that I'm not sure how to think about. Musk famously gets into a lot of fights with the US government, for example around SEC enforcement and the covid response. But we don't see him criticize China much -- maybe never publicly since covid? From a business perspective that seems smart: the Chinese government has a lot of ways to retaliate against Musk through Tesla, and it seems believable that they would if he criticized them publicly too much. But the review paints a picture of a guy who couldn't maintain that amount of message discipline on subjects he was really passionate about.
Maybe the fights with USG are more tactical than deeply-felt? Maybe China is just intimidating in a way that America isn't? I don't have a conclusion here, just a vague sense that I'm missing something.
I've seen this mentioned several times... but what kind of exposure does Musk even have to China ? (Tesla selling numbers, SpaceX contracts ??)
He has a Gigafactory in China to manufacture Tesla cars. I assume that is targeting the Chinese car market, which must be one of the largest in the world. SpaceX cannot work easily with China due to US national security restrictions (it is very hard to do any kind of space collaboration between the US and China), so there are no contracts there.
Not even for Starlink ?
With the meteoritic rise of BYD, I wonder how long before Tesla is irrelevant anyway in China ?
https://www.ev-volumes.com/
(Of course the CCP might just shut it down to make an example out of him, here his larger than life persona becomes a liability...)
Probably relevant both that you can sue the US government (but not China), and that he lives in the US and takes it more personally.
I think 1) he isn't politically coherent 2) he has the same 'mostly focuses on things that are salient to him instead of important' problem everyone has 3) he's selfish and knows Xi will ban Tesla the moment he takes on China.
Quick hit, long before I've finished the article. Musk's hands-on learn-how-it's-done practice reminds me a bit of Walt Disney, of all people. Do you know how Disneyland came about? During WWII Walt became interested in (obsessed with) model railroads. So he went into the company's machine shop and learned how to use the equipment to build his own models from scratch. Then, after the war, he had the idea that his employees needed a park where they could relax with their families. That much I learned from two biographies, a thick tome by Neal Gabler, and a somewhat more sympathatic one by Mike Barrier (and, I believe, a bit deeper). So, you merge the idea of a park with the skill of building model trains and out comes Disneyland, the world's first theme park and, some have said, a masterpiece of urban planning.
Disney, too, has been a controversial figure, very.
And then there's factory-floor lever micromanagement. When Walt and his brother Roy started their company in 1923, Roy handled the business and Walt was the creative. He did the drawing and animation himself for a couple of year. But after hiring some animators, Walt stepped back a level, but still micromanaged every cartoon up through the first five feature-length films (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi). He had to approve everything that went on the film and on the soundtrack. Only when WWII hit and changed the business, drastically (to making propaganda and training films) did Walt loosen up a bit. But then he turned his attention elsewhere.
Walt Disney has some parallels - was a technology innovator and pushed workers beyond what they imagined their creative limits. He also had his very sensible brother Roy handling the finance side. (The company was called Disney Bros. until Walt decided it sounded better with just his name.) The usual pattern was that Walt would push the company the point of bankruptcy on a dream project, Roy would call in favors to get a bunch of bankers in a room to hear about it, then Walt’s incredible pitching ability would convince the skeptical bankers it was worth keeping them solvent a little longer. When all else failed they would make a princess movie. What I take away from the Walt biographies is that Roy was working hard behind the scenes to keep everything afloat and that with him (and genius Ub Iwerks), Walt would have flamed out many times.
Well, it's not quite that simple. But, yes, there are parallels and Walt would have failed without Roy keeping business affairs more or less in order. But there was more to the creative side than princess movies. Only one of the first five major features – the one's that made film history – could be considered a princess movie, Snow White. And after those films, Walt stepped back from the cartoon business just a bit (though he voiced Mickey Mouse through 1947). The company went on to do nature documentaries, live action films (shot in England because they couldn't take their UK profits out of the country), and then something really different, Disneyland. At the very end of Walt's life the company had bought up a bunch of Florida real estate and was deep in plans from what became Disney World. But Walt died before they broke ground. His vision for the project was quiet different. He really did want to build an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), but that never really happened, not as he'd imagined it.
Thanks for the comment. You're certainly right about tech innovation. Walt loved technology.
One noticeable difference between Twitter and Musk's other companies is that it is straightforward to articulate what the other companies are for, but it's not really clear what Twitter is for. "Connecting the world" doesn't cut it; everyone can claim to do it and not everyone even agrees if it's a good thing. It's hard to be in hyper-focused mode for a longer time if there is no clear-cut goal.
Out of everything Musk has done to Twitter, Birdwatch (Community Notes) is the only feature that shows genius. Pissing off the schoolmarms was a good thing, but any unwoke leadership would have had the same effect. Changes to the UI were questionable, and his forays into rate limiting and closing off the timeline to non-registered users (forcing everyone to use nitter and the likes) look self-defeating to me.
and birdwatch wasn't elon at all, he just took over as it came out of beta
Clicking on the footnotes numbers from the text opens a popup that cuts out and shows text from mid-sentence on Android for me, forcing me to skip reading them.
Substack's handling of footnotes on phones is godawful (the app is even worse, they're just unclickable on it)
I love the feature on PC, I'll let them know you have this problem and hopefully they'll fix it.
It cuts off the first line of footnotes for me and locks my computer (if I wait a minute, my computer unfreezes, and then I can scroll up and see the first line) . And the comments barely work for me when there are several hundred of them, since that also freezes my computer (I have a newish laptop with decent specs and no issues with any website but Substack, so I'm thinking Musk should buy Substack and fire their engineers)
I dropped the incredibly boring biography after reading about 70%. This review of it is much better.
I have a problem with biographies, they're almost all far too long. I just don't care enough about anyone else's life to spend that much of my own reading about it.
I think there's a hole in the market market for 100-200 page biographies. Tell me all the interesting things about Pliny the Elder without boring me with every scrap of detail known about his life.
I pitched the idea of short biographies written by famous writers not doing original research to a guy at Penguin around 1989. A few years later, Penguin started publishing exactly what I had asked for. (I don't know if my idea was what inspired them or if they came up with it on their own.)
My idea turned out to be a huge flop for Penguin.
Oh, well ...
Right, reading the review of this biography made me update towards the direction that Musk isn't just an incompetent struck by blind luck a few times in a row, and then just coasting on the ill-deserved reputation (star engineers wanting to work on SpaceX/Testla, getting the government contracts, etc). I can well believe that cutting through the red tape and ACTUALLY doing whatever it takes (the sort of heroic responsibility Eliezer talks about) is a recipe for success, because I already believe it.
It didn't shift my belief in that Musk is an utterly despicable human being.
"Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
Unless they ask him nicely, then he'll switch it on and off on the dictator's whims.
What are examples of this behavior?
Whenever I read about Musk, I have only a single thought: he's a Heinlein's character. To be fair, many other writers with varying libertarian bend wrote 4D-chessmaster-technical-and-business-genius- characters - Neal Stehpenson and Michael Flynn come to mind among the more recent ones ("Firestar" series has "Musk-in-a-drag" obsessed female space company CEO with a childhood trauma), but all his talk about Mars makes me think about Heinlein specifically.
I wonder if anyone can get ChatGPT to write a "The Man Who Sold Mars" novella.
Here's a synopsis of Heinlein's 1950 short story "The Man Who Sold the Moon," which I'm sure Musk has read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon
I think of him more as a Bond villain.
I've yet to see him do anything particularly villainous, so I don't see him this way. He's not even building giant lasers in Earth orbit. And does he even own a single shark?
Heck Richard Garriot could build a better volcano lair than Elon.
Volcano lairs are so 60's. Elon should build a giant invincible space-flying mecha and upload his mind into it. THEN space lasers!
To be fair, the best Bond Villains are very '60s.
Almost completely by accident, I once came into possession of a set of paper construction documents for Garriot's never-completed second castle here in Austin.
The most notable feature was a circular bed which was also an elevator. It went from the observatory on the roof, through several floors worth of bedrooms, down to the dungeon.
There was also a circular feature called a "tokamak". It seemed like a large amphitheater thing, or it might have been, y'know, a tokamak.
I think the fairer and more obvious comparison is to Peter Thiel, and I think it's not even close.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/09/14/spacex-launches-first-full-batch-of-laser-equipped-starlink-satellites/
Not big enough?
Hm, sounds promising! These satellites are not big enough by themselves, but if SpaceX launches a system of mirrors to focus them all on a single point - THAT might have some impact, maybe!
Well, his ex-girlfriend did give this quote:
"If I’m stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically. If there’s nothing left to lose, that’s actually a really fun idea to me. I think it has freed me artistically. The best part of the movie is the Joker. Everyone loves the villain. Everyone fucking loves Thanos. Let’s make some Thanos art."
This is something I think Scott's review didn't emphasize enough about Musk and how to understand his persona. You can look at nearly everything Musk does up to the 2015 book with an eye toward building a colony on Mars. Something like SpaceX is easy to make the connection. Tesla and their solar subsidiary also make sense. But what about the others?
The Boring Company is exactly the kind of infrastructure project you'd need on Mars, where digging tunnels is basic infrastructure.
The same goes for the hyperloop. How do you travel long distances on the red planet? Are you going to have airplanes? There are no fossil fuels, and the atmosphere is thin. A few years back, Musk said he thinks it's technically possible to build electric planes with very long ranges (on Earth), but he's not interested in the project. Probably because it's not practical for Mars. Meanwhile, a hyperloop would be technically much easier to maintain in the Mars atmosphere, and would probably be better than planes for long-distance travel.
More recently, I think he has tempered his expectations on Mars. He talks about it less, and seems to be doing more that isn't obsessively focused on a Martian colony, like buying Twitter and focusing on AI x-risk. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see him make a new push in a few years to build out some kind of space exploration company that everyone thinks will fail.
And this is the part where I think understanding Musk really takes shape. Elon doesn't seem to be driven by a desire to build companies so he can make more money than anyone else on the planet. I'm sure he enjoys that, based on some comments he has made. The book mentions his intense partying, but I don't get the sense that he's working 100+ hour weeks for the money.
Sometimes he doesn't even seem to be driven by whether the companies nominally succeed. Yes, he cares, but when asked what odds he gave SpaceX and Tesla of succeeding, he said about 10%. The obvious follow-up question is "Why do them?" Why sink his ENTIRE fortune into companies that combined don't look like a good bet for making money? Because, he explained, even if they failed they would accelerate rocket ship development and adoption of electric cars. And to Elon that was worth the price.
Maybe Elon's "secret sauce" is that he's not laser-focused on profitability. He doesn't measure success in EBITDA, stock price, or any of the other metrics people use to gauge success. I'm sure he still stresses over these metrics, but users gained/lost doesn't cause him to change course or abandon a new project. He simply says, "I guess I'll have to adjust my expectations about market share" and pushes onward in his quest to make the Everything App. You think reusable rockets are a waste of money on an impossible dream? Elon doesn't care, because you're not going to get routine space flight without them and his goal is routine space flight, not making a bunch of money building rockets. So he's going to make the rockets reusable if it costs him the company. Because to Elon, it's the idea that drives him.
Yes, this is also a feeling I get from Musk. His utility function is just not the same. I think Daniel Suarez based his space-crazed millionaire character in "Delta-V" on Elon Musk. In the book, he does everything - including lying to his investors and committing fraud - to get his asteroid-mining project off the ground, so to speak.
I wonder where Twitter fits into this picture, though. A tool for controlling narrative? "Mars-say-yes" kind of ploy (from Asimov's "Battle-Hymn")?
I don't think the Twitter acquisition was aligned with his laser focus on Mars. If you follow his tweets, it's obvious he just really likes the platform. I honestly think he bought it because he saw signs they were messing with his favorite toy/pastime and since he had the money he figured he could prevent that from happening.
There are other complications to that narrative. I think buying Twitter was multicausal. He wanted to make the Everything App, but he could have bought something cheaper to do that with. He probably chose Twitter because he likes to use it so much. There's also the free speech concerns, which I think we can take at face value. But then when you hear him defend free speech, he clearly doesn't understand it at a more nuanced level. I don't agree with Scott's assessment that he's just not as smart in that area. I think it's just that he's really good with subjects he cares deeply about and reads deeply about.
I get the sense that he cares about free speech, but in a more shallow sort of way. He's not going to buy a dozen books and hunt down Supreme Court justices to hound them for their knowledge. "But he BOUGHT Twitter!" Like I said, I think he did that for many reasons, but the free speech aspect seems to be more defensive than vision-based.
In the end, he financed much of his Twitter acquisition. Why do that when you have tons of money? Because most of that money is in stocks and equity in Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has often said he's first-in, last-out for Tesla, and he felt that going public was a mistake he wouldn't repeat with SpaceX. There are clear signs he still deeply cares about those two companies, otherwise he would have been more willing to cede more control/ownership of them to buy Twitter, as opposed to financing the purchase. I agree with Scott that Twitter/X will likely be successful in ways unpredicted by prognosticators, but I don't think Musk sees it as mission-critical.
Some of the remarks about how it's realyy Musk's employees doing all the work make me think more of Nick van Rijn in Poul Anderson's 'The Man Who Counts'.
Right.
I knew a guy in 1981 who wanted to make his fortune off shooting rockets into space. I humored him because I'd read a lot of Heinlein books too. But I knew better: only the government could afford to do anything in outer space.
Years later, I found myself sending a firm he founded $25 per month for satellite radio.
Another example about getting himself into a lucky position is buying Twitter and now being able to use that data for an LLM project, he didn't anticipate that but considered it a nice bonus.
The main thing I took away from this review is that you can buy an emerald mine in Zambia for fifty thousand dollars.
For the price of an Audi you can have an emerald mine in Zambia, and if you can find a way to drop it into conversation that you own an emerald mine in Zambia then it sounds way more impressive than owning an Audi.
Probably would be more expensive now than fifty years ago though :(
Inflation calculator shows less than $400,000, which still seems surprisingly cheap!
Depends on how many emeralds are in it, I suppose.
Regarding the "Why?" question for a Mars Colony: Robert Zubrin has a coming book about it
"The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet"
" I think when he’s tried to form philosophical/intellectual opinions, they’ve been well-intentioned, shown good instincts, and sometimes displayed deep insight, but also often been unsophisticated or messed up key points.... IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes." This seems like a very generous description considering his output on twitter...looking admiringly at Andrew Tate the first example that comes to mind.
Who is Andrew Tate, for people who can't be bothered keeping up with twitter controversies?
A popular online macho influencer, currently on trial for sex trafficking in Romania. Someone who seems to view people, especially women, as mere tools to be used (or abused) as he pleases.
Can you link the tweet you're referencing or a screenshot of it?
This derailed my train of thought badly enough that I had to comment on it before reading the rest of the post. Sorry if it's elaborated on later, I might feel silly if it is.
> I like this story but find myself dwelling on Musk’s request - why shouldn’t he be allowed to read his own biography before publication and include footnotes giving his side of the story where he disagrees? That sounds like it should be standard practice!
I understand this moral impulse on a 'nice-to-have' level comparable to the notion that it's nice (and standard practice!) for a journalist writing an article about someone to reach out for comment, and we consider it an obvious dick move when they "reach out" at 2am for an article that's running at 5. But the implementation can be so variable and the specifics given here so unworkable (and hypocritical?) that I've lost the plot on how obligatory this "should" is supposed to be.
A commitment to include material from someone hostile to the project is a nightmare, both editorially and legally. Am I allowed to make changes to their input, at a minimum editing for length or shuffling it around in the book? Either a yes or no is a headache. Am I allowed to make changes to *my* work after they've seen an advance copy? (It's not unusual for sweeping changes to come in at the last minute - or even after publication, in digital!) Heck, can I even respond to their footnotes without requesting another round of commentary?
> If I ever write a post about any of you and you disagree with it, feel free to ask me to add a footnote giving your side of the story (or realistically I’ll put it in an Open Thread).
