An interesting theory, but Occam's razor says Musk simply means what he says about Mars. You're free to dislike Musk, but whatever he is, he's far more than a SW engineer and scam artist.
Tesla sells almost 5x more cars than Chrysler (now Stellantis). No other US car mfr has gotten to anywhere near that scale since Chrysler itself, founded in 1935. So they've done what nobody else was able to do for 90 years. This is more than a scam - this is serious heavy industry.
SpaceX has reduced the cost of putting payload in orbit *by a factor of 10* vs. where it was previously. Because so far nobody else can match their prices, SpaceX launches *more than 90%* of ALL mass to orbit from the entire planet - including Russia and China. They pioneered practical rocket re-use when nobody in the industry was even trying. Again, this is a lot more than salesmanship and hype.
Yes, Musk is eager to pick up money left on the table by the US government. SpaceX *saves* the USG billions in launch costs tho, and neither Tesla nor Musk lobbied for the EV rebates or the emission credit scheme that makes a lot of Tesla's profits. If you were running a car making company and billions were on the table that you qualified for, wouldn't you or anyone pick up that money? Even more so, if you really wanted to colonize Mars out of your own pocket as an act of charity, and seriously thought the *fate of the universe* depended on it, wouldn't you also be ruthless in pursuit of that goal?
Yes, Musk has a long history of overpromising and delivering late. Sometimes very late. But he also has a long history of eventually delivering on even outrageous promises. Musk's investors are keenly aware of this (both sides). SpaceX likes to say they specialize in turning the impossible into the merely very late. And the self-driving cars DO work (I have a couple of them). They still aren't 100% perfect and probably never will be, but then human drivers aren't 100% perfect either - if the self-driving car is safer than human drivers, that's good enough. And they're about at that point now.
Musk is a real industrialist who builds real companies that make things efficiently in quantity and are vastly more innovative than all of their competitors.
Is he serious about Mars? Only Musk knows for sure, but many people have made the argument that as our society reduces travel time and cost, and communications becomes cheap (it's at ~ zero now), we become a monoculture. And monocultures have all kinds of well-known vulnerabilities. The only fix short of abandoning technology (not going to happen politically) is to spread the human race apart - re-create independent isolated societies, so if something bad happens to one, others are not affected, and (both biological and social) evolution can test different survival schemes. It's not just meteor strikes - it's nuclear/bio/chemical war, ideological dead ends, the fertility crisis, etc. Mars is just the first step toward spreading intelligent life throughout the universe.
I think you've said you'd be OK with the human race dying out. Most of us don't feel that way; Musk has repeatedly said he doesn't either. Occam's razor says he means it.
-- Added: I just got around to reading your recent "in defense of human extinction". You didn't say anything there implying you'd be OK with the human race dying out (I was misled by the title); sorry.
You have completely overlooked the main claims of Musk intending to sow distrust and "destroy democracy". Whether he actually delivers as an industrialist is besides the point.
I hate Elon but come on. You skipped over SpaceX being responsible for the majority of all satellites currently in space, beating out all governments and other companies combined. The man is beyond detestable but that’s real.
"His purchase of Tesla would mirror the purchase of railroads, while his purchase of SpaceX would be akin to investing in telegraph lines... With Twitter as the software, and SpaceX as the hardware, Elon is doubling down on controlling media as his long-term goal." I think SpaceX is real I just think it's part of a larger plan.
Finally, an article from deep left I don’t detest. I never trusted Elon, or saw Mars Colonies as all that feasible, or even desirable. His industrial achievements are impressive, more so than infinite financialization and data harvesting, but his reasons are of course self serving and benefit him more than anyone else, by far and away.
I just hope Tesla gets unionized, then both you and Elon can be mad.
Articles like this make me appreciate when rationalists describe their epistemic confidence behind claims. The tone of high confidence makes me lose all trust in deepleft, but it is possible his tone doesn’t map onto confidence how I would expect. Maybe he is not confident in this theory and is just spitballing. If this article is an expression of certainty, I can never trust this man again. This post is just not logical. Elon musk is an engineering genius AND great marketer/recruiter. This post falls flat for the exact same reasons almost all conspiracies fall flat upon inspection
Nah. Elon Musk is a Heinlein character made real. Study Heinlein and you will understand Musk.
Heinlein started off as a far lefty who was big on the Social Credit theory of money. (Not the Chinese Social Credit score!) He moved hard right after visiting the Soviet Union.
Musk moved hard right after seeing the American Left do the phase change from liberal to Cultural Revolution Mode.
Musk's business path is a mix of "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and Heinlein's essays. Once you are in orbit you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. Musk is laser focused on cheaply moving lots of mass into orbit.
