[flagged]
Musk put good people in charge of some of these companies, Gwynne Shotwell is a great example, but his sphere if influence is big enough that the collateral damage could be significant.
Profitability, vehicle autonomy, market share etc weren’t really the reasons why the company was founded.
Sort of. China has done more for this mission than Tesla, certainly Musk, at this point.
At this point, no not going to happen. The money sucks given how much you work, no work/life balance. These people already sacrificed their personal lives to get the company to this point. No other company is getting to Mars first. If you are an Olympic class engineer, would you really just walk away from getting to be a part of history? I guess unless you are at the top of your field you are not going to feel the same as these guys.
Regarding engineers burning out, given that Tesla and SpaceX are some of the most desired companies for new Engineering grads Musk will have a continual supply of engineers to grind down to dust as the old ones become useless to him.
A Supreme Court ruling that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements violate the first amendment, however, that might help.
We need competitors to Musk, preferably nicer, that can attract the best of the best. I guess in order to fight a psychopath you need tendencies of being a psychopath yourself?
For whom? There isn't another ship. (Literally. Ariane has nothing, ULA is on its deathbed, Blue Origin might do something in the 2030s and nobody is moving from Hawthorne to Xi'an.)
SpaceX remains a jewel of American industry and technological achievement. If you're an ambitious aerospace engineer, SpaceX is the only place where you'll see your cutting-edge work launched.
Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers to get on this too.
These are all smallsat launchers. I have worked with a few of their teams and have mad respect for their work. But between launch cadence, fundraising and mission profile, they’re not comparable to SpaceX.
> Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers
SpaceX has a global commanding position and domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed. It’s fair to say it has a monopoly in commercial launch outside niche operations, e.g. dedicated smallsat.
> domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed
Agreed, but I think SpaceX showed that reuse could be done before Musk got any political influence (and went off the rails...).
Catching up to SpaceX is something even us Europeans haven't accomplished.
All of them?
Meanwhile, plenty of people still work in industries such as oil+gas, tobacco, gambling, military tech, etc. No hate, no threats, business as usual.
Musk founded SpaceX. He hasn't been a chief engineer in anything but title for a long time. To the extent he deserves respect, it's in giving its team the insulation he's denied Twitter and the American people.
Certainly he's more useful to organizations when he goes in with the approach of listening to engineers' ideas to build stuff than when he goes in with the approach of gutting the organization in revenge for things he's taken exception to.
SpaceX also wasn't very big in the early years, and the CTOs and chief engineers of the space launch startups I know absolutely do involve themselves in the low level technical work. I don't imagine Elon did much of that even when he did make a point of interviewing every new hire and sitting in on meetings about low level purchasing decisions.
SpaceX employees online say he was heavily involved in engineering, as chief designer; but even imagining he did not, just allowing those crazy ideas to actually happen has incredible merit.
This will go down in history as the most shameful descent into madness of the 21st century. I sincerely hope he gets hospitalized for his drug addiction or whatever is going on, allowing others to take back command of these companies before they run into the ground.
His fate may not be all the different from Howard Hughes. A wealthy and influential figure from not so long ago who lost his mind towards the end.
One of my favorite insights applies:
Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
-- Robert CaroMerlin and Falcon 9, yes. Methane for Raptor, yes, but the integrated design and certainly Starship are not Musk. (Chopsticks, yes.)
Now, it's true enough that he didn't literally _build_ these things. He is the CEO. Steve Jobs didn't build the iPhone.
But these programs are very obviously shaped by Musk to a large degree.
What are you basing this on? It was carbon fibre or steel. SpaceX tried carbon. The bake was too inconsistent, so they went with steel. This was the stated and obvious design path since Falcon Heavy’s design trajectory plateaued.
The obvious choice that everyone uses is aluminum, or various alloys, like aluminum-lithium.
Musk was heavily involved in the engineering efforts at SpaceX. NASA struggled to keep up with his continual and extremely detailed stream of questions regarding engineering choices, with an obsessive and relentless focus on blueprints.
The list of engineering achievements and innovations (often unorthodox) is too long to list in a comment, but I highly recommend the book The Space Barons by Christian Davenport [0]. It's a fantastic read.
It was started also this time: https://www.fox7austin.com/news/faa-spacex-starship-explosio...
E.g. in 2023 such inspection lasted around 5 months and "63 corrective actions the company "must take to prevent mishap reoccurrence"" was stated by FFA. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closes-spacex-starship-mish...
However, this time, as the article states, it was suddenly "finished". Nothing. They wouldn't have time to conclude it properly.
Take a break. Take a kitkat. It's going to fine. In four or eight years the other side will take power and you will have your revenge.
Tell that to people in Ukraine who were invaded by Russia. They were provided support by the US. Our leader and Musk are now blaming the victim and want them to surrender to the invader. Or pay $500B for US to give them additional support.
This is what we have come down to. People are dying and we are trying to shake them down like a mafia. Even mafia bosses are not that heartless.
Tell the Ukrainian kids hiding under desks from incoming missiles to take a break and take a kitkat.
And US have a long history of shaking down people dying in the trenches - like the Louisiana purchase and Alaska Purchase.
And Ukraine is Europe's not US problem anyway.
It actually is a problem of the US just as much as it is a problem of Europe. Russia has been financing and steering terrorist organisations across the world, most notably the entire MENA clusterfuck via its proxy Iran, and if Russia isn't stopped in Ukraine, they will escalate in other parts of the world.
That position is currently being thrown away, and will have consequences. I suspect many Americans don't even realise the benefit they have from such global soft-power, and won't for another decade. 2025 isn't a turning point, the hearts and minds have been on the wane since 2003, but it's likely to be an inflection point.
In exchange for them giving up nuclear weapons, the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteed its security and borders.
I also think framing this as just a culture war is downplaying the dismantling of the US government and US influence around the world. Cozying up to Putin for example, will likely have geopolitical ramifications for decades.
Yes. It will help reign in China.
Which is annoying as the US is going to face some serious consequences from Trumps idiocy, phrasing it the way you did, is handing the future to Trump and his kind.
But so okay, let's be sensitive to others, and avoid using the word "privilege". What word/phrase better describes the situation where for some people, the harm is largely theoretical; something happening to other people, and that for a different set of people, there's real life ramifications to stuff the p-word people only hear about on the news.
The trend was clear pre-COVID, but accelerated during COVID. The K recovery is real and those on the upslope will likely continue to be just fine while everyone else continues to go backwards - even large segments of Trump voters.
The main thing is that these are the kinds of actions that can't be reversed overnight if power flips. eg, You can't just rehire an entire department and have them operating effectively. We'll be feeling these things for years afterwards, possibly decades.
They're causing real damage, and it's intentional.