Specifically: there is a *huge* difference sending a work to someone for their inclusion in the published copy, and sticking some commentary in what is functionally Author's Notes sold separately. If I'm to take this footnotes idea seriously, I want Scott to take seriously the notion that he's obligated to withhold posting until adding (unlimited?) the commentary from subjects within the same piece. This is not a small ask!
Yeah, I think the custom is that unless it's an "authorised biography" (which often is a puff-piece by other name), the biographer doesn't give the subject right of reply like this. Because you want to tell the story as truthfully as you can, and even though we all have biases, letting the subject give only their side of the story and tidy inconvenient or unpleasant facts under the carpet means a worse job in the end.
There absolutely have been biographers who made their name by doing hit jobs and being unpleasant muck rakers, but in the end you do need the balance: a popular and beloved public figure may have skeletons in the closet that the immediate hagiography after they die doesn't cover, and which is necessary to get a sense of the whole person. Same way with biographies and studies that have been critical of someone, and maybe years down the line a new writer or researcher revisits that and balances out the 'official' condemnatory line with new facts or a reappraisal of what happened.
People have tried to exercise control over biographers in the past by withholding information, particularly literary estates or executors who hold on to relevant material and won't let the biographer see it unless they agree to toe the party line, or won't let them see it at all.
+1. I don't see an issue with a literary ecosystem that includes both puff pieces, hit jobs, autobiographies both ghostwritten and legitimate. Let writers write and judge them by the fruits of their labors.
If the subject wants to reply, they absolutely have the right to release their color commentary in the form of their choosing. I see no obligation for the publisher to bundle it together and only sell the package deal.
This reminds me of the MacDonald-McGinniss controversy, where Jeffrey McDonald (accused and later convicted of killing his family) hired Joe McGinniss to write a book about the case. McGinniss decided at some point that he was guilty but didn’t tell him, then wrote a book that concluded he was guilty, which MacDonald only found out after publication.
MacDonald didn't "hire" McgGinniss to write a book about his case. Mcinniss signed a book contract with Signet Books like any other professional author. Originally, McGinniss was open to MacDonald's version of what happened and MacDonald cooperated with the project by providing access. McGinniss eventually concluded that MacDonald was guilty, but withheld this opinion from MacDonald who continued to cooperate thinking McGinniss was on his side. After the book came out, MaDonald sued McGinniss for securing his cooperation on false pretenses.
MacDonald was looking for a writer to write about the case, he met McGinniss and proposed that he write a book. They signed a contract dividing up the proceeds and giving McGinniss exclusive access to the defense team. MacDonald signed a release to protect McGinniss's freedom to write what he saw fit. McGinniss was made an official member of the defense team, to prevent him from being subpoenaed by the prosecution. After publication, MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract.
"Hired" isn't completely accurate, but MacDonald proposed the idea to McGinniss and they had a formal agreement about it.
There's just a huge difference between being paid by a publisher and being paid by the subject of the book. And, in fact, it was McGinniss' publisher, Phyllis Grann, who basically pushed him into committing to the he's-guilty line. McGinniss was a lot less sure than he makes himself out to be in Fatal Vision until she insisted that he had to come to some kind of conclusion.
I occasionally withhold posting until I've run it by a relevant person. More often I don't because it would take a while, I'm lazy, I have a 2+-post-a-week schedule, and it's intimidating to ask famous people to read stuff about them.
I assume Vance spent years on this biography. Musk seems like the sort of person who gets things done quickly - I don't see why he couldn't wait a week to get his comments. Probably he went through many rounds of editing that each took more than a week, and Musk's feedback seems more important than an editor's.
If it were my project, I'd send Musk a first draft, let him know there might be minor stylistic changes afterwards, and include his comments as footnotes, edited slightly for readability, while explaining all of this to him.
Moral issues aside, I would be terrified to publish a Musk biography without Musk's input. What if I got something really wrong? What if it started an international incident (like the part about Starlink Crimea in Isaacson's bio which Isaacson is now sort of walking back)? What if Musk sues me, as he is known to do often, and he wins because I did accidentally defame him? If nothing else, "Musk read this and said it was fine" would be a great defense against accidental errors.
I think the idea of half biography half autobiography is a great idea. Imagine if there were occasional chapters written by Musk “despite what Vance has written there, I don’t think I’m that single minded”.
That sounds like a good premise for a Nabokov novel.
> I occasionally withhold posting until I've run it by a relevant person. More often I don't because it would take a while, I'm lazy, I have a 2+-post-a-week schedule, and it's intimidating to ask famous people to read stuff about them.
As I see it, you, Scott Alexander, are something like +2~3 SD above the journalistic median in terms of the melange of conscientiousness/curiosity/integrity that would be relevant on this metric. That's a good thing, one of the defining elements of your writing! It also has implications for any proposed practice.
You occasionally write pieces that have a strong focus on living individuals; you often include footnotes in your work. Can you point to an example where those footnotes are in the subject's own voice, directly and systematically responding to the less flattering parts of your writing?
I want to see what this would look like in reality. If it can't be done, woe for the rule rather than thee.
> I assume Vance spent years on this biography. Musk seems like the sort of person who gets things done quickly - I don't see why he couldn't wait a week to get his comments. Probably he went through many rounds of editing that each took more than a week, and Musk's feedback seems more important than an editor's.
I see a sharp line between 'there are a number of good reasons for an author writing a focused piece to get input from the subject' and 'an author has a moral/ethical/professional obligation to yield the final cut privilege to the subject'. Musk's feedback is certainly "more important" than any given email from Vance's editor, but it is not in the slightest guaranteed to be aligned with Vance's goals in writing a biography. Deiseach makes an excellent point - authorized biographies exist, and they typically aren't better than the inverse.
> Moral issues aside, I would be terrified to publish a Musk biography without Musk's input.
I'll skip the fisking, but the short version is: good lord, would including Musk's input seem like a singularly bad way to address concerns of liability or accuracy! Unless Hollman gets the really-final cut, legal's gonna have nightmares.
But the wider point is that to the extent to which professional biographers think these are meaningful worries, they have an existing toolbox of approaches to mitigate them. To the extent that they're not dutifully relaying the subject's words, that's a choice. I object to the idea that there ought to be an additional imperative that is justified on the grounds that authors don't know what's good for them.
And above all else - there's no amount of footnotes that addresses what happens when what the subject wants is something *removed*.
If you asked me who are the 2 extent people that I wouldn't want to share a beer with: Trump and Musk. No question about it.
There are plenty of despots and criminals in the world who would quickly kill you over a beer. And you choose to avoid two people who haven't killed anyone. I bet both have considered it, though, who hasn't?
Trump - Musk - Putin are the rock - paper - scissors of evil.
One of these is not like the others.
Dennis might disagree.
Is that an always sunny reference? I don't get it, sorry.
Dennis DiTullio is the OP of the thread, but I still don't get it. Having singled out Trump and Musk as the only two people in the world with whom he wouldn't share a beer, he would surely *agree* that one of Purpleopolis's three (that is, Putin) is not like the others.
Biden, Obama and all recent US presidents as well.
And the list keeps growing🙄
Of those three, the one who has an established pattern of poisoning people who annoy him is the one I'd least like to have a beer with.
And definitely don't sit near a window.
Really no one died on Trumps watch as Prez. Musk and dad were complicit to apathied. No killing and suffeted in S. Africa?
I didn't say no one died under their watch, I said they never killed anyone. I don't know whether or not the Musks were complicit in apartheid, but i do know that Elon never killed anyone.
Ok
Musk moved away from South Africa at 18 and yet somehow he's complicit in apartheid? You're being ridiculous
I thought that Musk' dad was "complicit" *against* apartheid ? (While Elon was too young.)
I believe his father was active in the anti apartheid struggle.
Trump is a teetotaller lol
So I take it your build isn't optimized for melee DPS?
Eh, I can think of worse people to meet in a bar. Just don't bring up politics.
Re: Everything App
I wrote a piece for Foriegn Policy about why the vision of an 'Everything App' in the US market is essentially impossible. WeChat was created in a very specific Chinese context that simply doesn't translate to the US
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/31/elon-musk-wechat-twitter-x-united-states-everything-apps/
Thanks, that was a great article !
We actually *do* have an "everything app" in the West : the Minitel.
(Or rather did, it was basically smothered by the Internet, and especially the Web, though at least one infocom oligarch did use it as a stepping stone : Xavier Niel.)
Yes, it was still evil because a platform (GAFAMs have been nicknamed "Minitel 2.0"), but at least it could be kept in check because owned by the government.
(Notably, IIRC it also solved payments, by having them integrated into the connection bills. AFAIK the small businesses were all over it.)
Ashlee Vance is a terrific journalist and his book will likely be far superior to whatever fluff piece Isaacson has come out with.
Muggles just don’t understand what motivates engineers, and why they will knowingly and willingly work for abusive bosses like Jobs or Musk, or in an earlier era Adm Hyman Rickover or Howard Hugues. It’s about achievement more than even the mission.
As for his foibles, that reminds me of Inspector Lestrange in the BBC series Sherlock: “I do it because I believe Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and he may someday be a good one”.
As Musk has become richer and more powerful, and probably more in his own bubble, the risk is that his trajectory is going to be towards becoming a worse man, not a better one.
Sadly likely. The opportunity cost of Musk's attention wasted on something utterly useless like Twitter is horrific. The sooner he runs it into the ground, digests the $44B loss and moves on, the better. After all, didn't his co-founder Peter Thiel say "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" (https://som.yale.edu/blog/peter-thiel-at-yale-we-wanted-flying-cars-instead-we-got-140-characters)
The calculation does have to take into account the anticipated utility (positive or negative) of Twitter if counterfactually left to follow its pre-Musk course.
Speak for yourself - I’m an engineer (never a “muggle”, LOTR FTW) and the Musk sweatshops sound awful.
I'm a pretty successful engineer by any measure and would not touch Tesla or any other Musk-run companies with a 10-ft pole (and yes I have been asked). Never had an abusive boss in my life and not going to start, thanks.
> He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.
You write further down about people making the mistake of misunderstanding Musk because they dismiss what he says and don't take it literally. Well, what did Musk literally say about taking over Twitter? He said that people pushing toxic identity politics caused one of his children to become estranged from him, and Twitter was so deep in the toxic identity politics camp that he was literally not allowed to talk about the harms it was causing, so he took over in order to clean up the cesspool that Twitter had become.
That's my take on it too. Right or wrong about whether he's succeeded in running Twitter, he absolutely got what he wanted out of it. And managed to expose some government involvement and problematic censorship at the same time.
What does "literally not allowed to talk about..." mean in this context? I'm pretty sure Must was allowed to talk about any damn fool thing he wanted on any platform he wanted that wasn't Twitter, and reasonably sure he was allowed to talk about alleged Twitter-harms on Twitter as long as he wasn't completely bonkers in his phrasing.
It means exactly what it sounds like: speaking against the prevailing orthodoxy was a good way to get the posts in question censored and perhaps even to get your account suspended.
I've seen no shortage of people "speaking against the prevailing orthodoxy" on Twitter, specifically includng high-profile individuals speaking about how Twitter was causing harms and that these harms were linked to Twitter's left-leaning editorial and moderation policies. Twitter, pre-Musk, did *not* automatically censor anyone who tried to talk about the harms it was causing. So I'm skeptical that Elon Musk was on some special secret list where *he* was not allowed to talk about these things even though most everyone else was.
Evidence is required here.
Read what I wrote more carefully; you are rebutting a claim that was never actually made. And furthermore, I'm not the one making it. This was the reason Elon Musk gave. If you think it's not real, take it up with him.
"One of his worst moments came after a prototype Falcon 1 failed halfway through the launch. Musk immediately blamed key engineer Jeremy Hollman. This was a reasonable assumption - he had been the last person to work on the rocket before liftoff - but instead of waiting for the investigation, Musk went straight to publicly accusing him."
That's probably his biggest way of shooting himself in the foot - he won't back down from what he perceives as a challenge to his authority, or rather, his *rightness* about something.
"This happened, it must be somebody's fault, you're the guy holding the hot potato at the time, it was your fault!"
Look at the absolutely stupid fight he got into with the cave diver in Thailand - yes, Elon, your submarine idea was cute but it wouldn't work. Doubling down and implying the guy was a paedophile (because why else would he be an ex-pat in Thailand if not for cheap young sex workers?) was not edifying and I think probably cost him a lot of credit with the public.
That's the kind of thing comes back to bite you in the behind later, e.g. when taking over Twitter, a lot of ordinary people were "Oh, isn't that paedo-guy?" and discounted what he was trying to do. And were more easily convinced that he was a crypto-fascist or whatever. Blood emeralds!
Musk is a net positive to society imo and admittedly I may be mistaken as to why(Pascal) but to say he "never changes" and "a paradox" smacks of hero worship.
I think the move to X will work because the social media giants can't grow exponentially forever. At some point they need to shift into being utility companies - regulated monopolies that make plenty of cash, enough to support some interesting research, but not growing at 20%/year forever. But this is horrible and scary for their investors, so you get crazy ideas like the Metaverse instead of just improving the core model. Twitter needed to be slashed. The product, basically, worked, and hadn't changed much in years. But the investors never would have accepted "OK, that's enough growth, now we cut costs and profit" without some huge disruption to blame it on.
“He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.”
I don’t think this is fair; he’s been exceedingly clear and consistent about his philosophical reasons for buying Twitter.
His actions haven’t fit his free speech rhetoric, though--he’s throttled traffic both to competitors like Substack and to sites he just dislikes like the NY Times; he went through employees’ Twitter history and fired anyone who had been critical of him personally (before he was their boss), etc.
Shortly after he took over twitter there was a wave of leftwing journalists and activists who were suspended or banned under flimsy pretexts, none of which involved them breaking any laws. This was less than a year ago. People just sometimes lie about caring about free speech in order to thwart attempts to deplatform speech they want people to hear while they themselves are quite censorious. Rhetoric about free speech is just instrumental, and the actual underlying belief just that power should be used to promote their interests and thwart their enemies. This is a trait that is notorious of the crowd of people Musk spends most of his time agreeing with on Twitter, and you have to engage in a lot of contortions not to see Musk as just being cut from the same cloth.
Musk unambiguously bought twitter for one reason - to ensure he can never be banned from it. Not simply because he loves attention for attention's sake (he does), but because his twitter account is his primary marketing tool and has literally made him billions of dollars. I'm sure he is genuinely, albeit modestly, in favor of free speech all things being equal, but it's definitely not why he bought it.
There are other answers to that interview question. You could be a distance from the south pole such that if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the earth becomes 0.5 miles (or 1/n miles, for any positive integer n).
Yes, I came here to post that there are an infinite number of such solutions, as you describe.
More to the point (well, my point anyway): that problem's been known to smart 12-year-olds for decades. If somebody asked me this in an interview I'd wonder if the "real" test was seeing if I'd admit I knew it.
My favorite answer is that you're on a train that runs along an east-west route with stops a mile apart. You start on one train, walk three sides of a one-mile square, and at the end of the last leg you step onto another train on the same route, one station earlier than where you started. You stay standing still on the train until it reaches your original stop.
Really enjoyed the review, its been ages since I read this book so it was a good refresher.
I do disagree with your stance on Twitter/X on a couple of fronts. In terms of Twitter Blue, I don't see it as successful or on the path to success because it is kind of a half-measure. Twitter should either be primarily subscription model that basically operates on "FOMO" for its addicted users or rely strictly on advertising and be the town square. Twitter Blue is in this weird in-between where there are benefits to membership but its not needed to use Twitter, and so it becomes just a poor enough experience for non-subscribers that I think over time they will start losing users as the site becomes less useful (Like seeing subscriber tweets and comments before the people you actually want to read).
The second issue I have is with the idea advertisers need Twitter instead of vice versa. There are plenty of social media options for advertisers to go to, I just don't believe Twitter is essential there. Especially when Twitter isn't really associated with buying things as a consumer. No one shops on Twitter. I can see this actually being a major problem if advertisers stay away and realize their bottom line isn't actually hurting, so might as well just make this decision permanent since its all downside being in the Elon Musk business from a PR perspective (As your own review noted in terms of how he handles PR and drives folks nuts).