I've had the idea of mars being a stated goal while astroid mining is the real goal. But he has been launching lots of satellites, and astroid mining is still decades away at least.
Your analysis of the true purpose of the "america party" being a gridlock producer makes sense. And I *think* is what the libertarian party has done historically.
I do think he'd still want a successful mars venture eventually, for ego reasons. But that would obviously be secondary to securing his position.
If Elon and Thiel get their way, will that order last, or be short lived? I know you are more in favor of the Elites than in the "working class", but the prospect of an American Oligarchy of those guys genuinely scares me, IDK if you too are concerned about it....
If his goal was to control the media, why was he not making movies that don’t suck? All he had to do was make movies that people actually want to watch, since Hollywood insisted on making slop.
Wouldn’t that be far more direct than spending all this time on electric cars and rockets?
"His purchase of Tesla would mirror the purchase of railroads, while his purchase of SpaceX would be akin to investing in telegraph lines... With Twitter as the software, and SpaceX as the hardware, Elon is doubling down on controlling media as his long-term goal."
Mark Cuban didn't “acquire” Broadcast.com in 1995. Stopped reading when basic factual errors in your cherry picked examples are so glaringly incorrect. Cuban sucks btw.
Do you think it's a grammatical issue to distinguish between a company's founder and buyer? If it doesn't matter, why does Cuban always lie about this?
What you changed it to is an improvement and accurate. I think we're agreed that Cuban sucks. It's quite the con job he's done that retcons the story to make him some business genius.
An interesting theory, but Occam's razor says Musk simply means what he says about Mars. You're free to dislike Musk, but whatever he is, he's far more than a SW engineer and scam artist.
Tesla sells almost 5x more cars than Chrysler (now Stellantis). No other US car mfr has gotten to anywhere near that scale since Chrysler itself, founded in 1935. So they've done what nobody else was able to do for 90 years. This is more than a scam - this is serious heavy industry.
SpaceX has reduced the cost of putting payload in orbit *by a factor of 10* vs. where it was previously. Because so far nobody else can match their prices, SpaceX launches *more than 90%* of ALL mass to orbit from the entire planet - including Russia and China. They pioneered practical rocket re-use when nobody in the industry was even trying. Again, this is a lot more than salesmanship and hype.
Yes, Musk is eager to pick up money left on the table by the US government. SpaceX *saves* the USG billions in launch costs tho, and neither Tesla nor Musk lobbied for the EV rebates or the emission credit scheme that makes a lot of Tesla's profits. If you were running a car making company and billions were on the table that you qualified for, wouldn't you or anyone pick up that money? Even more so, if you really wanted to colonize Mars out of your own pocket as an act of charity, and seriously thought the *fate of the universe* depended on it, wouldn't you also be ruthless in pursuit of that goal?
Yes, Musk has a long history of overpromising and delivering late. Sometimes very late. But he also has a long history of eventually delivering on even outrageous promises. Musk's investors are keenly aware of this (both sides). SpaceX likes to say they specialize in turning the impossible into the merely very late. And the self-driving cars DO work (I have a couple of them). They still aren't 100% perfect and probably never will be, but then human drivers aren't 100% perfect either - if the self-driving car is safer than human drivers, that's good enough. And they're about at that point now.
Musk is a real industrialist who builds real companies that make things efficiently in quantity and are vastly more innovative than all of their competitors.
Is he serious about Mars? Only Musk knows for sure, but many people have made the argument that as our society reduces travel time and cost, and communications becomes cheap (it's at ~ zero now), we become a monoculture. And monocultures have all kinds of well-known vulnerabilities. The only fix short of abandoning technology (not going to happen politically) is to spread the human race apart - re-create independent isolated societies, so if something bad happens to one, others are not affected, and (both biological and social) evolution can test different survival schemes. It's not just meteor strikes - it's nuclear/bio/chemical war, ideological dead ends, the fertility crisis, etc. Mars is just the first step toward spreading intelligent life throughout the universe.
I think you've said you'd be OK with the human race dying out. Most of us don't feel that way; Musk has repeatedly said he doesn't either. Occam's razor says he means it.
-- Added: I just got around to reading your recent "in defense of human extinction". You didn't say anything there implying you'd be OK with the human race dying out (I was misled by the title); sorry.
I never said SpaceX or Tesla wasn't real, just that he has a different end goal than Mars.
I think his Mars goal is what he says it is, for the reasons I explained. Occam's razor.
You have completely overlooked the main claims of Musk intending to sow distrust and "destroy democracy". Whether he actually delivers as an industrialist is besides the point.
