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Gentlemen, it is with deep regret that I must urge you to consider to drop Elon...
Okay, okay... so I can't pretend I was ever much of a fan of his, and given my past comments about him here, some might even consider me biased against him. I am, however, very much a fan of the ethos he represents. "Move fast and break things", regulations stifling innovation, anti-credentialism., etc., etc. are all ideas close to my heart, and this is precisely why I'm worried Elon going down in flames would irreparably damage the reputation of the entire techo-libertarian ethos, and why I'd like to persuade fellow weird nerds to give the guy a skeptical look.
I always felt there was a bit of a motte and bailey with the arguments for Elon's greatness. The bailey being that he has/will revolutionize anything he touches, that he will take us to Mars, where we will be chauffeured around by self-driving electric cars via a network of vacuum-tunnels. The motte is something to the effect of "look at how much his companies are worth", and I have the impression that it's integrity heavily depends on some parts of the bailey being true, or there's no reason to value anything he does at it's current levels. Going from good to bad:
Twitter
His takeover went a lot better than I expected. I fully expected him to face the full wrath of the Powers That Be for opening it up, and while he did face an advertiser boycott, and does still occasionally censor dissidents, the truth is Twitter is a much more open space than it used to be, and a lot more stable than any of the haters or hopeful skeptics could have predicted. Were it not for the boycott, what he did might have even been a formula to turn it into moneymaker, but as it stands it seems to be stuck at a decent and stable state. That would have been fine, but Elon's issue is he had to go into substantial debt to buy it, so he does need it to be a moneymaker. This is probably where all the ideas like login walls, and limiting previously open APIs came from. While this comes off to me as "greedy" / "needs this stuff to generate money", there's one thing that comes off as "no longer able to maintain the project", and it's the sudden appearance of porn bots. It seems that nobody likes having them around. Old Twitter, for all it's faults, was able to keep a lid on them, but nowadays they roam freely, so it does feel like it's a sign of weakness.
SpaceX
A fundamental problem for SpaceX is that there just isn't all that much demand for space. The entire space launch market on Earth can gross you $4.28 billion. So even if he monopolized the entire industry, he won't exactly be paying for those Twitter loans this way anytime soon. His solution was to grow the market - to come up with services he can sell that depend on high-volume low-cost launches, like Starlink or Point-to-Point.
At a glance, Starlink seems at least plausible, but I think it will be a struggle to make any kind of profit from it. Between launches being expensive, the sheer amount of satellites required, their 5-year lifespan ensuring the costs will be recurring, and fees for Earth-side ISPs, I doubt they're anywhere near the break-even point. Elon seems to agree. Starship is supposed to be the cure for all their ills, but anything reliable seems years away, even in an optimistic scenario.
Point-to-Point is dead on arrival. The idea here is that if you get rapid reusability right, you can outperform long-haul flights by making several trips in the time it would take a plane to make one. If they get their rockets to stop rapidly disassembling, then we can start talking about reusing them fast enough to make a roundtrip on the same day. While they might be able to crack the former at some point (again, years away IMO) the latter is unrealistic, given that even with Falcon 9, the shortest reuse time they managed to achieve was 21 days. And this is without going into details like how much would the ticket have to cost, for the idea to make any sort of sense, or which city would want to have a starport anywhere near it.
I don't know if they were hoping to make any significant amount of money from government contracts, but if they were, it's not looking good for them either. The Artemis mission is an utter clown show right from the drawing board (the whole speech is pretty great, if you have time to kill). I'm prepared to lay a significant portion of the blame for that on NASA itself, and their autistic levels of obsession with reusability, but I don't think it's NASA's fault that the current mission architecture requires something to the tune of a dozen launches, in order to get one rocket to the moon. The... suboptimal... architecture in itself might not have been that much of an issue for SpaceX. The contracts are signed, so as long as they could deliver, they'd get their money, but they can't seem to deliver. There's already a big slip up with the schedule, and no sign of getting close major milestones like ship-to-ship refuelling. On top that, they have actual competition. A date that could mark the turning of the tide for SpaceX is 29 September 2024, that's when Blue Origin is set to go to Mars. As far as I understand, the mission is deemed high-risk, so it might very well end the same way as SpaceX' Starship launches, but if they get it right (on the first attempt, no less), while Starship can't even get to orbit, that might trigger a cascade of "wait, what have you guys been doing all these years?" from investors and NASA administrators.
This goes more into the realm of Vibe Analysis, but an interesting thing to look at is Elon's "Starship Update" presentations (2018, 2022, 2024). The first one goes great for him, he is largely able to sell his vision of building a self-sustaining city on Mars. The press asks him a few skeptical-ish questions about the details, but he's allowed to brush them off ("Boil-off? Pfft, that's easy!"), and is taken seriously, even as he's making wild promises/predictions (orbital flight within 6 months, manned flight within a year). The second one is largely a repeat of the first and the reception is still warm, but by the third the vibe changes completely.
Every engineer / techie probably had the experience of working with a sales / marketing guy BSing the client, promising impossible things in order to make a sale. What is perhaps less common is having the marketing guy trying to BS the very techies responsible for delivering on the fantastical ideas being sold, but I've had that experience as well, and Musks latest presentation reminds me of it. Exciting announcements of imminent success are met with a wall of silence, but that's the reaction you're always going to get, when you're trying to hype up a crowd that knows exactly how far away they are from reaching any of these goals.
SpaceX being private, I can't tell what their financial are, but unless they pull a rabbit out of a hat (and possible even if they manage it), I think they're toast.
Tesla
In theory that should be the strongest company, since they have actual factories, producing actual cars sold to actual people... but that's never the argument used to support their value it's always about great innovations that are just around the corner:
Listen to the last few quarterly earnings calls, and it's always the same story. Any moment now they'll crack some great new thing, and it's gonna be bigger / faster / stronger than anything anyone has every done, "by orders of magnitude", but they never seem to have anything to report on that they actually cracked, and are ready to go with. Cybertruck is a meme by now. Semi, which was supposed to be shipped to the tune of 50K this year, looks like it will be lucky if it reaches 50. The revolution in batteries turned out to be a minor iterative improvement, if that. The way Elon is talking about self-driving is especially bewildering. He seems set on the idea of "photons in, controls out", and maybe I'm a simpleton, but I have no idea why you would kneecap your system by deliberately cutting it off from other sources of data. I'd literally have an easier time believing they're close to cracking it, if he completely glossed over the implementation. And as far as I can tell Optimus is a manually controlled puppet, that they can't find a practical use for, by their own admission.
If he actually delivered on any of this stuff, I'd probably be more cautious about criticizing the company, it wouldn't even have to live up to the hype, but it looks like the cycle for the company and it's supporters is "cusome product, get excited for new product", with the "consume product" bit crossed out. I think it's the hype that will do them in, and I don't think they can even pull off a "let's get back to the basics" and just make good cars anymore, because of the insane valuation their hype has gotten them. And again, they have actual competition now. Feel free to make the case that they make the best cars, but even if that's true, I don't think that's going to help them much, when other companies make good enough cars that are more affordable.
