Personally, I hope it’s true. Starlink is good for the world.
> have probably been positively impacted by him
Well, every time my Model 3's wipers go batshit insane, I get a little irritated with his decision to forego a known good solution that the rest of the world has been using for decades. Not feeling positively impacted at that moment ;-)
To my knowledge, he has never lied about the present financial state of his companies. That gives him credibility in a way e.g. Yaccarino bullshitting about what fraction of Twitter’s advertisers have returned does not.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/03/cars/musk-tesla-tweet-lawsuit...
The end result is left out every time the "court finds" articles are linked. The jury found the opposite, which is what actually matters.
Do you agree with that logic or do you trust the courts over your peers?
(ie. what "metric" would you use "for what constitutes truth"?)
Under that logic, maybe Musk is just another African American being persecuted by the US government.
We're all waiting on the edge of our seats to know what your ideal judicial system is.
Btw you've never had jury duty? Did you vote in a mob form? I sure hope not. I haven't.
No jury I've been on has functioned that way. Have you acted that way?
If you don't support a system of a jury of your peers determining your guilt, what do you support?
Have you served on an American jury?
The facts are not in dispute here. He tweeted "funding secured" and funding was not secured. He announced intentions to take it private at a given price, which did not happen.
He misrepresented the financial state of his company.
Luckily the jury had sense that the tweet was harmless in the end.
The judge ignored his stake in SpaceX he could have leveraged and mainly the Saudi Arabia firm that he was in talks with in taking Tesla private would not testify and then said the exact opposite:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23040961/elon-musk-saudi-...
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/1/23/musk-on-trial-sa...
So in the end it's do you believe Elon or the Saudis?
The judge sided with the Saudis.
Capital Raise
4,281 days since Elon Musk said Tesla will never need to raise capital again. (2/12/2012)
"Tesla does not need to ever raise another funding round." Elon Musk, quoted by John Voelcker in Green Car Reports
4,052 days since Elon Musk raised $195.7M in common stock. (9/28/2012)
3,822 days since Elon Musk raised $313M in common stock. (5/16/2013) 3,822 days since Elon Musk raised $600M in convertible notes. (5/16/2013)
[...]
1,157 days since Elon Musk raised $5B in common stock. (9/1/2020)
1,059 days since Elon Musk raised $5B in common stock. (12/8/2020)
I've been reading about low-orbit satellite since at least the late 1990s when it must have been Slashdot articles then. There have been several plans, but the one whose name I remember was Iridium. I believe it became operational, but only ever managed to be used for voice telephony. It's been bankrupted and bought by other companies since then.
This is an absurdly difficult market to break into, and everyone has failed to one degree or another, with the degrees of failure all clustering around the really extreme end of that spectrum. This is ignoring any technological challenge (of which there are apparently more than a few).
He is claiming to have done a (business) thing that has been demonstrated to be nearly impossible. A thing which, if he hasn't done it and is merely lying about, we might not know for months or years.
It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of this, and no one owes him the benefit of doubt on this issue or any other. It is perfectly reasonable to remain skeptical even if you do not believe the man a liar. It is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.
Edit: Lol, bring on the downvotes, it only serves to prove my point.
The problem with bringing up those other tech CEOs vs. actually defending Musk is it starts looking like whataboutism.
I personally think there's enough hate for tech CEOs to go around and we don't need to ration it out.
He's not saying "look over at that other CEO".
Even still, it's not whataboutism to put things in perspective as you may see that you're blowing one thing out of proportion due to bias if those same values are being violated by another entity but you are okay with it because of the entity itself.
It's always a good exercise to check for contradictions in your values.
No, white knighting is accusing skeptics of being emotional haters who just don't appreciate all the good that Musk brings to the world. Accusing them of being short sellers, etc. Jumping to the defense of someone who is more than capable of defending himself.
Developing reusable rockets was thought to be impossible and there was no hope for lowering the cost to orbit on the horizon _at all_ by anyone in the world, country or company. Rocket technology developed by governments is laughably bad compared to what SpaceX has built. Now, Starship promises to lower the cost to orbit to an incredibly low number and open up access to space to normal people. This is not a pie in the sky plan, the rocket is literally sitting on the pad in south Texas, waiting for bureaucratic rubber stamping so that it can launch.
I am not white knighting, I don't care about the personal foibles of the man running the thing, I am cheering on science, technology, and the progress of the human species.
There are few such men, and arguably fewer who have the enthusiastic haters that Musk does.
I understand criticism. However, a (multiple) path of innovation is always going to be riddled with mistakes and failures. Within this context, the specific enthusiasm for hating Musk, by some, seems petty to others.
Why do people always talk about needing to meet a guy to have an opinion on them? I haven’t met Dick Cheney either
Can you share a link that documents him saying this? Every statement I've heard is something to the effect of "to preserve a space for free speech." If you can't produce evidence, you're assuming intent. That's your bias, and it isn't rooted in reality.
> Why do people always talk about needing to meet a guy to have an opinion on them?