I hate Elon but come on. You skipped over SpaceX being responsible for the majority of all satellites currently in space, beating out all governments and other companies combined. The man is beyond detestable but that’s real.
"His purchase of Tesla would mirror the purchase of railroads, while his purchase of SpaceX would be akin to investing in telegraph lines... With Twitter as the software, and SpaceX as the hardware, Elon is doubling down on controlling media as his long-term goal." I think SpaceX is real I just think it's part of a larger plan.
Finally, an article from deep left I don’t detest. I never trusted Elon, or saw Mars Colonies as all that feasible, or even desirable. His industrial achievements are impressive, more so than infinite financialization and data harvesting, but his reasons are of course self serving and benefit him more than anyone else, by far and away.
I just hope Tesla gets unionized, then both you and Elon can be mad.
You have a real gift for coming up with interesting theories. Interesting in the sense of Murray Davis' article, "That's Interesting! Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology." Summary of the Davis article here, https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/interest.htm and the article itself is available here, https://proseminarcrossnationalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/thatsinteresting_1971.pdf
The EDS runs deep with this one
Articles like this make me appreciate when rationalists describe their epistemic confidence behind claims. The tone of high confidence makes me lose all trust in deepleft, but it is possible his tone doesn’t map onto confidence how I would expect. Maybe he is not confident in this theory and is just spitballing. If this article is an expression of certainty, I can never trust this man again. This post is just not logical. Elon musk is an engineering genius AND great marketer/recruiter. This post falls flat for the exact same reasons almost all conspiracies fall flat upon inspection
you never had the trust
Nah. Elon Musk is a Heinlein character made real. Study Heinlein and you will understand Musk.
Heinlein started off as a far lefty who was big on the Social Credit theory of money. (Not the Chinese Social Credit score!) He moved hard right after visiting the Soviet Union.
Musk moved hard right after seeing the American Left do the phase change from liberal to Cultural Revolution Mode.
Musk's business path is a mix of "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and Heinlein's essays. Once you are in orbit you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. Musk is laser focused on cheaply moving lots of mass into orbit.
I've had the idea of mars being a stated goal while astroid mining is the real goal. But he has been launching lots of satellites, and astroid mining is still decades away at least.
Your analysis of the true purpose of the "america party" being a gridlock producer makes sense. And I *think* is what the libertarian party has done historically.
I do think he'd still want a successful mars venture eventually, for ego reasons. But that would obviously be secondary to securing his position.
If Elon and Thiel get their way, will that order last, or be short lived? I know you are more in favor of the Elites than in the "working class", but the prospect of an American Oligarchy of those guys genuinely scares me, IDK if you too are concerned about it....
If his goal was to control the media, why was he not making movies that don’t suck? All he had to do was make movies that people actually want to watch, since Hollywood insisted on making slop.
Wouldn’t that be far more direct than spending all this time on electric cars and rockets?
"His purchase of Tesla would mirror the purchase of railroads, while his purchase of SpaceX would be akin to investing in telegraph lines... With Twitter as the software, and SpaceX as the hardware, Elon is doubling down on controlling media as his long-term goal."
Don’t buy it. If he wanted to control media, he wouldn’t have funded movies that didn’t suck.
I’m not even aware of these movies. Twitter is media. Forest for the trees.
Mark Cuban didn't “acquire” Broadcast.com in 1995. Stopped reading when basic factual errors in your cherry picked examples are so glaringly incorrect. Cuban sucks btw.
You prefer "create" to "acquire"? Why nitpick? It's a metaphor.
Do you think it's a grammatical issue to distinguish between a company's founder and buyer? If it doesn't matter, why does Cuban always lie about this?
Instead of being mean just state what you want the correction to be and give me a source.
What you changed it to is an improvement and accurate. I think we're agreed that Cuban sucks. It's quite the con job he's done that retcons the story to make him some business genius.
I didn't change the article at all. No edits were made. What do you disagree with about in this sentence?
"After selling this company in 1990, Cuban went on to acquire Broadcast.com in 1995."
Are you misreading me?
The long version: Chris Jaeb founded in 1995. Cuban invested shortly thereafter, took over management. They renamed to Broadcast.com in 1998.
The shorter version: Cuban invested in the company and took over managing it.
You do not have the correct framework for understanding insider trading.
It is about theft, not fairness. What you’re attempting to say doesn’t really make sense.
total side issue
Agreed. But I like history and stupid hodgepodge legal frameworks enough that I couldn’t help it.
The problem is they're all Jews and Jews are demons who have taken on synthetic human flesh to deceive us.
I am Jewish
Like Musk and Thiel, right? So Jewish, those two. 🙄🙄