Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked Which of this generation’s biggest tech luminaries and innovators will ultimately be remembered for having the greatest lasting effect on the world? His answer was Elon Musk. Musk will be bigger than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were critical to launching the age of personal computers. Steve then followed up with the success of smartphones and tablets with iPhone and iPad. Bill Gates has had tremendous impact with efforts to get rid of Malaria and other diseases and problems of world poverty.
Elon Musk is trying revolutionize both human transportation and space exploration.
Neil did not discuss the potential revolution that Musk could have with rebuilding cities. The Boring Company could solve traffic problems and rebuilding sewers and other infrastructure with tunnels.
Elon Musk could also revolutionize communication with the Starlink satellite network.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Ofc Musk is the most important. He's the one responsible for the world going electric!
You are am absolute noob.
Silence peasant
THANKS FOR INTERVIEWING ME!!! 🙂
Congressional pork doled to districts where ULA has facilities? SpaceX killing that gravy-train?
I don’t know why this won’t post with my screen-name, I’m logged in.
I am “OliveGuitar” above.
Doesn’t matter, because they spontaneously degrade when heated.
LOL
Fail to argue, fall back to insults.
Getting off this planet and generally making vehicles less polluting is a social improvement. The status quo for both of those was a stagnant one; so reality is opposite of your assertion that Musk & co “took more money off the table from being available for social improvements”.
Nevermind all the byproducts, e.g. kids and young adults growing up to see something inspiring a lot like with Apollo. Both the result (e.g. passing the point of no return for cheap and reliable LEO/BEO access that leads to actual democratization of space a lot like the early American west) and the process (e.g. burning the status quo of stagnant and corrupt industrial progress).
<< he is the only one seriously pursuing these goals. >>
He’s not; though I’m pretty sure I agree with what you meant to argue.
Endorsing a bad paper may merely be unfortunate choice of which paper to endorse. He would retract his support of that paper for its faults but not his position on climate change.
Musk commits unforced errors and he needs to stop doing that. I want everything he is doing to succeed. I want him to succeed. But calling the scuba driver that rescue those boys in Thailand a pedophile was uncalled for. And smoking weed on TV was uncalled for. And saying he was going to take his company private when it wasn’t a done deal. He is the CEO of a very large company. He needs to act like it.
Martian soil is full of poisonous perchlorates. If any was found on Earth, it would be a superfund toxic exclusion area.
A rotating habitat would need a massive rock radiation shield around it to match ground level radiation levels – cosmic rays involve iron nuclei tavelling at relativistic velocities, and when they hit anything, they shower a huge fan of energetic particles. The radiation shield would have to be rotating too, which would require fantastically expensive structural support; or not rotating, but around the habitat, with ever-present possibility of catastrophic contact. The inertia of a planet is a great insurance policy for life – it’s taken us two hundred years determined effort to even start to muck up the life support system. Any engineered habitat would be seconds from disaster by blowout or structural failure, and the gas mix and heat controls would also have little room for error. In a war, or even a trade war, the whole enterprise would be even more vulnerable.
Space will be a great environment for machines, probably including intelligent machines, but not for us. Gerard K O’Neill made his rotating habitats appear attractive by making them look like Earth, but they could only ever be a plastic replica.
I deeply admire Musk, and I think NDT is probably right. But I have two sore spots about Musk:
1. Calling that rescue diver from Thailand a pedophile on Twitter. That happened this year, and of course Musk is now being sued for defamation. This was part of the whole episode where SpaceX built an emergency submarine to rescue those kids, but it was ultimately not needed.
2. Endorsing, on Twitter of course, the 97% climate consensus paper by Cook et al. That paper was false, invalid, and fraudulent (the raters were supposed to be blind to author and journal, but they cheated and called out dissident authors to each other on a secret online forum during the rating process). It was complete garbage, should never have been published, and the Australian authorities should prosecute the Australian authors, especially Cook, for scientific fraud. (It’s a crime in Australia, but not in the US.)
My problem with Musk there is not just pushing junk, fraudulent science. It’s his obvious conflict of interest. The guy sells electric cars. He seems to be against anything that could reduce his revenue long-term, and supports anything that might bolster it. Pushing global warming alarmism presents an obvious conflict, and he should acknowledge that conflict of interest and be more objective and rigorous.
More on the actual climate consensus from valid studies: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-climate-science-consensus-is-78-84-percent
And on the 97% fraud: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97
I’ll have a journal article or two on these topics soon. It would be awesome if we could get Musk to retract.
High style. Sleeping under furniture. Costing your investors millions with a tweet.
He has done some amazing bait and switch, for sure.
Absolutely. And what’s more I do it without using it as an advertisement to sell more products and take more money off the table from being available for social improvements.
You’re name is TruthSeeker, yet this post is very hmm… “Biased”
Listen up bud, so what if Elon had replaced Martin E? Martin was bringing in the downfall of Tesla, if you ask me. It was the right thing to do. Elon has amazing ideas and great imagination. Overrated? You’re entitled to you’re own opinion. Why? So having extremely cheap and fast travel is a bad thing? Buddy he doesn’t always spend time on Twitter. Most of it is in meetings. (Source: Talking Tech with Elon Musk! Marques Brownlee) Most of that time is in meetings. What’s so bad about it though? Seriously I can’t seem to get your point here? That includes this really stupid post. Explain please.
Kiss my buttt, not on the left side, not on the right side, but in the groove.
Is that precise enough?
Facts are facts, nor grave nor bed denied.
jealous much? Find your hero and talk about him or her. Find what you admire and support it.
Show me. Quote and refute precisely.
It reads like one of those russian troll farm shitposts
en wikipedia org wiki Shitposting
Do you even read the posts.
Not quite. Soil composition matters a lot. They may be able to figure it out and tune it when they get there, but only if they have the necessary supplies (the right chemicals to treat the soil).
Meanwhile, airponics and hydroponics are the same everywhere, and the BFS should have enough of that to support the colonists for the duration of the transit. So it should be able to support them long enough for them to set up a permanent airponics or hydroponics farm on Mars.
>”Seems like you believe your own BS”.
You got me there; I do believe what I say. But, I understand how a lot of people can be confused by that these days.
>”… first sentence doesn’t outweigh the rest of your BS”
Which of these statements are wrong, and explain how?
“… the relatively wealthy are going, REGARDLESS of their abilities or skills,”
They will be “… shaved from a very thin sliver of a very narrow twig of the Human tree.” Statistically correct.
Very few miners, farmers, artists, on the whole, will be able to afford a ticket.
“… people that will be needed for “basic work” will owe somebody for their trip-and-turf.”
“Class divisions” will exist.
Musk advocates a Martian governmental system based on direct Democracy.
“… when you owe some one for your air, food, shelter – existence, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll give SERIOUS consideration to voting the way they “suggest””
Crystal Angels enjoy urinating on Martian Mole people.
It is obvious to everyone here that you are delusional, teetering on the very edge of reality.
The ongoing harassment of Elon Musk and his enterprises proves you wrong.
Your posts are the muddled thoughts of a paranoid schitz-o…laughter
Liked.
But, all I want to say here is this – Bigelow MUST buy Bed Bath and Beyond, and merge it with his space hotel company, retaining B B and Beyond as the company moniker.
You should resist the temptation of saying whats on your mind especially if it is negative.
Follow your own advice then you can take off the Fool’s cap.
Are people hearing and reading every Musk utterance? Pay Attention! That is a clue.
Fortunately you are not immersed in Truth….keep seeking.
That’d be genuinely “realistic”. Not just notional debate.
Can you cite the literature that supports the assertions you make? And show that they outnumber/outweigh their respective dissents.
Because the above complaint that Musk talks too much, as comment to an article about his practical accomplishments, is not itself a baseless complaint. Because it’s actually relevant to actual brass tacks of a Tesla Model S, or every SpaceX mission, etc — those can’t be considered on their own without considering Musk’s “bad personality traits”.
Pot, kettle.
SpaceX won’t be merely arguably game changing if Ariane & co are so badly left behind they’re effectively deprecated. It’s already heading that way.
The NASAspaceflight forums would welcome your ideas and be happy to contribute to taking them further. There’s already a good number of threads for various concerns, some of them very thoroughly detailed.
That’s her..
This new comment program is madding. lol
It’s called Gateway Foundation. at gatewayspaceport dot com
Okay. That didn’t work. It’s called Gateway Foundation. at gatewayspaceport dot com
For that matter, never mind that they weren’t corrupt.
” They haven’t even figured out how to grow anything in that Martian soil. ”
To start with, it’s the same as growing it anywhere else.
” Theres nothing special about Tesla’s battery life, range or cost ”
Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
” So all musk did was put in bigger batteries, they don’t have anything special technology wise. ”
Keep up your stvpid, it can’t hurt your credibility at all that Teslas have been on the road for over 300k miles and only lose 85% of their battery life.
Seems like you believe your own BS. And your first sentence does nothing to outweigh the rest of your BS post.
” Martian mole people being pissed on by Crystal Angels on pleasure flights down from their incubation clouds ”
You’re dvmb.
Trump kids are richer
But they are hidiots why?
” He succeeded because the government gave him favoritism ”
Nope, zero favoritism. None at all. COTS EELV and CCDEV were competition open to all. He in fact had to sue the Air Force to free them from the actual crony capitalist block buy of launches. You very much have not the least idea what you are talking about.
When I was young, I thought institutions were just automatic parts of civilization, somehow. When I got older, I began to see that they were all the result of a lot of work and good ideas by individuals, kept going by all the followers-of-good-things. Right now, I feel very privileged to be able to watch one of those individuals in practice, ripping his way through society creating new institutions left and right. Why? Because he can. There’s nothing more exciting.
Liar, liar, and liar. You are three for three.
Thing is, you are abjectly a mor0n, one who has already claimed there’s nothing unusual about Tesla’s car tech,–and then had multiple teardown reports say what is remarkable about their car tech. You are merely a blithering !d!ot.
It’s your only stand out quality.
” Most of musk’s success is based on friends in the government, friends in silicon valley and daddy’s money ”
No, none of his success is from daddy’s money, lots of people have friends in Silicon Valley (only one is Musk) and none of his success is from friends in government. You can not defend so much as one of your assertions with any facts — that’s because they are all BS.
Try to get around Vuukles flaws to give us a link so we know which Julia Greer you are talking about.
Is it this one? jrgreer caltech edu
Put dots into the spaces to get the URL
Lots of people were running successful startups in Silicon Valley. They all had such access.
And no, none of the research to Tesla was done by GE, or paid for by them.
There are thousands if not tens of thousands of people in the US who have ”rich parents, tons of cash and powerful friends in government and tech and access to investments in startups” even more than Elon Musk when he started. Let alone companies and organizations
Why they did not do it?
I have yet to no evidence whatsoever that Musk has so many friends or in the government, and I have yet to see evidence that his father was even a billionaire at the time Musk started ..
This guy has done nothing intelligent other than capitalizing on things everybody already knew
-> It is something extremely intelligent to capitalize what other people know and to put it into practice. lt takes a lot of time and effort to put abstract ideas into practice.
The latest serious attempt to pay for a rotating habitat is by setting up a world-wide lottery for it. I don’t know if it would world, but the tech is getting set up nicely. Check it out: https://gatewayspaceport.com/
If the born !d!ot Matheus Henrique is calling you out on your stvp!d!ty, you’re really bad off Pisa.
And you are.
The Boring Company got every required permit and had no need to purchase any property rights, since the surface rights holders had none. Not so much as a single bribe was involved in the success of any of Musk’s enterprises.
Have you heard of this private attempt to put together a rotating space station? https://gatewayspaceport.com/
From what we’ve heard, he’s not taking very good care of his health: very high anxiety, little sleep.