It won't be long now...
As always in Vibe Analysis, timing is tricky, but something's in the air. Between Tesla's top brass cashing out, and deciding this is a great moment to spend more time with their family, construction projects being halted, people getting fired, public opinion turning against Elon, and everything depending on a rabbit (possibly multiple rabbits) being pulled out of a hat, it feels like things are hanging on by a thread. If investors pull out, I don't think either of his companies has strong enough fundamentals to survive.
I would love to be proven wrong. If Elon delivers, all that happens to me is that I look a bit silly for shitposting on the Internet (and will also have to pay for some outstanding bets about Starship going to orbit), but on the plus side, I'll be driven around by robo-taxis, as I watch a livestream from the latest moon landing. If he doesn't, we're up for a massive collapse of wealth, call-off for our return to the moon, and the cratering of the credibility of the entire techno-libertarian memeplex.
The idea of in-group policing was commonly disputed on our site / subreddit, the idea being that no movement or subculture is a monolith, so you can't blame people for the excesses of their group. I happen to disagree, I think it's extremely important to call out the excesses of your in-group, so if you happen to be an Elon fan, please try taking a skeptical look at the guy's endeavors. If nothing else, if you conclude he still comes out on top after a more skeptical analysis, you'll get the chance to hone your arguments.
So I've started to see Elon (and many other tech CEOs for that matter) as living LLMs most of them can guess the correct technobabble to look smart for people that don't have knowledge of the areas they talk about. There is no true understanding of the things that he has been speaking about lately and has managed to staff with people that have been able to correct him in the past, but now no one can contradict Elon anymore. He is surrounded by yes-men and has been successful too many times being contrarian that there is no one to save him anymore. You are essentially listing stuff that is straight from Elon and someone who truly knows something about cars, running a social media company or rockets are able to correct or massage the message down the hierarchy anymore.
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I think almost all of recent turns in Musk's reputation comes from his depriving of the journalist class of what had been their sacred bullying grounds. Stripping their bluechecks away and handing them out to the highest bidder? Unforgivable.
But even before that, I think (regarding electric cars) he may have had the problem of his would-be allies in the environmental movement not really wanting his help. What does that mean? If the environmental movement is about the environment, then taking electric cars from a Simpsons gag to an everyday sight ought to be greatly desired.
If the environmental movement (except for some true believers) is more about tribal jockeying - about providing yet more proof that the current system is Wrong and must be overthrown, and the right people put in power - then technological solutions are the last sort of help such a movement would want.
"The planet is in terrible danger under the current system, so that system must be overthrown!" / "Here's a way to save the planet without having to overthrow the system!" Is the next line "thanks" or is it "curses!"?
Okay, it's never explicitly "curses!" Instead, there's always some very good reason why any proposed solution to the biggest problem in the world except the desired suite of sociopolitical changes is unacceptable. (Exhibit B: fission power.)
Personally, I'm in favor of humanity innovating its way out of problems over resorting to social control, 'cheating' though it may be. Maybe Elon Musk isn't the person for the job - maybe everything you've written here is true (I don't really care.) Still, though, I'm going to look with suspicion on whatever looks like an attempt to turn down a technological alternative to "overthrowing the system."
"Otherthrowing the system" is usually composed of a variety of reasons, ranging from "not being in the demographic of who's in control of The System" to "not having access to people in control of The System" to "the effects of living under the people who have control of The System are intolerable" to "the people who are in control of The System aren't very good at keeping The System running". It is not surprising one is tempted to say "curses!" faster than "thanks!"
Just as you are allowed to distrust people who use these particular Arguments As Soldiers, it is also allowed for them to mourn the deceased arguments.
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Musk is a very impressive booster and is therefore an important figure in modern capitalism.
He isn’t an “inventor” or “engineer” the way, say, Brunel was. No Musk stan can point to a key mechanical component of the spaceship, or model S, that he personally designed, drew the CAD model of, came up with the physics behind, actually invented in the way even a 5 year old would understand the term.
Yeah, you can point to his employees saying he’s really smart and “gets it”. So do plenty of regular people with STEM degrees. Musk isn’t a great inventor in the Victorian tradition. He’s a businessman.
No, his employees and former employees say understands rocket engineering to a very high level and is responsible for the very ambitious engineering that got done by insisting it's possible.
Even the entire insane approach: it's just a rocket, just metal, and not a precious one, so it shouldn't cost like it's made out of silver is his approach.
I bet there are plenty of MBAs at Boeing smart enough to understand rocket engineering too, who can insist that “it’s possible”. The reason for Musk’s success is that against all the odds his personal brand is extremely strong, and that pays immense dividends. “The real life Tony Stark” is what Tesla and SpaceX were built on, a meme from the first Marvel movie which of course itself begat the most successful box office franchise of all time.
Musk’s image can attract engineering talent nobody else can. There are very smart minds whose choice is essentially going into quant roles, possibly the most elite tech jobs, or working for Elon Musk. They won’t work for Ford or Boeing, no matter their pay. But they will work for Tesla or SpaceX, because of him.
But I don’t think vague comments about him being able to understand the tech means much. Transformer models are easy to explain and understand, but it still took someone to invent them. Musk wasn’t that person for his product. Making it possible isn’t the same thing.
I think that's BS. For one he clearly understands the stuff and loves it - you can see it in some of the interviews he gives where he talks about the most minute details. He's not 'just a guy who studied engineering and then decided it's not for him and got an MBA' which is imo the stereotypical manager with engineering degree.
He's a guy who earned money in internet, then staked it all on an absolutely insane idea, hired great people and succeeded despite everyone making fun out of him. (the mocking comments are all out there, archived).
People who don't work for him anymore, so not on the payroll (Cantrell, Mueller) said he's extremely smart or a genius, learns very fast.
Mueller said that Musk hates everything that detracts from the mission: office politics, bureaucracy etc. Also hates hearing "can't be done".
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You'd think so, and yet the trouble is they don't. They've only occasionally said the exact opposite, but everything they do suggests that their statements aren't a fluke. SpaceX was flying Grasshopper in 2012. As of 2022 ULA (Boeing's space consortium with Lockheed Martin) was still debating whether they'd have a better time catching falling booster engines with a helicopter or just packing an inflatable ballute+raft in them.
Boeing's vision of the economics of space was decades of cost-plus contracting. The idea that they could make more profit by bringing down costs than by incurring them was so foreign to them that they didn't even want that to be an option. In hindsight, the overruns on Starliner (despite getting 60% more money than Crew Dragon) suggest they weren't wrong about that - for themselves, anyway.
