Europe is trying to leave Starlink behind
wsj.com
wsj.com
Love or hate Elon, he's been able to turn himself into a very powerful figure on the world stage through technology alone. If you think him having complete control over Starlink is a national security risk, he's just getting started.
Unfortunately with European employement laws, I don't see them being able to compete. If you tried, you’d face fines, lawsuits, and maybe even criminal penalties for making your employees work the 80+ hour weeks that Elon requires from all of his companies.
Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
The problem is cultural yes but they have plenty of low cost labor willing to work overtime and put in long hours. It's called Eastern Europe. The bigger problem is an overly bureaucratic Brussels and a lack of imagination among their leadership. Britain can probably do well in this area, maybe the French too if they get their head out of their asses. The day they stop sending their top ML companies like Huggingface and Mistral to the US for funding is the day when the Fifth Republic finally spreads realizes their potential.
It's possible to mix reasonable hours of demanding work with additional hours of meetings, routine work, and procrastination. Maybe it's cheaper for the employer than managing the work better and hiring additional people for the routine parts. Maybe there are some social and organizational benefits to the employer when the employees have no life outside work. But long hours like that don't lead to superior outputs.
Technology is not magic. If you can do something, others can do it as well, if they want. Established organizations often fail at that, because they don't want to be successful. They might want to be successful in principle, but in practice, the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization.
Essentially, just as old as SpaceX.
So, how does one ensure a company continues to make good decisions? Have a very flat structure, and have alot of smart people work insanely long hours. If you hire twice as much people to match the 80 hour weeks, you no longer have a flat structure and >> "the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization."
You are right, technology is not magic, you've just got to want it more than anyone else. SpaceX wants it, Europe would rather have their maximum of 48 hours a week. Which is actually halarious, i don't think i've worked under 48 hours a week in my entire adult life. 50 is usually expected, 60 if you want good performance reviews and 70 if you want a promotion.
It's not possible to keep making good decisions indefinitely. Every organization eventually regresses towards mediocrity. Maybe incentives ruin things, maybe administrators learn how to game the system, or maybe the environment changes and the way the organization operates is no longer adequate.
If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
All organizations eventually stagnate, because humans have their own goals instead of being mindless cogs in the machine. SpaceX is still young enough that it may not be showing clear signs of stagnation, but it's hard to see that from the outside. Google is a few years older and clearly suffering from conflicting interests.
This line shows me that we will never agree. If i showed this to my boss he would laugh... and so would my entire team.
Silicon Valley runs on 80-hour weeks, sleepless nights, and a culture that glorifies obsession. It's a system that burns hot — and burns people out. Many of the engineers and founders who fuel these breakthroughs walk away in their 30s and 40s, exhausted but occasionally leaving billion-dollar companies in their wake.
If you have more people willing to work longer hours... you win, thats it. It's pretty simple really.
Musk specifically went to Silicon Valley because that's where the opportunity were.
But he was only one of many who tried to make it big. Just because the US is a big country doesn't magically create rockets that can fly to space.
* The dictate of fail fast and iterate quickly, along with simplification of mechanisms and ample compute power.
* Not being mired in the bureaucracy of committees and government bodies to answer to
Absolutely makes a difference. My point is that hard work alone was not enough to make it happen -- "fail fast" was key.
And other people as rich as Musk tried their hand in the space industry.
Starship is even bigger and more powerful and has the most advanced rocket engine ever designed.
Just because they haven't yet managed to create a fully reusable vehicle, doesn't mean its 'stagnet'. A fully reusable rocket is insanely hard to build. Lets alone all the new infrastructure required to do it. And the first stage has already proven re-usability. If all they were shooting for was a much bigger Falcon 9, they would already have it.
And maybe try to actually compare it to the competition. Ariane 6 for instant was financed in 2014. And had lots and lots of work done before it, the engine that is in the Ariane 6 second stage has been in development since the late 90s.
SpaceX only had the resources to seriously invest in Starship around 2020 and even then it was nowhere close to top priority.
I know its fashionable to shit on Musk, but common, at least have some perspective. They are by far the biggest most successful space company in the world by such a wide margin that its not even funny. The competition has not yet even replicated the Falcon 9. And Amazon is struggling to get even an inferior version of Starlink up. And Boeing can't get their human system to work at all.
> Elon himself said that Starlink would fail without Starship. Or is believing what he says situational?
Elon is well known to make dramatic statements to motivate people. He said that many years ago and the company is totally fine, Starlink is doing well. SpaceX still has the cheapest launch by an order of magnitude.
Rocket Lab is in talks to purchase Mynaric, a German company which specializes in laser links.
https://spacenews.com/rocket-lab-to-expand-into-laser-commun...
No need to bring anti-worker propaganda into this.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/eutelsat-succeeds-w...
And IRIS2 as far as I know isn't a direct to cell technology.
That’s not to say he’s dumb - it’s just that there is no one (!) who is generally smart - there is no generally applicable intelligence, experience always matters, and you always learn by doing.
It’s an illusion of the high IQ crowd that high IQ will means you will always succeed.
He is also always taking high risk bets. The X/politics/Trump bet paid off, in a way, but it also has its blowback.
edit also having said all this, it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.
I think the events of the last few weeks have been a wake-up call to many people around the globe who now see the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.
I suspect there's a lot of really smart people who were previously happily living/working in the US who are now looking to emigrate to other lands, Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative. Could also rope in the Chinese to help as they also aren't too happy with the current state of affairs.
Are you talking about the European Commission, which we didn’t vote for?
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> Could also rope in the Chinese to help
This is pretty funny. That's just switching who you rely on.
> Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative
In Europe we prefer unskilled labour from third world countries so that they can do uber eats for cheap
No way to hand-wave the Nazi salutes away with game theory, though. Those were just stupid. Safe to say that nobody including Trump expected him to go that far.
How much of Elon’s conversion was genuine vs mercenary is impossible to know, but it’s likely.
That won't work with Trump. Not if you built your businesses on sectors that he is targeting, ranging from EVs to space exploration and research. Musk had to pick a side. Neutrality was never an option.
Few if any of us, regardless of wealth, have any real "agency" with Trump in office. There's nothing he can't fuck up and no one he can't fuck over. This is not an attempt at justification or absolution, just a simple statement of fact.
If you're under the impression I think any of this is a good thing, that would be grossly incorrect.
Musk's all-in fervent support wasn't necessary. He doesn't get a triple pass from having to support the fascist candidate to avoid being put up against the wall, and then again for his natural tendency to embrace things and go hardcore, and then again for working to destroy/loot our institutions because it's just lucrative business. This isn't some British comedy sketch where someone is trapped by social pressure in an increasingly escalating role - at a certain point he is just a neonazi (or "sparkling autocratic authoritarian" for the "akshually" simps).
If it turns out that Musk was showing so much support as a cover for acting behind the scenes to oust Trump, I will happily change my opinion. But given Musk's longer trend of spiraling into debilitating social media addition, I'm not holding out hope.
If your business relies on the USPS as much as Amazon's still does, you want to have a seat at the table when the administration decides how they're going to kneecap the USPS. Same with tariffs, when half of the crap they sell comes straight outta Shenzhen. See also NASA and Musk. Being locked out of the rooms where these decisions get made is potentially fatal for them.
for Jeff Bezos - it is.Unfortunately, like most things from Canada, there was never enough market for it to catch on. Maybe that will change now the US has unlocked the demand.
2.) He believes in far right and government is far right. He is at home in this goverment.
3.) Attention and power. He got both now to unprecedented degree.