I hope you’re right. I’m very excited by the whole process that’s taking place. But, if you’ve looked carefully at the problems, and how serious they are, and that solving them may very well take a lot more work and science/technology than will be available in the very nearr future, then the first colonists may not be able to do anything at all to help themselves. They haven’t even figured out how to grow anything in that Martian soil. What happens when they run out of food from Earth. And would they actually be able to feed continuously just one BFR full of 100 colonists? For my own excited sake, I hope they go anyway. On the off chance all these things will be solved by 2024. But if not, disaster. That’s all I’m saying. Trying to be realistic.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a self-serving science “personality”, but maybe right here. Yes, Elon Musk far more important that Bill Gates, a excellent monopolist but a zero innovator. Steve Jobs is dead so I think he is not in the running for “most important person ALIVE”. Highest grades for Mr. Musk need to go to the mass popularization of the self-driving electric car with Tesla. SpaceX has been impressive but not yet game changing. So good and promising … he wins since nobody else seems to be doing much. Even Mr. Bezo’s nearly 20 year old Blue Origin has yet to launch a paying sub-orbital flight, let alone a test orbital flight.
Is it just me or are every one of his endeavors built for mars?
Land on mars and you need to dig underground for habitat, solar for power, electric vehicles for transport and a satellite constellation for basic communication.
If hydroponics hadn’t been perfected for weed already, I’d bet he’d be working on that, wait, a, second.
There are about 5000 (?) billionaires in the US? Why none of them did it?
GE had the first EVs back 20 years ago, there are probably 20-30 huge conglomerates in the car business, why nobody went for it?
I think you have no idea of what you are talking about . Seriously dude
1) Venture capital non existent in the early internet days? I think the internet boom happened precisely as there was too much capital available. If it was such a no brainer why did not VISA or Amex did this?
2) If SpaceX was such a no brainer why Bill Gates or any other billionaire invest in this in the 90s?
3) EVs nothing genius? Then Why General Motor or Fiat did not come up with this 20 years ago?
4) Teslas are low quality? Then why Tesla can not produce them enough?
…but mammals DID out compete everything else to fill the top niche in the aftermath.
In fact, there’s this one mammal who’s working on making sure the same doesn’t happen to us.
People complain about the celebrity status given to shallow and inconsequential media personalities.
They say, “We should be making stars, heroes of our scientists and innovators.”
Well….
better is not better, for the sake of only having it good-enough.
And it’s understandable. Sometimes change sucks, or is just a pain to deal with. But it’s another thing to rationalize that better is not better for the sake of having it only good enough.
The current state of things is not good enough. We can and we must do better. Good enough is once scarcity is negligible, and happens before the planet is one big carpet of broken eggs with no omelet to justify it.
“someone who pushes the boundary of human understanding ”
You unconditionally specify human understanding which discredits the argument: No one else made SpaceX, except 1 dude who made Blue Origin. 1 person is exceptional, not a sign of ordinariness. Which then fails anyway because that exception indeed made Amazon and is the richest human alive and effectively can buy countries and buy humanity their ticket to BEO, but does not
have as much influence in terms of real world human livelihood
which is what the article asserts in quoting NDT. NDT is who is quoted, not Pisa2019.
Yep, other business men had access to the same subsidy system but didn’t maximize its relevance and intended impact like Space X and Tesla have. In most American households we commend that kind of efficient return on our tax dollar investment. It’s only because Musk is disrupting such established gravy trains (pork, graft, inflated contracts, etc.) that we have professional trolls out vilifying this guy.
No, the point is that you would never be able to say in person to industry professionals what you write here to internet anyones, without those engineers and others walking out shaking their head at the nonsense.
You dislike that Musk was rich and is richer. BFD
It’s irrelevant and no one (that matters to the actual goals Musk actually works for; not the ones you project on him) cares about your distaste for all those irrelevant details.
Your arguments are not : What is better for humanity
They are instead: What is respectable on the Pisa scale of worship worthiness.
Total non sequitur. neil degrasse tyson did not say “Musk is the best according to Pisa 2019’s rules of thumb about how to run businesses”. RTFA
You don’t get it. What you argue is Musk’s success is not what he actually considers success. You’re so fixated to his personal drama that you seem completely blind to the real world consequences of “his” projects.
And back off the total non-sequitur arguments you make and to the actual topic:
You do *nothing* to disprove the specific assertions in the article and any other truly related facts, namely that Musk has influence comparable or greater than Jobs, Gates, Bezos, in terms of real world useful accomplishments for humanity.
Like, is it reasonable to assert that Jobs can be reduced to the iPhone and that Musk’s BFR and EV adoption (not Tesla domination) is a “better” thing.
You don’t touch that with a 10 foot pole cause you’re too busy complaining about all the corrupt ways Musk takes to reach his goals. Nevermind if the goals are worth it.
The article quotes NDT’s opinion as to who has the most influence. You conflate that with worshipping and then shift goal posts yet again with your nonsensical dislike of Musk by cherrypicking whatever out of context “dirty tricks” Musk had the gall to use to outcompete every other CHEATING BASTARD out there. Guess what. Being a cheating bastard is what it’s all about. You compete or you die. That is the game and those are the stakes. So either the project is worth it, or it’s not. Worth out-cheating bastard’ing all the other actors who do not want to make adoption of EVs the goal at all costs (incl making Tesla the uncompetitive dinosaur — *a DIRECT quote from Musk*), and likewise with the other projects.
Making the future exciting by pushing technology to make human mastery of nature more powerful and efficient. Your complaint about Musk’s oligarchic aspirations and whatever other tyrannical schemes is just baseless self-serving word salad conflating yet again the fact that he does what everyone else does, just like using subsidies that were going to be used anyway.
>to actual industry engineers, that aren’t political sycophants
You are projecting normal people to Elon Musk
Elon musk isn’t a normal person
normal people, don’t buy 10 bedroom houses to convert into a nightclub as a college student , throwing parties with 1,000+ people every weekend
normal people don’t walk around NYC with emeralds in pocket at age 16 worth $2000+ to sell
His father was filthy rich, and had a yacht, numerous thoroughbreds horses, his own plane, multiple houses around the world
you can google all of these facts, Musk grew up filthy rich and lived around filthy rich people all his life, and regularly rubbed elbows with filthy rich and powerful people he would definitely have the social skills, and mannerisms to fit in with the 1 percent
More cherry picking. No one else really competes with Tesla for throwing a bomb into the placid boring waters of EV progress. The fact that you don’t like Teslas, and pretend your opinion invalidates the masses of people who do like Teslas whether they bought them or not, is immaterial to the fact that it’s Musk and the people he brought in to help, that made Tesla what it is and the EV landscape what it is.
What basis do you have for arguing that the previous non-Musk leaders would have produced equal or better results, in the attempt to enrich and liven up the EV landscape? What are you basing yourself on when you seem to imply that post-Tesla (incl Tesla vehicles themselves) EVs are worse than pre-Tesla EVs? Do you really want to pretend that Porsche & Jaguar and everyone else would have made their v2 (sexier, correctly done) EVs without Tesla, or even that somehow Tesla delayed or worsened the state of the art ?
It is such a transparently petty agenda to disguise as reason. Equally so with:
” The only people are SpaceX and other government entities, so congrats spacex won a race in the retard Olympics as a normal person beating other retards.
Why is this a accomplishment? ”
You must be living UNDER A ROCK to pretend SpaceX (and only SpaceX e.g. no such argument against Blue Origin which is basically another bird of same feather) is doing nothing remarkable or positive for humans to break out of this gravity well *which is one of the main OBSTACLES* to further reducing the misery of spatial and material scarcity for humans.
BEFORE you shift goal posts yet again to some complaint about how some arbitrary tribe of benefitors (opp. benefactor), or whatever other baseless argument about Gaia or whatnot, account for the fact that humans today already have it EASIER THAN EVER c.f. medieval livelihood etc.
You’re effectively a luddite, if your posts are anything to go by.
How is this cherry picking? He succeeded because the government gave him favoritism, the business models would never work if the government didn’t play along
and for Tesla his actual contributions are questionable other than being a celebrity and boosting the brand.
Tesla was not founded by him, Tesla was funded by him but they were planning to build and sell electric cars anyway
Stop attacking strawmen, I never claimed that the projects were worthless
I was merely stating that Musk is not someone who should be worshipped as a genius nor as the most important person in the world
Most of musk’s success is based on friends in the government, friends in silicon valley and daddy’s money
So aside all the brokenness of your argument, for the sake of running with it:
For you the political schema is the goal, and kicking scarcity’s ass is irrelevant.
You dislike Musk personally and will argue anything to fit that premise.
How many people have access to billions and high level politicians and other powerful friends?
Not a lot of people, there’s your answer
All of his success comes from government help, he never had to compete in a free market
The one exception that did succeed in the free market was Tesla it was built by other people and most of the intial research and development was paid for by GE
Clearly they don’t have the political connections that Musk has
Not every billionaire is a popular guy
Genius would be someone who pushes the boundary of human understanding
Guys like Tesla, Witten, Tao, Von Neumann, Perelman
Or someone who gains success in a field at an extremely young age or has a extreme physical disadvantage against other people with decades of more experience, or physical advantages
Some examples of this are extremely short NBA players succeeding despite a massive physical handicap that they are able to compensate for with pure skill, extremely young world champs or top level athletes
Musk didn’t make EV’s a thing
Tesla was founded by former GE engineers who worked on the GE EV-1
The GE EV-1 was a EV produced by GE that costed 32,000 and had 160 mile range and ran on nickel cadmium batteries
The GE EV-1 was killed by GE for fears that it would cannibalize ICE sales
seriously google history of Tesla
These engineers met with musk, sold it to him and musk wrote a fat check funding them
———————
>LEO and BEO cheap and past the point of no return
The only people are SpaceX and other government entities, so congrats spacex won a race in the retard Olympics as a normal person beating other retards.
Why is this a accomplishment?
——————–
>solar
A bankrupt company that relied on the government paying them money to buy and install Chinese solar panels
>transport
A company that bought a used tunneling machine and drilled under people’s property without acquiring property rights, ignoring environmental regulations, ignoring permits due to having approval from bought off politicians
Where exactly are the innovations you are listing? The common thread in all of these is the government favoring him by showering him with subsidies and letting him break laws
Congrats musk you proved that you can build a tunnel for dirt cheap as long as you ignore a bunch of laws and regulations
Wrong, Smartphones or mini computers that could take calls were already around and vastly unprofitable
Many CEO’s were already using palm pilots and blackberry’s to access the internet, call people, send emails, take photos etc… while ordinary people used flip phones they had all sorts of interfaces and software like stylus, touchscreens, touchscreen keyboards, physical keyboards etc…
Seriously just read the Wikipedia on history of the smart phone
Nothing that the iPhone did was innovative
The iPhone brought about the smartphone revolution because they convinced people that smartphones were cool and totally worth dropping half a grand on instead of using a $50 flip phone
It’s such a non argument. The subsidies would be taken anyway. The fact Musk has made his use of them so conspicuous is SPECIFICALLY because he’s had some major successes; the fact that those same subsidies are no big deal for the anonymous masses is because they’re not as remarkably influential on the status quo.
It’s just an artifact of the level of our communication tech. Every single human with a cellphone and cheap/free internet can add their 2c more or less loudly. That’s all it takes. Never mind if you have time money talent and other means of attracting attention.
>Also, awful build quality?
“Munro Compares Tesla Model 3 Build Quality To A “Kia From The ’90s””
“Munro found some extra sealing material for the driver’s side window that had been glued on. “This is an afterthought or something. … You’re not supposed to just glue on another piece. Usually you take whatever’s wrong and pull it out and put another one in. Geez, I never saw that before.”
Panel gaps and overall fit and finish have been dissed by others — something some Tesla fans furiously dismiss. Here’s what Sandy Munro found: “The gaps on this car are like — you can see ’em from Mars. This is really, not so good.” Turning his attention to the rear of the car, he says. “Let’s just have a look at … the gaps. If we look over here, I can barely get my fingernail in. And if we look over here … I can almost put my thumb in. This is … very unusual. The tolerance stack-ups on this car are just, like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Not since … the ’70s or something.”