Boeing's grandest vision of the future in space is a rocket that costs $25B to develop, plus another $4B minimum per year to launch one mission per year, and the mission can put people in lunar orbit but a lander is going to take some more work and maybe four versions down the line plus a new reentry vehicle plus another lander we can talk about Mars in the 2030s unless there are some delays just like there were the last time and the time before that. They do not believe a high flight rate is possible. They do not believe reuse, much less rapid reuse, is possible - they will be using extremely expensive Shuttle-derived engines originally designed for reuse, but they will be throwing them in the ocean for each flight. They do not believe rapid innovation is possible. They choose technologies like solid rocket boosters (for which "flyback" is an impossibility, as is "an off switch") and hydrolox fuel (great if you're optimizing ISP, less great if you're optimizing cadence or dollars) that don't even allow for a latter switch in that direction.
To be sure, SpaceX's newest rocket may be a failure. I've been getting a little more optimistic with each test, but the hardest parts are yet to come, and just because they've succeeded at reuse with Falcon and reentry with Dragon doesn't mean they're guaranteed to manage reuse with Starship and reentry with Starship. But the point where they're at with it as of their last test, sailing the upper stage through space before it disappointingly breaks up on reentry ... that's basically the point where nearly every other launch vehicle declares victory! By SpaceX (and honestly any reasonable) standards, Boeing's newest rocket was designed to be a failure, even if it had been a nominal success. It was designed so that, if everything had worked even with the schedule they had originally hoped for and the prices they had originally hoped for, it would not have been an economically sustainable system for anything more worthwhile than a few national pride stunts before Congress gets bored with funding those again, and in the absence of competition its greatest effect on the space industry would have been further normalization of the falsehood that space is just so super hard that there's no reason to expect anyone to ever do it any better.
You don't get rocket engineers (who really ought to be the ones in the common idiom! I've done a little rocket science, but rocket engineering still greatly intimidates me...) to work with the kind of passion that SpaceX was getting from them by offering them the chance to Go Where Man Has Gone Before while repeating the same mistakes as last time. Part of the SpaceX formula for success was their engineering choices, part of it was their vertical integration, part was their willingness to design "hardware-rich" even though that's embarrassing ... but a lot of it was that, for the first time since before their engineers were born, they were actually being given the option to succeed.
Elon Musk could succumb to a heart attack tomorrow, and as long as Gwynne Shotwell was still at the helm (or at least someone who's picked up the same long-term vision - I doubt SpaceX upper management has many who haven't), SpaceX would still have just as easy a time (probably easier - aerospace engineers are 50% left-wing, and the right-wing half surely aren't all comfortable with Elon's edgelord shitposting style either) recruiting.
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The problem I have with these anecdotes is that they're coming from other nerds (no hate, I'm one of them), and Elon is basically king nerd, so anything bad they say against him is like blasphemy. I personally have not witnessed Elon be competent about software (my expertise) once.
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I remember in the late 90s and early 00s, reading many a diatribe about how Microsoft was done. They then went on to grow by 10x and are almost hip again.
I'm not sure what changed all that much. They were just well positioned to tax computer industry growth and it grew massively. Hardly anyone can point to a brilliant innovation at Microsoft during this period.
To me, being a futurist brand guy that's well positioned to capture value in the growth of the transition to EVs, development of space, and AI is a pretty fantastic position. And unlike Microsoft, Elon still has big bets to make.
Speaking of which, have you made any bets?
The shift to software-as-a-service significantly increased the amount they could get away with charging for Office. Azure is a new business in the last 10 years and accounts for about 1/2 of Microsoft's profits.
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The advantage of the software industry over hardware is that hardware is bounded by the laws of physics and the costs of making things and moving them around. This brings on a lot more recurring costs— replacing worn out equipment, transportation costs, and the costs to continue to produce more product. Starlink cannot be a money maker without finding ways around entropy and the costs of putting satellites in orbit. Microsoft was and still is doing software. Sure software has development costs, and needs a few plugs and patches, but it doesn’t really cost anything to ship software (and it’s mostly downloaded from a server these days anyway). Software doesn’t wear out except totally on purpose via the company no longer supporting it. This makes growing and making money as a software company a bit easier. If you can keep market share as the default option for most office software, you basically print money by not doing anything to fuck that up. If you’re selling a product, you have to keep the costs down while not losing either quality or market share. It’s not impossible, but harder.
It does, but the downside is that your entire industry can be commoditized by a few people (fewer than people think) or completely destroyed by your competition exiting the market and just releasing their product. Effectively every area Borland was monetizing 30 years ago is completely free now.
Yeah, microsoft's product doesn't wear out naturally, but the other side is, how much more could they have taxed the industry if linux didn't exist? On the other hand, open source hardware has never really gone anywhere.
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Software makes it harder and easier to make money. Profits scale a lot more. But it’s a lot harder to get to initial profitability because the competition to be the one who scales is more fierce.
In the physical world every real estate developer can make a building with positive unlevered free cash flow (harder to create a yield above capital costs but fundamentally the project will have profits).
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The product was stickier than people expected. Turns out 50-60 year olds who are often the boss now don’t feel like saving $100 to learn how to use google sheets. Which means everyone else has to use excel. Even though the products are incredibly similar. But the learning curve was enough to prevent switchability. The product would have obviously been toast if it operated on pure value creation like if it was Coke versus Pepsi and Pepsi was free and Coke costs a $1.
I agree, many billion and trillion dollar empires are built on companies finding the cost of migration unbearable.
Microsoft probably should've sold Office for $1 for the entire 1990s.
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Google Sheets is vastly inferior to Excel for a lot of functionality.
Indeed -- I'd venture that there is no longer in fact any product competitive with Excel in the general business market!
This is a vast improvement (for M$FT) from the 80s/early 90s when there were quite a few spreadsheet options with different pros and cons.
@sliders1234 :
Thing is it's free water vs dollar coke -- both will hydrate you, but one is clearly a different sort of product. (you will note that even though this is in fact the case, Coke sells a lot of Coke!)
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The brilliant innovation was in Azure and especially Office 365, in leveraging their dominance in Office desktop application software to provide a superior and indispensable cloud-based service even as desktops starting becoming less relevant. This made them well-positioned to tax not just computer industry growth, but some fraction of all economic growth, basically the new IBM.
Yeah, they figured out how to tax every white collar job in the developed world like $100 per year, indefinitely.
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I don't think Elon's position in EV's or space is as good as Microsoft's was in computers, and for that matter I don't think EV's or space in general are going to be that big of a deal. I don't have an opinion on AI yet, but then again I don't understand why people are acting like OpenAI == Elon Musk. Does he still have a stake in it? Why was he using "give me my compensation package, or I'll leave Tesla to found an AI company" as an argument?
I have 2 outstanding bets with fellow motteposters about Starship ever making it to orbit. If you absolutely insist, you can join in, I think I can take 1 or 2 more, but I'd like to diversify. You think they'll ever make it to the moon? What about robo-taxis?
I think his early investment in OpenAI shows vision even if he did leave them for dead for not bending their knee to him.
Also, because FSD is amazing? It's pretty reliable! I mean it needs to be, like, 4-5 orders of magnitude more reliable and it's unclear if they can achieve that with their current tech stack but it's still one of the most remarkable AI achievements ever to have a car that can drive itself for an entire day, using only cameras, in any arbitrary environment and maybe only kill one pedestrian. I would absolutely say they're well positioned to capture a portion of an AI market.
