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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely staggering what a titanic job Elon has done of obliterating his reputation.

I really wish he could just come out and say "sorry guys, I haven't slept in 6 years", coma the fuck out and come back as a sanish man.

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I wish that we could apply credit where it's due to the rest of the SpaceX team by name for some of their amazing technical achievements (100+ landings and re use of a falcon 9 first stage) for instance, and let them bask in the glory, rather than musk as a figurehead.

On the other hand if musk keeps doing loony shit like this we now have Howard Hughes v2.0.

I don't know what role Musk actually played in design (beyond "it needs to be pointy"), but he absolutely bet the farm on SpaceX.

One more rocket-boom and SpaceX and Elon's pocketbook were done for.

I am familiar with the history that SpaceX almost failed when the falcon 1 failed to work, but I can't say I have a huge amount of sympathy for musk taking an immense risk.

I'm sure he had enough money set aside even then from PayPal/x.com that even if SpaceX had gone belly up he could have bought a very nice house somewhere and lived in a very comfortable lifestyle for the rest of a human lifespan just living off the interest from $15-20 million.

I'm sure he had the engineering nous and connections to find his way back from oblivion, but (unless he exaggerated) things we near dire for him financially.

I think his original plan was to have around $40 million left over even if tesla and spacex failed, but when they both ran into difficulties in 2008-9 IIRC, I think he put the rest of his money into both companies to keep them going

https://youtu.be/AeeeEDSekG8?t=3663

[EDIT: in this interview he talks about the fact he had “no money” and had to borrow money for rent around that time]

If you can trust Elon with things he says. Over the years I got really skeptical.

Given all of the other actions I've seen from Elon, I wouldn't say he's a reliable narrator.

> (beyond "it needs to be pointy")

Here's a few very consequential decisions that were taken under Musk: liquid methane instead of liquid hydrogen, same engines for first and second stage, full cycle combustion engine, usage of steel for Starship, and of course, reusable rockets. None of these decisions were close to being obvious. When you have hundreds of very passionate and talented engineers working for you, you'll be bombarded with lots of options. If you don't become a mini-expert yourself, you will start delegating lots of decisions, and the final result may or may not be optimal. Just look at Boeing.

These exact things are something Mr. Musk should not have any opinion on.

Sometimes dictators are able to choose optimal policies, even with all the costs.

And yes, most firms are command economies, after all. As CEO...

Those decisions aren't minor trifles which Musk inexplicably micro-manages. They are core to the entire differentiation between SpaceX and its rivals. He's an engineer, of course he's going to be involved in such decisions. Claiming otherwise is like saying that Steve Jobs shouldn't have had any opinion on switching from MacOS Classic to NeXTStep as a base for macOS.

> If you don't become a mini-expert yourself, you will start delegating lots of decisions, and the final result may or may not be optimal. Just look at Boeing.

I'm assuming you're talking about Boeing's screw-ups with 737 MAX. If so, you've got it backwards. The 737 MAX's design issues were precisely because the leadership (i.e., non-engineering management) wouldn't delegate to the authority of the experts (i.e., the engineers) and forced their own decisions on the project. They did not become "mini-experts" themselves, sure, since they didn't actually put in the effort to understand what the consequences would be, but they did treat themselves as "mini-experts", as evidenced by their "we know better than the engineers" attitude to the concerns that were raised by engineering during the development of the MAX.

And the amount of expertise that SpaceX has gotten from the US government / contractors on how to build rockets that don't explode.

I know it's besides the point, but, has spacex published any figures showing how much it costs them to refurb these rockets? Last I checked, they had not. Which suggests they have nothing to brag about, yet.

Spruce Goose 2.0? If it could be launched into orbit it could be useful.

He was an arse 6 years ago as well, it just wasn't quite so well documented. Plenty of us knew it.

But now he's made the cardinal sin of being a Republican. Thus the internet has turned on him.

He's giving the internet _plenty_ more reasons than that to turn.

And for years the internet didn't turn on him. Then he made some pro Republican noises and his favorability among young Democrats (i.e. most of the internet) dropped by 25 points in a month.

Bullshit, the turn started years ago with the Pedo-calling fiasco.

So Elon expresses support for Republicans while disparaging Democrats and thus loses favorability among Democrats. So what?

"The internet" is not the same thing as Democrats.

You're replying to the wrong comment, I never said it was.

That’s playing a bit fast and loose with the facts.

The timing of his announcement was suspicious: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CH55WpJxF1s

And he’s gotten some flak from a high profile Republican as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7kT_80NaS6A

Similar nonsense has been said about Trump (“it’s just the liberal media”), as though we didn’t have direct access to his tweets.

This is backed up by numbers:

https://morningconsult.com/2022/06/23/elon-musk-favorability...

What else happened between April and June to make his unfavorable rating go from 37% to 59% among Democrats?

