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Comment by nomdep | Hacker News Reader

Building rockets, moon bases, making fossil fuels less critical… yes, I agree

He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.

Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams ever will.

Not only that, but his @grok bot is now completely unhinged too (the public version) spewing an even more polarized version of his exact views without any ability to consider new information:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632336

Starship will never get to the moon.

those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.

I have a bridge in downtown NYC, interested in buying?

https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4

What does he do except making fossil fuel MORE critical? What do you think rockets are powered with?

> making fossil fuels less critical

Tesla for years made billions by enabling others to pollute, and it still does so.

Every EV Musk sells enables more ICE cars to stay on the road.

If you want to drink the kool-aid thats fine, but the facts are not on your side.

Can you explain this a bit? How does Tesla enable ICE cars to stay on the road?

It's not 2014 anymore. Check his tweets, right wing slop occupies most of his brain these days.

What moon bases?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III

These don't exist.

Yet

More Musk vaporware.

They did say building, not built. Starship R&D work is… tough to deny.

Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware. Unless it actually exists, it's safe to assume that it never will.

I'm very much in the Musk hater category, but it really takes some doing to dismiss SpaceX as vaporware.

This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem enough.

In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.

Going to the moon is very much vaporware. Maybe the penultimate example of it.

Going to the moon was, at the very least, demonstrated as technologically possible in the 1960s, and you can literally go watch a Starship launch if you want. I have a very hard time putting it in the same "entirely prospective" category as androids, self-driving taxis, and Mars bases.

The moon is orders of magnitude more difficult to land on than launching a LEO satellite.

And that'd be a great point if we didn't already do it six times with slide rules in the 1960s.

penultimate = second last

I'm sure Musk will have another scam soon enough!

Touche!

> Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware.

Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you look silly.

Every shareholder meeting he announces something that never comes to fruition. He’s the vaporware king.

It's near the middle of Musk's pile of vaporware.

That was 5-10-15 years ago Elon.

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