I don't get it. Did he get it from them? Has it been a part of how OpenAI got to where they are today? Otherwise what does it have to do with them?
Also if FSD is so amazing, why is he not using it as an argument in quarterly earnings calls, and instead keeps promising actual self-driving at some point in the future (next year, for sure this time!)? Why has he gone so far as to say Tesla is worth nothing without (actual) self-driving?
All I'm saying is the CEO of the company that developed and deployed FSD has an obvious edge in AI and is well positioned to capitalize on it.
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Out of curiosity, why not do put options against $TSLA?
Tesla’s history is a graveyard of short sellers. They could be right eventually but it’s been a bloodbath so far.
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Unless you're going to take a decade-dated one at which point you get annihilated on fees, the whipsaw effect of a meme stock run by somebody with a history of overpromising random in-vogue ideas makes it hard to leverage against.
Ha. Amusingly, I had a friend who was consistently betting against Tesla on short-term puts but he forgot to renew them at some point this last go-around and that was right before the recent huge collapse happened.
Still too hard to bet against Elon.
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Diversification seems like a really good idea here, in that it seems to bring the nature of the disagreement into focus. Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses. Is the general consensus that those other businesses are write-offs, and thus SpaceX has all the value? Does anyone actually expect him to crack auto-driving or tunnel boring or robots or making twitter profitable? Is it just the rockets? Maybe the rockets are enough, maybe not, but is any of the rest plausible enough to bet on, or is it essentially fog?
I guess the flipside, though, is what the alternative is supposed to be. Like, let's say I conclude you're probably right, and Musk is probably going to fail. Why is that information useful? Is there an effective way to "short" him? What's the benefit to doing so, beyond bragging rights on the Motte? If he succeeds, I think that's probably a very good thing, and if he fails, I'd agree that's almost certainly a bad thing, but if we knew for sure that he was going to fail, right now, what should we do about it?
Auto-driving seems believable to me, though I imagine regulation's a fairly dangerous threat to any company attempting to do so.
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SpaceX is so far the only really "cool" company that Musk has. Maybe Tesla used to be cool, when EVs were new and they could shatter acceleration records while talking big about "saving the earth." Now they just seem normal- lots of other companies make EVs now too, and we've all had a chance to ride in them and see "OK yeah it's pretty just another car." It's decent but no where near enough to justify it being one of the most valuable companies on earth, ahead of other companies that produce way more money.
SpaceX can still trade on that "we're going to mars!!!!" sci fi aspect. But I think their real value is launching spy sats for the military, and maybe eventually ABM missiles like Brilliant Pebbls, or straight up weapons like "Rods from God." For that, they can pretty much name their price to the military and the US taxpayer.
Ignoring the whole Cyber Truck Fiasco, can the other EV cars be considered competitive with a Tesla from a branding perspective?
https://posts.voronoiapp.com/automotive/Global-BEV-Market-Share-Tesla-Retains-its-1-Spot-for-2023-733
The biggest competitors seem to be Chinese EV cars which sell to a mostly Chinese market. I haven't looked into it much but I have seen several videos about the poor quality of Chinese EV cars. I don't think they will catch on in the Western market.
Factor out China and Tesla is still well far ahead of the competition as of last year.
Their brand is nowhere near as strong as it was 10 years ago. Rivian is the new "cool" EV company, while Kia, Hyundai, Ford, and GM offer perfectly good normie alternatives. They had the dream of being apple, selling for twice the price of anyone else, but I don't see that happening.
I got curious so I found some better stats:
So Tesla has maintained consistentl sales of units of cars in the past 8 quarters while the other players are growing. 52% is still a lot but it doesn't seem like Tesla is able to really grow it's customer acquisition rate. EV in general is also slow to catch on. But in comparison to another individual company Tesla is still far ahead.
In comparison to Apple in 2024:
But this was a drop from when Apple basically had 100% of the market since they were basically the first popular smartphone. I think the fact that EV has a strong competitor in just regular cars (EVs are not that much better than regular gas cars, while smart phones were vastly superior to flip phones) coupled with many other players entering the market before Tesla could grow too big makes your summary correct.
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Cars are just too expensive to be iPhones. Apple hit that perfect price point where people are willing to pay $1000 vs a $300 Android because of the OS, convenience, style, brand and lack of desire to switch, and that means huge margins for Apple. People are not willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla vs $35,000 equivalent tier other car. That’s real money, which many car buyers literally cannot afford.
I think many people would pay that premium if the car could drive itself, but they just can't crack it.
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It seems to me like SpaceX is the stand-out success (reusable rockets are a big deal!) so there's a sort of natural gravitation towards it, perhaps particularly on here. But I think you raise a good point! In the spirit of answering your questions, here's my somewhat reflexive thoughts on the other stuff:
So, overall, based on my assessment, I'd say SpaceX is a huge W, Tesla a solid W so far, Boring company hasn't had it moment yet and may never, and Twitter probably a good thing on balance but the jury's still out on the end results for Musk.
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Well I think most people expect Twitter not to be that valuable.
Tesla is still one of the largest valued companies in the world. It is profitable car company. The latest FSD is amazing. The big question there is whether Elon will still be there if they try to screw him on his earned comp (after a terrible ruling by a Delaware judge).
Also it isn’t as sexy as talking about literally space travel.
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Yes! I wanted to bring it up in this comment but it ended up slipping my mind. This discussion is useful in figuring out where Elon's strengths and weaknesses are. Like you said, from the replies it seems like Falcon 9 and Starlink are his strong points.
Well, the only "short" I'd urge people to do is to avoid falling on any swords for the guy. He (rightfully) won a lot of goodwill with his takeover of Twitter, but I'm worried people are too defensive of him. It might all be very silly in the end, I doubt preventing the establishment to have a gotcha on the contrarians will work, even if it's achievable... but, I dunno, I feel like this will end up being a pretty big egg on some people's faces.
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Everything Musk does depends on the government being fairly friendly. The government is the big customer for SpaceX and Starlink (note that the FCC cut off some grant funds recently). The government is behind a lot of the push for electric cars and solar energy (both Tesla). The Boring Company would make its money from government if it ever made any. Twitter doesn't depend on the government but he makes no money from it thanks to the Left, Inc. boycott. This kinda leaves him in a tough spot -- he depends on government friendliness but he and the Democrats have a somewhat hostile relationship and they are willing to punish him for it. The Republicans, on the other hand, are less likely to push for electric cars and solar energy, though they're fine for SpaceX.
I feel like solar/batteries, specifically, are exempt from a ‘f you, greenies’ push by republicans because government solar programs are so often about giving middle class people free money.
The majority of Republicans with solar seem to be off grid and not eligible for the absurd subsidies given to California Democrats.
"I have solar and get paid $.5/kwh to use the grid as my battery!" <-probably leftist.
