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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

Rather the surveillance tool is in Elons hands than someone else

I'd rather no one has any surveillance tools on that scale.

It's weird, though: I supremely dislike Musk, but I do think he might be a less-bad steward of that kind of tool than a lot of people/corporations.

Then again, he also throws a bunch of tantrums, so I expect he'd eventually weaponize that kind of view into everyone's lives. Probably in childish ways, not your garden-variety discrimination.

I think he would approve of a mostly open-sourced system that removes anyone's ability to manipulate data where most other people would see dollar signs for selling data

The problem isn't "who is the steward" but that there is a steward other than yourself, over stuff that you are supposed to be in charge of.

Your priorities are not someone else's priorities.

Besides you don't have to trust Elon Musk, you have to trust Elon and everyone else he trusts, and also everyone that he and they accidentally let in.

The largest customer of SpaceX is the US Government; the largest customer of Starlink is the US Government; what makes you think the largest customer of X data mining and analysis won't also be the same as the above?

It might the largest customer, but I am not sure it's a majority customer. According to SpaceX, several months ago they had 1 million paying customers. Assuming the cheapest price they are bringing in $100 million a month.

Is US govt paying them $100 million a month?

> Is US govt paying them $100 million a month?

https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-tesla-government-money-...

"SpaceX alone got a whopping $2.8 billion in government contracts last year, according to The Information, and has gotten a total of $15.3 billion from the government since 2003."

$2.8B in a year is $233M/month, and I'd wager it's gone up since then with SpaceX's ever-increasing launch cadence.

Isn't this confounding Starlink and launch capacity?

You are confusing it with Starlink. SpaceX has all sorts of contracts with NASA and the Space Force.

But we are talking about Starlink customers. It's definetely not 100 million a year or even close.

If you are bundling "the US Government" as one entity, then you already have absolutely 0 hope of any privacy. If you think the US Government teams in charge of purchasing space transport are concerned with your data, you're pretty mistaken.

he's done some really impressive things by pushing the bounds of what's possible/legal

i absolutely don't trust him to put user privacy/protection over product development. he thrives off outlandish predictions and aggressive deadlines. user protection is the first thing to go when that's the case

Has Elon actually done anything? It seems like he just buys stuff then takes credit for things that happen to do well. I am not sure he even does things in the traditional sense of a CEO directing work towards an intended vision. The most successful companies that Elon happens to be a CEO at are the ones that do the best at managing Elon and working in despite of him. The only thing he has been good for is spending money and generating hype by himself being outlandish.

So the more money he spends and the more money he generates through investments with the least amount of personal involvement is going to create the most successful company that he happens to be a CEO at.

> Has Elon actually done anything?

I mean, conclusively proving this either way requires A/B testing with a time machine, but I think it's hard to argue SpaceX would've managed to get Falcon 9s reusing their first stage without Musk's driving it. Reusable spacecraft does genuinely to be his thing, even if he's not doing the technical work.

Rubbish. He's clearly driving the engineering culture at both Tesla and SpaceX and has a fantastic knack for getting people to try new things and push boundaries.

Is he actually designing rocket engines himself? Of course not. Is he directing workers towards his vision? 100%.

He may be an arsehole with an ego the size of Mars but the idea that he is stupid and doesn't "do" anything is naive and wrong.

You figure he’s driving the culture at SpaceX more than Gwynne Shotwell is?

Yes. I used to work at a huge company owned by one man. He may not have run the day to day business but he still had enormous cultural influence because he could override any decision.

Not this drivel again. The man deeply understands his rockets, and is heavily involved in the design of them.

And no, he doesn't take credit for all the work, either. For example, find any NASA post-launch conference and the first words out of his mouth are always "I'd like to thank the SpaceX team and our NASA partners...", usually followed by the anecdote about how the company wouldn't exist today if not for NASA's willingness to believe in SpaceX after their first successful launch.

Ya'll really need to lay off the haterade, or at least dilute it with a little bit of reality. The dude gets a lot of (arguably well-deserved) hate, but that doesn't justify flat out inventing reasons to hate him.

I disagree. I think Musk is right up there in the group of entities that absolutely should not have that power.

Why?

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