The beatdown continues. “I don’t understand how it got to this point. These are flaws that we would see on a Kia in the ’90s or something. I can’t imagine how they released this. It’s just a surprise. A really big surprise for me.” Ouch!”
>Consumer Reports labeled the Model S and the best car ever built
Tesla is voted the least reliable car by consumer reports
More than 18,000 car owners in the UK identified the Tesla Model S as the least reliable car out of 31 brands and 159 model.
Motoring magazine What Car? gave the Tesla Model S a reliability rating of just 50.9%, with owners identifying issues with the car’s electrical systems and bodywork.
>SPACE TRAVEL HAD NEVER BEEN ACHIEVED BEFORE BY A PRIVATE ENTITY.
Because its not profitable unless you get government funding transferred from NASA to your own company, SpaceX success is due to bribing government officials
Is there some kind of Vulcan mindmeld embedded into every single Elon Musk-derived product that forces the user to hear and read every little Elon Musk utterance ?
Contemporary social media and ancillary technologies have made humans so out of touch with what matters and what’s just chaff.
Go crazy. Pay the price for being a single point of failure PR wise. Fail to see some new paradigm (he’s only human). Fail to predict something critical. He even says so himself – just like the Falcon Heavy launch where there were a thousand things that could have gone wrong and made the whole thing fail.
>Secondly, he didnt have money from his parents dipshit
“Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub”
Buying a 10 bedroom house, renovating it, reportedly every weekend there would be 1,000+ people as his parties
So he had to renovate it to have numerous toilets to serve all these people and this would require building permits, contractors etc..
Doing any of the above would require millions to drop down, at this point he was a college student and was before paypal
“Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world’s most famous jewellers – as his father lay sleeping. “They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’” Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. “And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200.”
A few days later the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000 — a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem.”
Yeah normal 16 year olds typically walk around NYC with Emeralds worth $2000+ actual value was much higher than 2,000 musk was a 16 year old kid who got duped
And I am the one that is full of shit?
“Errol earned massive wealth as an engineering consultant and as a real-estate developer. He owned several mines and other natural-resources infrastructure. Errol had a share in an emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika, Zambia. He also owned thoroughbred horses. He also had a private yacht and a ‘Cessna’ aircraft, as he enjoyed sailing and piloting back then. Errol would spend most of his holidays at the several posh homes he owned. One of them was in Waterkloof, a classy suburb of Pretoria, where Elon had spent most of his childhood after Errol and Maye got divorced.”
Private yacht, private plane, throughbred horses Yup Elon totally grew up poor!
The federal government spends more than $20 billion a year on subsidies for farm businesses. Current estimates are similar for domestic oil production subsidies. It looks like there is a long list of people who would “soak up” all of the subsidies and have been for decades. At least we can agree the flame thrower was cool.
Disagree on Elon being the most important person alive.
This lady is: Dr. Julia Greer
http://www.jrgreer.caltech.edu/
Can you even tell that you’re cherry picking facts?
Before even getting to the part where you actually back up OBJECTIVELY the assertion that nothing positive and worthwhile (two separate metrics) resulted from said projects.
You don’t read the posts your reply to. You’re stuck in your own echo chamber.
Answer this, not something else:
“The only things he invented were SpaceX and the boring company both business models required massive political bribes ”
If that’s true and as ordinary as you argue, then why did no one else do it? Not one other person or company did what any of those Musk projects. How do you reconcile that fact to your arguments?
Human civilization has more technological dimensions than even Musk influences directly. That he shows up named as most important in an article like this one more accurately means that he is somewhere on the very short list, regardless if he’s #1 or not. Who’s #1 is academic.
Who are the people you think are more important and why? If Elon gets us to Mars I would canonized him.
Boring company – literally drilled under peoples property without buying rights, ignored environmental regulations, ignored permits got away by bribing government officials
Tesla – Not a founder, literally formed using stolen IP from GE, the founders and original engineers all came from GE who built the EV-1 a massively successful EV that had a range of 160 miles and a $32k cost. GE killed it because they were afraid that it would cannibalize their ICE sales even though it was massively profitable. Massive government subsidies
SpaceX – literally bribed federal officials to shift funding from NASA to SpaceX , the entire profitability model banked on the government paying them to launch instead of NASA
All it proves is that when you have rich parents, tons of cash and powerful friends in government and tech and access to investments in startups not available to the average investor you can build or invest in successful companies
The “Dinosaur” did not become extinct because mammals out competed them. Someone dropped a rock on their heads.
The only things he invented were SpaceX and the boring company both business models required massive political bribes
SpaceX hinged on the Federal government transferring NASA funding to spaceX
The boring company literally drilled under other peoples property without having to purchase any sort of property rights, ignored permits and environmental regulations
Musk has friends in high places, hence why he was able to capitalize when others couldn’t
And ultimately it’s not impossible he goes full Howard Hughes.
Also, it’s not impossible that he somehow stretches and stresses himself even thinner and burns out so bad he bungles some or all of his projects.
They could still have some freak sequence of failures. A BFS with a large load of pax suffering some improbably bad catastrophe also coinciding with major media coverage, etc, followed by another improbably bad Starlink accident with major orbital pollution, etc. You have two of these and inevitably basically the whole world is tuned in for any further flustercuck and given Musk’s history (now, not before the whole 420/SEC and Joe Rogan/NASA and Thai/pedo PR fiascos), such a sequence of mere bad luck probably wouldn’t allow SpaceX & co to consequently show it was just a run of bad luck.
People would shut it down, politically and commercially. The chicken littles and neo-luddites and NIMBYs and all of the aerospace competitors who aren’t dead yet, will jump on that bandwagon with Musk sitting there on the tracks with his funny and naive geek eccentricity suddenly not so funny anymore.
>> ALMOST EVERY POINT YOU MADE HERE IS FACTUALLY FALSE.
Like the current trend, when in doubt, make things up and yell loudly.
There’s no such thing as too much hurry to make LEO/BEO access cheap. Nor to make EVs the status quo. The sooner LEO/BEO colonization is a thing, the sooner people will make surviving and then living in great health their concern.
The logic in your post likely showed up during *all* of history, *every time* something changed (iow technology arrived) that shifted some paradigm or some boundary to the previous status quo. What was the world going to do with so many babies when we reduced infant mortality? Likewise in every single other technologically-enabled growth of human existence.
Yes, it is very possible that other planets are a dead end for long term human life, low gravity making impossible to have healthy offspring. Ergo, it would be morally wrong and forbidden by law to have kids there.
In that case, trips to other planets will be mere visits, and that’s not really becoming a multi-planetary species.
But space settlement has more options than Mars.
Rotating habitats can have perfect gravity, atmosphere and radiation levels.
And such infrastructure can be enabled with the technology SpaceX is developing.
If we don’t go, our machines will, and they will help us create an ecosystem of economic activity in space over the coming decades, one that will ultimately result in industrial self replication (anything we need on space, we will be able to extract and make it there).
At that time, we could still be living mostly on Earth with a few thousands in tours of duty on space for keeping the more complex machinery working. But the economic output would be enormous, and then the first actual permanent habitats in space won’t be far away.
” living us all behind on the wrecked planet Earth”
Can you back that up with *anything*, or is it just a cheap drive by comment?
It doesn’t matter. Even if that were true, the financial effect of mass production and sales make EVs happen, which is the actual goal. Not to make you like Elon Musk, which you’re so obsessed over.
Teslas could be the worst vehicles ever, and still if they make EVs happen sooner and better, it’ll have been a success. But they’re not, even if they’re not the absolute best. They’re great vehicles much like most of the better half of all recent technological products are. Humans are spoiled nowadays, spoiled enough that they can get away with ridiculously whiny attitude like in your posts.
Just a blink of an eye ago, cosmologically, we were rubbing sticks together hoping for fire. Less than a century from now our reach will finally allow us to grasp space and land beyond orbit and time and freedom beyond the miserable self-imposed scarcity of space and matter and time, that exactly the kind of pathological naysaying you obsess with has enabled.
The democratization of space, matter, time, ARE the growing pain of humanity and the sooner it’s done and over with the better. Moaning that you personally don’t like one of the persons who specifically refuses to take yours and the rest of your type’s hand wringing as an EXCUSE for not leaving any stone unturned towards those goals, is irrelevant.
He has and will fail. Said so himself, e.g. his conviction that fast iteration is worth the errors, and better than slow iteration. Random major e.g. his recent attempt to go straight to “alien dreadnought” in Tesla mfg.
“Nobody did SpaceX before elon because space wasn’t profitable, Space x only became profitable when NASA stopped launching and paid Space X to do it instead. ”
You’ll NEVER be taken seriously saying that (and probably the rest of your post – that’s how low quality it is right off the bat) in real life instead of an internet webpage, e.g. to actual industry engineers, that aren’t political sycophants (not common but they’re human too so they must exist) or crackpots.
Sour grapes
Exactly. That one bystander heckling for no reason except their inconsolable bitterness.
“Everyone in the paypal mafia has made a ton of companies also like thiel and steve chen”
How many of them has made EVs a definite instead of a gimmicky status statement niche thing, LEO and BEO cheap and past the point of no return, simultaneously with major positive impact on progress for solar, transport, AI, precursors to BMI, etc?
” nothing intelligent other than capitalizing on things everybody already knew ”
Then why did no one else (single handedly) invent SpaceX & co?
Voluntarily or not, it’s powerpoint still.
You are seriously arguing that the same human failures that basically every rich guy has anyway, without going into how much more or less he has in particular, are not worth having a fire lit under orbital and BEO access, EVs, solar, AI, Loop/Boring applications?
What do you prefer? The same old corporate corruption but without actual maximized progress/competition ?
Whatever it is, tall poppy syndrome or sour grapes for whatever reason, it’s hard to take seriously. Schadenfreude makes the world go round.
Wow!!!
FoxNews is really working, huh.
Because people are lazy and don’t want their gravy train derailed.
Yes, if Musk wasn’t alive and soaking up all of the subsidies and corporate welfare, who would do it? He’s a welfare momma, that’s it. That’s his only real claim to fame…and the flamethrower was cool.
Someone crowd funded a bowl of oatmeal, and raised over $50,000.
Do you really want people who would buy a bowl of oatmeal for $50,000 to choose who’s DNA should be added to the back-up off-world “Holy crap, that was a big asteroid!” gene pool?
Perhaps it is you!
If this is true, which I have no doubt it is, why is America doing all it can to destroy this man? I am not even slightly a conspiracy theorist but he is putting a lot of very rich companies and rich people at risk. For example what will starlink due to the broadband companies? And tesla do to the big car company? He is trying his best to help the average citizen and being persecuted for it.
I agree. I am glad you mentioned Starlink. The business Gurus never mention this and I wonder if the Verizons and ATT’s of the world appreciate what is about to hit them. Living in Rural America it is the only thing I see on the Horizon for broadband. My biggest concern is that the way he is being treated for what he is doing at Testla will make him never want to take any of his new ventures public. As I understand it the FBI has an criminal investigation open for his failure to make production goals. Give me a break. A lot of people are going to earn their Dinosaur stripes before he is done disrupting business.
So many factually false statements here, this comment is almost laughable. First off, ever heard of hindsight bias dude? Go look it up. This post is the definition of it. Secondly, he didnt have money from his parents dipshit, his mom was a model and dad was some low level engineer. The money he had to put into PayPal was from the sale of his first company, Zip2, to Compac, a couple years before. And he did invent PayPal, along with Thiel and a couple others, except it was X.com and not PayPal back then.
People did try to privatize space travel before him, but they all failed. Its not that noone tried, like you mention here. Maybe pick up a book and read about the many people who tried and failed at it.