"I installed it myself" <-probably conservative.
"I'm off grid and power my home with a salvaged Tesla battery and some microcomputers I had laying around" <-there are two wolves inside you: they are both far-right libertarian congressman Thomas Massie.
This is probably one reason why IRA subsidies now require home inspections from "energy efficiency experts", other than the usual "jobs for the folx" pork.
Edit: this also applies to heat pumps, on a scale of "brags his $25k install is saving the planet", "installed it himself", and "is a real HVAC tech"
I've seen the first from people of both parties.
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Lots of middle-class suburban homeowners get solar as a home improvement, many of them fairly red. As a minor datapoint, I drive all over DFW frequently and see about as many solar panels on roofs in Tarrant county(light red) as Dallas county(deep blue), and only slightly fewer in Denton county(deep red). Exurbs aren't eligible for solar subsidies, just the tax credit, but I still see plenty of panels in exurbs. It's often a reasonable financial decision to install solar panels, even if they're a retarded basis for a power grid.
That's interesting. The majority of people I know here who did solar before the subsidies were fringe Christian survivalists (great folks, very practical, always good for a 5 gallon bucket of 1999-dated dried beans).
Now it's the Subaru and Prius crowd getting paid to put prayer flags on their roofs.
Think I ruined a "friendship" with one when the power went out at his place during the day, and I laughed at him because his grid-tie solar couldn't even power his own house. I may as well have been Mohammed spitting on his pagan idols.
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Maybe the neocon or Whig wings, but the minarchist and libertarian wings are quite willing to end subsidies.
They're pretty small. Fact of the matter is subsidies for at home solar- which probably benefits Elon Musk more than solar power plants- are fairly popular among the republican base.
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I forget who said it, but some Carl Sagan type science communicator/futurist predicted that whoever mines the first asteroid will be Earth's first trillionaire.
You know what, a quick google later, and it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Make of that what you will.
Casey Handmer writes some on why he doesn't think this is feasible here.
TL;DR: Transport's costly enough that there aren't many things that would be profitable. But for these, the market demand would quickly be saturated, meaning the price would go way down, so there wouldn't be the enormous revenues.
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DoD wants a spy satellite constellation.
Your argument is invalid.
I recognize this as a valid comeback, but I think their patience has limits. Politically the blob has turned against him. so the moment they find an alternative the gets ejected. This is why I think the EscaPADE mission is potentially the mark when the tide turns for him.
I mean, you might be right on Tesla, but .. even if the company goes bankrupt, worst that could happen he'd lose Twitter. (that'd be bad) because the debt collateral are Tesla shares iirc.
I'm pretty sure SpaceX is going down as well. Admiteddly contracts for BlackOps satellites, and Jewish Space Laserss are a wildcard, but if Bezos proves he can compete, that's when I'm betting the cascade starts.
That seems unlikely. Their pace of development is anaemic. SpaceX also developed Starlink - so they're the guy who are probably best at making large amounts of satellites.
Well, again, they are scheduled to go from zero to Mars this year. How well it goes is anyone's guess, and I'll admit that if their launch goes about as good as SpaceX's that will be very humiliating for them.
But if it works, it will prove what I'm suspecting - Elon's "iterative design" and "move fast and break things" are memes, and an anemic pace can easily prove to be faster.
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State department hates him, but I highly that is true is of the rest of them (people at DoD etc).
He's not critical for the day to day running of SpaceX.
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This doesn't make sense at all. Falcon 9 can already deliver about 4000 kg to Mars, so this hardly seems like a game-changing mission. If you want to talk about LEO, which is obviously what the DOD is more interested in, SpaceX in 2023 put over 1,000 metric tons into LEO. Even without Starship, there is no other company that can hope to do anything like those numbers anytime soon. The idea that the DoD is being held up by SpaceX is ludicrous. DOD is concerned about launch cadence, but with regards to ULA, not SpaceX. The only customer that could claim to be reasonably concerned about pace would be NASA with respect to HLS, but since the entire Artemis program is already underfunded and way behind for other reasons, they have little actual grievance.
Ok, why the push for Starship then? My contention is that Starship is one of the galaxy-brained promises Elon will never deliver on, and that this will be the end of him. If Falcon 9 is more than enough for them to rake the cash in, why not just rake the cash in, instead of blowing $1 billion on every rocket that goes boom?
Why?
Because that means SpaceX and its customers will be able to orbit 100 tons to LEO at a very low cost. In addition to satellite internet everywhere, this will enable spy satellite constellations, ballistic missile defence, orbiting telescopes, relatively affordable flights to the moon and much other stuff.
Ok, so your contention is that they're already making massive profits because they revolutionized space launches, and Starship is just a way to make even more money?
Would you consider contractors not being paid on time an indication that their financial situation is not that great?
What % of contractors are they not paying ? What's the total amount they spent on contractors and the % disputed?
I think I can get you the disputed amount (the article makes it sound like that info is public) but not in percentage terms.
This is a very good question, and I'd say people should ask similar ones about positive claims about Elon. People throw (unverified) Starlink growth and revenue numbers at me, ignoring the fact that they're meaningless without the costs part of the equation.
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One argument is dimensions. The difference between Falcon9 and a Starship to launch a cubesat is just economics, but the difference between the two to launch a fuckoff big mirror, not having to fold it up into a million pieces pretty much allows an entirely different and better design philosophy.
There's also some reliability arguments in favor of Starship's liquid methane fueling approach over the Falcon9's kerosene-fueled approach, especially given recent instability in fuel markets.
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First, your premises are wrong. Each prototype Starship launch almost certainly doesn't cost $1 billion. Per SpaceX, the whole development program is expected not to exceed 10 billion dollars. Estimates of the production cost of the Raptor engine is about $250000 each, so round that up to 50 engines per flight, double and you're still at only about $25 million. The rest of the ship is made out of relatively inexpensive stainless steel coil sheet, and the thermal tiles are made in-house. $250 million would be a liberal estimate, and more conservative estimates are about $100 million per launch.
Second, there is no desire to just rake the cash in. As with Amazon, the goal of SpaceX is to rake in cash for the purpose of further development, so as to obtain a position that is not just nearly unassailable by competitors, but creates a completely new market. And of course, Musk, as the controlling owner of the company, has goals for the company that do require Starship, which is capable of orbiting more than 100 metric tons of payload per launch, such as establishing a continuous presence on Mars. This requires lots of bulk mass, which only Starship could possibly deliver. One reason it was selected for HLS despite the development work needed is because you'd be landing not just a small landing craft on every mission, but what amounts to an entire base.
SpaceX has been quite explicit that the goal with Starship is to completely cannibalize Falcon 9 launches, and to eventually discontinue Falcon 9 altogether, as they expect a fully reusable Starship launch cycle (even expending $1 million in propellant per launch) to cost less not just per kilogram but per launch than Falcon 9 which does requires a new upper stage for each launch. (Though I think Falcon 9 + Dragon will remain the preferred human launch system to LEO for longer, unless some kind of Starship transporter with more robust abort modes is developed.)