I think its more a question of the degree to which people care. Dick Cheney was integral in launching wars that spent trillions and killed millions. Compare that to Musk who is probably more responsible than any other single person for reviving both the electrification of transport and the reviving of space exploration. All via companies that you're perfectly able to completely ignore. Meanwhile, Cheney used public treasure to mire the U.S. in foreverwars. Do these two people seem even remotely equivalent to you? Do both seem worthy of your very strong opinions?
His actions speak louder than words: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
Are Dick Cheney and Elon Musk equally as evil? No. It’s an analogy.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/02/twitter-invented-a-reason-to-h...
https://reason.com/2023/01/02/under-government-pressure-twit...
As with everything Elon does, one should wait and see because he has had decent success turning things that seemed stupid money pits at the time (i.e. electric cars and rockets) into legitimate companies disrupting what was thought to be entrenched markets. Also, to my knowledge he has never pulled share structure Bullshit in his companies which makes it possible for his shareholders to fire him if enough don't like what he is doing, something I can't say about the other big tech CEOs, and something that deserves respect in its own right regardless of your opinions of anything else the guy has done.
Musk is not in favor of free speech, he is in favor of allowing speech he likes to get a free pass while limiting the speech of people and groups he disagrees with. The left does not like what he is doing because they disagree with which speech he is allowing and which speech he is blocking. What I have seen lately is users reporting trouble for accounts which support Palestine (which are not making any posts which violate twitter rules). And of course Musk is supportive of accounts which primarily exist to harass trans people, which is justifiably upsetting for people who just want trans people to be able to exist without harassment. But it's not about "free speech" it's about who gets to control the speech. The "free speech" line is just a convenient narrative.
So actual rule violating accounts are purportedly being protected, while left leaning accounts which do not violate rules are being manipulated behind the scenes, if the reports are to be believed.
Again I recognize that I have not provided sources and I don't expect you to just take me at my word, but I wanted to correct what you think I am saying. I am not just concerned with uncomfortable speech, but outright harassment and the apparent suppression of certain left leaning accounts. That is why I say it is about controlling the narrative.
EDIT: Did a couple of quick searches. Banning journalists for being critical of Musk/Twitter isn't very free speech oriented!
December 2022
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/journalists-who-wrote-ab...
April 2023
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-st...
For better or worse is up to the individual opinion, but its not really weird to have a strong view on a polarising figure, especially one with the influence of musk.
You can love him because rockets, EVs, and enormous satellite constellations are pretty cool, but you'd be a fool to trust him.
It doesn’t require strong opinions about Musk to understand the value in taking what he says with skepticism.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat...
Musk's record is quite clear at this point: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
And no, it is not about predictions of this being done by that year alone.
Why would people most probably been positively impacted by him? He seems to constantly have knee-jerk reactions to things happening around him, and his companies seems to frequently have issues with overworking employees.
He's accelerated the switch to electric cars.
He's made transport to space a lot cheaper, saving a lot of taxpayer's money.
Gwynne gets all the credit for SpaceX IMO. Elon gets credit for letting her succeed.
Remember the Tesla deathwatch blog?
Everyone loves the Teslas and hates the Edisons, but the world does need Edisons.
It was nice of her to have the idea, pursue that idea through financial hell across many years, bankroll the start of the business top to bottom, use all of her connections to get it outside funded, and sustain it financially personally to the direct threat of personal bankruptcy.
Good thing she did all that and gets all the credit.
Which, in today's industry and world might have been too early as we still haven't figured out if mining all that lithium is better for the world or not, right now.
> He's made transport to space a lot cheaper, saving a lot of taxpayer's money.
Yeah, for ~4% of the world's taxpayers. We'll still see if SpaceX is a net-win for humanity, too early to tell.
There's not evidence for that. In fact, by being willing to lose so much money on each car Tesla likely discouraged the broader industry from investing in electric cars for many years. Tesla may have, in fact, made the switch to electric cars slower than it otherwise would have been.
I agree with you. I don’t think it’s worth working that hard for someone else. No one will remember someone who works for Musk. They won’t earn more than they could somewhere else. To each their own, though. I worked incredibly hard on much stupider things in my past.
I'll never take anything he says at face value because anything that's ever come out of his mouth is posturing.
I'm frankly tired of billionaire windbags like him. I have no idea how someone could be a fan of his.
1. His only software contribution at PayPal was torn out and discarded 2. After his software at paypal was rejected he was fired by the board at paypal.
It is not that he does not have business skills to market. It is that he presents himself as someone that does quality engineering..which in fact is somewhat false.
It wasn't good for Ukraine when Musk pulled the plug on them.
Musk's SpaceX is the only reason Ukraine has been able to maintain its Internet infrastructure throughout the war. It would have been a communications disaster otherwise, particularly for all non-military (NATO would have done its best to provide patch-work communications for the military).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-uk...
> Elon Musk foiled an attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet last year
> Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, accused Mr. Musk of enabling Russian aggression. Because of Mr. Musk’s decision, “civilians, children are being killed,” he wrote on X on Thursday. “This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”
> a SpaceX executive said that Starlink had taken steps to curtail Ukraine’s use of the technology to control drones, infuriating Ukrainian officials.