I find Twitter Blue confusing. Why would someone pay to provide a social media platform with its product? No other platform works this way. The product is the attention of the users, sold to advertisers. If you adopt a program like Blue that elevates the posts with the least value--that is, posts by people who have to pay to get anyone else's attention--you're going to lose everyone but those users eventually because the overall quality of the content will degrade. You end up with nothing but people paying for the attention of a group that consists entirely of the kind of people who have to pay to get other people's attention. I used to check Twitter once a day. Now I barely look at it once a week, and I'm not alone. It's mostly coasting on the inertia of the network effect.
As you said, the main advantage of subscription is your comments get promoted in visibility, which is the product some people want. Not a lot of people, as it turns out, but definitely some. One of the problems this creates is the people who pay for this tend to be dull and obnoxious, and so it degrades everyone else's experience to have exposure to them prioritized. It also associates the the brand of subscription with uninteresting and nasty content. The war between those people wanting to be seen and others wanting to avoid seeing said people has led to a countermeasure of making it easier to hide that status. I'm not sure this coup and countrecoup is over, and it's not clear where it ends up.
It's pretty clear there is a vulnerability for Twitter in that there's a widely felt desire for a Twitter-clone that doesn't have this (and a few other) issue(s), but network effects are very strong and all the current alternatives have failed to be a clone in at least some key respect up to this point. We'll see if that remains true forever.
All true, and the big question is "promoted in visibility" to whom? Just anybody, or to the famous and/or influential who are one of the reasons a lot of people read the site? Musk's problem is that the same people (journalists, celebrities, politicians) who annoy him are the people whose presence attracts a lot of users to the site and those people don't want to pay for Twitter or even to be seen as paying for Twitter. That's why he stealthily gave Stephen King a blue check for free and then King publicly said, "No, thanks!" If Threads were more developed, I think it could be a serious rival, but I also think there's some outrage-exhaustion with the whole engagement-driven model of social media. People who leave X might just start using social media in a different way.
Not to be banal, but I think the answer to your question is "it varies." Depends on the motives of the specific blue check. Some just want to be near the top of replies to anyone they might reply to. Others care specifically about being promoted to more famous people. There's a contingent of people who are seeking more visibility to try to be more effective at spreading their (typically, though not necessarily, far right) politics to others. Some are running straight up scams. They key point in which they are united is what they are paying for is promotion to other people's eyeballs.
Scott in his article mentions that anecdotally he sees a lot more people using Twitter blue lately despite subscription numbers not exploding, and I wonder if he's being naive about why he might be seeing that a lot more often these days.
"Seeing a lot more people using Twitter Blue" could mean "People I know weren't subscribing before have now become subscribers" or it could mean, "When I look at Twitter, I see a higher proportion of posts with blue checks than I have before." The latter could just mean that people with blue checks are posting more while people who don't subscribe aren't using the platform much anymore. That's certainly the case with me!
Two other possibilities. One, he's seeing more Twitter blue subscribers because they are vaulted to the top of the content he looks at, including his own replies, and he's oddly unaware that's how the algorithm works now.
Two, Scott's audience and interests has a pretty sizeable overlap with exactly the sort of person who subscribes to twitter blue - alt-right curious, would-be intellectuals who see SV types as visionaries - and he hasn't taken this fact into account when evaluating his personal experience. The interests and community around SSC/AC10 strikes me as a honeypot for your most stereotypical example of subscribers.
The current blue check isn't something invented out of the whole cloth, it's an evolution of the blue check that existed under previous management.
The previous version started out as a verification that you're definitely the person of that name that most people think about when they hear that name. But then it evolved somewhat in the direction of "... and also, Twitter staff approve of you". It became a mark of status among a certain breed of twitter users, so it made sense to monetise that status mark rather than removing it.
It verified that if you were using the name of somewhat well-know person, you were in fact that person. Much like Wikipedia will only let you make an entry about yourself if you are "notable" enough. That caused it to become status symbol of a sort. Now it is the opposite of a status symbol because all you need to get it is $8 and the people considered notable won't do that.
There was a whole right wing discourse, one that sometimes made it into the comments of this site, that supposed that people who were verified under the old blue check system highly valued that as a status symbol. The problem is that this wasn't true. That was their envy of other people as noteworthy clouding their thinking. This led to an idea that lots of people would value purchasing the same check as a status symbol and this would drive the old verified people wild with jealousy. They, for the most part, did not. At the end of the day, it was just verification and the check's value was largely in the fact that it could assure users that the people they were reading really were the celebrity, journalist, scientist, etc. they thought they were. This is what people had been saying, but some just wouldn't listen.
Things have moved so far from that not-that-long-ago time that some people now actively try to hide their check so others don't try to avoid them on sight.
Steve Davis, director of advanced projects at SpaceX, describes his experience:
"He got a quote back for $120,000 ... Davis spent nine months building the actuator ... The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space."
Presumably the 'director of advanced projects' gets at least a six-figure salary, which should be included in the calculation? Of course, as mentioned, there are benefits to in-housing etc, but this particular example doesn't really seem to carry the argument.
But they don't have to build many rockets for that difference to pay for itself.
Most of that $120,000 was probably non-recurring engineering and qualification testing costs amortized over a small initial run of units. The nuts and bolts cost of the two units probably is not wildly different. It’s not all just profit and overhead for the subcontractor.
SpaceX also lost a rocket because they didn’t unit test a critical structural component and they got a bad one that failed mid flight. Individual testing is extremely expensive, but it certainly can be the difference between 90% and 99% reliable sometimes.
We're reading the anecdote very differently, I think. The text says Davis "went out to find some suppliers who could make an electromechanical actuator for him. He got a quote back for $120,000." If it was just $120,000 for the first actuator but future ones would cost wildly less, then the story in the book is misleading. That's not impossible, but it's not a very charitable reading.
It's also not the way such things are usually priced in the aerospace industry. Nobody charges bignum for the very first unit and 10% over marginal cost of production for everything after; they amortize all the fixed costs over the entire projected production run and charge that figure for each.
It's possible that the manufacturer expected Elon was only going to buy a couple dozen gimbal actuators and charged accordingly, and if Elon had convinced them he was genuinely going to be buying thousands then the price would have come down. But, A: probably not to anything like $5K, because if you expect the contract to be say $2.4 million for 20 items then there's a bunch of ~$1K cost reductions that you don't engineer in at the start and will have a hard time adding later. And, B: there's probably no way Elon can convince anyone that SpaceX/2008 or whenever was going to be launching many dozen medium-lift launch vehicles a year any time soon. The manufacturer would reasonably assume "OK, ten Falcon 1s and them SpaceX is kaput; I have to sell for $120K each to make a profit". And then a few years later, "Hey, this is great, SpaceX is locked in to buying my actuators and they're accustomed to paying $120K each; now that they're up to 500 units a year and I've long since amortized the fixed costs that's $60 million a year gross at 50% margins, and nothing they can do about it unless they want to shut down for nine months".
They only ever built five Falcon 1s. I guess the question is whether the component made it into the Falcon 9.
It doesn't really matter anyway; we're talking about one of thousands of trade-offs that must be made using incomplete information during a huge project like this. Looking at a single decision in isolation and admiring or condemning it is silly; any project like this will have hundreds of good decisions and hundreds of bad decisions made along the way.
(in-)housing benefits for the director of advanced projects would be a comfy beanbag next to his desk to sleep on ! (j/k)
Napoleon Bonaparte reminds me of this. Or rather, reading about Napoleon reminded me of Elon Musk - particularly the terrifying intensity and emphasis on speed, the micromanaging, the ability rapidly to suck information out of people's skulls via conversation, the incredibly bold bets.
I wonder how many people as skilled as Musk or Napoleon lose their first giant bet and then are never heard from again.
Guess you've gotta estimate how many people have what it takes to be a "great man" in a vacuum (impossible to really know). I'd estimate 1 in 100.
Being a great man in a vacuum requires access to a spacesuit. That immediately cuts down the numbers a lot.
Unless they died in that bet or did something incredibly destructive, my guess would be not that many. Losing a company and getting a bad reputation are recoverable, and I would expect the kinds of people with this level of drive to recover far more often than most.
I hear of people who failed on the first company (or sometimes multiple) before eventually making it big. The guy who made McDonalds apparently had *many* failures before his big success.
Hitler failed the first time too. Not trying to Godwin the thread, it was just the first example that came to mind of someone who tried something massively ambitious, failed miserably, and then succeeded wildly a decade later. Most Hitlers give up after the Beer Hall Putsch.
Good example, as he seems to have been an extremely driven person and fits the description.
Now I'm wondering how many extreme dictators in history have been people like Musk - very driven, with additional talents that make it possible for them to do what other people wouldn't or couldn't.
I think about this a lot - along with all the folk who could be Julius Caesar but are working checkout counters. And all the folk who could be Einsten, but are working in rice paddies.
I have a friend who is like this - a man out of time. In another age he'd have been the head man of his village - big, strong, shrewd and gregarious. But here and now he's working a blue collar job, smoking too much weed and becoming socially isolated.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard
I think on that tier ability there's no way - unless they get *killed* - that they fuck up so bad that don't at least get a wikipedia page. But there's a huge dropoff in name recognition after the top tier, so they may lose 99% of the fame going from Napoleon to Louis-Nicolas Davout, or Musk to RJ Scaringe
I think we can try to estimate, but first, we need to know the relative influence of luck and skill on fame. Luckily, we do!
10% luck + 20% skill + 15% concentrated power of will + 5% pleasure+ 50% pain = 100% reason to remember the name
Sounds like a great read about Napoleon - is there a particular book on him you’d recommend?
Enjoyed this review and the book when I read it a couple years ago. Also just want to add a link to the Search Engine podcast (for people who like that kind of thing) with a good deep dive into more recent Elon: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dxqaAKNQhLzRzfOTJ60mI?si=ab9b530a373a48d5
To get a generic replacement mouse, my current employer required 3rd level management approval for the expenditure. Yes, it was for about $20. Too much middle-management is absolutely a thing.
This was the most cogent and useful review of my book that I've ever seen.
Thank you! Hopefully it came across from the writing, but I really enjoyed the book. I was really impressed by it, I can't imagine how much work it took to figure all of that out and organize it into a sensible timeline. I also liked the appendices at the end dealing with controversial issues in more depth, that was a great touch.
I didn't realize you had a Substack, I'll have to check it out.
Eh, the Substack is mostly to distribute my work done elsewhere. Not sure what to really do with it yet.
You might like my new book, though.
I have no shame.
It's a really sweet moment for me to see this intro between my favourite writer of all time, and the author of one of my favourite books of all time! <3
I’ll be ordering this book and not “Walter Isaacson’s”. The latter’s book on Steve Jobs bored me to tears, which should be impossible.
You've probably gained a deep understanding from researching Musk from the book, and having observed him for years.
What is your opinion, if you don't mind sharing it, of him helming some of the most pressing projects involving humanity's future? Are you glad that somebody of his caliber is single-handedly creating and challenging entire industries and paradigms, or do you think it's dangerous that one man has so much power and influence?
It's interesting to read all this with an inversion of the question in mind: not, "what is Musk's true nature such that he has been so successful?", but "what is the nature of society such that someone like Musk could be one of it's most successful individuals?"
Not giving up or taking the various soft "No" answers (or sometimes the emphatic, hard "NO!") has been a cheat code in most societies for a long long time. It's a regular feature of business, especially in sales. The key is to have something people want from you, in addition to what you want from them. It sounds like Musk has managed to do that in multiple industries, with multiple workforces.
Most people give up the first time they fail or get told off.
Not to mention a sociopathic streak and a fragile ego. Being thin skinned and willing to climb over the bodies of others gets you far in today's world.
I think it worked even better in the past, when there were fewer merit-based or earned opportunities. Think Ebenezer Scrooge-type landlords or some king starting a war because he felt snubbed by his neighbor. Now there are far more checks and balances on that kind of behavior, making it less successful than it used to be.
If anything, Musk is a huge step up (because he is actually really smart and capable, in addition to his shortcomings) from most kings in history. Talk about sociopathic with a fragile ego - which describes a significant percentage of most hereditary rulers I can think of.
Agreed - I'd rather have our elites selected on the basis of some sort of outstanding characteristics than it simply being a lottery of whoever came out of the right vagina first.
Worrying thought, isn't it?
At least it's not hereditary nobility and palace politics producing our rulers again... yet.
I agree that " in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made", but he also benefited more from privilege than I think you're acknowledging. If he'd gone bust in his early efforts, family money could've come to the rescue; he was never risking not having enough to get by.
There's a reason tightrope walkers who go between skyscrapers with no net do much less impressive stunts than circus performers who have one, even though I've never seen the circus performers fall.
> If he'd gone bust in his early efforts, family money could've come to the rescue; he was never risking not having enough to get by.
Simply getting by would be trivial for someone in the first world who has the skills necessary to start his own company.
It would. But instead he chose a path that, for somebody without family money to fall back on, would have been very risky.
What I'm trying to say is that it wouldn't have been risky. I'm no Elon Musk but I am a software developer. If I tried to found a startup and it failed, I would have:
1) My own savings - I would have set aside enough to get by for a few months even if I invested all the rest into the (failed) company.
2) My human capital. I think I would be able to find a software-developer job within those few months.
3) My middle-class relatives. I don't think what they have is what is usually meant by "family money" but I can still move back in with my dad even if he isn't rich.
3) My friends. I'm sure that three or four of the people I know would be willing to help me get back on my feet.
4) My ability to get a working-class service job on short notice. I look respectable, I speak eloquently, I'm able to reliably follow directions, and I'm not too proud to do physical labor. I think I could get hired within a few days.
So overall, founding a startup and failing would delay my retirement but it wouldn't put me at risk of "not getting by".
Yup. And that's a level of privilege not everybody has. It means those resources Musk never touched and which don't count in that "self-made" story of arriving in Canada with only $2500 gave him an advantage over people from poor backgrounds. (For that matter, so did his Canadian citizenship - getting started in Canada would be a lot harder for most South Africans.)
His accomplishments are genuine, and genuinely his, but there are obstacles he didn't face because of his family, so yes, he's a child of privilege. These statements do not contradict one another.
Not contradictory, just pointless
Scott uses the fact that he really seems to have done it largely on his own to dismiss the idea that he's a child of privilege. The point is that he is, and responding to that fact with something else which doesn't contradict it at all feels like a non-sequitur.
Of course, and being born with a high IQ gave him advantages over most people, who are born with lower IQs. We are all born in massively different positions with massively different personal qualities, and nobody succeeds without a bunch of things on their side.
You aren't born with a high IQ, any more than you are born tall. It takes significant resources to feed, care for and train a mind to perform difficult or complex tasks.
Elon was definitely a child of privilege in this regard as well (despite his father's general awfulness).
The vast majority of people without this base level of 'privilege' do not possess the intellect to ever be in a position to be a wildly successful entrepreneur.
Musk's background level of affluence is about average for a Famous Rich Guy: less rich than Howard Hughes or Donald Trump, about the same as Bill Gates, a little better off than Jeff Bezos, quite a bit richer than Steve Jobs (but from a much worse location to become a tech tycoon than Jobs, who went to school in the heart of Silicon Valley with Steve Wozniak's little brother). Sam Walton's dad was a ne'er-do-well, but his dad's brother was a discount store tycoon.
In general, to make it to the top of the world takes more than one generation.
"It means those resources Musk never touched..."
Do we have a rough estimate over how much those resources amounted to and what fraction was realistically accessible by Musk? Or are we just assuming the answer is Bignum because Musk is a Rich White Dude and can thus be assumed to be Privileged from birth?
The original review estimates Errol Musk's net worth as being in the neighborhood of $10M in 1970s money - not astronomical, but more than the vast majority of people in the developed world.
I can attest to this. I come from an upper-middle-class family background. I tried setting up a startup to commercialize my thesis while I was in grad school. I came pretty close to picking up a small-business defense research contract a couple of times (the closest was three of the five reviewers wanting to fund our proposal, but one of the other two giving us a low enough rating to put the average below the cutoff), but never actually got funding. And a former manager who had been coaching me advised me that I was unlikely to be able to get VC or Angel funding in the short-to-medium-term.