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I agree a lot with your sentiment. Musk does happen to share a lot of my values, but he's definitely a snake-oil salesman to some degree, and I'd hate to work for the man, not only because I don't agree with his goals, but he's also very petty from what I've heard, and too confident in his own abilities where he has no real expertise.
I do respect his accomplishments for what they are, but electric cars, rocketry, and satellite internet were all established before him, and none of his innovations have shown to be game changing. The coolest thing he's done recently is fire most of Twitter's staff, but we all kind of knew that most people weren't doing anything real at these companies, he just proved it. X hasn't really improved in my view since his takeover, but it hasn't declined significantly either.
His true talent is being able to stay relevant and alive (in the sense of playing the game, not actually staying alive) through any means. He's a trickster, and I respect that, because it's the opposite of my skillset, so I tip my cap. The man can spin plates, no doubt about that. But, like you, I feel his day is coming, and all his plates will finally shatter on the ground.
Twitter is noticeably worse for me. About 40% of the time the app is in a state in which no images or videos will load. It's full of bots, which I never noticed before. I get follow requests from bots several times a week, even though I have a private account and have never posted anything.
There are more ads and oftentimes I am shown the same ad three or four times in a row. The recommendation algorithm sometimes does weird things. Recently, about a third of the recommended Tweets were in Turkish. I don't speak a word of Turkish.
I do like that there is less censorship, but I don't believe for a second that firing so many people hasn't caused serious problems.
Other companies that have done mass layoffs are having similar problems, though not as severe. Most software I use has gotten worse lately. Facebook Messenger is especially bad.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I myself have noticed different problems on different accounts. On my main, where I spend 99% of my time on Twitter (and where I post), I do experience BOT interactions (follows, likes, DMs, but not replies), but the difference between how it is now versus how it was in this regard is a difference in degree, not kind. It is definitely worse than it was, but it's not insanely worse. The ads are different, and I noticed that some ads are even unlabeled, that is, they don't tell you that they're ads. Another thing with ads is that some of them don't handle UI interactions in kind with other tweets. For example, some ads instantly open the in-app browser whereas on a normal tweet the same interaction would be interpreted as part of a scroll action. I have never experienced the foreign language thing, that's truly odd.
On my private account that I created after Elon took over, on which I don't post and only follow a few accounts, I get 2-3 BOT follow requests per day. It's weird. Also, I had to solve like 12 captchas just to sign up; I thought that was funny.
I guess it comes down to what you attribute to the mass layoffs vs. what you attribute to Elon's sense of product and product management. I think a lot of the bad things we're seeing are due to the latter, not the former.
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He helped other tech companies learn as well. Facebook, Google, and friends announced big layoffs after this display. A true visionary.
I mean they chickened out and only did 10-20% instead of 75%, but still.
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A more charitable reading would be that Musk is uniquely aspirational - not for money or power, but for real technological progress. He really, honestly believes taking a chance on a technological leap forward is worth large investments even if success is not guaranteed or even highly probable. This is refreshingly different than most other businesses, which either tend to sclerotic, bloated enterprises trying to squeeze every last bit of profit out of absurdly well-tread technological paths, or absolute grifters who don't even intend to try to accomplish the goals they set, but do plan to enrich themselves along the way. This is why I think he is so valuable - he has both the vision to see openings for large progress, and the ambition to make an honest try.
People tend to lump Musk into the "grifter" category because his vision and ambition is usually larger than what turns out to be possible, but they ignore that what does turn out to be possible is usually still well beyond what everyone else thought was possible. This happens because he actually does take the time to learn the fundamentals, and because he understands important concepts that we have tended to downplay in the West, such as the importance and the benefits of engineering for manufacturability and vertical integration. In way too many businesses, especially public companies, nearly every single person in management all the way up to the board of directors is far more concerned with ass-covering and deflecting failure than they are with taking on challenges and engineering solutions.
That is why, to a mild degree, I am a Musk supporter. The future belongs to those who show up, and the rewards belong to those who take chances and solve problems. Humanity will stagnate if everything is left in the hands of committees and study groups, people who are not "too confident", and if failing to achieve total victory is deemed more shameful than never trying. Musk is, for whatever faults, a Man in the Arena. He's not a prophet, but he has a unique set of skills that has put him in a position to be a singular force for technological and material progress.
I'd also point out that he has the capital, not as a knock in the false 'inherited from his dad's emerald mine' vein, but in that I bet I could find plenty of nerds with the same phenotype (obsession with engineering/science, poor social skills, visions of grandeur) but without the cash. Hell, just wander around the labs at MIT and screen out anyone who looks well put-together and has any kind of connection to VCs/business in their CVs and I bet you'd be able to find a couple Musks.
Maybe the drive/aggression and obsession with details are a bit harder to replicate...
True, and I think that's because some his unique set of skills include ruthless business sense something that nerds are generally lousy at and/or lack experience with.
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Are you for real?
You're joking. They ate the launch market, slashed prices majorly. Game changed.
If BFR works, total game changer.
And they did by reusing rockets which was a game changer
What does BFR mean?
The big new Mars rocket SpaceX is building.
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Officially "Big Falcon Rocket" but this is commonly known to be a euphemism for the actual meaning, "Big Fucking Rocket". Circa 2019 IIRC it got renamed to "Starship" so the term is deprecated at any rate.
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Big fucking rocket?
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This reads to me, respectfully, as:
"A fundamental problem for the Wright Brothers is that there just isn't all that much demand for air travel."
The hope is that with Starship bringing the cost of sending mass to space down to earth (pun intended) that entrepreneurs will jump at finding new ways to monetize low earth orbit and, eventually beyond.
If it doesn't do so, I do fear we might be resigned to remaining a single-planet species
There’s tons of economic use cases for near-earth space exploration. There’s fewer for exploration at remove and the only one for actual space colonization is paying people to go somewhere conveniently far away.
I think the bootstrapping process kind of ramps up naturally, if we are serious about keeping our species alive and happy and people continue to demand a decent standard of living.
Get Geostationary power stations collecting sunlight and beaming energy to the surface.
Repeat this until almost all energy needs for the planet are met. Energy is 'too cheap to meter' for residential uses. Commercial/industrial production is functionally independent of local energy availability.
Notice that the sun gives off a LOT more energy that you could be using.
Expand operations to harness ever more energy, driving need for greater presence in space.
Either start mining the local orbital bodies (possibly including planets) for mass and resources or colonize them as further bases of operations.
Assuming you avoid an AI apocalypse, don't trigger a species-wiping civil war, or some crazy bioengineered plague, seems like there's no reason humans WOULDN'T push out into space as far as they possibly can if the cost of doing so was brought within reason.
As a thought experiment, I'm curious what sort of frame of mind you think would convince people to leave Earth en masse to start a space colony. I grew up watching Star Trek, so I like the idea, I just can't really reasonably picture people of 2024 electing to go live their lives in such confined quarters. What are we missing to make that palatable, or am I just not the target audience? Maybe "fully automated", but we can't even deliver that terrestrially.