The behavior described in the chain of comments you're responding to. Or literally the thread you're in. Making a public ass of himself on a consistent basis. Acting like a child.

You can't be seriously arguing that Elon just started making an ass of himself between April and June.

Attempting to buy Twitter because you think it doesn't favor trolls enough was not a popular move.

Sure, that's what it is. Not the multiple missed deadlines around FSD, Cybertruck, Hyperloop, etc. At least that "flamethrower" product placated his fanboys for a bit.

Again, the numbers show that it is just that:

April: -5 Net favorability amongst Democrats

June: -37 Net favorability amongst Democrats

https://morningconsult.com/2022/06/23/elon-musk-favorability...

Or if you look at the percentages.

April to June:

59% more Democrats find Musk unfavorable

61% more Republicans find Musk unfavorable

But we don't do that because percent change is meaningless without talking about the baseline

The baseline is that a number of Democrats already didn't like Musk in April and somehow him becoming a Republican made 60% more of both political parties not like him.

20% of Democrats turned against him, compared to 8% of Republicans.

But why is this even an argument? Is anyone still unaware that a lot of Democrats hate Republicans?

The argument was: "he's made the cardinal sin of being a Republican."

So why would being a Republican cause both parties to dislike him at the same percentage?

> both parties to dislike him at the same percentage

That's not true at all. The percentage of Democrats who dislike him is much higher.

The number of Democrats who started disliking him during the Twitter acquisition is much higher.

And the percentage of Democrats who started disliking him during the Twitter acquisition (as a percentage of the party) is also much higher.

As GP said, percentage growth in the percent who dislike him in each party is not a useful thing to compare. Doubling a side business from $100/month to $200/month is not comparable to doubling from $1M/month to $2M/month.

The percentages are the same. Why would Republicans dislike Musk more now that Musk is identifying as a Republican? And why is it the liberals fault, cause that's what was being asserted.

>But now he's made the cardinal sin of being a Republican.

> Why would Republicans dislike Musk more now

That's easy to answer: hostile media coverage and negativity on social media.

What do you think is driving the change from April to June if not his Twitter acquisition and identifying as a Republican?

That's precisely what happened.

If you also want to dismantle SpaceX reputation there is a many part series that can help:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-eVf9RWeoWEfSK9mjKe4E67I...

Nice Playlist

I don’t remember where i saw it, but the thesis that being that unimaginably rich is detrimental to complex decision making has a certain logic to it. Compared to a normal person, you just have so much power that your inner circle is unlikely to be able to change your decision making process if you don’t want them to. No matter how bad your decision making any consequences of those decisions is almost completely abstract (going from 100bn to 1bn net worth is a lot of money, but there are still almost no limits on your purchasing ability) It seems like a lot of people i respected early on in their software careers (dhh, pg, etc have succumbed to this specific malady.)

That's possible, though it implicitly assumes that Musk's reputation fell because his decision making has deteriorated, while the simpler explanation is that his decision is not any worse than i was he's just been placed in a position that involves increasingly bigger decisions and more scrutiny. People simply mistakenly thought that he was put in that position because he was amazingly good at making such decisions.

I don't think he has at all. Not that I knew much about him before a few years ago but his companies are doing well and actually creating interesting things which really is a breath of fresh air from the tiresome old ad-tech garbage from the overhyped surveillance-capitalism industry. From an interview I saw of him walking around his rockets talking about things he seems quite thoughtful and interesting and very open, also a breath of fresh air from the scripted and PR-managed execu-speak CEOs and billionaires of today.

He may not be a genius, may not even be a nice person at all, but surely you're not fooling yourself that other billionaires and CEOs who let their PR firms manage their image are what they appear either.

>obliterating his reputation

i thought this whole twitter deal thing was a way to expose how twitter is full of government ran bots? atleast in my eyes his reputation hasnt changed at all.

Obliterating his reputation? Have you not seen the changes he has forced on twitter? For example after the purchase announcement a bunch of politically correct twitter users lost a sizable number of followers and politically incorrect users gained sizable number of followers.[1] Likely having to do with the bot problem.

Seeing the headlines and social blade stats mentioned in [1] reminded me of veritasium video about facebook fraud (bots).[2] This video demonstrates just how easy it was to buy fake likes on facebook. Doing some basic research shows that buying twitter followers is pretty cheap. After doing some basic analytics the creator finds where the bot accounts are very likely from. Looking at the same engagement statistics of political figures shows some pretty interesting results.

But then things get interesting when you take Dead Internet Theory into account.[3] Elon has made it pretty clear that he views AI as a possible existential threat to humanity and if the majority of the internet is indeed fake accounts managed by a minority manipulating the masses something ought to be done and nobody is talking about it. Elon seem to be trying to fix humanities sense making apparatus.

1. https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2022/04/27/progres...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28813746

> Elon seem to be trying to fix humanities sense making apparatus.

Remarkable that this is what you are taking away from this fiasco.

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