And Tesla does have innovative technology. You are right, electric cars did exist, but did not have the patented technology (he later opened the patents to the public to encourage competition) that Tesla had (for the range and acceleration etc with these lithium ion batteries). Also, awful build quality? Consumer Reports labeled the Model S and the best car ever built. In terms of technology. Also, the labeled it the SAFEST car you can be in. Awful build technology? The hell are you smoking?
You keep going on and on about how people kept talking about the fact that this and that could be done. Except noone did. NOONE. This was the first successful car company in a CENTURY. And to make it even better, it was an ELECTRIC car startup, there wasnt even a market for it.
SPACE TRAVEL HAD NEVER BEEN ACHIEVED BEFORE BY A PRIVATE ENTITY. THE ONLY ENTITIES TO SUCCESSFULLY REACH ORBIT AND BACK WERE THE US, RUSSIA, INDIA, AND CHINA. And now of course, they are joined by Elon.
You are the typical example of some ignorant person who never picks up a book and actually reads about anything at all. ALMOST EVERY POINT YOU MADE HERE IS FACTUALLY FALSE. Stop putting people down each time they do good for the world. And if this was so easy, why dont you give it a shot there tough guy?
People like you are whats wrong with the world.
Define the boundaries of genius, and then show me how Elon Musk exists only outside of those boundaries.
Uddervise, he’da geenus.
Do you have any idea how hard he has been working for more than two decades to build the future . It is easy for you to type thrash behind a screen . You are a disgrace to this world
There’s a lot of stuff going on in your comment.
How many people have liquid assets of at least $500,000, are of an age and level of health to be able to make the journey, are not found to be psychologically unsuited to the circumstances surrounding deep space travel and the restrictive isolation of living within a cramped and crowded outpost, have no criminal record of violent or antisocial behaviour, have a skill set that fits a job available on Mars so they can earn a living, or have enough wealth to pay others to provide them with food, water, air, septic service, entertainment… AND will want to go?
Shavings off a very thin sliver off a very narrow twig. And, likely not a particularly dark barked twig, at that.
And what government will pay to send colonists to Mars, knowing that those colonist will become citizens of a foreign power? That is, will all of Mars become “‘Mars”, one nation, under Musk” as soon as the first colony is established?
And as for sponsors? Yes, people will bring people, who will be indebted to their sponsors.
Don’t get me wrong. I want this to happen. I believe it will happen. I just haven’t really heard a lot of talk about the societal challenges or structures that are going to exist. Short term. Middle term. Long term.
Let it be a given that Musk will succeed. What then?
Who chooses who to go, and by what standards? What restrictions? What requirements?
What societal model?
What rules?
Wrong wrong wrong
Nobody did SpaceX before elon because space wasn’t profitable, Space x only became profitable when NASA stopped launching and paid Space X to do it instead.
People didn’t do it because they didn’t want to compete against a government agency
This was after extensive lobbying and bribing of politicians, since space launches were basically a NASA monopoly all they had to do was undercut NASA’s launch price by 10 million and then convince the government to pay them 190 mil for a launch that would cost NASA 200 mil
So congrats Musks entire profitability plans were based on bribing government officials
———————–
Electric cars? Already done see the documentary “who killed the electric car”
GM already released the EV1, and with nickel metal hydride batteries 26.4 kwh was able to go 160 miles and was affordable $34,000
There was massive demand, but GM cancelled it after they realized that electric cars would cannibalize their ICE cars
Tesla was actually started by people who worked on the EV1 project and was well aware of the profitability and the increase in potential from switching from metal hydride to lithium ion
Musk merely wrote these guys a big fat check, and was later made CEO in 2008 after he became famous for SpaceX and rambling on social media and building a cult.
And furthermore Tesla benefited massively from bribing politicians to literally give him free money from subsidies and tax credits
———————-
Musk is no genius, he is a guy with political and silicon valley connections that allow him to invest in startup companies that the average person has no access to and is able to bribe politicians to make companies profitable
Tony stark he is not
Then why are there so few, arguably maybe three tech billionaires who are doing similar things (one is dead)?
You can continue your sour grapes logic forever but the facts stand for themselves.
Everyone in the paypal mafia has made a ton of companies also like thiel and steve chen
The fact is that it was extremely easy to make money during the time period that musk was in
This was the pre silicon valley era, where companies like Microsoft, apple, google, amazon etc… were desperate for funding and traditional lenders like wall street were largely ignorant about technology. Even the guy who painted a mural for facebook and was paid in stock is now worth millions.
The masseuse for google is also worth millions
My respect goes to the people who actually invent the break through technologies or ideas, not to some guy who writes checks.
Nothing Musk did was genius, that’s a fact.
Anyone could create a profitable company like spacex if they were allowed to compete against government monopolies, it is well known that the government is massively inefficient
You could say more of the same about anyone. It’s the fact that he DID these things and is doing these things that counts. Sitting in your chair belittling the accomplishments of others is not doing anything great.
Don’t forget that regular Space Force grunts will be there to protect them. And anyone can set up a crowdfunding project to go to Mars.
I kinda had the same plans when I was in high school. Start a private space program and save the world. I even wrote off and got the NASA study on space habitats after I saw an article on them in a 1976 National Geographic (and dog-earred Gerard K. O’Neills The High Frontier, as well as a few others). Unfortunately, the first step in every plan that I could think of was, 1) accumulate tens of billions of dollars . . .
If you think you can do it with a kickstarter or something, instead, go right ahead. Seriously, even if it were possible, no one would take you seriously until, at the very least, you had accumulated a few billion on your own.
If you have a problem with some people having billions of dollars, save your outrage for people inheriting so much money it’s not even money any more, just power, say a few hundred million in US dollars. I expect that will keep you plenty busy.
Funny.
“All he did was do something no one done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen.” But for some reason never had.
Then, in a totally different field, he did something no one had done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But, for some reason never had.
Then, in yet another totally different field, did something no one had ever done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But for some reason never had.
Then, in yet another totally different field, did something no one had ever done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But for some reason never had.
Then, in yet another totally different field, did something no one had ever done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But for some reason never had.
Pfft, he’s such a loser.
Serious musk fluffing
This guy has done nothing intelligent other than capitalizing on things everybody already knew
He was born in a rich family, then went to school with the people who created paypal, nothing paypal did was genius either a system for processing online payments was a no brainer and he had millions from his parents to invest. This was during the days when the internet was a new thing, and venture capital was non existent
A couple of guys setting up servers to provide a web service was completely alien, and no one was willing to invest
Then using his paypal money he decided to make a company that privatized outer space, everybody and their dog knew that the government agencies like NASA etc… were massively inefficient due to a vast host of reasons. And realized that millions of dollars were siphoned away from NASA by hucksters and that any idiot could build a rocket for a fraction of the cost that NASA pays. And that the government would simply pay to private company for launches instead of NASA once they realized that private launches were cheaper.
Again nothing super genius, in fact libertarians have been talking about how cheap privatized space launches would be for half a century
Tesla? Again nothing genius, Tesla cars don’t have any magical technology and they are extremely overpriced compared to other EV’s and have awful build quality. They are literally the iphones of the car world. At this point after spacex he built a literal cult who will buy his cars. Vastly inferior yet hideously overpriced but people buy them because of trendiness and status signaling
And neither are rocket ships, or tunneling machines, or even brain augmentations. It doesn’t matter; his very existence has caused powerful forces to be applied in these and other areas sooner and faster than they otherwise would have been.
Yup, and that’s the thing, even if every single one of his business ventures ultimately fails and he dies as a broken wino in a gutter, he is still the one that has forced everyone else to lean forward in nearly every area he has touched.
Theres nothing special about Tesla’s battery life, range or cost
Tesla model 3 has 75 kwh batteries the volt (2nd gen) in comparison has 18.4 kwh and 60 mile range, Leaf has 30 kwh and 107 miles range
Chevy bolt has 60 kwh and 238 miles
So all Tesla did to get 300 miles is putting in bigger batteries
So all musk did was put in bigger batteries, they don’t have anything special technology wise.
Kind of feels like you scanned the post, saw the word class and were triggered.
What?! Did you skip over the first line?
“…intelligent, industrious, brave. ”
Seriously, explain.
Well Gary, you and yours are turtles, Musk is a frog.
NEVER sell Elon Musk short!
So among the many delusions yo have on display, is that the wealthy have unearned wealth and no “skills” ?
Musk, if/when a true colony has been established, will have populated it with his own chosen: intelligent, industrious, brave.
Basically, those who’ve accumulated enough wealth to buy a ticket; to make a home on another world.
And they will be shaved from a very thin sliver of a very narrow twig of the Human tree.
Who will they not be – unless brought?
Scratch farmers from Senegal? (Who grow crops in borderline soils, under dry skies.)
Atacama miners from Peru? (Who mine copper and iron ore in .5 atm and half the oxygen at 18,000′.)
Rural artists from the American Midwest? (Who… who… um… paint, I guess?)
Point is, the relatively wealthy are going, regardless of their abilities or skills, and the people that will be needed for “basic work” will owe somebody for their trip-and-turf.
Class divisions will be the flaw in the first inch of Elon’s tapestry.
Musk envisions a Martian government based on direct democracy. No representatives, just one person, one vote. But, when you owe some one for your air, food, shelter – existence, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll give SERIOUS consideration to voting the way they “suggest”.
Etc, etc, etc…. till, all of a sudden — Martian mole people being pissed on by Crystal Angels on pleasure flights down from their incubation clouds.
I know of no excuse for presuming the colonists will not be aware before their chief job is to make it work by over the long haul by their own lights.
None of which means anything, because the technology to deal with every problem you whine about is at hand.
Ones with useful range and a tolerable cost had never been done, let alone the kind of battery lifespan Tesla’s are seeing.
To subvert you must grab hold of the machinery that makes a system possible and retarget it to other ends. It sounds like what you are expecting is a magical flick of the fingers to change everything. The resistant type is good for pointing out problems but it doesn’t change anything because it refuses to engage the machinery.
Electric sports car were not a new idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venturi_F%C3%A9tish
Where’s ol’ Warren, going on about fluffers like usual? I think he has a bit of an obsession, a bit of an “oral fixation”, you know.
No they weren’t. The Volt and the LEAF were both motivated in no small part to the performance success of the Tesla roadster. Bob Lutz has specifically credited Elon with motivating him to push GM engineers to design the Volt. Tesla proved that EVs could be done.
Frankly no one person really matters all that much in the grand scheme. Electric cars were happening before he entered the market and the would have continued to advance without him. The same goes for reusable space launch vehicles.
I do not see how he could fail
I mean, he has already proven that the concept of reusable relaunch works so ..
He seams intellectually rather modest, the most important person alive must have a better understanding of what it would really mean to be subversive as I see nothing revolutionary in hoarding billions, selling millions of other personal cars then fleet to Mars, living us all behind on the wrecked planet Earth
The Spanish conquistadors conquered the Inca empire in a year or so, but it was three hundred years before a European woman was able to give birth under the low oxygen conditions of the high altiplano. Mars has many more potential roadblocks to human colonisation than Bolivia, and most of them would be enough to make trying to bring a child up there criminally irresponsible.
Elon is the man any way you cut it.
I hope he makes it to Mars, and soon, just for my selfish sake, but the biggest problems to overcome, and the biggest likely point of failure, will occur after arrival. Very likely, Musk will push this thing before all the remedies are perfected. If colonists die from some serious cause–radiation, or lack of gravity, or lack of food, or all of the above–it will all come to an end. And even if those don’t happen but the colonists can’t have viable babies it will all come to a crashing halt. And we’ll look back and see that Musk, along with all the rest of us, was in way too much of a hurry.
I think if Musk does fail – for example if there were several catastrophic launch failures – Bezos is waiting in line & Bezos is not making the same level of focused effort at present
Pretty sure he would do more if he had the time. He needs to get more managers who are able to execute his vision, so he will be able to do even more.
Well, if his peculiar kind of folly makes humans multi planetary, he will be no doubt remembered as the most important person of this epoch.