The reasons previous generations packed up and left their homelands are pretty well documented: religion, economics, escaping conflicts, and such. I don't see as clean a mapping there into moving into space, but I'm curious to hear ideas. Are we waiting for a cult explicitly based on sending it's followers to live in the
Promised LandSea of Tranquility?Greatness? Doing hard things? Some people are attracted to that challenge. Add in the potential for economic return…
What potential economic return?
Every economic use case for space relies on either 1) being near earth 2) expeditions to go get stuff and bring it back to earth(asteroid mining and the like) or 3) someone else being willing to fund the giant money pit of creating demand up there. Colonies are very firmly in the third category; somebody has to be willing to lose a lot of money to get them up and running, and in the real world there’s probably not a McGuffin to justify it.
Fundamentally there’s just not any reason to expect a return from it. There’s people that would quite like to go, sure. But a major government has to spend a significant fraction of their budget over a long time horizon setting it up. That’s the kind of resources we’re talking about here.
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Something vaguely similar to what would convince them to crowd aboard a rickety wooden ship to cross the ocean to an untamed wilderness or buy a Conestoga Wagon and head 'west' braving various dangers and risks to stake a dubious claim on some land.
There's some subset of the population who have a different (arguably, defective?) risk calculus/tolerance when it comes to tackling new frontiers. It seems likely that >1% of the population is willing to sign on for such a trip with relatively dubious reward.
The tricky part, from my view, is that we'd need some of the best, brightest, and most adaptable, and they might be in shorter supply.
The cheap and easy answer is to what would motivate such action is to assume we send automated drones ahead to make things habitable and reasonably pleasant before the average biological human travels there.
In my mind, a probable option is the creation of O'Neil cylinders that are very directly optimized for some particularized environment which would make them extremely appealing for long-term habitation. One thing humans have consistently been willing to uproot and relocate for is desirable places to live.
Instead of retiring down to Florida or going on nonstop cruises, for example, I could imagine a dedicated "retirement orbital" which can house millions upon millions of septuagenarians while guaranteeing they all get to live on waterfront property, have sunshine and temperate climate year-round, and have minimal risk of crime or external diseases sweeping in.
You say this is an overly ambitious project which would require an obscene amount of resources and labor to construct, and you're right. I counter by pointing out that mankind has already built The Villages and similar communities across the state of Florida and elsewhere at great economic cost, so really I'm just proposing we scale up a model that has already been proven.
This partially solves the issue of who would be willing to risk it. Older people who have lived their life might not mind a risky trip to the place of endless bliss, even if it does make it nigh-impossible for the grandkids to visit.
My tongue is in cheek when I say this, but my larger point is that starship is a necessary step if we want to figure out what viable business models might be available in space.
Heading west has lots of risks, but requires few resources (especially, few resources by the standards of people who don't use electricity or plumbing) If it took a million dollars or even $50000 to head West, nobody would have done it.
Yes, but that's why I think it is fair to speculate that Starship bringing launch costs down might be a sufficient catalyst to get people interested in traveling out there.
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It seems like some of the precursor missing technologies are obvious, but comparatively few are working on them. I'm thinking small-scale closed-loop habitats: Biosphere 2 was cute, but it mostly failed as an experiment and wasn't even a reasonable size for space colonies. I think we're quite short of the required technology, but it seems a fairly easy experiment to run iteratively on Earth to get there.
Biosphere 2 is not a good model for a planetary colony, which would undoubtedly make use of planetary resources to supply themselves and dispose of waste likewise.
That's probably true, but I think it is a reasonable model for a long-term space station or asteroid colony, which has long seemed to me more appealing than planets, especially in the short term. The bottom of a gravity well seems like one of the least economically useful niches, unless you really can't find enough raw materials on moons and asteroids, or unless you have a serious proposal for terraforming.
More to the point: if you want to build a space colony, starting iteratively on closed-loop environs (assume spin gravity, which I've been told is practical for station designs not much larger than the ISS) seems a low cost, relatively low-risk research effort we could be doing more of today.
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Interesting comment -- so you think a BS3 could be made to work if 'import of any resource somewhat easily available on Mars' and 'throw whatever you want out the airlock' were allowed?
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Colonization is very very expensive and the kind of groups that would take that deal are not very popular.
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Early pioneers would become historical legends, for one.
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Might?
Last year you wrote,
more than three years AFTER SpaceX put people in orbit. SpaceX was then (and still currently is, though I'm excited and hopeful for Starliner this week) in fact the only American team putting people in orbit. Is there any explanation other than bias for opining with that level of ignorance? Was that incident still not enough to make it obvious to you that you're coming to your conclusions first and then trying to assemble facts to rationalize them afterward?
That should have been the point where the laudable idea of:
hit the uncomfortable reality of being proven wrong, smashed your broken epistemology to splinters, and gave you a chance to build a working one to replace it.
"I'll happily wear the DUM DUM hat for the rest of the day", though a tiny step (on the order of 1 day / 3 years, 0.1%) in the right direction, was clearly not a rebuild in progress.
The irony here is that, though I'd agree with many of your points above (as would most techies; e.g. "Elon time" is something in between a sad joke and an actual conversion coefficient at this point), I still can't actually trust your presentation of them to add anything on top the bare hyperlinks themselves, and even with the links I've got to worry that selection bias is a problem. How could I justify further trust as more than Gell-Mann amnesia?
Indeed, my past posts is why I said I could be considered biased.
No, but on the other hand, I think ignorance is self-justifying! It is our default state after all.
First of all, I hope I'm not coming across as believing I'm some sort of an expert. I have a mild interest on the subject, follow some of the news, and am going off on vibes. In fact a good part of the reason why I'm posting is to test Vibe Analysis. I'm pretty sure it's a valid way of analyzing the world - I predicted Trump with Vibe Analysis, I predicted COVID with Vibe Analysis, I predicted BLM2 with Vibe Analysis... the problem is that my wife is the only person that heard me making these predictions, and her memory isn't even that good so I have no bragging rights. Now the vibes are telling me Elon is about to crash, and if it's true, I want bragging rights, god dammit! If it's wrong, and I have to wear the DUM DUM hat until the rest of my life - I'm happy with that deal. My pride is a small price to pay for an affordable ticket to space.
Posting here is also a way to verify whether or not I'm receiving all the relevant vibes. It's a bit like my TransTrend prediction post (and it's follow-up), I felt the vibes shift, pro-trans people going from extremely confident to somewhat on the back foot. I wanted to plant a flag, and see if they'll try and take it, and they didn't... at least not in the same way. It was no longer "The Science is on our side, chud!" and a lot more of "oh, are you sure you want the government to dictate what adults can do with their bodies" or petty relitigatiion of Culture War history. Same with Elon - I think his companies are going to crash, I wanted to see if anyone is going to call me a retard for it, and so far the arguments in his defense boil down to him already deserving some sort of trophy... Fine! Give him his bloody trophy, I just want to know whether his companies are sustainable.
