I can’t get over the fact that this is the guy who was supposed to be some kind of tech genius.
He was never a tech genius. Maybe fairly competent in some areas, I’ll give him that, but his main shtick was coming up with spectacular and insane ideas (who doesn’t like rockets?) and having enough emerald money to pay engineers until they could come up with solutions that work.
So basically he is any eight year old with emerald money.
Have you seen starship?
Or his bid for the lunar lander?
It looks like a back of the napkin drawing that he gave to real engineers and gave them billions of government dollars to turn into something real, at least in the case of starship.
It’s a tube, the same diameter all the way up with a ridiculous number of engine strapped to it. You know why nasa didn’t do that? WEIGHT. The more shit you have to push, the less distance you can go. Elon’s napkin plan is to refuel the upper stage in orbit, something that has never been done before, and something that requires multiple launches per mission.
You know what happened the first time they launched one, it fucking exploded a third of the way to space. You know what didn’t explode? Any of the Apollo missions, except for Apollo 1, which caused nasa to commit to a “no second chances” philosophy. Elon’s philosophy with starship was “if it gets off the pad, it’s a success” would you step into a building if the construction foreman said “if it doesn’t topple over on day one, it’s a success?”
Space travel is hard, but we were doing successful missions that survived failure scenarios over 50 years ago. Rockets that were designed with slide rules and notebooks full of handwritten math. Spacecraft that were hand built by talented engineers and tradesman, all survived their missions on the first and only try. This bullshit move fast and break stuff strategy shouldn’t be applied to human Spaceflight.
He’s not even spending his own money. SpaceX is primarily funded by the US government. Starship was a government payed experiment, and watching it blow up in the sky and hearing everyone at spaceX cheer made me angry. Real research deserved that money, real engine tests should have been done. Instead, we got the most expensive firework in history because Elon wanted to launch that day.
Starship is an amazing chunk of engineering that really does have a shot at revolutionizing launch economics. Musk is an ass but SpaceX is doing some incredible work. Just getting off the pad with that thing was a win and returned a lot of valuable test data.
Getting off the pad is not a success, it should be a given.
This is supposed to be a human rated vehicle.
Where is the launch escape system? Cause they don’t have one.
And launching a brand new rocket and having it reach orbit the first time is not an oddity. SLS did it first try, the Arian family from ULA has been doing it for 5 versions of the rocket.
Building a billion dollar rocket and only being happy if it manages to get off the ground, only shows a severe lack of understanding of how engineering should work.
You know what would have given way more valuable flight data? A successful launch to orbit.
You know what would have given plenty of data without wasting tons of money and an entire launch facility? Test vehicles with smaller numbers of engines.
Oh, and a flame diverter that was a known basic requirement for large rockets over 50 years ago.
Starship’s launch was a failure. If SLS had blown up, heads at NASA would have rolled. But because Elon is some rich tech bro, he gets a pass to waste a billion of our tax dollars to make a fancy firework, that didn’t even self destruct right.
Maybe if someone at spaceX would explain how mass to orbit worked, they would have a better design for a rocket, but their current design is brain dead, and is never going to be rated for human flight.
If your willing to spend the money, testing things in practice can be much quicker than planning everything out. They admitted that they didn’t expect it to reach orbit and that anything beyond the launchpad would be a success. I suspect that Elon pressured them to launch too early though.
The SLS is built using tried and tested technology, so it should have (and did) work, but due to (effectively) corruption it’s stupidly expensive per launch.
The falcon 9 was ‘impossible’ to re-use untill they did it. It’s now revolutionised the launch business. If they can do that again by doing the ‘impossible’ then it will have been worth it.
I do kinda agree with you on the lack of an escape system though, but if they can prove reliability on unmanned missions then it could work.
Yeah, making it reliable enough not to need an escape system is the goal. One of the original concepts was that in a stage 1 failure outside black zones (also, Starship on paper does a great job minimizing the black zones due to re-entry design), stage 2 will light up and go for a powered landing. A stage “explosion” is usually very energetic but more burny-energetic than explosive-energetic, because the fuel can’t efficiently mix, which should be within the tolerances of the upper stage.
Planes don’t need escape systems, and hopefully Starship can get into at least 5 nines of reliability, preferably more. It’s never going to be entirely safe (planes have an accident rate around 1 per million flights, not many of which are fatal), but there’s no reason to think that we couldn’t get to that safety level in time.
Ugh. Pass.