I’m not a fan of idolizing people, but enabling life to propagate to other places outside of Earth really is as important in historical terms as the discovery of the Americas or the first trip to the Moon.
History will forever keep memory of that civilization milestone, 1, 10 thousand years hence, if there still is anyone who thinks and cares.
SpaceX can still fail in its plans, but I really doubt it by now. The moment of most peril for them has already come, passed and is now in the past. And that was when they were about to close doors, nearly out of money in 2008.
Elon is certainly more respectable, with all his flaws, than Bozos, [hand]Jobs, or Zuckerbot.
Musk is certainly bigger than Jesus.
LOL
Fail to argue, fall back to insults.
Getting off this planet and generally making vehicles less polluting is a social improvement. The status quo for both of those was a stagnant one; so reality is opposite of your assertion that Musk & co “took more money off the table from being available for social improvements”.
Nevermind all the byproducts, e.g. kids and young adults growing up to see something inspiring a lot like with Apollo. Both the result (e.g. passing the point of no return for cheap and reliable LEO/BEO access that leads to actual democratization of space a lot like the early American west) and the process (e.g. burning the status quo of stagnant and corrupt industrial progress).
<< he is the only one seriously pursuing these goals. >>
He’s not; though I’m pretty sure I agree with what you meant to argue.
Endorsing a bad paper may merely be unfortunate choice of which paper to endorse. He would retract his support of that paper for its faults but not his position on climate change.
Musk commits unforced errors and he needs to stop doing that. I want everything he is doing to succeed. I want him to succeed. But calling the scuba driver that rescue those boys in Thailand a pedophile was uncalled for. And smoking weed on TV was uncalled for. And saying he was going to take his company private when it wasn’t a done deal. He is the CEO of a very large company. He needs to act like it.
Martian soil is full of poisonous perchlorates. If any was found on Earth, it would be a superfund toxic exclusion area.
A rotating habitat would need a massive rock radiation shield around it to match ground level radiation levels – cosmic rays involve iron nuclei tavelling at relativistic velocities, and when they hit anything, they shower a huge fan of energetic particles. The radiation shield would have to be rotating too, which would require fantastically expensive structural support; or not rotating, but around the habitat, with ever-present possibility of catastrophic contact. The inertia of a planet is a great insurance policy for life – it’s taken us two hundred years determined effort to even start to muck up the life support system. Any engineered habitat would be seconds from disaster by blowout or structural failure, and the gas mix and heat controls would also have little room for error. In a war, or even a trade war, the whole enterprise would be even more vulnerable.
Space will be a great environment for machines, probably including intelligent machines, but not for us. Gerard K O’Neill made his rotating habitats appear attractive by making them look like Earth, but they could only ever be a plastic replica.
I deeply admire Musk, and I think NDT is probably right. But I have two sore spots about Musk:
1. Calling that rescue diver from Thailand a pedophile on Twitter. That happened this year, and of course Musk is now being sued for defamation. This was part of the whole episode where SpaceX built an emergency submarine to rescue those kids, but it was ultimately not needed.
2. Endorsing, on Twitter of course, the 97% climate consensus paper by Cook et al. That paper was false, invalid, and fraudulent (the raters were supposed to be blind to author and journal, but they cheated and called out dissident authors to each other on a secret online forum during the rating process). It was complete garbage, should never have been published, and the Australian authorities should prosecute the Australian authors, especially Cook, for scientific fraud. (It’s a crime in Australia, but not in the US.)
My problem with Musk there is not just pushing junk, fraudulent science. It’s his obvious conflict of interest. The guy sells electric cars. He seems to be against anything that could reduce his revenue long-term, and supports anything that might bolster it. Pushing global warming alarmism presents an obvious conflict, and he should acknowledge that conflict of interest and be more objective and rigorous.
More on the actual climate consensus from valid studies: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-climate-science-consensus-is-78-84-percent
And on the 97% fraud: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97
I’ll have a journal article or two on these topics soon. It would be awesome if we could get Musk to retract.
High style. Sleeping under furniture. Costing your investors millions with a tweet.
He has done some amazing bait and switch, for sure.
Absolutely. And what’s more I do it without using it as an advertisement to sell more products and take more money off the table from being available for social improvements.
You’re name is TruthSeeker, yet this post is very hmm… “Biased”
Listen up bud, so what if Elon had replaced Martin E? Martin was bringing in the downfall of Tesla, if you ask me. It was the right thing to do. Elon has amazing ideas and great imagination. Overrated? You’re entitled to you’re own opinion. Why? So having extremely cheap and fast travel is a bad thing? Buddy he doesn’t always spend time on Twitter. Most of it is in meetings. (Source: Talking Tech with Elon Musk! Marques Brownlee) Most of that time is in meetings. What’s so bad about it though? Seriously I can’t seem to get your point here? That includes this really stupid post. Explain please.
Kiss my buttt, not on the left side, not on the right side, but in the groove.
Is that precise enough?
Facts are facts, nor grave nor bed denied.
jealous much? Find your hero and talk about him or her. Find what you admire and support it.
Show me. Quote and refute precisely.
It reads like one of those russian troll farm shitposts
en wikipedia org wiki Shitposting
Do you even read the posts.
Not quite. Soil composition matters a lot. They may be able to figure it out and tune it when they get there, but only if they have the necessary supplies (the right chemicals to treat the soil).
Meanwhile, airponics and hydroponics are the same everywhere, and the BFS should have enough of that to support the colonists for the duration of the transit. So it should be able to support them long enough for them to set up a permanent airponics or hydroponics farm on Mars.
>”Seems like you believe your own BS”.
You got me there; I do believe what I say. But, I understand how a lot of people can be confused by that these days.
>”… first sentence doesn’t outweigh the rest of your BS”
Which of these statements are wrong, and explain how?
“… the relatively wealthy are going, REGARDLESS of their abilities or skills,”
They will be “… shaved from a very thin sliver of a very narrow twig of the Human tree.” Statistically correct.
Very few miners, farmers, artists, on the whole, will be able to afford a ticket.
“… people that will be needed for “basic work” will owe somebody for their trip-and-turf.”
“Class divisions” will exist.
Musk advocates a Martian governmental system based on direct Democracy.
“… when you owe some one for your air, food, shelter – existence, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll give SERIOUS consideration to voting the way they “suggest””
Crystal Angels enjoy urinating on Martian Mole people.
It is obvious to everyone here that you are delusional, teetering on the very edge of reality.
The ongoing harassment of Elon Musk and his enterprises proves you wrong.
Your posts are the muddled thoughts of a paranoid schitz-o…laughter
Liked.
But, all I want to say here is this – Bigelow MUST buy Bed Bath and Beyond, and merge it with his space hotel company, retaining B B and Beyond as the company moniker.
You should resist the temptation of saying whats on your mind especially if it is negative.
Follow your own advice then you can take off the Fool’s cap.
Are people hearing and reading every Musk utterance? Pay Attention! That is a clue.
Fortunately you are not immersed in Truth….keep seeking.
That’d be genuinely “realistic”. Not just notional debate.
Can you cite the literature that supports the assertions you make? And show that they outnumber/outweigh their respective dissents.
Because the above complaint that Musk talks too much, as comment to an article about his practical accomplishments, is not itself a baseless complaint. Because it’s actually relevant to actual brass tacks of a Tesla Model S, or every SpaceX mission, etc — those can’t be considered on their own without considering Musk’s “bad personality traits”.
Pot, kettle.
SpaceX won’t be merely arguably game changing if Ariane & co are so badly left behind they’re effectively deprecated. It’s already heading that way.
The NASAspaceflight forums would welcome your ideas and be happy to contribute to taking them further. There’s already a good number of threads for various concerns, some of them very thoroughly detailed.
That’s her..
This new comment program is madding. lol
It’s called Gateway Foundation. at gatewayspaceport dot com
Okay. That didn’t work. It’s called Gateway Foundation. at gatewayspaceport dot com
For that matter, never mind that they weren’t corrupt.
” They haven’t even figured out how to grow anything in that Martian soil. ”
To start with, it’s the same as growing it anywhere else.
” Theres nothing special about Tesla’s battery life, range or cost ”
Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
” So all musk did was put in bigger batteries, they don’t have anything special technology wise. ”
Keep up your stvpid, it can’t hurt your credibility at all that Teslas have been on the road for over 300k miles and only lose 85% of their battery life.
Seems like you believe your own BS. And your first sentence does nothing to outweigh the rest of your BS post.
” Martian mole people being pissed on by Crystal Angels on pleasure flights down from their incubation clouds ”
You’re dvmb.
Trump kids are richer
But they are hidiots why?
” He succeeded because the government gave him favoritism ”
Nope, zero favoritism. None at all. COTS EELV and CCDEV were competition open to all. He in fact had to sue the Air Force to free them from the actual crony capitalist block buy of launches. You very much have not the least idea what you are talking about.
When I was young, I thought institutions were just automatic parts of civilization, somehow. When I got older, I began to see that they were all the result of a lot of work and good ideas by individuals, kept going by all the followers-of-good-things. Right now, I feel very privileged to be able to watch one of those individuals in practice, ripping his way through society creating new institutions left and right. Why? Because he can. There’s nothing more exciting.
Liar, liar, and liar. You are three for three.
Thing is, you are abjectly a mor0n, one who has already claimed there’s nothing unusual about Tesla’s car tech,–and then had multiple teardown reports say what is remarkable about their car tech. You are merely a blithering !d!ot.
It’s your only stand out quality.
” Most of musk’s success is based on friends in the government, friends in silicon valley and daddy’s money ”
No, none of his success is from daddy’s money, lots of people have friends in Silicon Valley (only one is Musk) and none of his success is from friends in government. You can not defend so much as one of your assertions with any facts — that’s because they are all BS.
Try to get around Vuukles flaws to give us a link so we know which Julia Greer you are talking about.
Is it this one? jrgreer caltech edu
Put dots into the spaces to get the URL
Lots of people were running successful startups in Silicon Valley. They all had such access.
And no, none of the research to Tesla was done by GE, or paid for by them.
There are thousands if not tens of thousands of people in the US who have ”rich parents, tons of cash and powerful friends in government and tech and access to investments in startups” even more than Elon Musk when he started. Let alone companies and organizations
Why they did not do it?
I have yet to no evidence whatsoever that Musk has so many friends or in the government, and I have yet to see evidence that his father was even a billionaire at the time Musk started ..
This guy has done nothing intelligent other than capitalizing on things everybody already knew
-> It is something extremely intelligent to capitalize what other people know and to put it into practice. lt takes a lot of time and effort to put abstract ideas into practice.
The latest serious attempt to pay for a rotating habitat is by setting up a world-wide lottery for it. I don’t know if it would world, but the tech is getting set up nicely. Check it out: https://gatewayspaceport.com/
If the born !d!ot Matheus Henrique is calling you out on your stvp!d!ty, you’re really bad off Pisa.
And you are.
The Boring Company got every required permit and had no need to purchase any property rights, since the surface rights holders had none. Not so much as a single bribe was involved in the success of any of Musk’s enterprises.
Have you heard of this private attempt to put together a rotating space station? https://gatewayspaceport.com/
From what we’ve heard, he’s not taking very good care of his health: very high anxiety, little sleep.
I hope you’re right. I’m very excited by the whole process that’s taking place. But, if you’ve looked carefully at the problems, and how serious they are, and that solving them may very well take a lot more work and science/technology than will be available in the very nearr future, then the first colonists may not be able to do anything at all to help themselves. They haven’t even figured out how to grow anything in that Martian soil. What happens when they run out of food from Earth. And would they actually be able to feed continuously just one BFR full of 100 colonists? For my own excited sake, I hope they go anyway. On the off chance all these things will be solved by 2024. But if not, disaster. That’s all I’m saying. Trying to be realistic.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a self-serving science “personality”, but maybe right here. Yes, Elon Musk far more important that Bill Gates, a excellent monopolist but a zero innovator. Steve Jobs is dead so I think he is not in the running for “most important person ALIVE”. Highest grades for Mr. Musk need to go to the mass popularization of the self-driving electric car with Tesla. SpaceX has been impressive but not yet game changing. So good and promising … he wins since nobody else seems to be doing much. Even Mr. Bezo’s nearly 20 year old Blue Origin has yet to launch a paying sub-orbital flight, let alone a test orbital flight.
