478
Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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He founded SpaceX, but he was the money man. He didn't like the way he was treated in Russia, so he said, fine, I'll make my own rocket program, with blackjack and hookers... But he didn't actually do any of the lifting, other than lifting the pen to sign the checks. Other, brilliant, people did the real work.
Spacex owes its success to Gwynne Shotwell if anyone, that woman is a powerhouse.
I mean having money and connections to cut through red tape is helpful even if it's only from his privileged life.
Sure, I don't deny that, but I don't think he has ever done something great on purpose. It's like if I give all of my friends 5 bucks and one of them saves a child from getting hit by a car on their way to 7-11 to buy a Slurpee with that fiver, I don't get to take credit. Elon has enough money that he can throw a lot of shit at the wall. Some of it sticks. If the Boring company had taken off, he'd still be the same small dick white supremacist he is today, he'd just have exchanged one phallic symbol for another.
I'd say that, other than the money, those companies succeeded in spite of musk rather than because of him. If your only positive contribution is to sign the checkbook to keep it running, that's not much to give praise over.
I think musk is dumb but he's engineer dumb, when you hear him talk about rockets with other rocket nerds he does actually know what he's talking about - he's not like rocket scientist level understanding but having someone in charge of the money that actually understands and is interested in the principles and practicalities of the task at hand is kinda huge in today's corporate world.
His problem in Tesla comes from his ability to understand more of the technical situation than most the money people he knows as that's led him into making some exaggerated claims and pushing through some half baked ideas. The business model for the gigafactory was fantastic, the initial development seemed promising but when he had problems with automation and flow rate that caused so many delays he wasn't really accounting for that - he could design a great science fiction factory but it got to the point he couldn't pay people to make his ideas work because they're not problems you can just brush under the rug - the cybertruck one piece press seems to be an attempt at circumventing problems he already faced with more wishful thinking 'theoretically we can just...' classic engineer bravardo, it's not a bad idea but it's going to result in tradeoffs and I think we can already see that in how shitty the production version looks compared to the original design.
Elons biggest mistake of course is another classic engineering student error 'I'm much better at engineering than other people who don't study engineering, that must mean I'm better than them at the things they study too...' I think he genuinely thought that rubbing a social network would be really easy for him, he had this idea that the evil fun police were artificially limiting his engagement and all he needed to do is get rid of the bias against him and everyone would see how great he is at reposting ten year old memes and hail him as a hero of the world..
What I'm getting at is you can't be as dumb as Elon by actually just being dumb, it takes intelligence misdirected to be such an idiot.