They claimed “we learned a lot”, but I’m skeptical. They could have learned a lot from not fucking it up too. The BS like not having proper shielding of the launchpad reeks of some idiotic decision that musk made and wouldn’t change his mind about because he’s a moron. The FAA came up with a long list of things they need to fix - and it was all things they should have known to have in place for the first launch.
Exactly! Everyone is acting like Spaceflight is some Brand new technology that SpaceX is pioneering.
No.
Spaceflight is a well understood field. It was well understood 50 years ago. We had put a dozen men on the moon by the time Elon musk was in diapers.
Reusable rockets aren’t even a new concept. McDonnell Douglas was testing propulsive landing with the DC-X in 1993. The space shuttle was fully reusable except for the fuel tank. Both of those were flying 20 years before spaceX landed a falcon nine for the first time. And neither of those concepts looked like starship
If a new competitor came to aviation and said they were going to revolutionize the industry with swept wings or some bullshit, and said it would make flying 10 times cheaper, we’d all call them idiots. But Elon said it with spaceX and suddenly he’s a genius and all his haters just don’t understand “science”(his fancy CGI render)
The emerald mine is a red herring, he didn’t actually get any significant (on this scale) wealth from it. He was just lucky to be on the PayPal team at the right time and that’s where his fortune got its real start.
The emerald mine paid for his Ivy league education, and multiple attempts to get an engineering degree. Also his entire upbringing was funded by it.
So much more than what anyone else got.
He also bought PayPal with the same money.
More than most, but basically nothing when we’re talking about his wealth. The emerald mine has basically nothing to do with how he became a member of the 1% let alone the ultra wealthy. He basically grew up in an upper-middle class home and is one of the few who found massive wealth during the dot com boom.
Further Reading: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/
He repeatedly is stumbling into the same fucking roadblocks tech companies have struggled with for a decade or more, and he’s walking through even worse thought processes when there’s mountains of data and analysis and proof on what does and doesn’t work.
It’s like rewatching a train wreck in slow mo, but for some reason there’s extra explosions added in.
How people thought, let alone still think, he’s some sort of tech genius is absolutely beyond me.
It was a bunch of marketing hype all along, apparently. The more he’s revealed who he actually is, the less most people believe that he’s really good at much of anything besides hype and being pretentious. The past decade of fawning news articles about how he’s the smartest and most hard working person in the entire world is even more nauseating now, in retrospect.
I believe he’s only good at wasting money and destroying livelihoods. With 200 billion he should’ve fucked off somewhere as he’s clearly not useful for anything. Even Zuckerberg and Bezos have their value.
He was good at publicity and being a front man… but now his deranged political obsessions have ruined that. I can’t imagine why someone would have enough FU money for 1000 people, but be so obsessed with forcing his political will on everyone that he doesn’t just fuck off and enjoy being rich. Drunk on power, I guess.
Well, he’s got emerald-mine money to throw at problems, and he’s been lucky. Money and luck are a potent combination, and can stand in for actual talent and skill in a lot of cases.
He’s also had a good eye for tech investments in the past, though he seems to have lost that recently. For example, he co-founded OpenAI. (Sold all his stake in it to Microsoft before it hit the big-time, though.)
So… luck, money, and a history of investing in or founding tech companies that become at least moderately successful off the talents of others. Of course that’s going to give him an enormous ego and make him think everything he touches turns to gold.
That is what he pays his internet meme troll group to spread, yes.
supposed != fact
Charging users to use a web service that costs money to run isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s how the web should work.
Just fucking do it.
Maybe then other media will finally stop reporting shit like
“Person Z said Y on X (formerly Twitter).”It’s annoying enough when they report what someone famous said on Twitter but the articles about what a bunch of random unknown people posted on Twitter (often phrased as if they represent a community) are even worse.
Headline: “People are outraged about something!”
Source: 5 random tweets I found that are mildly mocking the thing.
“Twitter went wild about this!”
Source: 5 random tweets from people with 22 followers each, most of whom are crypto spammers
Yeah, it’s crazy how much influence Twitter still has on the media conversation. Nothing that happens on Mastodon ever makes the news because journalists haven’t been able to figure it out.
This is a great idea. Do it!
Please kill it harder
Yes please. Do it.
Test
Who in their right mind would pay for a dying social media platform? This reeks of desperation from a man trying to convince himself of his own supposed public image.