Is it just me or are every one of his endeavors built for mars?
Land on mars and you need to dig underground for habitat, solar for power, electric vehicles for transport and a satellite constellation for basic communication.
If hydroponics hadn’t been perfected for weed already, I’d bet he’d be working on that, wait, a, second.
There are about 5000 (?) billionaires in the US? Why none of them did it?
GE had the first EVs back 20 years ago, there are probably 20-30 huge conglomerates in the car business, why nobody went for it?
I think you have no idea of what you are talking about . Seriously dude
1) Venture capital non existent in the early internet days? I think the internet boom happened precisely as there was too much capital available. If it was such a no brainer why did not VISA or Amex did this?
2) If SpaceX was such a no brainer why Bill Gates or any other billionaire invest in this in the 90s?
3) EVs nothing genius? Then Why General Motor or Fiat did not come up with this 20 years ago?
4) Teslas are low quality? Then why Tesla can not produce them enough?
…but mammals DID out compete everything else to fill the top niche in the aftermath.
In fact, there’s this one mammal who’s working on making sure the same doesn’t happen to us.
People complain about the celebrity status given to shallow and inconsequential media personalities.
They say, “We should be making stars, heroes of our scientists and innovators.”
Well….
“better is not better, for the sake of only having it good-enough. “
And it’s understandable. Sometimes change sucks, or is just a pain to deal with. But it’s another thing to rationalize that better is not better for the sake of having it only good enough.
The current state of things is not good enough. We can and we must do better. Good enough is once scarcity is negligible, and happens before the planet is one big carpet of broken eggs with no omelet to justify it.
“someone who pushes the boundary of human understanding ”
You unconditionally specify human understanding which discredits the argument: No one else made SpaceX, except 1 dude who made Blue Origin. 1 person is exceptional, not a sign of ordinariness. Which then fails anyway because that exception indeed made Amazon and is the richest human alive and effectively can buy countries and buy humanity their ticket to BEO, but does not
have as much influence in terms of real world human livelihood
which is what the article asserts in quoting NDT. NDT is who is quoted, not Pisa2019.
Yep, other business men had access to the same subsidy system but didn’t maximize its relevance and intended impact like Space X and Tesla have. In most American households we commend that kind of efficient return on our tax dollar investment. It’s only because Musk is disrupting such established gravy trains (pork, graft, inflated contracts, etc.) that we have professional trolls out vilifying this guy.
No, the point is that you would never be able to say in person to industry professionals what you write here to internet anyones, without those engineers and others walking out shaking their head at the nonsense.
You dislike that Musk was rich and is richer. BFD
It’s irrelevant and no one (that matters to the actual goals Musk actually works for; not the ones you project on him) cares about your distaste for all those irrelevant details.
Your arguments are not : What is better for humanity
They are instead: What is respectable on the Pisa scale of worship worthiness.
Total non sequitur. neil degrasse tyson did not say “Musk is the best according to Pisa 2019’s rules of thumb about how to run businesses”. RTFA
You don’t get it. What you argue is Musk’s success is not what he actually considers success. You’re so fixated to his personal drama that you seem completely blind to the real world consequences of “his” projects.
And back off the total non-sequitur arguments you make and to the actual topic:
You do *nothing* to disprove the specific assertions in the article and any other truly related facts, namely that Musk has influence comparable or greater than Jobs, Gates, Bezos, in terms of real world useful accomplishments for humanity.
Like, is it reasonable to assert that Jobs can be reduced to the iPhone and that Musk’s BFR and EV adoption (not Tesla domination) is a “better” thing.
You don’t touch that with a 10 foot pole cause you’re too busy complaining about all the corrupt ways Musk takes to reach his goals. Nevermind if the goals are worth it.
The article quotes NDT’s opinion as to who has the most influence. You conflate that with worshipping and then shift goal posts yet again with your nonsensical dislike of Musk by cherrypicking whatever out of context “dirty tricks” Musk had the gall to use to outcompete every other CHEATING BASTARD out there. Guess what. Being a cheating bastard is what it’s all about. You compete or you die. That is the game and those are the stakes. So either the project is worth it, or it’s not. Worth out-cheating bastard’ing all the other actors who do not want to make adoption of EVs the goal at all costs (incl making Tesla the uncompetitive dinosaur — *a DIRECT quote from Musk*), and likewise with the other projects.
Making the future exciting by pushing technology to make human mastery of nature more powerful and efficient. Your complaint about Musk’s oligarchic aspirations and whatever other tyrannical schemes is just baseless self-serving word salad conflating yet again the fact that he does what everyone else does, just like using subsidies that were going to be used anyway.
>to actual industry engineers, that aren’t political sycophants
You are projecting normal people to Elon Musk
Elon musk isn’t a normal person
normal people, don’t buy 10 bedroom houses to convert into a nightclub as a college student , throwing parties with 1,000+ people every weekend
normal people don’t walk around NYC with emeralds in pocket at age 16 worth $2000+ to sell
His father was filthy rich, and had a yacht, numerous thoroughbreds horses, his own plane, multiple houses around the world
you can google all of these facts, Musk grew up filthy rich and lived around filthy rich people all his life, and regularly rubbed elbows with filthy rich and powerful people he would definitely have the social skills, and mannerisms to fit in with the 1 percent
More cherry picking. No one else really competes with Tesla for throwing a bomb into the placid boring waters of EV progress. The fact that you don’t like Teslas, and pretend your opinion invalidates the masses of people who do like Teslas whether they bought them or not, is immaterial to the fact that it’s Musk and the people he brought in to help, that made Tesla what it is and the EV landscape what it is.
What basis do you have for arguing that the previous non-Musk leaders would have produced equal or better results, in the attempt to enrich and liven up the EV landscape? What are you basing yourself on when you seem to imply that post-Tesla (incl Tesla vehicles themselves) EVs are worse than pre-Tesla EVs? Do you really want to pretend that Porsche & Jaguar and everyone else would have made their v2 (sexier, correctly done) EVs without Tesla, or even that somehow Tesla delayed or worsened the state of the art ?
It is such a transparently petty agenda to disguise as reason. Equally so with:
” The only people are SpaceX and other government entities, so congrats spacex won a race in the retard Olympics as a normal person beating other retards.
Why is this a accomplishment? ”
You must be living UNDER A ROCK to pretend SpaceX (and only SpaceX e.g. no such argument against Blue Origin which is basically another bird of same feather) is doing nothing remarkable or positive for humans to break out of this gravity well *which is one of the main OBSTACLES* to further reducing the misery of spatial and material scarcity for humans.
BEFORE you shift goal posts yet again to some complaint about how some arbitrary tribe of benefitors (opp. benefactor), or whatever other baseless argument about Gaia or whatnot, account for the fact that humans today already have it EASIER THAN EVER c.f. medieval livelihood etc.
You’re effectively a luddite, if your posts are anything to go by.
How is this cherry picking? He succeeded because the government gave him favoritism, the business models would never work if the government didn’t play along
and for Tesla his actual contributions are questionable other than being a celebrity and boosting the brand.
Tesla was not founded by him, Tesla was funded by him but they were planning to build and sell electric cars anyway
Stop attacking strawmen, I never claimed that the projects were worthless
I was merely stating that Musk is not someone who should be worshipped as a genius nor as the most important person in the world
Most of musk’s success is based on friends in the government, friends in silicon valley and daddy’s money
So aside all the brokenness of your argument, for the sake of running with it:
For you the political schema is the goal, and kicking scarcity’s ass is irrelevant.
You dislike Musk personally and will argue anything to fit that premise.
How many people have access to billions and high level politicians and other powerful friends?
Not a lot of people, there’s your answer
All of his success comes from government help, he never had to compete in a free market
The one exception that did succeed in the free market was Tesla it was built by other people and most of the intial research and development was paid for by GE
Clearly they don’t have the political connections that Musk has
Not every billionaire is a popular guy
Genius would be someone who pushes the boundary of human understanding
Guys like Tesla, Witten, Tao, Von Neumann, Perelman
Or someone who gains success in a field at an extremely young age or has a extreme physical disadvantage against other people with decades of more experience, or physical advantages
Some examples of this are extremely short NBA players succeeding despite a massive physical handicap that they are able to compensate for with pure skill, extremely young world champs or top level athletes
Musk didn’t make EV’s a thing
Tesla was founded by former GE engineers who worked on the GE EV-1
The GE EV-1 was a EV produced by GE that costed 32,000 and had 160 mile range and ran on nickel cadmium batteries
The GE EV-1 was killed by GE for fears that it would cannibalize ICE sales
seriously google history of Tesla
These engineers met with musk, sold it to him and musk wrote a fat check funding them
———————
>LEO and BEO cheap and past the point of no return
The only people are SpaceX and other government entities, so congrats spacex won a race in the retard Olympics as a normal person beating other retards.
Why is this a accomplishment?
——————–
>solar
A bankrupt company that relied on the government paying them money to buy and install Chinese solar panels
>transport
A company that bought a used tunneling machine and drilled under people’s property without acquiring property rights, ignoring environmental regulations, ignoring permits due to having approval from bought off politicians
Where exactly are the innovations you are listing? The common thread in all of these is the government favoring him by showering him with subsidies and letting him break laws
Congrats musk you proved that you can build a tunnel for dirt cheap as long as you ignore a bunch of laws and regulations
Wrong, Smartphones or mini computers that could take calls were already around and vastly unprofitable
Many CEO’s were already using palm pilots and blackberry’s to access the internet, call people, send emails, take photos etc… while ordinary people used flip phones they had all sorts of interfaces and software like stylus, touchscreens, touchscreen keyboards, physical keyboards etc…
Seriously just read the Wikipedia on history of the smart phone
Nothing that the iPhone did was innovative
The iPhone brought about the smartphone revolution because they convinced people that smartphones were cool and totally worth dropping half a grand on instead of using a $50 flip phone
It’s such a non argument. The subsidies would be taken anyway. The fact Musk has made his use of them so conspicuous is SPECIFICALLY because he’s had some major successes; the fact that those same subsidies are no big deal for the anonymous masses is because they’re not as remarkably influential on the status quo.
It’s just an artifact of the level of our communication tech. Every single human with a cellphone and cheap/free internet can add their 2c more or less loudly. That’s all it takes. Never mind if you have time money talent and other means of attracting attention.
>Also, awful build quality?
“Munro Compares Tesla Model 3 Build Quality To A “Kia From The ’90s””
“Munro found some extra sealing material for the driver’s side window that had been glued on. “This is an afterthought or something. … You’re not supposed to just glue on another piece. Usually you take whatever’s wrong and pull it out and put another one in. Geez, I never saw that before.”
Panel gaps and overall fit and finish have been dissed by others — something some Tesla fans furiously dismiss. Here’s what Sandy Munro found: “The gaps on this car are like — you can see ’em from Mars. This is really, not so good.” Turning his attention to the rear of the car, he says. “Let’s just have a look at … the gaps. If we look over here, I can barely get my fingernail in. And if we look over here … I can almost put my thumb in. This is … very unusual. The tolerance stack-ups on this car are just, like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Not since … the ’70s or something.”
The beatdown continues. “I don’t understand how it got to this point. These are flaws that we would see on a Kia in the ’90s or something. I can’t imagine how they released this. It’s just a surprise. A really big surprise for me.” Ouch!”
>Consumer Reports labeled the Model S and the best car ever built
Tesla is voted the least reliable car by consumer reports
More than 18,000 car owners in the UK identified the Tesla Model S as the least reliable car out of 31 brands and 159 model.