I pretty much fell back on 1-3. When my lease on my college apartment ran out and I didn't have enough savings to renew it without income, I moved back in with my father and started looking for a regular software developing job. And despite a crappy economy (this being 2003) and limited work experience (two internships plus my failed proto-startup), I had a job within a couple of months.
Sure, but I think that explains close to none of the variance between the Musks and Musk-nots of the world
“even though I've never seen the circus performers fall.”
have, saved by the net. Then he did much harder stuff after a consultation with other staff. I think it was deliberate. If so, it worked.
Yeah, it's hard to start a successful business without connections, training and resources to fall back onto.
Not to say that Musk's success was inevitable or something, but he was already playing in a fairly rarefied field to begin with. Some person wandering in from poverty to try and sell their payment software scheme has very little chance of succeeding, and gets to eat an existential risk of poverty if they want to take their shot at all.
This feels like an isolated demand for rigor. It seems like people would only grant musk "self-made status" if he came from deep third-world poverty and drug addiction and was 100% self-taught from the three moldy phone books his decaying local one-room schoolhouse had?
I mean, he has several siblings who are also pretty successful but not to the degree he is. The generic very smart physics PhD student will never achieve anything close to what Musk has, and they tend to be kids of professors themselves (at least from anecdotal experience).
Except that I explicitly *do* agree he's self-made, to a degree almost no other billionaire is. My entire point is that being from a privileged background doesn't conflict with that! Read my damn comment, it's in the first sentence!
Per your point that Musk might not be playing 4D chess but more like stumbling into it by being in the right place at the right time:
>[on Starlink] He just happened to be in the exact right place to make it happen.
> [on self-driving cars]Musk wasn’t expecting this to happen. But by doing things bigger and faster than anyone else, he must have put himself in a place where something was going to right for him.
In my observation, that's basically how chess masters beat you too. For the most part, they only rarely think more than a couple of moves ahead (especially when playing non-masters). They just have a really good idea of roughly where the pieces need to go to get a good position and then "the tactics tend to favor the side with the better position."
But largely, they don't know ahead of time which tactics exactly are going to win, but they have high confidence that they've put themselves in a position where something will work out well for them.
This does sort of sound like exactly what Musk is doing, so maybe he is playing some 4D chess? But then again, even masters blunder sometimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK5QdJ715zw
I think that in common parlance, "playing 4D chess" means that you're executing some complex stratagem that others haven't guessed at. Usually it means you appear to be doing something stupid, but actually you have correctly predicted that this stupid move will actually massively pay off.
I doubt this happens all that often in chess. High level players understand the game well enough that they can't be bamboozled by each other, and while a high level player could probably bamboozle a low level player they are unlikely to bother because they can win anyway with less effort by playing normally.
I wonder if there are even any fields where it's NOT the case ?
"Day[9] Rant - Just F@#$ing Kill Them" : https://youtu.be/LPL3zMPVklY?t=142
Sounds like this "4D chess" is a trope that is there to make a story exciting, but wouldn't work in real life ? (On average : the definition of "unusual" being that it rarely happens !)
For what it's worth, both Tesla and SpaceX do amazing things with much less money and time than you'd expect them to. But some of these amazing things come with trade-offs that are invisible to the average consumer. For example, Tesla batteries have amazing charge density and recharge speed; however, their lifetimes are slightly worse than other comparable batteries even at slower charge speeds. Tesla's current top-of-the-line batteries have a lifespan of 1000 cycles at C/3 per their patent (three hours to charge, three hours to discharge.) This is well below the 800 at C (one hour to charge) that Apple's current top-of-the-line batteries have. These issues come from high charge density with a fairly low Li transference number due to the electrolyte used, which leads to lithium dendrite growth between the anode and cathode, and once they meet, short circuits (which, in the worst cases, may lead to (in Apple's phrasing) "fire or burning"). It's uncommon for lifespan and stability to be sacrificed in batteries in this way, but if you do such a thing, you can certainly make them cheaper and higher-energy on initial sale.
This sort of thing is pretty common among Tesla and SpaceX projects and is generally why I'm not so optimistic about SpaceX's push towards reusable launch platforms- Musk's companies are fantastic at making things that work very well exactly once. I'm not so sure he can make the push towards something that works moderately well repeatedly, especially with the concerning lack of redundancy we're seeing.
Comparing these batteries is literally like comparing apples and oranges (or maybe even apples to steaks) : different use, different tradeoffs. How do they compare on this to other electric cars of similar pricing ?
It really isn't! Li-ion batteries across the industry are made with similar goals in mind- it's just as bad if your phone catches on fire as if your car battery pack catches on fire. The Hyundai Ioniq 6's batteries (similar distance on one charge and price to the Tesla Model 3) are also rated for about 800 cycles at C (1 hr charge, 1 hr discharge). I used Apple's batteries as a comparison because they're also optimizing for high charge density (you need to do that to keep phones small) and are a luxury brand. Note I say "rated for" because these are the claims on the patent; it's certainly possible that you can get specific cells to last longer and publish that in papers (hell you can get complete garbage to last 1000 cycles at C if you try enough times) but these are the claims that each company is willing to stake a patent on. It's possible that Tesla is simply being exceptionally modest with their patent claims, as well- but I don't see the benefit for them in doing so by that much. For what it's worth, empirical testing (people using their cars on an everyday basis) shows about 1200 cycles' worth for the Ioniq and 900 for the Tesla Model 3 (at who knows what cycle rate) so the difference doesn't seem to be that much in the field, but you'd expect there to be a significant positive difference in favor of Tesla considering their market cap and the claims in the papers that their R&D department publishes. Hyundai isn't a specialized electric car company!
(Final note: if you want a really unfortunate example of a Tesla battery, the Model S's 100 kWh battery hits the degradation threshold at 60k miles on the odometer or just over 200 cycles. Most of Tesla's batteries aren't like that, though, so I picked a more reasonable high-charge-density comparison in the 75 kWh Model 3 batteries. This is in comparison to the Ioniq's 77 kWh battery, and is the same formulation as the lower capacity Model S batteries. If they can work out the kinks in the 100 kWh one, I'll be much more confident in Musk's ability to make things that last.)
Ok, thanks for the info !
I really have to give Musk credit for is just embodying the kind of arc-of-history techno-optimism that seems to have been a hallmark of the space age and just abandoned for blinkered, ultimately transient concerns that are just less inspiring and less long-term relevant than the kind of challenges Musk has taken off.
At a certain level, "Why should we go to Mars?" has to be a question that answers itself, and I think Musk is the primary counterweight against various forces that would pose it. Pose it in a manner that makes short-term sense but at the cost of any sort of long-term vision for human advancement. Perpetual local optimizations can generate a tremendous amount of value but it is not a total replacement for an overarching teleology. Wisdom is slave to the passions -- let us have our damn passions back.
Telos is humanity reaching out into the uncaring universe and wresting meaning from the void by force of will. It's worth going to Mars *because it's fucking going to Mars.*
I was going to write a comment in response to this, but you absolutely nailed it.
I love Tolkien’s work, and, oddly, when I was reading this, my mind turned to Feanor in The Silmarillion.
Feanor was the most gifted of the elves. His was unbelievably brilliant, talented, and determined, and “his spirit burned like a bright flame.” He would work obsessively hard and he achieved many great things, including making the three Silmarils, the magnificent jewels after which the story is named.
He was also arrogant and quick to take offense, and he made some catastrophic errors in judgment that cost both him and his people dearly. He was very charismatic when getting people to follow him, but had zero kindness or understanding of others.
He had seven children, so not as many as Musk but still a large number, and he and his wife became “estranged “ due to his bad choices. Bear in mind that this is in a culture where divorce didn’t exist and true love was forever, so becoming estranged from your spouse was a really huge deal and a sign of something being deeply broken and wrong.
As Scott would say, TINACBNIAC.
I hadn't made the connection with Feänor, but now that you mention it, I think you're onto something here.
Now I'm curious - who has Tolkien based Feänor on ?
In one of the very early drafts of the Silmarillion material, Tolkien linked some of the characters to established figures in Germanic/Scandinavian mythology. Feänor is identified with Wayland the Smith. Looking over Wayland's wikipedia article, the connection seems pretty tenuous, apart from both being master smiths who had adventures and made a bunch of stuff that shows up in later stories. In particular, Wayland sounds like a guile hero, while Feänor's more of a "May Eru have mercy upon those who stand in my way, because damn well won't" type.
Thanks, though I misspoke : I wondered if Tolkien was inspired by some contemporary friend/foe of his...
I get a distinct impression while reading the Silmarillion that Feanor is, at least in some ways, an exploration of Tolkien's own flawed character. I think it's telling that it's Feanor whom Tolkien credits with creating Tengwar, the Elven writing system. And that his chief sins were pride and stubbornness (particularly regarding his creations), things Tolkien himself struggled with throughout his life. Tolkien was famously particular and stubborn, which caused significant tensions with his beloved wife and made him difficult to work with. And then you have Tolkien's extensive discussions about why creating an explicitly pagan fantasy world isn't blasphemous - at the risk of psychoanalyzing a man who's been dead for 50 years, he clearly had some Catholic guilt regarding his "playing God," and Feanor definitely seems to be an exploration of those feelings and something of a critical self portrait.
Hah, of course !
Regarding autism, Musk self-described as having Asperger's syndrome in 2021 (on Saturday Night Live, for some reason): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57045770.
FWIW, I have a few friends who work at the gigafactory and they have a picture of Elon in their front room as a saint and call him daddy. They also work 6-7 days a week
https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/Saint-Elon-of-Musk-Elon-Musk-Original-Religious-Painting-by-6amCrisis/94604861.LVTDI
Elon's personality appears amusingly similar to that of Napoleon (at least, as related in Andrew Roberts' 'Napoleon the Great').
Both boast/boasted near-perfect recall (Napoleon could recognise and name common soldiers he'd met two decades prior), a widely remarked-upon ability to rapidly master the complex details of processes at every level of thier operations (+esoteric topics of interest), a tendancy towards obsessive micromanagerial interventions, and reputation for meeting timelines conventional wisdom deemed impossible, though a combination of belligerence and highly motivated employees. Both worked their way out from initial training in maths/engineering, were/are obsessed with the frontiers of technology, and think/thought in terms of archs of history. The megalomaniac box also probably gets a tick in both cases.
Is Napoleon what happens when would-be tech bros lack silicon?
Key differences between the two are that Napoleon had a habit of being (often unjustifiably) trusting of long-time colleagues, built rapport with his low-level employees, and was exceedingly charismatic.
After decades of risk-taking, Napoleon's luck eventually ran out. It will be interesting to see if Musk meets his own proverbial early Russian winter.
Also, I think Napoleon only needed (?) a few hours of sleep per night, what about Musk ?
I had assumed a major part of the reason for renaming Twitter something so generic was thinking that it was well-known enough to get away with being one of the main associations of a whole letter. If he previously named a startup (which necessarily wasn't already famous) the same thing, that's an argument against this, but I guess Musk's extreme optimism about his projects makes that still possible.
I mean, he might succeed in creating "X, the everything app", but I would not describe this as "okay" insofar as "X, the everything app" sounds dystopian and evil. (In particular, it sounds like combing Twitter with PayPal would involve going forward with the noises he's made about banning anonymity/pseudonymity, which I think would be a bigger blow to freedom of speech, and human freedom in general, than a thousand old-school Twitter censors…)
>"X, the everything app" sounds dystopian and evil.<
How do you feel about the Everything Bagel?
Now now, haven't you watched "Everything Everywhere All At Once"? The Everything Bagel could destroy the multiverse! …In all seriousness, if "everything app" remains silly marketing hyperbole for something that's still basically just a new social media app, fine. But that part of Scott's post was saying that we need to take Musk's stated aims literally, rather than as hyperbolic marketing gimmicks. A single, privately-owned app that *literally* fulfills all functions does in fact sound quite dystopian (in much the same way as an "Everything Bagel" that was literally supposed to act as a substitute for every foodstuff, and had as its aim to drive all other food-producers out of business with its superior homogenous everything-food).
My personal theory is that 1) PR doesn't matter, but PR people have convinced us it does 2) many of the cited mistakes Musk has made, were indeed mistakes, but they were things that matter less than we might think 3) making mistakes in general matters less than people think. If you keep taking bets where you can win 1000x more than you can lose, it doesn't take long to end up the world's richest person. If you're paralyzed by the possibility of failure, then you're an internet commentor.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere before, I'll note that SpaceX almost certainly needs Starlink for internal use. If you're going to launch dozens/hundreds of people into space every week on Super Heavys, or build out any kind of significant human presence in space, you're going to need to be able to communicate with them. The existing NASA ground station network and things like TDRSS are insufficient for the scale, or for providing communications infrastructure to people who live in space but aren't working for a government 24/7. Even if somebody else had the "idea" for Starlink first, it was going to become an obvious necessity at some point in the long-term planning process for "I want to put lots of people into space".
He'll probably want a Starlink equivalent on Mars, and some sort of interplanetary interconnection between the two. I can't imagine he'll want to pause deliveries to Mars just because there's a conjunction.
It's important to remember that the world is filled with countless examples of people who took risky bets and lost. It's easy to look at the winners and attribute good fortune to their personal genius, but you risk engaging in a form of counting the hits and ignoring the misses. The business world is filled with would-be megalomaniacal obsessives taking risky bets. Corporate ladders likewise are filled with psychopaths in the Hare sense whose amoral machinations fly close to the sun. It inevitably works out for some, and it's not always easy to tell how much of that comes down to anything special about them over the fallen.
>but in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made
The idea of 'self-made' is a myth. Musk had plenty of employees and business partners who were indispensable in getting him where he is. This is like the Great Man Theory of Business.
"Doesn't have employees" seems like a very high bar for self-made, and not how people commonly understand the term.
Well the word 'self-made' sets a high bar.
Okay, there's literally no reason for you to set this bar besides having some ideological axe to grind. Nobody else reads the phrase 'Musk is a self-made man' and literally infers this as meaning that Musk never had any employees or investors. So again, your reason for insisting it has to mean this is because you feel it has negative implications based on your political ideology.
>Nobody else reads the phrase 'Musk is a self-made man' and literally infers this as meaning that Musk never had any employees or investors
I wasn't inferring that
"Self-made" just means "he worked his way up from not having too much money to having lots of money, without anyone directly giving him the money". Although your definition reminds me of Peter Bleackley on the English: "They consider themselves a self-made nation, thus relieving the Almighty of a terrible responsibility".
The phrase 'self-made' isn't the right term for that though. It's a very contrived way of using those words.
You have to remember that the default way of getting rich throughout almost all of history was to inherit. The term "self-made" comes from an era when going from not-that-rich to really rich was truly exceptional.
With the massive creation of wealth over the past couple of centuries, the vast majority of rich people are now "self made", so people think it should mean something different, but it doesn't. Nowadays most of the richest people in the US are self made, except for the Waltons, the Marses, and Julia Koch.
I'm not sure how any of that justifies the usage of the phrase 'self-made' as opposed to using some other word(s) to describe that.
It’s about as justified as using the phrase “very contrived” as opposed to “not what I would have thought that phrase meant based on the literal meaning of its component words”.
Why do you say that?
It’s the common way of using those words.
Mistakes are commonly common.
But that’s the phrase. That’s what it means.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-made
Self made: made such by one's own actions
**especially** : having achieved success or prominence by one's own efforts
This is a weird thing on the Internet, people not really understanding common and dictionary usage and believing that they themselves get to define words or idioms.
You could say anybody with any kind of success is self-made by this definition. Human beings are not puppets on strings, we take actions and these actions have results, that's just a trivial part of the human condition.
You would reserve the words "self made" for God alone?
If I recall my Catholic theology correctly, God is described as eternally existing, not created, and Jesus is explicitly "begotten, not made". Perhaps there are other theologies out there, though; I can think of a few ones from fantasy universes that would count.
