Astrobach Mar 9

The media is such a wiener for Elon Musk.

The dude will say baseless nonsense like "in ten years every one will have telekinesis" and it'll be a headline with no skepticism.

Besides being an actual Nazi, he also has been wrong about everything for a decade. We aren't on mars, the hyperloop is a single-lane tunnel in one city, AI is still broken, and DOGE somehow added cost while reducing services.

He's an idiot. Stop quoting him like anything he says is meaningful.

Show threadAstrobach Mar 9
I want to note, too, that all of those claims were known absurdities when he said them. Mars was and, at least as he conceived, is never going to happen. The details he ignores are the whole puzzle. Middle management types love the idea that he's just cut through the faff of the overthinkers to get to brass tacks. No, he's ignoring the core logistic impossibility of all of those proposals. He doesn't understand anything and doesn't think he needs to--his opinions are worthless.
Show threadDFYXMar 9

@rorystarr Which makes SpaceX‘s other achievements all the more impressive. Despite being led by a the personified midlife crisis, their engineers have created the Falcon 9 which is the first partially reusable rocket ever and one of the most reliable rockets we currently have.

I still have hope for Starship (though not as part of a Mars mission) but it could probably get done much more efficiently if Elon just learned that his contribution is money, not engineering.

Show threadAstrobach 

@dfyx there was an article some years ago about how Tesla basically succeeded in spite of Elon. Given how the cybertruck, his personal project, went I think that is probably true. Any success we see from "his" company occurs in spite of him.

I remember a dude was trying to tell me why Elon was so special and he said "there was this exploding clip that cost $30,000 at NASA and he pointed at the engineer and said, 'make it for $1,000'. They did!"

And I was like, "how is that his accomplishment?"

Mar 9 at 11:51pmWeb
Show threadPaul HouleMar 10
@rorystarr @dfyx when you are up against NASA it would be an accomplishment to just pay $29,999 for the $30,000 clip