Motoring magazine What Car? gave the Tesla Model S a reliability rating of just 50.9%, with owners identifying issues with the car’s electrical systems and bodywork.
>SPACE TRAVEL HAD NEVER BEEN ACHIEVED BEFORE BY A PRIVATE ENTITY.
Because its not profitable unless you get government funding transferred from NASA to your own company, SpaceX success is due to bribing government officials
Is there some kind of Vulcan mindmeld embedded into every single Elon Musk-derived product that forces the user to hear and read every little Elon Musk utterance ?
Contemporary social media and ancillary technologies have made humans so out of touch with what matters and what’s just chaff.
Go crazy. Pay the price for being a single point of failure PR wise. Fail to see some new paradigm (he’s only human). Fail to predict something critical. He even says so himself – just like the Falcon Heavy launch where there were a thousand things that could have gone wrong and made the whole thing fail.
>Secondly, he didnt have money from his parents dipshit
“Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub”
Buying a 10 bedroom house, renovating it, reportedly every weekend there would be 1,000+ people as his parties
So he had to renovate it to have numerous toilets to serve all these people and this would require building permits, contractors etc..
Doing any of the above would require millions to drop down, at this point he was a college student and was before paypal
“Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world’s most famous jewellers – as his father lay sleeping. “They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’” Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. “And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200.”
A few days later the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000 — a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem.”
Yeah normal 16 year olds typically walk around NYC with Emeralds worth $2000+ actual value was much higher than 2,000 musk was a 16 year old kid who got duped
And I am the one that is full of shit?
“Errol earned massive wealth as an engineering consultant and as a real-estate developer. He owned several mines and other natural-resources infrastructure. Errol had a share in an emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika, Zambia. He also owned thoroughbred horses. He also had a private yacht and a ‘Cessna’ aircraft, as he enjoyed sailing and piloting back then. Errol would spend most of his holidays at the several posh homes he owned. One of them was in Waterkloof, a classy suburb of Pretoria, where Elon had spent most of his childhood after Errol and Maye got divorced.”
Private yacht, private plane, throughbred horses Yup Elon totally grew up poor!
The federal government spends more than $20 billion a year on subsidies for farm businesses. Current estimates are similar for domestic oil production subsidies. It looks like there is a long list of people who would “soak up” all of the subsidies and have been for decades. At least we can agree the flame thrower was cool.
Disagree on Elon being the most important person alive.
This lady is: Dr. Julia Greer
http://www.jrgreer.caltech.edu/
Can you even tell that you’re cherry picking facts?
Before even getting to the part where you actually back up OBJECTIVELY the assertion that nothing positive and worthwhile (two separate metrics) resulted from said projects.
You don’t read the posts your reply to. You’re stuck in your own echo chamber.
Answer this, not something else:
“The only things he invented were SpaceX and the boring company both business models required massive political bribes ”
If that’s true and as ordinary as you argue, then why did no one else do it? Not one other person or company did what any of those Musk projects. How do you reconcile that fact to your arguments?
Human civilization has more technological dimensions than even Musk influences directly. That he shows up named as most important in an article like this one more accurately means that he is somewhere on the very short list, regardless if he’s #1 or not. Who’s #1 is academic.
Who are the people you think are more important and why? If Elon gets us to Mars I would canonized him.
Boring company – literally drilled under peoples property without buying rights, ignored environmental regulations, ignored permits got away by bribing government officials
Tesla – Not a founder, literally formed using stolen IP from GE, the founders and original engineers all came from GE who built the EV-1 a massively successful EV that had a range of 160 miles and a $32k cost. GE killed it because they were afraid that it would cannibalize their ICE sales even though it was massively profitable. Massive government subsidies
SpaceX – literally bribed federal officials to shift funding from NASA to SpaceX , the entire profitability model banked on the government paying them to launch instead of NASA
All it proves is that when you have rich parents, tons of cash and powerful friends in government and tech and access to investments in startups not available to the average investor you can build or invest in successful companies
The “Dinosaur” did not become extinct because mammals out competed them. Someone dropped a rock on their heads.
The only things he invented were SpaceX and the boring company both business models required massive political bribes
SpaceX hinged on the Federal government transferring NASA funding to spaceX
The boring company literally drilled under other peoples property without having to purchase any sort of property rights, ignored permits and environmental regulations
Musk has friends in high places, hence why he was able to capitalize when others couldn’t
And ultimately it’s not impossible he goes full Howard Hughes.
Also, it’s not impossible that he somehow stretches and stresses himself even thinner and burns out so bad he bungles some or all of his projects.
They could still have some freak sequence of failures. A BFS with a large load of pax suffering some improbably bad catastrophe also coinciding with major media coverage, etc, followed by another improbably bad Starlink accident with major orbital pollution, etc. You have two of these and inevitably basically the whole world is tuned in for any further flustercuck and given Musk’s history (now, not before the whole 420/SEC and Joe Rogan/NASA and Thai/pedo PR fiascos), such a sequence of mere bad luck probably wouldn’t allow SpaceX & co to consequently show it was just a run of bad luck.
People would shut it down, politically and commercially. The chicken littles and neo-luddites and NIMBYs and all of the aerospace competitors who aren’t dead yet, will jump on that bandwagon with Musk sitting there on the tracks with his funny and naive geek eccentricity suddenly not so funny anymore.
>> ALMOST EVERY POINT YOU MADE HERE IS FACTUALLY FALSE.
Like the current trend, when in doubt, make things up and yell loudly.
There’s no such thing as too much hurry to make LEO/BEO access cheap. Nor to make EVs the status quo. The sooner LEO/BEO colonization is a thing, the sooner people will make surviving and then living in great health their concern.
The logic in your post likely showed up during *all* of history, *every time* something changed (iow technology arrived) that shifted some paradigm or some boundary to the previous status quo. What was the world going to do with so many babies when we reduced infant mortality? Likewise in every single other technologically-enabled growth of human existence.
Yes, it is very possible that other planets are a dead end for long term human life, low gravity making impossible to have healthy offspring. Ergo, it would be morally wrong and forbidden by law to have kids there.
In that case, trips to other planets will be mere visits, and that’s not really becoming a multi-planetary species.
But space settlement has more options than Mars.
Rotating habitats can have perfect gravity, atmosphere and radiation levels.
And such infrastructure can be enabled with the technology SpaceX is developing.
If we don’t go, our machines will, and they will help us create an ecosystem of economic activity in space over the coming decades, one that will ultimately result in industrial self replication (anything we need on space, we will be able to extract and make it there).
At that time, we could still be living mostly on Earth with a few thousands in tours of duty on space for keeping the more complex machinery working. But the economic output would be enormous, and then the first actual permanent habitats in space won’t be far away.
” living us all behind on the wrecked planet Earth”
Can you back that up with *anything*, or is it just a cheap drive by comment?
It doesn’t matter. Even if that were true, the financial effect of mass production and sales make EVs happen, which is the actual goal. Not to make you like Elon Musk, which you’re so obsessed over.
Teslas could be the worst vehicles ever, and still if they make EVs happen sooner and better, it’ll have been a success. But they’re not, even if they’re not the absolute best. They’re great vehicles much like most of the better half of all recent technological products are. Humans are spoiled nowadays, spoiled enough that they can get away with ridiculously whiny attitude like in your posts.
Just a blink of an eye ago, cosmologically, we were rubbing sticks together hoping for fire. Less than a century from now our reach will finally allow us to grasp space and land beyond orbit and time and freedom beyond the miserable self-imposed scarcity of space and matter and time, that exactly the kind of pathological naysaying you obsess with has enabled.
The democratization of space, matter, time, ARE the growing pain of humanity and the sooner it’s done and over with the better. Moaning that you personally don’t like one of the persons who specifically refuses to take yours and the rest of your type’s hand wringing as an EXCUSE for not leaving any stone unturned towards those goals, is irrelevant.
He has and will fail. Said so himself, e.g. his conviction that fast iteration is worth the errors, and better than slow iteration. Random major e.g. his recent attempt to go straight to “alien dreadnought” in Tesla mfg.
“Nobody did SpaceX before elon because space wasn’t profitable, Space x only became profitable when NASA stopped launching and paid Space X to do it instead. ”
You’ll NEVER be taken seriously saying that (and probably the rest of your post – that’s how low quality it is right off the bat) in real life instead of an internet webpage, e.g. to actual industry engineers, that aren’t political sycophants (not common but they’re human too so they must exist) or crackpots.
Sour grapes
Exactly. That one bystander heckling for no reason except their inconsolable bitterness.
“Everyone in the paypal mafia has made a ton of companies also like thiel and steve chen”
How many of them has made EVs a definite instead of a gimmicky status statement niche thing, LEO and BEO cheap and past the point of no return, simultaneously with major positive impact on progress for solar, transport, AI, precursors to BMI, etc?
” nothing intelligent other than capitalizing on things everybody already knew ”
Then why did no one else (single handedly) invent SpaceX & co?
Voluntarily or not, it’s powerpoint still.
You are seriously arguing that the same human failures that basically every rich guy has anyway, without going into how much more or less he has in particular, are not worth having a fire lit under orbital and BEO access, EVs, solar, AI, Loop/Boring applications?
What do you prefer? The same old corporate corruption but without actual maximized progress/competition ?
Whatever it is, tall poppy syndrome or sour grapes for whatever reason, it’s hard to take seriously. Schadenfreude makes the world go round.
Wow!!!
FoxNews is really working, huh.
Because people are lazy and don’t want their gravy train derailed.
Yes, if Musk wasn’t alive and soaking up all of the subsidies and corporate welfare, who would do it? He’s a welfare momma, that’s it. That’s his only real claim to fame…and the flamethrower was cool.
Someone crowd funded a bowl of oatmeal, and raised over $50,000.
Do you really want people who would buy a bowl of oatmeal for $50,000 to choose who’s DNA should be added to the back-up off-world “Holy crap, that was a big asteroid!” gene pool?
Perhaps it is you!
If this is true, which I have no doubt it is, why is America doing all it can to destroy this man? I am not even slightly a conspiracy theorist but he is putting a lot of very rich companies and rich people at risk. For example what will starlink due to the broadband companies? And tesla do to the big car company? He is trying his best to help the average citizen and being persecuted for it.
I agree. I am glad you mentioned Starlink. The business Gurus never mention this and I wonder if the Verizons and ATT’s of the world appreciate what is about to hit them. Living in Rural America it is the only thing I see on the Horizon for broadband. My biggest concern is that the way he is being treated for what he is doing at Testla will make him never want to take any of his new ventures public. As I understand it the FBI has an criminal investigation open for his failure to make production goals. Give me a break. A lot of people are going to earn their Dinosaur stripes before he is done disrupting business.
So many factually false statements here, this comment is almost laughable. First off, ever heard of hindsight bias dude? Go look it up. This post is the definition of it. Secondly, he didnt have money from his parents dipshit, his mom was a model and dad was some low level engineer. The money he had to put into PayPal was from the sale of his first company, Zip2, to Compac, a couple years before. And he did invent PayPal, along with Thiel and a couple others, except it was X.com and not PayPal back then.
People did try to privatize space travel before him, but they all failed. Its not that noone tried, like you mention here. Maybe pick up a book and read about the many people who tried and failed at it.
And Tesla does have innovative technology. You are right, electric cars did exist, but did not have the patented technology (he later opened the patents to the public to encourage competition) that Tesla had (for the range and acceleration etc with these lithium ion batteries). Also, awful build quality? Consumer Reports labeled the Model S and the best car ever built. In terms of technology. Also, the labeled it the SAFEST car you can be in. Awful build technology? The hell are you smoking?
You keep going on and on about how people kept talking about the fact that this and that could be done. Except noone did. NOONE. This was the first successful car company in a CENTURY. And to make it even better, it was an ELECTRIC car startup, there wasnt even a market for it.