A 'made man' is a Mafia term, meaning your family ties made you important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_man So a "self-made man" would be important without their family's influence.
If you want it changed you'll have to argue terminology with the mafia.
I'm not sure the mafia are a source of authority.
Tell it to them.
I have no idea what you're trying to accomplish.
Description of Elon really reminds description of Stalin from Mikoyan diaries
Very alike idea of ruthlessly appointing and firing people, same treating people like cogs, same very deep micromanagement where he both knew ton about ton and also faked a lot of it
He even did that very aggressive examining of his subordinates that for many looked like brutal test, but actually it was him figuring out
One anecdotal story tells how Stalin that Germans use electric melting of steel, so he drove right to home of minister responsible for the newest steel factory and accused him of sabotage for using coal
For the next hour a minister afraid of his life was proving and explaining all details of steel industry and why on certain mill the coal was preferable
The same was near-endless work stamina and also charm, for some reason people believed he was a great person no matter what Stalin did to/with them
Does the book offer any insight on why he’s so desperately supporting Putin, including repeatedly taking down Starlink to sabotage Ukrainian efforts?
I double that question.
It feels like Elon actually has something personal against Ukraine or for Russia, because it doesn't look he has any other reasons for his position
Being pro-Putin is the default Republican position these days of course, but that doesn't seem like it would automatically influence Musk. Routine contrariness could be another explanation?
He simply didn't want his company being involved directly in offensive operations on Russian controlled territory, which is the most reasonable thing in the world. Again, you have to believe that supplying Starlink in the first place was part of a grand conspiracy to hurt Ukraine by cutting it off later, even though there wasn't a good alternative and its not clear that Ukraine could have possibly been made worse off overall by Starlink being turned off compared to never having access to it in the first place.
Good god, this again? Musk's decisions around Starlink pretty much mirror the US Government's foreign policy regarding support for Ukraine (allow for defense on Ukrainian territory and limit offense, to the extent possible, from Russian territory to avoid escalation of the conflict). Go complain about the slow-rolling of weaponry the US and the entire western alliance has inflicted upon Ukraine if you want a real target.
Crimea is Ukrainian territory.
It's been controlled by Russia for almost a decade. For the sake of what we're talking about here (avoiding offensive operations in Russian territory), then Crimea is absolutely Russian territory and the US aiding an attack on Crimea is functionally equivalent to aiding an attack on any "real" Russian territory.
No it isn’t and that is not the American position.
But the American position is to not escalate on many dimensions, with a significant one (but not the only one) to limit US-provided arms capable of attacking Russian territory. The defacto Russian control of Crimea and the heavily signalled red-line Russia has drawn around it in this regard are of relevance, even if you discount the fact that an agreement did exist (Kharkiv pact) to lawfully base the Russian fleet in Sebastopol (though this was technically voided after the little green men operation in 2014).
It's worth noting US weaponry provided to Ukraine is artificially range-limited in some cases (ATACMS) and other weaponry. Finally, Blinken refused to criticize Musk for this Starlink decision when asked about it recently...who knows who in the State Dept may have spoken to Musk about this. I don't think we can be confident we have all of the facts.
This doesn't appear to be true, he just hasn't done Ukraine certain special favours when asked.
He gave the Ukrainians access to starlink last year, something that’s pretty much essential to their war effort. This isn’t supporting Russia. It’s supporting Ukraine.
Originally he was donating Starlink, at some point he signed a contract with the US DoD after which he has presumably been doing whatever the US DoD tells him to do. Which may not be that different to what he was doing before, since the USG is also concerned about managing escalation risk.
So when he provided them with Starlink in the first place, this was some 4d big brain move to pull the rug out at the last minute? And how does Musk's agreement he signed with the US DoD help Russia, exactly?
What source do you have for this claim ?
The first time isn't in doubt - it's been admitted by Musk, and only the details are in question: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264 "Escalation" is of course whenever the West tries to help Ukraine, and parroting Russian talking points..
The second time, Starlink went down _exactly_ as Ukraine launched the most recent strike on Crimea. In theory, it could have been a coincidence, but if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/13/2193063/-Unfortunate-Starlink-2-Hour-Outage-Last-Night-As-Ukraine-Attacked-Sevastapol
And Putin praises Musk to the skies over it.
Musk also of course supports China to the hilt over Taiwan, but that's more immediately understandable - it may cost him money if he doesn't. The Russia thing is something else, though, as is his anti-semitism.
Thanks, but both of your articles literally contradicts your previous statement.
(Also, how low has the BBC fallen that they are reporting on tweets, *especially* Medvedev's ?)
It was probably not a coincidence, and indeed sounds a lot like Musk "pressing the big red button", knowing his volatility, but then Starlink has been very clear for *at least* half a year (and more if we believe their statements about their discussions with the Ukrainian government) that (inter-personnel, military ?) comms are "ok", but "offensive purposes" are not :
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/168m7me/elon_musks_shadow_rule_the_new_yorker/jyyre2f/
I don't think that I agree with their position, and (with hindsight !) it was naive of them to think it wouldn't happen, but then we needed to react fast, and you don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Are you sure it was Musk, and not a highly trained team of feline saboteurs ?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6-RhqNAK6tI
https://www.teslarati.com/starlink-includes-cat-5-sticker-commemorates-meme/
(Apologies in advance, you will need to unblock Twitter to be able to see these pictures.)
A book written in 2015 would obviously not have anything specific on that one. But IIRC the sequence of events was:
1. Musk gives Ukraine lots of essentially free Starlink terminals and access as A: good marketing and B: the right thing to do when the Armies of Darkness are on the march.
2. The Ukrainians make good use of Starlink, integrate it into every aspect of their operations, and speak favorably of Musk.
3. Elon tweets without thinking and says basically "It's stupid for Ukraine to expect they will reclaim Crimea; Putin will nuke them if they try that. They should negotiate a ceasefire and lock in their partial win". Which is a defensible position that seems to be shared by a significant part of the US national security apparatus, but it really calls for more than 140 characters and it doesn't really help Elon (or Ukraine) for Elon to be the one saying it.
4. Lots of Ukrainians and Ukrainian sympathizers high on the victories of Autumn 2022 say "Fuck you Elon, we thought you were on our side but clearly you are either a Putin apologist or a fool who doesn't understand geopolitics, we're totally taking back Crimea!", and again often in a 140-character format that disallows nuance.
5. Elon instinctively responds the way most people do when someone says to them "Fuck You", and being Elon, never revistis that decision. He's got enough PR savvy to know that just cutting Starlink service to Ukraine outright would not be a good move, but he can shut down Starlink over Crimea and maybe over Russian-occupied territory in general, so that the Ukrainians are less likely to provoke a nuclear war, and so that if they do provoke a nuclear War it will be Not Elon's Fault, and so that he can say "Fuck you" right back at the Ukrainians.
6. Elon also hints to Kyiv and DC that it's really time for *someone* to start actually paying for all this tech, because SpaceX isn't a charity and because see above, Fuck Ukraine.
So, not pro-Putin in his intentions, but also not pro-Ukraine any longer.
The "1 in 1,000 level intelligent" estimate seems quite low. The Space-X engineers he's talking to are probably already 1 in 10,000: it takes about 1 in 100 intellect to get into Stanford, plus they're at the top of their class in one of the hardest majors to get to Space-X, and then are promoted at least once to be speaking with Musk. And these 1 in 10,000 folks are amazed by his intelligence. So shouldn't we estimate Musk at least at 1 in 1,000,000? (A 1 in 10,000 person might recognize that a 1 in 100,000 person is a bit smarter than them, but would not yet be amazed.)
To Scott's other point in that section, I agree that his intensity is why he's the richest man in the world, instead the other ~1,000 people or so at his level of intellect.
Can you think of any other reasons why graduates of elite universities might describe their famously vain and petty boss as very intelligent on the record other than assuming he must be a 1 in a million intellect?
Lol.
It reminds of, what I think was, Trump's first cabinet meeting where they went around the table one by one praising him to the skies.
I was debating saying 1/1000 vs. 1/10,000 (for reference, these correspond to IQs 147 and 156). I don't think the average SpaceX engineer is 1/10,000 - that would suggest Musk employs ~1/3 of all the IQ 150+ people in the country, but I think there are some tech companies, Wall Street firms, and colleges that have a lot of these people too, and many of them are entrepreneurs in their own right, and many others are weird and never find stable work.
I also don't know if SpaceX engineers are truly amazed by his intelligence in the sense of "he's smarter than me" or just "even though he's the boss he understands everything as well as I do".
I could probably be convinced up to 1/5,000 or 1/10,000, and maybe 1/100,000 if we're talking about engineering in particular. I'm nervous saying anything about 1/1,000,000; I don't think I have a good enough sense of what that's like.
I similarly debated between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 10,000 for Space-X engineers. I was thinking, "Space-X employees in technical roles who are senior enough to talk to Musk" as opposed to all 12,000 employees, but I think you're right that I should lower that estimate somewhat.
My argument for amazed is that Musk is understanding like 100 different roles as well as the person focusing solely on their own role, but I am speculating.
I was thinking engineering in particular with my high estimates. I liked your point about different types of intelligence being correlated but only at 0.2-.04 and it seems useful for understanding Musk.
I also don't have a good sense of 1/1,000,000 either, but there are 7,800 of those people in the world and I don't have a good guess at what they're all doing if they're all better at engineering than Musk.
I believe one of them made a very successful YouTube channel: Stuff Made Here.
He was the former Head of Engineering at Form Labs so he has the achievements as well as passing the eye test. If anyone knows of any other public engineer that's at this level or better I would love to hear it.
The ability to synthesize multiple different areas of expertise is so rare that most people would be amazed at someone doing it well even at a fairly low level. "I didn't have to explain it to him like a toddler, and he still knows about finance!" is likely enough of a bar. Musk clearly exceeds that bar, but the anecdotes don't necessarily mean they were impressed by his raw intelligence or thought he was operating at their level within their individual domains.
What then are the other 300,000 people at Musk’s level of intelligence doing with their lives?
Arguing on the internet, obviously.
Playing Civ IV. Joking, but not really.
Woe to those who click here !
https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ4-caveman-2-cosmos.449/
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
> Part of the answer must come from that story above about him taking over people’s jobs. His strategy is to demand people do seemingly impossible things, then fire them if they fail. To pull that off, you need to really understand the exact limits of impossibility.
I agree with this, and would add that it's not specific to his strategy of micromanaging folks and taking over their audaciously-scoped tasks if they can't complete them. For any tech company, a technical CEO has superpowers compared to a non-technical one (but are predisposed to a fairly standard set of weaknesses too).
Even beyond just the CEO role, in the tech industry there is a very widely discussed challenge of "technical vs. non-technical managers". The engineers doing Individual Contributor (IC) work can grow to resent non-technical managers if they don't have a sense for how hard a given ask will be to implement, and a common anti-pattern is for the non-technical product, marketing, sales, and scheduling decisions to be made without a deep understanding of the actual feasibility as it bottoms out in the technical implementation. At worst this can lead to myopic leadership ("MBA management" etc.).
At the end of the day, a non-technical manager/CEO must be good at synthesizing the team's estimates and opinions, and knowing when to defer to concerns about tactical considerations, vs. take a tactically more difficult path which will advance strategic aims. (Aluminum chassis is a great example of this kind of tactically-painful but strategically visionary decision where a non-technical leader might struggle.) In a normal tech org the CEO has to trust the CTO, and then the CTO works through layers of managers to enact their technical vision, so there are multiple hops where the CEO's vision can be lost in translation. At Tesla Musk is collapsing both CEO-CTO and CTO-manager-IC communication down to him directly talking to ICs, which (while having other obvious organizational issues) allows him to make bold technical bets and stay very aligned on what is actually possible for his ICs to do.
Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".
Having said all that, why not just use technical managers? The answer is that it's usually not the best use of a strong IC's time; managing is very hard, requires strong empathy, is hard to teach, and training is criminally underfunded and under-appreciated. Managing is very different than IC work; it's meetings and interrupt-driven communications and performance management, whereas ICs usually thrive on "Maker Time" where they (optimally) get long blocks of uninterrupted time to get into the flow state and think about one problem. So while a good senior IC starts to get involved in communications and scheduling and other "outwards-facing" non-technical activities, there isn't an obvious universal progression from IC to manager. It used to be quite standard to have "senior IC" as the pinnacle of technical career progression, and the only way to get promoted further was to become a manager; this turns your best ICs (technical leads, mentors, or whole-system generalists) into normally-distributed managers (i.e. some good some bad, with no expectation for them to be better-than-average). Now at least in software it's more common to have a strong IC progression track that's parallel to managers, but you still see some degree of "strong IC -> mediocre manager" career paths.
The reasons you'd favor non-technical managers also apply to why non-technical CEOs are usually better at their jobs; in most organizations, the technical work is one or maybe a handful of roles in the C-suite (you might have a CTO and a Chief Scientist, say), while there are more non-technical roles (Sales, Operations, Marketing, Legal, HR, fundraising, and so on), and the CEO needs to be something of a jack-of-all-trades between all of those; in aggregate, non-technical skills are required more than technical ones. Musk's successful companies are outliers in that they benefit from being heavily technology-focused; they are applying tech company style iterative innovation and experimentation to historically non-software/non-"tech" domains, which I believe increases the importance of the CEO->CTO->IC chain, and is why Musk's strength in that area is disproportionately impactful. Having a Musk-style technical CEO would not be useful in a traditional car company, or a sales-driven enterprise software company like SAP.
This is an excellent summary and description of the problem and why Musk stands out.
I am a non-technical-manager, and I'd say quite good at it. I work with ICs and non-technical management a lot, and there's always a rub that's hard to fix. Technical people rarely make great managers, and great managers rarely know enough about the details to make the hard decisions. What I've found that works best is either an IC fairly early in their career that can be turned towards management - and thereby learn the management skills before they ossify into technical, or someone who is good at management and is willing and able to learn enough about the technical to understand at least what the ICs are telling them.
Most managers end up some kind of hybrid, which generally works but results in lots of inefficiency and missed opportunities. The most common solution is meetings between IC-centric managers and non-technical managers in front of a decision-maker, who they each have to explain their perspective to. There's a lot of lost efficiency in this process, highly contingent on the ability of the decision-maker to synthesize the information received and correctly identify an appropriate course of action.
Leslie Groves (head of the Manhattan Project) is such a fascinating case - he was surrounded by the premier geniuses of his age, many of them quite quirky, and they could have quite rightly thought that that he wasn't on their level with either technical knowledge or pure intelligence (it's not that Groves was a stupid man or anything, and he wasn't untechnical generally, but can you just imagine the context?).
But he was good at management and good at recruiting people (he personally selected Oppenheimer) and came out of it successful and generally respected. That takes some managerial skill and vision.
Paul, I loved your quote about the SpaceX engineer drawing a direct connection between the mission and his operational tasks. Do you recall the source of that quote/interview? Any clue would be most appreciated.
I'm afraid that I've not been able to find the original source for this quote. I came upon it a while ago, probably somewhere around 2018/2019.
Thank you Paul!
What do Musk admirers think of the cringy names he gave to his kids?
My mental model of being an engineering genius does not rule out being weird about kid's names.
Definitely cringy, indefensible.
I think Grimes gets most of the blame for the weird names, it's only her kids that have them.
Elon's kids in order of bad name:
Vivian
Damian
Griffin
Saxon
Kai
Nevada
Exa Dark Siderael (the least bad since "Exa" on its own isn't too bad)
Techno Mechanicus
X AE A-12
My big question here is if Grimes is the instigator for the weird names, or if Musk wanted weird names for all of his kids but Grimes is the only one of his partners who didn't veto it.
He could have named anything else in the world that, and no one would have cared, but he chose the one time it's inappropriate: doing it to a person.
Incredibly bad, but Musk likes (/needs) any attention he can get
Bad, but not the worst thing he's done. Not very relevant to the question of whether or not he's been good at running his businesses or will succeed at some future endeavor.
