And yeah, I’ve gotta give it to him: tragic. Tho I guess that’s “Homeric” or “Hellenic” deceit?
I think the bigger tale is how Microsoft is essentially getting swindled here, and Zuckerberg looks like a man of the people somehow.
Point out what he did that couldn't be done by Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, or Mark Zuckerburg, or in fact that was done by Jeff Bezos with his own company. And I don't mean some ephemeral "well he wanted to!" yeah big fucking deal. I want to convert a DeLorean to an EV powertrain to commute to work. I want to have a garage big enough for 5 cars and a shop. I want to have a sex bot that me and the wife can share. Anyone can fucking want something. What did Elon bring to the table besides wanting it, and money?
Being an investor is not a skill. Paying for things is not a job. Buying stuff or people is not a trade. And I'm sick to death of people buying his and other's PR saying that paying someone else to do cool shit is the same thing as doing cool shit.
"If you were going to start Facebook, you'd have started Facebook." - apocryphally credited to Zuckerberg.
You do know that Bezos started his rocket company before SpaceX, right? If he could beat SpaceX, why hasn't he?
As for sex bots, that'll happen soon enough, be patient. At this point there is nothing but a few incremental advances in robotics and material science standing in the way of implementing the bots from Garland's Ex Machina or Spielberg's AI. The software side is basically working now.
No, I wouldn't, because I have a soul and I don't want to light the mental health of the entire world on fire no matter how much money it makes me.
> You do know that Bezos started his rocket company before SpaceX, right? If he could beat SpaceX, why hasn't he?
I don't know what "beat" means in this context nor am I particularly interested in billionare's dick measuring contests which are funded in part by the taxpayer.
My point isn't that someone did it. I'm sick to death of Elon's mythmaking and I'm going to shout into the void every time it comes up until the day I die that that man hasn't done shit besides write checks. Say what you will about Fuckerburg, and I've said plenty, but at least he actually wrote some of Facebook's code.
Because Elon lied to humanity about their mission, in order to secure his position. Bezos didn't.
Can't you find any other examples of this in history? Yeah, there are a lot of them, and it's probably why humanity are effectively still slaves and stuck on this planet, years behind where we should be.
Time to wake up. Humanity can't blame anyone else anymore.
As an aside... the argument that space is less hospitable than Earth doesn't work anymore when "smart people" only say that only to avoid doing the prep work they'd need to avoid an Earth that can and will become imminently inhospitable due to up to ten different scenarios.
But by all means, guys, keep ignoring reality because you think you know better.
How quickly humans forget, and how amazingly deep their ignorance is of what only recently transpired.
Setting aside feelings about Elon and whether he misled anyone about the mission of SpaceX, saying "Our mission is to put humans on Mars" didn't help secure any position, except some popularity with the Mars Society, sci-fi fans and nerds. It certainly didn't help SpaceX get financial support from big money hedge funds, governments, Wall Street analysts or NASA administrators.
If anything, setting a goal of what was then only a nerd fever dream, and which even today has no clear path to profitability, hurt SpaceX's early position substantially. The only thing that eventually turned around that "screwball billionaire blowing his money on a vanity project" perception was developing a launch system able to deliver orbital payloads at a dramatically lower cost per pound than anyone else.
As to whether Elon misled anyone about SpaceX's long-term Mars goal, anyone who listened to his in-depth interviews from early on heard him repeatedly say that getting there would first require making SpaceX a highly profitable commercial enterprise because Elon didn't have enough money himself, NASA payloads alone wouldn't be enough and government can't tax a meaningful portion of GDP only to spend it on a goal most people don't value much. Even if Elon hadn't said it, it was already obvious to anyone who understands how government, finance and funding multi-billion dollar projects work. There's no other realistic way it could happen. Starlink and payload delivery are on track to make SpaceX profitable, so how was anyone misled about SpaceX's objectives?
Personally, Elon's Mars talk turned me off too. While a permanent Mars colony is inspirational for sci-fi fans and Singularity types, there are much more productive things to focus on first if the goal is to accelerate humans becoming a space-faring species. The hardest part is lifting large amounts of mass out of this planet's gravity well economically. To then immediately go drop that astronomically expensive mass down another planet's gravity well seems kind of... unproductive?
Isn't a much simpler explanation that they can't?
Elon hired the right people and let them get on with it, at the very least. For whatever reason, Jeff Bezos was not capable of that.
Yes. He wrote checks. That's it. That is not a skill.
(I'm posting too fast)
> No. Elon is a guy who will himself sleep on the factory floor to get something done. He is the guy who famously said "when you're going through hell, keep going". He is the guy who bet his entire fortune on electric cars and rockets when no one thought that was a bright idea.
What does sleeping on the factory floor do apart from obstruct anyone on said floor who happens to be trying to work? This is literally the same nonsense parroted by grindset influencers, and it is just that, nonsense. If you overwork yourself, your output is notably reduced, and of worse quality, you know, because YOU'RE TIRED and you should fucking sleep.
And bet his fortune? Fucking spare me. Every one of his companies could go under and that man would still be incredibly, absurdly rich. Elon Musk, sir, is as far from poverty as you and I are from his beloved Mars.
He is basically a chaos monkey.
A man for his time.
Meanwhile SpaceX launched 87% of the world's payload mass in 2023.
https://www.astralytical.com/insights/its-a-spacex-world-eve...
He played us like a fiddle.
Remember Mars as a backup plan? The reason why we thought SpaceX was a humanitarian and scientific effort that we could rally behind? Yeah that was bullshit. We just played to your wish to be able to trust someone and to be led to safety so we could gather talent and funding. Oh, your planet is in trouble now, and that was your last hope, and now that time is wasted, because you rallied behind the wrong person? Oh well. At least I'm head of DOGE now. pretends to be neurodivergent in order to get away with betraying and abandoning children the world over
Yep, he's probably a predator, guys, and maybe you all asked for it because you repeatedly wanted to turn over your responsibility to someone else (while consuming all the benefits of this planet in its last days) instead of leading your own species to safety instead, despite the repeated warnings over the past 5 decades of possible planet-scale collapse.
As much as I enjoy ripping him apart, that last bit ascribes to him a level of forethought and planning that I sincerely think is above him. I think the first one has it. The power is probably nice, especially if it gets him closer to being cool? But honestly when you dig into his history, he is just the cringiest edgelord imaginable who has spent his entire life wanting to be cool, and he just can't. He is an immense child of privilege who could have anything and everything he ever wanted, and the only thing he has ever wanted is for people to think he is cool, and it's the only thing he has never had, and it haunts him.
Truthfully I think this is why he has the following he does. It's just other people who grew up in the nerdy/edgelord spaces, who were bullied in school, who dreamt all day of being so rich that they could finally prove to the cool kids who was really cool. They see themselves in him, and his success is theirs, in a way. That's why there's just cavalcades of weird people online who will absolutely throw themselves on live subway rails to defend him.
It's honestly fucking sad, because he would sell every one of them for an ounce of attention from anyone who isn't them in a fucking heartbeat. They genuinely deserve better.