SPACE TRAVEL HAD NEVER BEEN ACHIEVED BEFORE BY A PRIVATE ENTITY. THE ONLY ENTITIES TO SUCCESSFULLY REACH ORBIT AND BACK WERE THE US, RUSSIA, INDIA, AND CHINA. And now of course, they are joined by Elon.
You are the typical example of some ignorant person who never picks up a book and actually reads about anything at all. ALMOST EVERY POINT YOU MADE HERE IS FACTUALLY FALSE. Stop putting people down each time they do good for the world. And if this was so easy, why dont you give it a shot there tough guy?
People like you are whats wrong with the world.
Define the boundaries of genius, and then show me how Elon Musk exists only outside of those boundaries.
Uddervise, he’da geenus.
Do you have any idea how hard he has been working for more than two decades to build the future . It is easy for you to type thrash behind a screen . You are a disgrace to this world
There’s a lot of stuff going on in your comment.
How many people have liquid assets of at least $500,000, are of an age and level of health to be able to make the journey, are not found to be psychologically unsuited to the circumstances surrounding deep space travel and the restrictive isolation of living within a cramped and crowded outpost, have no criminal record of violent or antisocial behaviour, have a skill set that fits a job available on Mars so they can earn a living, or have enough wealth to pay others to provide them with food, water, air, septic service, entertainment… AND will want to go?
Shavings off a very thin sliver off a very narrow twig. And, likely not a particularly dark barked twig, at that.
And what government will pay to send colonists to Mars, knowing that those colonist will become citizens of a foreign power? That is, will all of Mars become “‘Mars”, one nation, under Musk” as soon as the first colony is established?
And as for sponsors? Yes, people will bring people, who will be indebted to their sponsors.
Don’t get me wrong. I want this to happen. I believe it will happen. I just haven’t really heard a lot of talk about the societal challenges or structures that are going to exist. Short term. Middle term. Long term.
Let it be a given that Musk will succeed. What then?
Who chooses who to go, and by what standards? What restrictions? What requirements?
What societal model?
What rules?
Wrong wrong wrong
Nobody did SpaceX before elon because space wasn’t profitable, Space x only became profitable when NASA stopped launching and paid Space X to do it instead.
People didn’t do it because they didn’t want to compete against a government agency
This was after extensive lobbying and bribing of politicians, since space launches were basically a NASA monopoly all they had to do was undercut NASA’s launch price by 10 million and then convince the government to pay them 190 mil for a launch that would cost NASA 200 mil
So congrats Musks entire profitability plans were based on bribing government officials
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Electric cars? Already done see the documentary “who killed the electric car”
GM already released the EV1, and with nickel metal hydride batteries 26.4 kwh was able to go 160 miles and was affordable $34,000
There was massive demand, but GM cancelled it after they realized that electric cars would cannibalize their ICE cars
Tesla was actually started by people who worked on the EV1 project and was well aware of the profitability and the increase in potential from switching from metal hydride to lithium ion
Musk merely wrote these guys a big fat check, and was later made CEO in 2008 after he became famous for SpaceX and rambling on social media and building a cult.
And furthermore Tesla benefited massively from bribing politicians to literally give him free money from subsidies and tax credits
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Musk is no genius, he is a guy with political and silicon valley connections that allow him to invest in startup companies that the average person has no access to and is able to bribe politicians to make companies profitable
Tony stark he is not
Then why are there so few, arguably maybe three tech billionaires who are doing similar things (one is dead)?
You can continue your sour grapes logic forever but the facts stand for themselves.
Everyone in the paypal mafia has made a ton of companies also like thiel and steve chen
The fact is that it was extremely easy to make money during the time period that musk was in
This was the pre silicon valley era, where companies like Microsoft, apple, google, amazon etc… were desperate for funding and traditional lenders like wall street were largely ignorant about technology. Even the guy who painted a mural for facebook and was paid in stock is now worth millions.
The masseuse for google is also worth millions
My respect goes to the people who actually invent the break through technologies or ideas, not to some guy who writes checks.
Nothing Musk did was genius, that’s a fact.
Anyone could create a profitable company like spacex if they were allowed to compete against government monopolies, it is well known that the government is massively inefficient
You could say more of the same about anyone. It’s the fact that he DID these things and is doing these things that counts. Sitting in your chair belittling the accomplishments of others is not doing anything great.
Don’t forget that regular Space Force grunts will be there to protect them. And anyone can set up a crowdfunding project to go to Mars.
I kinda had the same plans when I was in high school. Start a private space program and save the world. I even wrote off and got the NASA study on space habitats after I saw an article on them in a 1976 National Geographic (and dog-earred Gerard K. O’Neills The High Frontier, as well as a few others). Unfortunately, the first step in every plan that I could think of was, 1) accumulate tens of billions of dollars . . .
If you think you can do it with a kickstarter or something, instead, go right ahead. Seriously, even if it were possible, no one would take you seriously until, at the very least, you had accumulated a few billion on your own.
If you have a problem with some people having billions of dollars, save your outrage for people inheriting so much money it’s not even money any more, just power, say a few hundred million in US dollars. I expect that will keep you plenty busy.
Funny.
“All he did was do something no one done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen.” But for some reason never had.
Then, in a totally different field, he did something no one had done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But, for some reason never had.
Then, in yet another totally different field, did something no one had ever done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But for some reason never had.
Then, in yet another totally different field, did something no one had ever done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But for some reason never had.
Then, in yet another totally different field, did something no one had ever done before, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. But for some reason never had.
Pfft, he’s such a loser.
Serious musk fluffing
This guy has done nothing intelligent other than capitalizing on things everybody already knew
He was born in a rich family, then went to school with the people who created paypal, nothing paypal did was genius either a system for processing online payments was a no brainer and he had millions from his parents to invest. This was during the days when the internet was a new thing, and venture capital was non existent
A couple of guys setting up servers to provide a web service was completely alien, and no one was willing to invest
Then using his paypal money he decided to make a company that privatized outer space, everybody and their dog knew that the government agencies like NASA etc… were massively inefficient due to a vast host of reasons. And realized that millions of dollars were siphoned away from NASA by hucksters and that any idiot could build a rocket for a fraction of the cost that NASA pays. And that the government would simply pay to private company for launches instead of NASA once they realized that private launches were cheaper.
Again nothing super genius, in fact libertarians have been talking about how cheap privatized space launches would be for half a century
Tesla? Again nothing genius, Tesla cars don’t have any magical technology and they are extremely overpriced compared to other EV’s and have awful build quality. They are literally the iphones of the car world. At this point after spacex he built a literal cult who will buy his cars. Vastly inferior yet hideously overpriced but people buy them because of trendiness and status signaling
And neither are rocket ships, or tunneling machines, or even brain augmentations. It doesn’t matter; his very existence has caused powerful forces to be applied in these and other areas sooner and faster than they otherwise would have been.
Yup, and that’s the thing, even if every single one of his business ventures ultimately fails and he dies as a broken wino in a gutter, he is still the one that has forced everyone else to lean forward in nearly every area he has touched.
Theres nothing special about Tesla’s battery life, range or cost
Tesla model 3 has 75 kwh batteries the volt (2nd gen) in comparison has 18.4 kwh and 60 mile range, Leaf has 30 kwh and 107 miles range
Chevy bolt has 60 kwh and 238 miles
So all Tesla did to get 300 miles is putting in bigger batteries
So all musk did was put in bigger batteries, they don’t have anything special technology wise.
Kind of feels like you scanned the post, saw the word class and were triggered.
What?! Did you skip over the first line?
“…intelligent, industrious, brave. ”
Seriously, explain.
Well Gary, you and yours are turtles, Musk is a frog.
NEVER sell Elon Musk short!
So among the many delusions yo have on display, is that the wealthy have unearned wealth and no “skills” ?
Musk, if/when a true colony has been established, will have populated it with his own chosen: intelligent, industrious, brave.
Basically, those who’ve accumulated enough wealth to buy a ticket; to make a home on another world.
And they will be shaved from a very thin sliver of a very narrow twig of the Human tree.
Who will they not be – unless brought?
Scratch farmers from Senegal? (Who grow crops in borderline soils, under dry skies.)
Atacama miners from Peru? (Who mine copper and iron ore in .5 atm and half the oxygen at 18,000′.)
Rural artists from the American Midwest? (Who… who… um… paint, I guess?)
Point is, the relatively wealthy are going, regardless of their abilities or skills, and the people that will be needed for “basic work” will owe somebody for their trip-and-turf.
Class divisions will be the flaw in the first inch of Elon’s tapestry.
Musk envisions a Martian government based on direct democracy. No representatives, just one person, one vote. But, when you owe some one for your air, food, shelter – existence, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll give SERIOUS consideration to voting the way they “suggest”.
Etc, etc, etc…. till, all of a sudden — Martian mole people being pissed on by Crystal Angels on pleasure flights down from their incubation clouds.
I know of no excuse for presuming the colonists will not be aware before their chief job is to make it work by over the long haul by their own lights.
None of which means anything, because the technology to deal with every problem you whine about is at hand.
Ones with useful range and a tolerable cost had never been done, let alone the kind of battery lifespan Tesla’s are seeing.
To subvert you must grab hold of the machinery that makes a system possible and retarget it to other ends. It sounds like what you are expecting is a magical flick of the fingers to change everything. The resistant type is good for pointing out problems but it doesn’t change anything because it refuses to engage the machinery.
Electric sports car were not a new idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venturi_F%C3%A9tish
Where’s ol’ Warren, going on about fluffers like usual? I think he has a bit of an obsession, a bit of an “oral fixation”, you know.
No they weren’t. The Volt and the LEAF were both motivated in no small part to the performance success of the Tesla roadster. Bob Lutz has specifically credited Elon with motivating him to push GM engineers to design the Volt. Tesla proved that EVs could be done.
Frankly no one person really matters all that much in the grand scheme. Electric cars were happening before he entered the market and the would have continued to advance without him. The same goes for reusable space launch vehicles.
I do not see how he could fail
I mean, he has already proven that the concept of reusable relaunch works so ..
He seams intellectually rather modest, the most important person alive must have a better understanding of what it would really mean to be subversive as I see nothing revolutionary in hoarding billions, selling millions of other personal cars then fleet to Mars, living us all behind on the wrecked planet Earth
The Spanish conquistadors conquered the Inca empire in a year or so, but it was three hundred years before a European woman was able to give birth under the low oxygen conditions of the high altiplano. Mars has many more potential roadblocks to human colonisation than Bolivia, and most of them would be enough to make trying to bring a child up there criminally irresponsible.
Elon is the man any way you cut it.
I hope he makes it to Mars, and soon, just for my selfish sake, but the biggest problems to overcome, and the biggest likely point of failure, will occur after arrival. Very likely, Musk will push this thing before all the remedies are perfected. If colonists die from some serious cause–radiation, or lack of gravity, or lack of food, or all of the above–it will all come to an end. And even if those don’t happen but the colonists can’t have viable babies it will all come to a crashing halt. And we’ll look back and see that Musk, along with all the rest of us, was in way too much of a hurry.
I think if Musk does fail – for example if there were several catastrophic launch failures – Bezos is waiting in line & Bezos is not making the same level of focused effort at present
Pretty sure he would do more if he had the time. He needs to get more managers who are able to execute his vision, so he will be able to do even more.
Well, if his peculiar kind of folly makes humans multi planetary, he will be no doubt remembered as the most important person of this epoch.
I’m not a fan of idolizing people, but enabling life to propagate to other places outside of Earth really is as important in historical terms as the discovery of the Americas or the first trip to the Moon.
History will forever keep memory of that civilization milestone, 1, 10 thousand years hence, if there still is anyone who thinks and cares.
SpaceX can still fail in its plans, but I really doubt it by now. The moment of most peril for them has already come, passed and is now in the past. And that was when they were about to close doors, nearly out of money in 2008.
Elon is certainly more respectable, with all his flaws, than Bozos, [hand]Jobs, or Zuckerbot.