If you put any stock on myers-briggs theory stuff, this article shows that Musk is the definition of the strengths and weaknesses of extraverted thinking vs introverted thinking. Probably an ENTJ.
I'm assuming it was an error that this wasn't filed under the "Dictator's Book Club" section of ACX
Very much a side note to the thrust of the review, but it was a trip to see Andy Beal mentioned. I had an internship at Beal Aerospace in the long ago, have always been saddened that it full-stopped so soon.
On the subject of Beal, as I understand it Beal did not so much fail, as Andy Beal simply gave up. He saw the creation of ULA and the associated block procurements that the United States Government intended to subsidize and protect its favorite contractors to the point where they would always be able to undercut any domestic competition, and he didn't think he could win in that rigged game.
I believe that he has since acknowledged that this decision was a mistake and that the underlying fear was illusory. I don't think his rocket was ever going to be as broadly capable and transformative as the Falcon, so it's not a huge loss, but I don't think it was a technical failure.
Yeah, the BA-1 was never trying for reusability (the computing tech available in 1998 wouldn't've been up to the task), just much less expensive expendables. They were definitely pushing the envelope on composite main structures.
He might even have been correct originally that the path they were pursuing couldn't've cut costs enough to get past the existing government-contractor relationships, and I don't think his pockets were nearly deep enough to hang on long enough to pivot to something that would; hell, even Bezos hasn't actually managed to get something to orbit.
Don't over-estimate the significance of mistakes in business. You don't have to make zero mistakes. You just have to make fewer mistakes than the other guy. In the sorts of ambiguous business situations that Musk puts himself in, the other guy will make plenty of mistakes.
Correcting mistakes seems like the key skill, not avoiding them.
A one-man dictatorship of a company can correct mistakes much faster than a giant company ruled by some complicated consensus of executives.
Though if that one man is intolerant of being proved wrong, that might make correction harder.
As well as learning from them.
Reportedly from the Issacson book:
"Grimes was furious when she found out later and wasn’t at all sure whether she would ever allow her Musk babies (a boy named X and a girl named Y and a new baby boy named Techno Mechanicus) to hang out with Zilis’s Musk babies (a boy named Strider Sekhar Sirius and a girl named Azure Astra Alice)."
Zilis has strong naming game, good for her for taking Musk's weird-naming instincts in a better direction than Grimes did.
Also, I'm screaming inside about naming the boy X and the girl Y, that's so bad.
Hard proof that Musk does not have OCD/autism?
I think those are nicknames, not the actual names?
He sounds like a smart, intense guy - but also one that has gotten very, very lucky. Musk has not managed to piss off the wrong employee at the wrong time in a way that does irreparable damage to one or more of his businesses, or maybe those employees have become fully adept at avoiding that to save themselves.
As for Twitter/X, I'm more skeptical. He wants to make Twitter into WeChat for America, but WeChat only became that in China because of good timing and their connections with the Chinese government. Twitter does not have good timing on getting into mobile payments, and it's insanely competitive.
The only positions that are irreplaceable are ones where the owner/ceo has allowed themselves to be convinced by the employee that no one else could do it. In practice, the closest I've seen are the legacy mainframe type guys at major banks who run systems they themselves rigged up over a career and wrote out no documentation.
Even they are replaceable, and are being replaced (as they retire, or die). If a company is willing to pay top dollar for the best experts, they will get solid replacements for anyone. That Musk does this faster may be a cost concern and may delay projects, but maybe not. Identifying the right people to be on an A++ team may require cutting the A+ people or the A++ people that don't fit.
Musk is a genius in some ways, but in others he's merely average. I wrote in 2022:
"Musk's biography should be titled "the everyman." He gets married and then gets divorced. His second wife is an actress, exactly what an everyman would pick if he were rich and famous and too dumb to notice that Hollywood marriages never last. He gets divorced, then remarries the same woman, then divorces again. Then he decides to not bother with marriage and have some kids out of wedlock with a musician. The relationship shockingly does not last. He was accused of offering to buy sex from a masseuse. He's denied it, but if it happened it would have been a very everyman story. "Hey, I thought "massage" was a code word for sex! What, you mean some of you don't give happy endings?" He initially refused the COVID vaccine as he thought he was "not at risk of COVID" as a 49-year-old man. He always voted Democrat, but recently became a Republican. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was when one of the kids he has scattered around decides he's "transgender." Like a lot of everymen, he has this funny idea that his son cutting his d*** off is a negative util hit."
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6210.msg269419.html#msg269419
This is why Musk is so much more likeable than the Zuck.
"The only good answer to this question I’ve ever heard is that maybe it’s some sort of grand charter city proposal, and the benefit is that Earthly governments can’t touch it. As I explain later, I don’t think Musk is enough of a 4D chessmaster to think of this and keep it secret, although maybe he’s just so good a chessmaster that he hides it."
It is completely obvious and heavily signaled that Mars is about liberty/independence as far as Musk is concerned.
"Starlink's terms of service include a Mars clause: Users must agree that Mars is a free planet unbound by the authority or sovereignty of any Earth-bound government."
Zubrin's Mars Society was an early influence on Musk, and Zubrin's whole thing is that Mars is a new America, free from the old world's stultifying influence. "No EPA on Mars is one of the major reasons we have to go there" among other quotes.
It's somewhat annoying that people act like the Mars thing is out of pocket. It's the only planet besides Earth where you can sit on the surface and get as much CO2 as you want. It has readily available water ice. You can launch a single stage rocket from Mars to anywhere in the solar system because of the shallow gravity well and thin atmosphere. It is the only planet where independent survival is possible with near-term tech. Living on another planet can't be compared to Antarctica.
This review/book seems to presume that he has random obsessions and just happened to make electric cars and rockets -- it's pretty clear that rocketry needed major improvements and that those improvements were technically possible, same with clean energy/electric cars. Those were also at the burning core of America's national interest. This is a man who loves sex, video games, and porn - an accomplished womanizer who jets around including with Hollywood actresses. He's ravenous for all that life has to offer and takes a big bite out of everything. Yet he'll still buckle down and work day and night on what he thinks is important -- sacrificing an AAA class lifestyle long periods of time. How many people have "made it" and kept swinging in that manner? None of the other major tech people seem to have that fight in them - they shoot their shot and then move on to their foundation. Where's Jeff Bezos? Where are Larry and Sergei? Where's Bill Gates?
Yet more than any of the other tech billionaires, who "hit it and quit it," or who knock one thing out of the park and whiff thereafter, he has gone back to bat time and time again, and each time for something incredibly important. Yet despite being the most admirable and principled tech magnate in this most important of regards, he has by far the worst reputation because, essentially, of his vibes.
Maybe his irreverence for norms should reflect badly on the norms, not on him.
So, an eternal teenager, raised on the Golden (?) Age of science fiction ?
Sure, there are aspects to admire in this, and *eventually* we might need to colonize other planets, but what about our more immediate priorities/obligations as a species ?
(A big reason why he's so much in a rush is likely because he desperately wants to see humans walk on Mars before he dies, maybe even go there himself ! Which is an impressive dream, if it wouldn't be for its inherent egoism...)
We need to colonize space yesterday. Earth is a bunch of crabs in a bucket pulling each other down. Every increase in wealth on Earth is paired with an increase of obligations. People are desperately confused about this; the reason for homeless people is that as soon as we get richer and more capable of affording homes, the minimum standard to which homes must be built simply rises. The same hideous fools are trying to do this with food as well; anything can be made arbitrarily expensive by wailing about subjective things like "ethics" and "wholesomeness." Even more pernicious is the notion of a "rip off." If someone is able to provide something mega cheap and make mega profit, then new suppliers flood in and drive the price down. If as soon as you do that you are mobbed by leftist freaks for "price gouging" -- there is no point in driving the price radically down, just go with the insane inflation of standards like everyone else.
Space is much harder to police. It's the eternal Age of Sail in space, a truly boundless ocean. The murderously imbecilic busybody freaks who sabotage literally everything will be forced to torture each other instead of a captive audience.
The Age of Sail happened because the still relatively poor West was entranced by the (of course exaggerated) tales of immense riches of the Indias.
There might be *some* parallels to that for space, but it's not Mars then, but asteroid mining (and maybe Helium-3 mining on the moon ??).
But as long as we haven't found a way to make a civilization that is not self-destructive (in the worst case : an oxymoron ?), any increase in wealth brings even more destruction, faster.
If it's about some kind of Lebensraum (which, let's not forget, can't even be compared because the lands captured could be very profitably settled by anyone with farming / hunting / pastoral skills, and only the most minimal of capital !), then, as already been pointed out, Mars seems much worse than, say, Antarctica. (Also this is just can-kicking before these are filled again.)
Also, human nature doesn't change because you're in space, in fact I would say that it gets worse when you cannot flee your miserable environment on foot, (almost) naked.
In Heinlein books, space colonies on Mars and the Moon revolt against rule from Earth, like the American revolution.
Thank you for writing this.
I have seen several interviews with Musk and in none of them does he come off as being >120 IQ. Second-hand reports claim that he is very smart but I don't believe second-hand reports. Does anyone have any unfalsifiable proof that Musk is highly intelligent, like a video of him giving an unscripted talk about numerical methods for control systems or something? If he is able to meaningfully interrogate his employees about their work he should be able to lecture about various aspects of aerospace engineering. Where are the videos of him clearly demonstrating a genius-level IQ?
120 IQ isn't a terribly high standard. (top 9%). For instance he got into a Physics PhD program at Stanford which is something that not that many <120 IQ people can achieve.
Musk's interview on youtube with The Everyday Astronaut is the best video I've seen of him discussing heavily technical subjects without dumbing them down for a general audience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E and it convinced me he's pretty smart. Is he any smarter than the average Stanford physics PhD student? Not necessarily, but those are high standards to begin with.
He's smart enough that IQ is no longer a useful measurement anyway. The tails come apart and all that.
I have been interested in EVs since the 2000s when the price of oil kept increasing and most people believed in “peak oil”…I was the only person critical of him in the comment sections of EV blogs because I found his arrogance off putting. SBF made a very telling comment when he said something along the lines of Musk’s competitive advantage is the price of Tesla stock. So it’s almost like SBF doesn’t believe Tesla should have that valuation and it gives Musk an unfair advantage. So basically SBF believed he should be allowed to control a company with the valuation of Tesla and it didn’t really matter what the company did or if it was really worth what it was valued at but SBF would have done the most to make the world better with a company with an overpriced stock…so everyone should just make SBF’s stock price valuable and make him the world’s wealthiest man and he will solve all the world’s problems.
Honestly watching that interview I get the impression he's more of an engineering manager with 120-130 IQ who works with engineers 2SD above him. He clearly has a knack for attracting incredible engineering talent, but I don't get the impression he could actually do any of this himself. If he didn't have a media hype apparatus and a carefully crafted cult of personality I don't think he would be of any particular note among CEOs. Compared to Robert Playter the CEO of Boston Dynamics, (watch the Lex Fridman interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVdsZ3I5os) Playter comes off as more intelligent and like he could have actually contributed to the real engineering work that goes on.
If it turns out that Elon has a 125 IQ, does that make him more or less impressive than he would be if he had a 150 IQ?
Less, I consider that he has had praise heaped upon him for the accomplishments of others, like principal investigators that do little actual bench or theory work but still get their names put on the actually groundbreaking work of the scientists who work in their lab.
It sounds like you're a resentful engineer who thinks the smart guys "deserve" to be the rich ones, even though these smart engineers are vastly more replaceable than the Elon Musks of the world.
Perhaps all these big brain engineers should have been smart enough to start their own company - think of all the money they would be saving by not having to pay assholes like Musk to be CEO!
There are different ways of theorizing about what may be influencing the perspective of Liminal. I feel llike you chose the intellectual character attack route, so I'm not surprised they didn't reply to you.
For what it's worth, I have read Liminimal's comments over a decent period of time as they are active here, and I have never gotten the impression that they are a resentful engineer.
More!
Allegedly Richard Feynman's IQ was "only" 125. That "smartest kid in the class but not the whole grade" intelligence, combined with incredible curiosity, work ethic, and love of games and puzzles, combined to make him a giant.
Feynmann got the highest score i. The country on the Putnam (the most prestigious math competition for undergrads). He most certainly was not just the smartest kid in the class. It's more likely that the IQ test he took didn't accurately measure his immense mathematical talent
I didn't know that - thank you!
I wonder whether the reports of Feynman's IQ being 125 fall into the same category as the tales of young Einstein being considered a slow learner - quite possibly fabrications to boost the self-esteem of actual slow learners.
There's no real evidence of the 125IQ ...its.just a story he liked to tell.
There's almost no chance his actual IQ was 125. There's no proof that he scored that other than him saying so, we don't know what test he actually took (if any), and the apparent pride he has in his "low" IQ means there's a good chance he didn't take it seriously or is lying about it.
>Compared to Robert Playter the CEO of Boston Dynamics, (watch the Lex Fridman interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVdsZ3I5os) Playter comes off as more intelligent and like he could have actually contributed to the real engineering work that goes on.
What Musk is good at is vastly more valuable than 'contributing to the actual engineering work'.
I think this is true, but I also think that developing the kind of cult of personality Musk has comes from just having a critical mass of support that ends up being self-perpetuating. Once you accumulate enough, a vast apparatus becomes available to you that endures regardless of your personal skills. You might even get hagiographic biographies written about you that otherwise intelligent readers are oddly credulous about. Musk has ridden a snowball downhill for quite some time now.
Very early on, there were plenty of people warning that Elizabeth Holmes was a conwoman because she quite obviously was a conwoman, but she lasted anyway for quite some time. I don't think this is because she was particularly skilled at selling confidence games, but rather because she convinced the right crowd early enough on that it just steamrolled enough people's natural skepticism to keep it going for awhile. Eventually, this snowballed to the point that she got access to that vast apparatus too. Getting that initial crowd requires *some* skill, but also involved dumb luck. It is tempting to look at the people who won the lottery and assume they're just really good at playing lotto, but sometimes people just get lucky.
Elizabeth Holmes didn't convince the tech inner circle, she persuaded a bunch of old Cold War statesmen like George Schultz and Henry Kissinger.
What Musk does is not remotely comparable to what Holmes did. Musk convinces actual technical geniuses to dedicate their lives Musk's companies working directly on massive technical projects. Holmes convinced a bunch of dumb rich boomers to hand over cash for some make believe product and feminist friendly journalists to blow smoke up her ass. Musk didn't need to lie because he was able to build actual companies.
Everyone keeps claiming Musk got so lucky or had it so easy, but never ever can they explain why people with more wealth, power, prestige, intelligence and anything else were somehow not able to get anywhere near as "lucky" as Musk or why they had apparently things so much harder in the 'become a billionaire business leader' game.
I'm not sure if you're under the belief that Theranos didn't have highly educated employees working on complex technical problems, but it did.
The point of the comparison is just in how both are able to cultivate a self-perpetuating mythology around them that brings in investors and a cult of personality apologetics. It is to suggest that doesn't mean they are particularly skilled at doing this so much these are processes that involve some social momentum that feeds on itself. That said, the list of investors in Theranos was impressive. Now that she is disgraced, it's easy to say this was obvious all along - and in a sense it was - but that didn't stop the rather substantial run up. Her false promises and fake it until you make it routine just ran out of runway. You need some hits before the music stops.
Anyway, people keep telling me that lottery winners are "lucky" but if that's true, then how come everyone doesn't win the lottery? If people were the beneficiaries of random happenstance, then everyone would be lucky. That's how it works.
Somewhere around IQ 120-130 you can do anything except perhaps theoretical physics and math, and other personal factors start to become more important than raw cognitive ability. For instance the sense and judgment that Musk seems to lack in much of his interaction with the non-technical world. Or the ridiculous work-ethic that he _does_ have (a lot of more sensible people might right decide that they should take more time to enjoy themselves, and you already have virtually all your material needs fulfiled once you're at merely the top 0.1%).
I seriously dropped my estimation after Python script saga when allegedly AI-interested guy and former programmer didn't even comprehend what is Python script
I blow a whole foghorn in attention when a guy who looked smart for me fails precisely at point I know about
Any links ? (As a heavy Python user myself...)
