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Comment by trust_bt_verify | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why those who praise space-x also take the time to bad mouth nasa. They are basically teammates here. Space-x has done some great things (kudos to Shotwell) but they did it on the shoulders of nasa and government funding, and that’s ok too.

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Fascinating how Elon is now "He Who Must Not Be Named" villain.

Every single success and victory that SpaceX achieved, from the fourth flight of Falcon-1 to the latest Starship test flight bears his name too.

Being an outstandingly successful tech entrepreneur and being an asshole are not mutually exclusive.

Indeed, there seems to be a serious correlation.

Objectively, he's the greatest entrepreneur in American history.

I think you mean "In my opinion, subjectively..."

Who else founded 3 fortune 500 companies?

They pre-date the literal magazine, but definitely Vanderbilt, John Astor, Jay Gould, Rockefeller if you count that standard oil was broken up into multiple ones, and Moses Taylor if you count that he did not found, but rescued and built up citibank from an early stage, not unlike tesla.

Hypothetically, how you would stack Elon Musk against Grand Nagus Zek?

Zek had charisma.

You can search for persecution of Elon wherever you would like but there is none here. It’s my understanding that Shotwell is running the show there and Elon is mainly hands off. There are many achievements I believe should bear Elons name like the back-to-back live stream debacles over at xitter or the cybertruck… but he is not as involved in the engineering decisions with space-x and it shows.

SpaceX's finances are also largely unknown, they could be burning more money than NASA on experimental flights.

while it’s true that spacex is a private company, it’s widely known that they are highly profitable. they have many institutional investors, and a long line of people that would love to be on their cap table.

SpaceX has not yet turned an annual profit. They have recently denied their own shareholder employees access to company financial statements.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/08/27/despite-rare-profi...

the article you linked to is more than a year old, and does acknowledge that at the time spacex was flirting with profitability. do you contend that they are not currently “profitable”?

also, many (maybe most?) privste companies deny employees who have options access to complete company financial statements.

How does one reasonably make exercise (or buy/sell) decisions if one doesn’t have access to financial statements?

This. Elon’s entire MO is to lose more money than competitors, then raise more in the markets. Rise, repeat, claim successes, when in reality competitors just aren’t willing to lose that much money bootstrapping. SpaceX is no different.

NASA does amazing things.

The SLS just isn't one of them. It is a temporary Frankenstein resulting from the complications of adapting to a sudden uptick in private space transit, while necessarily maintaining congressional demand/funding continuity. A special dance well known for not being strictly reality based.

So my criticism of SLS isn't criticism of NASA leadership. I cannot imagine how difficult their job is. The nature of the beast is some waste is unavoidable.

In the meantime, lots of NASA projects are stellar.

Not only funding, but lots of technology, like original research into heat shield. And that's part of the intent of the NASA - it's as designed. Yet NASA is criticized because it doesn't do much useful lately - yes, it pays to SpaceX and yes, it runs ISS, slowly designs Moon program etc., but could do oh so much more judging by the past successes.

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