The requirement to create an account to view replies/threads is a show stopper for me and it has somehow made Twitter even more useless. It barely had value when it was freely legible but it’s not worth sharing data with them to get festering garbage in return.
Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?
We live in a world where social media and communication are commoditized as fuck and people refuse to pay premiums for shit they can do for free elsewhere. How is Twitter going to compete with Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, and Facebook when it’s arguably the worst choice, objectively the least feature rich, yet the only one that costs money?
Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?
The people who produce the garbage will pay for it and maybe a few journalists who want to report on the newest pile of garbage, trying to create enough outrage to generate a few clicks on their shitty “news” site.
Those people are already paying though
He’s seemed oddly desperate for money not only about twitter, but also how he’s the 1 or 2 wealthiest person in the world yet feels the need to run crypto pump-and-dump scams and game the stock market.
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the whole plan stinks of a man that doesn’t understand the value of money to 99% of humans
no, it’s not JUST $13; it’s a streaming subscription, it’s a nice dessert, it’s a couple of drinks at a bar
Not only the value of money (he really thought people would pay $20 a month for Blue?!); he doesn’t understand Twitter. He’s never been on the side of Twitter that used to joke “Twitter is free!” whenever funny stuff happened on the site. There are whole parts of Twitter he’s never seen, and he thinks his very narrow use case of Twitter is THE way Twitter is used.
When the running joke used to be “Twitter is free,” no one is going to want to pay for it.
He surely doesn’t understand the value of $20, like how Bill Gates guessed that a banana was probably $10.
He fundamentally doesn’t understand what Twitter is/was or does. That’s why this is like watching someone enter a race but keep tripping on their own shoelaces.
Nope. Like, he thinks there’s a huge bot problem on Twitter because he has to deal with bots because he’s famous and talks about crypto. Most Twitter users never deal much with bots so it’s not the big concern. But he does, so he thinks blaming bots for all Twitter’s problems is effective.
I bet he was shocked there was pushback for his API changes when it impacted accounts like the NY subway system, who used it to announce schedule delays. I bet I t never occurred to him people actually used Twitter for something other than shitposting.
Dude thinks he’s a genius (he’s not). This is the problem when you only look at the outcome of something without factoring what caused it (lots of luck including birth lottery and the effort and talent of people around him in this case).
I think the biggest problem at this point is how much Twitter has replaced a core part of how journalism used to function. Back in the day, if a company/organization/famous person/etc was doing something of note, they would write a press release and send it to news organizations, who would then decide how to cover (or not cover) the story.
Now, shit just gets tweeted out and a good chunk of journalism is just putting a few words around that tweet and calling it news. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow and no clone immediately popped up in its place, modern journalism would collapse.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.
You could ask the same about paying for verification. But a very surprising number of people did that.
I agree with your core point in general, but the reality possibly is “lots of people”. The vast, vast majority of people appear to have stuck with TwitX because that’s where the people are. People aren’t moving to other places because the people aren’t there. A jillion organizations, “influencers”, wanna-be “influencers”, etc are still there because of inertia that surprisingly hasn’t run out.
And a whole bunch of idiots have paid for the blue checkmark because they are desperate for attention and think they’ll get more views that way. In many cases they’re right.
This move, I think, would be more likely to motivate people to move or avoid the platform, but it’s ridiculous to me how many people are left after all the other bullshit (including requiring logins, dropping blocking, all the right-wing propaganda and terrible recommendations in general, Musk’s behavior, at least a handful of people dropping the platform, etc).
He may be losing money and advertisers but holy shit are a bunch of people still there.
I would imagine people with huge followings and money to burn. Once the paywall is up, those huge followings are going to shrink fast.
Shitfluencers, bots and corporate profiles
I think it’s a great move Elon, charge $100 a month base price to keep the riff raft out, and then offer packages going up to $10,000 a month that allow people to post. I really, truly, seriously think you should do this!
He said creating such a system is “the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots
Lol the fucking “bots” again.
He’s still raging because the “bots” were supposed to get him out of having to purchase the company on wildly unfavorable terms. He’ll ride this excuse along with the whole business straight into the ground.
The thing is that the bots aren’t going to lower by much when he does that, since the majority of bots on there are his own.
It does seem like it, considering how many inactive accounts follow him
So he’s really keeping that font as his logo?
Looks like it, no indication of going back. Over a decade of brand recognition into the trash.
Great idea. I definitely support this decision.
Do it.
You won’t.
No balls.
