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I wish Elon abandons US culture wars, Tesla and focus on this.

Think about it, if (and this is a giant if) he successfully pushes humans to become multiplanetary species by colonizing Mars, he will objectively be the most important human being who has ever lived.

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I understand your sentiment, but honestly at this point probably you should hope that Elon stays focused on culture wars, Xitter, and Tesla and leaves SpaceX alone.

SpaceX is where Elon spends the plurality of his time, and where he is having the most direct involvement /impact.

I don’t agree with some of Elon’s political takes, but I also don’t get especially freaked out or triggered by people who hold opinions I don’t agree with. And I’m not so stupid as to think that my opinion is better than someone else’s because I me and not them.

Seriously, this is the correct take. None of the “Elon success stories” were his alone.

That's a tautological statement. No man is an army.

Yeah if he focuses too much on SpaceX you get things like him launching a Tesla roadster into space.

I agree with Buzz Aldrin that the exploration is better left outside corporate hands.

You do realise that when other space agencies have launched test rockets, they’ve loaded the cargo bay up with stuff like lumps of concrete? Launching the Roadster instead of a lump of concrete was entirely harmless fun.

As a partial representative of humanity (and Starlink customer) speaking, I'd rather we shoot the brick of concrete into space and avoid giving aliens poor impressions about the cars we build. That's just my opinion though, I've always been adverse to mass-market masturbation.

If the aliens are smart enough, they'd realise that the vehicle is clearly someone's unwanted garbage, which is pretty much exactly the case.

The original Roadster is the vehicle which Musk had the least technical involvement with, and which was severely laden with technical debt courtesy of Eberhard and Tarpenning. (Most crucially, the pointless and arguably counter-productive use of the Lotus shell.) This technical debt nearly sank Tesla from the start, which would have basically turned US$100 million of Musk's money into ash. I'm not surprised that Elon had no love for it and was happy to see it flung into space... and maybe explode.

The Lotus chassis may be counter-productive from a business standpoint, but it was also a beautiful and even poetic choice, representing a storied automotive legacy. Having one in space seems far better to me than almost any other lump they could have opted for.

one reason that spacex has been so successful is because he isn’t getting in the way. he hired Gwynne Shotwell as the president and chief operating officer (COO). She runs a tight ship.

She doesn’t waste her weekdays posting on social media or getting bad press lol.

No knock on Gwynne.. but they are executing HIS vision using HIS money with a company that HE started

agreed. he deserves a lot of credit for starting SpaceX and helping it be successful early on.

I’m just explaining (IMO) he’s not going to be very helpful getting them from “current day” to “land on mars”. I don’t want Elon to get too involved with day to day operations of SpaceX. It’s going VERY well without his micromanaging at the moment.

I agree that Gwynne should be getting more praise than she gets now.

But Elon is phenomenally good at getting from 0 to something that works. And colonizing Mars has many, many various needs beyond Starship that have never been done before.

my opinion is that Elon is fantastic at very early stage startups, like what SpaceX was years ago. I don’t think Elon is as helpful after a companies become more mature.

That’s why I worded my comment the way I did. :)

SpaceX is not at the early stages because LEO transport is not the destination, Mars colonization is. In that light, we're not even at fully reusable rockets yet and then there's making them cheap and reliable and then there's the actual transport of large amounts of stuff and people to Mars. That's what SpaceX is about, not lofting up com sats and astronauts. So, no, they are not mature yet except on one tech they need to get to Mars and that's being operationalized efficiently by Shotwell just fine. The rest of SpaceX's much harder work, still in its infancy.

I'm suspecting with popcorn in hand that this must have been a massive contributing factor for successful Tesla Shanghai spinup. He'd have zero control over anything.

The reason Elon is successful is because he doesn't give a crap about what you or half the country thinks. You can't have one without the other.

I'm pretty convinced he only really cares about asteroid mining and colonizing mars is just marketing.

Building up the infrastructure for asteroid mining is really the only thing tying all his companies together.

- Boring company: we need to dig tunnels for mines

- Hyper loop: we need to move minerals and miners through the mines

- Satellite internet, electric vehicles, reusable rockets. This is all self explanatory.

Plus his family history of mining.

It kind of makes me wonder what Neuralink is about.

Riiiight.. so he can make even more money and be the richest person on earth..

Or… maybe he wants to do it for exactly the reasons he has stated so many times

If someone successfully mines an asteroid in our lifetime, it would probably make them a trillionaire. Not only is that a lot of money, it cements their place in history.

If he's not worried about making more money why are the "approve Elon's compensation package" ads the only ads that Tesla has ever run?

Teleoperated remote presence robots that can do the majority of what astronauts need to do and allow for experienced operators to do EVA manually if needed (due to crossover between mind and machine)

But also human cognition augmentation

Yeah this makes sense I think

> It kind of makes me wonder what Neuralink is about.

Asteroid telepathy!

Even ignoring the culture wars stuff, with the decisions we've seen from him, I wish he'd step away from Space-X. I think it's only a matter of time before he pulls the same antics and boondoggles we've seen at his other companies.

> I wish he'd step away from Space-X

How much do you really know about his involvement with SpaceX if you don't even know what the company is called? Don't tell me that's a typo.

Starship is his initiative BTW, not Gwynne Shotwell's. It's funny how many concern trolls seem to assume otherwise because it seems to be going well.

1) one of the biggest reasons spacex is successful is because he rarely mucks with it.

2) colonizing mars is not serious and only truly foolish rubes think otherwise. Even the most hostile corners of the earth are orders of magnitude more approachable.

I don't see how we're really close to that objective, nor would it be a really pivotal accomplishment. NASA was ordered to shift plans away from Mars to the Moon during the Trump admin and even with their efforts plus sending billions to SpaceX, it's behind schedule by years. Putting humans on Mars is far more complicated and we're not even working on it right now. Doing so would be momentous, but it's not like Martians are ever going to be productive citizens. Mars would be 100% dependent on resources from Earth to even survive. And I don't think they'd credit the guy who they paid to build the rocket over the people who traveled.

Yeah before turning into 2nd howard hughes, I hope he can.

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