Here's more or less retelling by NYost
https://nypost.com/2022/06/01/elon-musk-hits-back-after-dogecoin-co-creator-calls-him-a-grifter/
Script in question
https://gist.github.com/ummjackson/8fe9ef99819777c2e6655b5e71dd61ac
So if I understand the story Palmer told in some interview how Elon complained about spammers and Palmer sent him this script, which Elon failed to run
Later in discussion Elon called that script garbage and that his kids would write it better (by any means the script is short and clear)
Thanks, indeed, he even added tips how to run the script !
120 is nowhere near genius level - its less than half of one standard deviation above the average US college graduate, and the implied IQ (from SAT scores) of the average person admitted to Stanford (which Musk was) is substantially above this. With an IQ below 120, he would have only gotten in if they had erroneously assumed he was black based on being born in Africa or something.
>More on Musk’s recruitment strategy:
Yeah I remember the days when SpaceX was really ramping up university recruitment. They were the table at the career fair everyone wanted to give their resume to. Naturally, SpaceX sent a spectacular a-hole who yelled at and belittled most of the students applying. It got so bad they actually apologized about it when they held a talk at the next career fair. Turned quite a few folks off, it was a real embarrassment. Took a couple of years to wash that one out.
I sometimes think about the people that knew the type of behavior going on and still stood in line and applied. I think a large part of why all those ex Musk employees and etc. still excuse various behaviors and defend him so fervently is that there is approximately no one who goes to work at one of his companies just to work a job. No one would put up with that crap for a 9-5, and now that it's so well known, no one would apply for it. It's all starry-eyed (mostly recent college grad) true believers. And the turnover rates speak pretty well for themselves.
Some more thoughts after sleeping on this review. It's very strange... so being an automotive engineer for several of those "staid, evil" Big3 companies, one gets a very direct view of Tesla and how they have been over the years.
Something that probably ought to get talked about more: for large companies, we are among the first few hundred to buy the newest hotness from our competitors. I saw a Model X Founders' Edition fully disassembled on tables, with the welds drilled out and sectioned so we could see every single part. I've done side-by-sides with Teslas and various other vehicles, where we literally will put our part and the competitor part next to each other in a giant warehouse (all of them for a series of vehicles) and do side-by-sides. When you do that, abstract questions of genius kind of fade to the background, and you get to actual real world questions like "is this part good? Is it better than mine? What is it trying to do? How does it try to do them? What does this say about the engineer's constraints? What does this say about the company organization behind it? Where are the organizational seams? Where are the hard points that could not be changed? How do those reflect on my company, my program, what we're trying to do and the things we have to work around?"
This isn't just idle navel-gazing. Akins' Law about system interfaces is quite relevant here. Where you draw organizational and system boundaries and the restrictions you put on certain hard points can drive significant differences in a component on a table.
But out of all of that, my biggest take-away was that Teslas..... just aren't very good? Their structures up to the Model 3 are quite inefficient and don't have great rigidity. The dimensional variation is shocking (far beyond even SBU, IYKYK). The hang-on parts are generally relatively poorly performing on their own. They can't touch our structural or powertrain durability tests. Rate and handling is bad, ergonomics fails to meets package targets, NVH and sound quality are poor, and we pay JD Power far too much to find out just how bad the quality numbers are (hilariously bad). I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most other OEMs can't make a Tesla, because our systems and processes prevent us from releasing something that half-baked.
It really makes you question the customer sometimes, because if we put out a touchscreen that failed like that, we'd rightly be ridiculed. CEOs have lost their jobs over far less.
I think Musk's genius is in two very closely related areas: getting investors to give him an unlimited checkbook, and in getting customers to believe they're doing something new, novel, and important, in a way that lets him walk past screwing up things that legacy players get right as an inevitability. The technical side? Most engineers I've met can probably accomplish it.
P.S. the interface is so slow and laggy, holy cow
I found your comment in the "selections" post and the touch screen interface piqued my interest. I haven't used a Tesla screen, but I have used them on other cars, notably a 2021 Cherokee, and I must say, the user experience makes me absolutely sure the people who designed the interface never ever actually used it. XM radio loses a signal? Pretty clear when the sound cuts out, I don't need a giant dialog box that says "Lost satellite signal" to cover up nearly the entire screen (often including the navigation right before a turn) to tell me. I also really like, coming home at night with my eyes well-adjusted to the darkness, how the screen dimming is directly a function of the headlight status so it blasts me in the face with full brightness as soon as they go off. Or when it rains in the day time, and the headlights come on (as recommended) with the wipers, and the screen all but disappears because it isn't actually dark outside. Keyboard disabled while in motion? Real helpful for the passenger to punch in a destination. I could go on, but you get the point.
Elon Musk notably drives a Tesla. He owns several. Based on his history of responding to customer feature requests on Twitter/X, he is able to get things changed purely because he wants them changed, and fast. If his user experience is half as annoying as mine, and nobody is allowed to tell him "no," as is so often reported, I can't see how the touch screen can be anywhere near as bad as what Chrysler puts out.
Y'know, once upon a time, U-Connect was considered the best UI out there! Might be more of a commentary on stuff like old versions of My Ford Touch - the pre Android Auto / Apple Carplay days were wild.
This comment actually does kind of dovetail with my previous one though - why does the XM Radio throw up a sign? The XM radio team needed a way to indicate that signal had been lost. Split the functionality up into functional teams (auto headlights, dimming dash, rain sensing wipers, nav) and the organizational and system seams become obvious. (that keyboard disabling screams "the safety office and general counsel lost their shit after testing a prototype")
Re: why the gauge cluster blinds you when you turn the headlights turn off, it's probably tied to a light sensor that gets turned off right at key-off to hit a target 12V battery life.
You point out all the things that Tesla does wrong that the legacy players do right, but this is completely missing the point. What you need to look at are what are the things that Tesla does right that the legacy players do completely wrong! These are the areas of differentiation and the consumers don't care about individual part quality, panel gaps or any of that stuff.
I own a Tesla and have owned Hondas, Acuras, BMWs and Porsches before too. Those are all great engineered cars, but nothing rivals the simple daily easy usability of Tesla. What does Tesla do right?
- It's electric and has usable real world range
- There's a real charging network that actually works
- It's relatively affordable (Model 3 at least)
- It's much simpler mechanically and cheaper to maintain / repair than an internal combustion car
- The user interface is lightyears ahead of any electronics from the existing players. It just works like an iPhone
- The integrated electronics under the hood are impossible for any of the legacy manufacturers to copy because they're not software or electronic hardware companies.
- Tesla can actually make these cars at scale and make money (which is more than you can say about Ford and GM!)
My post was mostly intended to show the flip side of what's sometimes a bit of a silicon valley echo-chamber on this substack. It's pretty easy to find pro-Tesla stuff on the internet! But let's get into the bullet points.
Points 1, 2, and 4 are being (slowly) addressed by the mainstream OEMs getting into the mainstream EV space and adopting NACS now that Tesla updated and standardized it as SAE J3400. Future vehicles from most mainstream OEMs will have access to the Supercharger network.
Points 3 and 7 are largely a function of market entry timing, vehicle feature set, and volume - which the mainstream OEMs are currently working through, in their various ways with varying levels of success.
Point 5 is somewhat of a taste thing, and though the proliferation of Android Auto and Apple Carplay is making it less relevant today than in the past, I would expect the mainstream OEMs to continue to make improved infotainment that lags Tesla's latest.
Point 6 is the interesting one here: if you're referring to what I think you are, the monolithic controller architecture is a tradeoff vs. a distributed controller architecture. The latter is a more common legacy architecture due to high feature differentiation across the range (think cheapest $30k 2-door pickup vs. $100k+ 4-door pickup) and the ability to lego a car out of microcontrollers. The same controller can be used across a dozen vehicles (and with some software tweaks the supplier can sell it to multiple OEMs). A monolith is custom, must contain the vast majority of the featureset (cost and complexity) with it at all trim/feature levels, and is a bigger lift to alter vehicle line to vehicle line and for new features. Remember, these are full-lineup companies with a dozen+ models. There are also ASIL implications to monolithic architectures that really shouldn't be discounted. It's looking like big compute is getting cheap and reliable enough (thanks cellphones!) that fewer, larger controllers are becoming more fashionable. You'll hear rumblings about it from various OEMs. But I wouldn't call a fully monolithic architecture either the clearly superior choice or uncopyable.
I agree that mainstream automakers are catching up, but the fact that they'll all be using Tesla's standard tells you something about who is really driving innovation in the space and who is following.
I think your "Teslas..... just aren't very good?" point was just kind of triggering for me (as a product person by training) because it's very much the point of view of an automotive engineer taking it apart piece by piece rather than a consumer evaluating the whole package that just works better (my subjective opinion as a driver). Questioning the intelligence of customers is the classic fallback of failed product/design/engineering projects. The market judges cars on the customer experience (what do people buy and like) rather than the opinions of the engineers building them. Tesla has nailed the end product, the pricing, the marketing and the market timing and thus they have the business results to show for it. This may be dissatisfying to the engineers building other cars, but the results speak for themselves.
This is the state of play as of today, but given the track records for execution in the last 5 years there's a reason investors are betting on Tesla's model working better.
I had a similar reaction to the idea that Big 3 vehicles are “better”.
Personally, I want to like my Bolt, but:
A) The fit and finish is terrible! And the GM dealerships didn’t fix any of the many cosmetic issues worth a damn! The pumps for the windshield fluid have now failed three times, for example. I’ve given up on paying the dealership to fix it
B) The Bolt software is THE WORST SOFTWARE I HAVE EVER USED
My wife’s Tesla… just works. And when there were fit and finish problems, Tesla came to our house and fixed them.
It seems plausible that GM’s engineering approach on things I, as a non-car-person, don’t care about, is more solid than Tesla’s. But that’s classic innovator’s dilemma; GM is overserving some audience I don’t care about, but really not satisfying me on the dimensions I care about.
I do miss CarPlay in the Tesla, though. If they’d add that, it’d be great. Of course GM is taking that away, not that I’d ever buy another GM car.
So I bought a new car about six months ago. I didn't go into the process intending to buy a Tesla, but after looking at ~6 different manufacturers (five of them legacy) I ended up with a Model Y. The combination of general usefulness/convenience and `fun to drive' just couldn't be beat - none of the others came close. [I could have matched it with e.g. a BMW at double the price, but I'm not going to pay an extra 60k just for a BMW badge]. And I also see that e.g. Tesla's get top of class safety ratings from every ratings agency I checked, and Hertz says their maintenance costs are less than half those for their ICE fleet etc... So I'm surprised to hear you say Tesla's are not very good, because from my (ordinary consumer) perspective they blew the competition out of the water. I'm sure you know what you are talking about, but maybe the metrics on which you are evaluating cars just...aren't the right ones? I don't claim to be a car expert, so maybe you are selling Linux while Tesla is selling Mac OS, and maybe (compared to Linux) Mac OS just isn't very good (on metrics that an expert would care about), but then again, J random consumer will almost certainly prefer Mac OS.
When people evaluate Teslas by the metrics of a traditional manufacturer (panel gap uniformity, inefficient structural design etc.) then they may not stack up. But that's kind of the whole point people are missing when they use those metrics. Customers could care less about panel gaps or inefficient structural designs if the UX is qualitatively way better. And for the non car people I know who test drive a Tesla, I uniformly hear them rave about the simplicity and ease of use.
Musk is like our current day D.D. Harriman (The Man Who Sold the Moon, RAH) only better!
Huh, no edit button ... I wanted to add that I find it a little weird that he seems to be hated so much.
Click the ellipsis to the right
Let's say I am a tech entrepreneur and engineer who reads this bio of Elon Musk. My takeaways are that you should search for radically innovative solutions grounded in materials science expertise, relentlessly seek to drive down costs of components, ignore or fire any experts who tell you it can't be done, and generally seek to be a bold and contrarian visionary who succeeds by knowing when to break the rules about how things are "normally" done. Now, for my first project, I decide to build a low-cost deep sea submersible to disrupt the ocean tourism industry...
As long as you put your skin in the game, I see no issue.
If the lesson you take away from a bio of Elon Musk is "do these five simple things and you'll b successful" then you haven't been reading it very carefully. Execution and detail are the key.
That seems like a cargo cult?
I got nerdsniped by Elon's interview question: "You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
I'm not reading through all the comments in case someone already mentioned this, but by this reasoning aren't there a ton of other places you could be near the south pole? For instance, if you walk one mile south and the circumference becomes 0.5 miles you just do 2 circuits of the circumference and then go north to your original point. If you're initially 1 mile north of the 0.1 mile circumference you just go 10 times around the circumference of the earth, etc. Am I missing something?
Yes, that is the second solution to the problem given in the footnotes.
The footnotes say "The other answer is somewhere close to the South Pole where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile."
That makes it sound like there's a single second answer, but anywhere that is 1 mile north of a spot where 1 mile can be divided by the earth's circumference with an integer answer and no remainder works as well, correct?
Yes. 1 mile, 1/2 mile, 1/3, …. 1/N. The thing collapses on a parallel that is 1 mile away from the South Pole.
Yes: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a25018/solution-to-riddle-of-the-week-14/
Perfect, ty! I'm surprised Musk didn't mention that as well, (seems like the sort of detail that he would explain) or maybe Vance decided it wasn't worth including.
I care not a fig for Musk, but I hearted this review for footnote 1.
Feels weird talking about Musk, since his biggest impacts are fuzzier ones on x-risk (cofounding OpenAI and also the Ukraine Starlink non-activation event). AI risk and global geopolitical/nuclear risk. So far, what he's done in those areas is questionable at best and unusually terrible at worst.
Taking near-term extinction risk seriously, even getting to Mars wouldn't necessarily outweigh nudging the AGI field in a more dangerous direction (i.e. if OpenAI has contributed more to capabilities than alignment, or if X.ai does anything big).
IMHO these are the 3 things (X.ai, openai, and Ukraine) that matter most about Musk, and so far he seems net negative. The other massive things are rounding errors in the face of that, yet get more attention. (The extreme case: Twitter/X is a rounding error *on those other rounding errors*, and ofc that gets discussed 1000x more than everything else.)
If you believe that Starlink should have been activated for the Ukrainians in Crimea, I don't understand your conclusion that the net impact of creating Starlink and making it available to them except in Crimea is negative. The alternative without Musk's impacts on the world would not be Starlink activated in Crimea but no Starlink at all.
I meant the specific event where he didn't activate it despite the US government (iirc) asking him to.
This also sounds kinda like... not separating the good impacts from the bad ones? Yeah yeah, the whole discussion is "Musk personality = high-variance = mayhaps le good requires le bad????", but he laready had Starlink up in Ukraine before and after that one decision!
I could be wrong on the object-level, maybe he did, as he claimed, "avert nuclear war". It'd be more productive to debate that claim. We could also wonder about his subconscious-policy-of-impulsiveness and which arenas that works well and poorly in. (E.g. it could work poorly w.r.t. AI risk)
I don't recall reading any suggestion that he declined a U. S. government request to activate Starlink in a specific region, but I wasn't trying to challenge the validity of your judgment on the specific event. You're entitled to that.
What I didn't and don't understand was how your conclusion about his broader impact followed from your judgment on the specific event. I'm sorry for not having quoted the points I was asking about (I hadn't realized quite how bad Substack was about showing the context of a reply), but I'll rectify that now. In the OP I was replying to, you wrote:
"...his biggest impacts are fuzzier ones on x-risk (cofounding OpenAI and also the Ukraine Starlink non-activation event). AI risk and global geopolitical/nuclear risk. So far, what he's done in those areas is questionable at best and unusually terrible at worst.
"IMHO these are the 3 things (X.ai, openai, and Ukraine) that matter most about Musk, and so far he seems net negative."
Yet your argument for his negative impact in Ukraine, in the specific event you cite, seems to directly imply a *positive* impact in Ukraine overall, since *not* activating Starlink in Crimea did no more than lessen the impact of activating Starlink in Ukraine overall. I also don't understand how you can list "the Ukraine Starlink non-activation" as one of his biggest impacts without counting the creation of Starlink as, *ipso facto*, a bigger one.