Please DO
Yes, do it then everyone will move to mastodon and we can finally forget about twitter (x) existence
You know deep down that most people would move to Threads.
“Sorry, we can only use a social network if it’s owned by a large, evil corporation.”
Dew it!
Oh thank God, then we can all finally move on and stop talking about it.
I don’t hate what Twitter used to be. I never engaged with it much myself, but it was a fantastic tool for progressive organizations to network and mobilize, and the loss of that will genuinely hurt us all.
But at this point, that tool is already on life support. Better for it to die outright so that people find a new way to do those things x rather than this endless half life it’s now trapped in.
I suspect the intention was to kill it because of how it aided people in organizing. Musk like many techbros does not want people organizing because then they might he able to divert the money he needs to build inefficient tunnels under the ground that could be used to feed and educate the masses about why Teslas are poorly assembled cars.
Sorry, but I really hate this argument. It buys into the bullshit mythology that Musk is some kind of evil genius and not just an egotistical moron.
The fact is that Elon went to court, at great expense, to try to get out of buying Twitter. It was a stupid mistake, and one that he was desparately trying to undo, right up until the last moment. To claim that this was part of his genius plan would be like saying that a good first step in planning a murder is to call the cops and tell them you’re planning a murder.
He got into his mess because he’s a sad divorced loser whose trans daughter won’t speak to him anymore, and rather than do any soul searching about it he blamed Twitter for turning her into a “communist”. He got sucked into the manosphere bullshit about how all the “woke” Silicon Valley companies are “censoring” people, tried to strongarm Twitter into changing their policies on hate speech by threatening to buy out the company if they didn’t accede, tried to make the threat credible by tendering an actual offer that was, incredibly stupidly, far above what the company was worth, and then went all surprised Pikachu face when the shareholders of a company that has literally never been profitable said “That sounds great, we’ll take it.” Now he’s just doing the best he can with a bad situation, after every legal move he could come up with to escape that situation failed ( did you know he’s even suing the lawyers who won the case for Twitter against him?).
It’s also important to understand that Elon took Twitter private. That means its profits (there aren’t any, there never have been) flow directly into his pocket, and it’s deficits flow directly out of his pocket. This isn’t like with Tesla where he’s a CEO of a publicly traded company, and get can get paid big bucks even when they lose money.
If Twitter loses money, Elon loses money. And in order to raise the capital he needed to buy it, he had to take out significant loans. In order to pay the interest on those loans he’s been liquidating large amounts of his Tesla stock (which forms the bulk of his compensation as Tesla CEO), which is tanking the Tesla stock price, which further reduces his capital.
In all this debacle has lost Elon somewhere in the region of $200 billion dollars in net worth. There is absolutely no universe in which he is personally sacrificing that kind of capital just to kill a social media platform, and even if you still - against all reason - believe this was an evil scheme to kill Twitter, it’s painfully obvious that they (whoever “they” are) could have done it for a LOT less than $200 billion.
All the changes he’s made to Twitter since buying it are driven by two basic motivations; because he’s a bigot who loves the adoration of other bigots, and because he genuinely thinks these are good ideas. Twitter is called X now because Musk has been trying to make X.com a thing for his entire adult life, to the point where its exactly what got him pushed out of PayPal.
There’s no grand plan here. He really is just that stupid.
I don’t believe he is that smart but I think the KSA intelligence community is and I believe the suggestion was made to destroy it after he was required to purchase twitter.
Point 1: Why would he agree to that, at such huge personal cost? He’s paying the Saudis almost a billion a year for the loans they gave him. He’s getting the world’s shittiest deal here. Unless they have some kind of truly epic blackmail on him (the kind that billions upon billions of dollars couldn’t successfully erase) there’s literally no possible motivation for that. If the Saudis were bankrolling the whole operation and he was just the point man your theory would make sense, but as it is he’s the money and the mook. He’s getting nothing here.
Point 2: If Musk was knowingly destroying Twitter, why would he attach the X branding to it? X has been Musk’s personal baby for decades. He lost PayPal over it. He genuinely believes it’s some kind of brilliant, genius idea, his “everything app” for finance that will revolutionize the world. If he was trying to kill Twitter, he would kill it as Twitter. If you want to burn your business down for the insurance money, you don’t lock your kids inside first (metaphorical kids, the kind you genuinely love, not his actual kids who hate him). If he destroys Twitter as X then he destroys X, and there’s no possible benefit to that.