I honestly don't see how to make sense of these things. What am I missing?
My thoughts here:
- "your argument... seems to directly imply a *positive* impact" --> I don't see why you read it this way. I noted that maybe the non-activation increased nuclear war risk, Elon maintains it was to avoid one. In the hypothetical of [it causes a nuclear war], I'd call that the biggest impact of the whole Starlink-in-Ukraine program! I'm open to something like "the fact that nuclear war didn't happen, proves that Elon's choice was right / good-EV", then we'd end up in discussing "was it a bad or good decision if it was only good in hindsight, and more careful analysis at time-of-decision would have called it bad?".
- "I also don't understand how you can list "the Ukraine Starlink non-activation" as one of his biggest impacts without counting the creation of Starlink as, *ipso facto*, a bigger one." --> See the hypothetical above. Additionally to that, this logic seems like it'd assign high impact to earlier actions, rather than ones that could have been counterfactually different. Like, "This historical figure was impactful, but they wouldn't have been born without their parents, ergo their parents have *ipso facto* more impact".
- My whole larger point is that different specific actions, even when related to each other or grouped together as the "same project", can have different impacts on their own.
- I was probably biased by media into a more-critical initial view of the non-activation event.
- In hindsight, I probably should have solely mentioned the 2 AI companies, since their impacts are both larger (negative or positive, large either way), and because we have way more public evidence (mainly about OpenAI) to make a better decision about whether it raised or lowered AI extinction risk. I kinda just want to learn more about what X.ai is doing, if anyone here knows.
- I don't want to continue getting bogged down here; If my above explanations don't work, I apologize for not [writing more clearly AND/OR thinking more clearly], but I don't expect to have much better explanations beyond further rewordings/hypothetical-examples/re-explaining of the above points.
I'm sorry for the bogginess. I'm afraid I contributed to that, so I'd like to pose my question more concisely before giving up on the conversation. No need to respond again unless you are so inclined.
I believe:
1. Elon's *net* impact = the set of differences between our world as it is and as it would be had Elon never existed.
2. The inaccessibility of Starlink in Crimea is not one of these differences.
3. Therefore, it cannot contribute to Elon's *net* impact.
4. Yet you seem to take it into your consideration of said *net* impact. This is what I don't understand.
Edit after [writing the below edit after [writing the final section]]:
This *might* all be moot now (or the initial "event" may have been moot, with the related components non-moot), if Starshield goes up in Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/05/spacex-unveils-starshield-a-military-variation-of-starlink-satellites.html https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/how-musks-starlink-intervention-in-ukraine-could-impact-efforts-to-defend-taiwan https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2023/06/01/pentagon-confirms-spacex-deal-for-ukraine-starlink-services/
-------Second section written--------
So this led me to a 3rd(?) reason/way I was wrong: The "non-activation event" was actually Starlink not-expanding-coverage-to-Crimea (occupied by Russia at the time), despite Ukraine asking them to do so, despite Starlink being provided in Ukraine and the military using it but also being discouraged from using it but also (maybe?) not being kept-off-it in consistent or reliable-as-in-you-can-build-strategy-around-knowing-if-you-can-use-it-or-not-but-in-either-case-you-can-rely-on-that-being-the-case-consistently ways.
I wrote most of the below section before learning those details. My below logic only holds (and still holds) to the extent the Ukrainian military was (for lack of a shorter word) "rugpulled" on using Starlink in Crimea. This includes the following factors:
- If Starlink was already allowed to be used for defense, would the Ukrainian military have been reasonable in using it in Crimea, which was (in a complicated way that I am *not* going to discuss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Republic_of_Crimea#History) a Ukrainian territory until 2014?
- Since SpaceX is (among other things) a US government/military technology contractor, and the US has sent spare weapons as aid to Ukraine, and SpaceX was already letting Ukraine use Starlink upon Ukraine requesting activation of the service... what reasonable expectation, if any, was there for Starlink to be usable by the Ukrainian military ?
- How short-notice was this decision used? Was Ukraine e.g. *just* about to land some drones in Crimea, then they suddenly lost connection, and *then* Musk said "oh btw don't use this in occupied territories"?
- Should any such decisions be up to the contractor in general and Elon Musk in particular? (Of note: the timeline of when SpaceX was funding Starlink out-of-pocket VS being funded by DoD contract. This would logically drastically change which expectations the Ukrainian military should've reasonably had.)
-----------Initial section--------------
OK I think I see the crux(?): Your point #2 is that [Starlink being not-activated in Crimea] is literally the same as [Starlink having never been available in Crimea].
My "the [non-activation event that people talked about in the news for a few day], was net negative" claim relies on point #2 being false, in this specific way:
Building a service, and then allowing the military, only to not-turn-it-on at a specific strategically relevant time (or in a location they're asking you to turn it on in), has a different effect on the larger strategic picture than if you hadn't given that service to the military to begin with.
The key here is that I didn't consider the effects in a complete vacuum, but neglected to write them out more explicitly:
- Practically speaking, losing something you were previously relying on, can cause
- Giving something with few conditions, then adding in a previously-not-accounted-for restriction at-whim, can under many circumstances cause net problems for the recipient.
A contrived example: you give someone Super Bowl tickets, they spend the money and time to fly out to the Super Bowl to use the tickets, then right before they get to the ticket stand you cancel their ticket (using some software backdoor, let' say). You have now caused a net loss for the ticket recipient, and put them in a worse situation than if you'd never "given" them the tickets.
This is not 100% analogous to the Crimea non-activation, but it's the broad shape of what the situation seems/seemed like with little but recent news articles to go on, and if the situation *is* that way, then that's what would cause my potentially-net-negative judgement.
(For further context, since I don't think I explained *the non-activation event itself* further, I mean the thing I heard about through articles like https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk-ordered-starlink-turned-off-ukraine-offensive-biography and later got more context on through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Crimea .
I have to thank you for this piece. I was (embarrassingly) taken by the rumor that his accomplishments were thanks to financial advantages. I ought to have researched.
Elon Musk is frankly good looking and has a charming perceived generosity of trust that accompany his intellectual pursuits.
I think regarding X, it will take a very quick response to be more than a break-even effort to "save free speech." Where at first he was optimistic about renewed interest he is now releasing profit statistics that reveal extreme losses the value of the company. Regarding freedom of speech, is he really so passionate about it? That is important to how hard he tried. My instinct is that he is not extremely in favour of free speech. As in he holds some views that could easily be debunked if he really had to open his ears. Ie 'two genders no trans" or something like "im pro socialism but not in terms of helping unproductive."
I don't think it is impossible to make people want to pay money for online only things. I know about a website that people pay money in irrational spurts. The product is "fg" aka "forum gold" and it is exchanged for diablo 2 items. (ie. person x buys fg with real currency, Person x xfer fg to person y and person y joins the same room as person x to give them in game loot that otherwise takes hours. It's called d2jsp. I'm not sure how this principle could help Musk monetize x exactly but maybe it could. That said he valued twitter really highly for what the profit might be.
Good write-up. The ability to sell his vision to investors (including retail investors) is a big deal too, reducing the cost of capital and making it more likely he succeeds. It is not just great engineers he attracts.
I feel like this overhypes musks successes a great deal. For example, aluminum has a long history in auto manufacturing, with the first all aluminum production car being the nsx from 1989.
This reads, to me, like Elon is a smart man who routinely bullies his employees, often with his intelligence. Now most are afraid to tell him that some of his ideas are just bad. Even the smartest among us are bound to come up with an outright lousy idea every once in a while. And if one knows that the consequences of telling their boss that the idea is lousy is at best a very long assignment of having to prove that down to fundamental physics, and also likely to get one fired, why would anyone bother? "You want to put a nitrogen tank in your roadster and make it fly? Sure thing. Why not."
Removing oneself from negative feedback has rather predictable results.
"Removing oneself from negative feedback has rather predictable results."
Ooh, make a prediction! :-)
I wonder what Musk's Dunbar number is. With his enormous memory for detail, it's possible that he's running the world's biggest small business, with the owner/manager directly supervising every worker.
So has Musk had any new major successes since the biography was written?
SpaceX and Tesla are both much stronger and more impressive than eight years ago
This is a terrible review. The most egregious issue: it is impossible to distinguish what the book actually says vs. the review author pulling out bits to support said reviewer's views.
The reviewer has also done a terrible job of not reading their own review. Someone who can memorize a list of 80 technical items and track them (along with running a couple of companies and micromanaging tens of thousands of employees) is somehow only 1/1,000 smart? Who can grill a subject matter expert and get to 99% of said SME's knowledge in a few weeks? Puh-lease.
There is also a very clear case of "Musk is bad" syndrome going on here - one which I strongly suspect was "Musk was good" when he was the darling of the liberals because of Tesla and his stance on Marijuana etc. - before COVID in other words. In every case, if the choice is Musk is <good> vs. Musk is <lucky, persistent, a super trudger etc>, the latter choice is the answer 90%+ of the time.
"Musk seems IQ 150+ when he’s thinking about the interactions of well-behaved physical laws, and IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes."
I think this combo of multi-modal performance in those 2 domains is a competitive advantage when aiming for instrumental rationality.
I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more successful founders in the EA / LW spaces. There are a lot of successful founders of course (a higher rate than any other group I think probably - eg. Stanford students), but I think there should be even more, given the raw talent, IQ, first principles thinking in the movements.
I’ve occasionally discussed the differences between instrumental and epistemic rationality. Modern LW style rationalism (eg. Elieizer / Zvi) is very focused on epistemic rationality whereas in some ways I think it can confer an instrumental advantage towards success in startups if you're a bit crazy (instrumentally rational, but not necessarily maxing out on epistemically rationality).
I think the fact that Scott was interested in and read RAW / Crowley / Giurdjieff / the first wave psychedelicists etc. in his uni days makes him a uniquely interesting rationalist writer. Because both epistemic and instrumental rationality forked out from Korzybski’s map-territory distinction, but are distinct now.
Anyway - a joy to read one of the best writers and thinkers of our generation, analyzing the original biography of one of the most successful business people of all time. Looking forward to your review of the Isaacson one ;)
BTW there’s a "Paris in the the spring” typo in that original sentence I quoted
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
I find that exceedingly impressive. I couldn't do that in a million years. It is hard enough to keep track of the major questions in one area of a technology. Keeping track of them across all the relevant technologies for multiple companies is mind-boggling.
I hate how slow the interface has become after they integrated with Subatack Notes.
Not sure why you'd hesitate to call the person behind SpaceX and Tesla "smart"? If he doesn't qualify, not sure who does.
Also, the recent NYT article on Starlink suggests Musk has been thinking about it since at least 2001
Re. "Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?"
Because middle managers AREN'T great engineers, but most of them want to make decisions over the objections of the engineers.
Re. Steve Jobs as a designer: His main design contributions to the Apple were:
- Integrate the keyboard into the computer (a terrible design)
- Have no network connectors (a terrible decision)
- Integrate the monitor into the Mac (a terrible design)
- Make that monitor black and white instead of color (a terrible decision)
- Insist that the mouse have only 1 button (a terrible design)
The black and white Mac graphics not only looked great, but in the days before color printing was cheaply available, probably played a large part in making the Mac such a go-to for artists and designers.
The black and white was sharp, but it was one of the most-common complaints about the Mac. Every other serious computer on the market had color graphics by then. I think Jobs only did it to be different from the Apple 2, which he hated, because everyone knew Woz was the genius behind it.
That seems different from terrible design, though.
What about Steve Jobs monomaniacal focus on design resulting in the iPhone being wildly successful, even though it was not only not the first smartphone (the first iPhone wasn't one for like a year, because no 3rd party apps), but not even the only competitor at the time with a full frontal touchscreen and no keyboard ?
This is best and the most entertaining book review i have ever come across. Thanks a ton. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
I read Walter Isaacson's bio on Steve Jobs. And I notice a parallel that Jobs also set wildly unreasonable expectations. He had the drive, charisma, and sociopathy to simply will the impossible into existence.
Jobs supposedly had a keen eye for design, aesthetic, and marketing. The techne, however, was outsourced to colleagues.
Isn’t this the exact opposite of conventional wisdom in this area? Software, not rocket science, is the field with many bootcamp programs teaching people core skills for quick career transfer without a degree or major experience… the “private job skills bootcamp” model seems to be flourishing in coding, data science, and basically nowhere else — though maybe it’s doing well in other areas I haven’t heard of? Arguably self-sponsored police academy training counts as something like this?
I'm sure rivers have been written about this, but the Model S and X's UX was like going from a flip phone to an iPhone. Their software, charging network, and 0-60 times were game-changers. Tesla isn't for hardcore car fans.
The death of one monkey is a tragedy, the death of a million is a PR stunt.
When the Model S came out, its UX felt like an iPhone compared to flip phones on other cars in the same price range. Legacy still has not caught up. Whenever asked about the car, I'd say it's great, but not for people who care about cars too much.
Wikipedia: "In 2008, Riley began dating Elon Musk; they married in 2010 at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland."
Strangest fact is that Talulah Riley was a virgin as 23 year old? For some reason I don't expect beautiful women to be inexperienced.
The "expert at software engineering", AFAICT, wasn't musk but Max Levchin. Most of his decisions that I've read about at PayPal and at Twitter regarding software engineering specifically were not world class.
The obvious response to whether Musk will succeed or not with X/Twitter is "what counts as success"? This is not just a clever retort, it gets to the essence of the issue – why Musk bought the company, and what he hopes to achieve with it.
Suppose we take seriously _What's Our Problem?_ , the new book by your nemesis/doppelganger Tim Urban; then it's not unreasonable to see the closing of the American mind (and in particular the closing of places where free speech can be practiced in America) as THE most important problem of our time, the problem that has to be solved otherwise nothing else matters. If you take that seriously, then almost everything Musk has been doing around X/Twitter makes sense. He doesn't care if the DEIist's leave the platform – it's there to allow other voices to be heard. It's not exactly that he doesn't care if advertisers leave the platform, it's more that he wants to create one example showing that you can stand up to SJFs as a company and be just fine; he will welcome any other company that wishes to join his advertising platform, but he absolutely will not compromise the platform to allay their SJF-driven "concerns".
Most of the complaints being made against X/Twitter look a lot more self-serving when you understand this point. Getting rid of departments that claimed to be weeding out misinformation? Well, who exactly decides what counts as misinformation? Consider something as supposedly medical (ie science) based as large gatherings during covid. We have run the experiment, and we know the results – plenty of politicians and doctors said, loudly, that it was unacceptable to form such large groups – right up until the BLM protests, at which point we had always been fighting EastAsia.
Musk has presumably decided (correctly IMHO) that letting a thousand flowers bloom, and relying on people's exposure to all of them to come on a consensus (ie the way we did things up until about 2010) is, for all its flaws, vastly preferable to the alternative of an unaccountable Department of Goodthink that shuts down anything that even hints of disagreement with DEIist theology.
In other words, for Musk success for X/Twitter IMHO would probably be something like "Remains a vibrant platform for sharing ideas of all sorts, basically a more visible publicly version of the supposed 'Intellectual Dark Web'". This is very different from other metrics that people are going to use, like "retains as many users as in 2020" or "makes more money than in 2020" or whatever.
All the inevitable crowing around the "failure" of Twitter, which will only get louder as the next election approaches (along with the demonization of Musk) need to be understood in this context. Almost none of this is about people caring about the truth; it's about people driven furious by the fact that someone is willing to stand up to them and call them bullies – and that more than half the country agrees, but is cowed into being afraid to say so, except on Twitter.
Why shouldn't authors be obligated to include text by Elon Musk in any book they write about him, if that's what Elon Musk wants? Because it's their book, not his, and the author and publisher are not obliged to spend their money to publish Musk's views.
What they could do is say, "After the book is published, you're free to publish your own book giving your own side of the story." That would be nice of them. Oh, but wait, Musk could already do that anyway.