If I'm right I also want to warn you lot, so you don't suffer from splash damage of Elon's collapse. I'm planning on spending the foreseeable future bashing woke-supporters for being for "gender affirming care", I'm planning on establishing a goddamn museum, I don't want them to have "Oh yeah? Your side supported the arch-conman Elon Musk" as a comeback!
Sorry if this is too schizo, but I am, after all, the Tinfoil Gigachad... even if that tinfoil hat has "DUM DUM" written on it.
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@ArjinFerman
Looking at the previous thread that roystgnr linked, I see you arguing that HughesNet of all things has comparable speeds and prices to Starlink.
Speed is hardly the only important factor for an internet connection. HughesNet has latency in the 600-800ms range, making online gaming impossible and phone calls an intolerably laggy mess. It has hard data caps that make watching streaming video in any significant quantity a non-starter. And it has a horrifically slow upload speed, something like 3 Mbps, which would make my (and many other people's) work from home jobs impossible.
Starlink has none of these limitations. I gotta agree, into the Gell-Mann amnesia bucket you go.
Yeah, I know. My question is, do I really need gaming-rate latencies, when I'm in the middle of literal nowhere? I'm sure there are cases where the answer is a resounding "Yes!". Drone operators probably hate being fragged as much as gamers, and it's only so many times that your CO is going to take "lag" as an excuse. This is why I'm also willing to believe there is a lot more money in it, than a naive analysis of the civillian market would let on, and possibly how SpaceX was sustained for so long.
But for everyone else? Bro, move somewhere close to a cell tower. I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe you pretty much have to go underground to escape cell coverage.
Either that or live with the lag, and that's the whole question here. How many people absolutely need to low latencies, because if they don't the ISP's that are in geo-synchronous orbit are going to slaughter you on costs. For every one of their satellites, you're going to need... scores? hundreds?
I had cellular internet (also p2p wifi at one point) before Starlink, and while they sucked less than high-orbit, they suck more than Starlink.
It is extremely impressive that in a few short years Musk has been able to offer a service... lets say an order of magnitude better than literally any legacy telecom in the world -- these are extremely big companies with all sorts of infrastructure already in place, and he has totally slain them. I do believe that in the next year or two you will be able to connect a phone to his constellation from literally anywhere -- this is also very impressive tech-wise, and it happened super-fast.
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It's not about need, it's about want, and even when it is about need HughesNet can't meet the need and paying $100 a month for Starlink sounds a hell of a lot better than your suggestion of... buying a different house in a less rural location?
Clearly. Look up population density for the US compared to most European countries and you'll understand, maybe. You also might understand (one of the many reasons) why public transit in the US is so much more difficult.
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I don’t even understand these arguments. The motte for Elon Musks is he’s the most important person of the 21st century to date and the most important engineer since probably 1900. Electric cars didn’t exists before him. I believe he’s the only person to start a car company from scratch in a 100 years without state backing. Rockets had completely had no advance for 60 years before him. His satellite internet is an entirely new industry. He’s also the first backer of openAI which is like Microsoft’s entire bet the company bet.
Bill Gates invented a computer operating system and excel. Steve Jobs improved smart phone tech that already existed and created an animation company. Also competed in computers. Musks accomplishments seem above these two guys.
What is the Bailey for Elon Musks? He’s literally god or at a minimum a comic book super hero here to save mankind?
The motte for him is no reason to dump Musks as an ally. There is no human on earth I would prefer as an ally.
Electric cars existed for 120 years before Tesla. Why should I care that Musk made them popular? They’re not particularly better than ICE cars; there is no great improvement to the consumer.
He didn’t make them popular. He got them to the point of being economically competitive and profitable to sell which is a huge step forward.
We did nuclear fusion decades ago. We still can’t do it economically.
This seems to be the motte and Bailey. People say things like Jobs or Musk didn’t invent XYZ so they are no big deal.
But inventing things are easy! Scaling and explaining to people why they need or want XYZ is much more difficult.
We as a society praise investors way too much and discredit business builders.
Very few people invent things any more. I think someone can claim they invented mRNA. Everyone else builds on the backs of others. Products are too complex now for one person to invent a rocket. Which of course already existed by Musks rockets seem a big leap forward from what existed before. The process of creating a new tech today is having a lot of domain knowledge on what is now possible (Theranos not possible but reusable rockets were possible), hyping enough to finance (or being rich from last product), capability of hiring/inspiring enough of the .5% IQ to work with you on the project. Musks didn’t invent AI, but he had enough domain knowledge to make a play when certain techs were ready to create the product. It seems as though he has a much better ability to step in at the right time than others.
He seems a lot like Ken Griffin. Who has a good feel for building out organizations that win. He also shares a trait with Ken of firing a lot of people.
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Elon Musk didn't found Tesla. Electric cars existed long before him. Satellite internet has been around for a long time before him (though I will admit his has better performance). Him backing OpenAI is cool, but it could also be counted as a miss. I bet he wishes he were at the helm instead of sama.
On the contrary, I don't think anything Musk has really accomplished rises to the level of the iPhone, which is, so far, the defining innovation of the 21st century.
I very strongly disagree. There were smartphones before the iPhone, including with all sorts of applications and stylus interface over finger interface. The iPhone was the most popular smartphone and it will deserve a note on history for representing the moment that they spread, and represented an advance. But a small enough which was inevitable. As far as technological innovation goes, I am not that impressed. Still deserving praise for capturing the market though and some innovation on some features. But I wouldn't consider it sufficiently innovative to represent the definitive innovation of the 21st century. More representing the point of time that smartphones spread.
The OS was also preferable by many users over prior alternatives, and represented an inovvation, but I wouldn't call that a sufficiently impressive innovation for the praise you offered. Although definitely a great product at the right time.
ETA: Apparently a different smartphone was available in stores a month before the iPhone with a finger touchscreen interface. https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/
You can't disagree without offering your own pick for the invention of the century (so far) :D
That being said, I agree with much of your characterization of the iPhone, though I still say that Jobs was the only one to put the pieces together correctly. Likewise, Musk has the opportunity to do the same thing as Jobs for any of his products, especially Tesla, and I think he's failing. Tesla doesn't have near the same prestige or mindshare as Apple did after they released the iPhone, not even close. And while I do say a fair bit of Teslas on the road, it's still rare enough for it to be remarkable for where I live (and I live in a place that is biased towards Tesla).
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The smartphone is probably the early 20th century innovation but it was going to occur with or without Steve Jobs.
Which I think is the big fundamental difference between Musks and Jobs. Rockets and electric cars did not have any meaningful innovation before Musks.
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Not founding Tesla is a technical difference without a real difference. The company was an idea before him with I believe no revenue but maybe they sold some hand build cars. And now does $100 billion in revenue. Warren Buffett didn’t found Berkshire Hathaway. It was a shell company with a cheap asset or two he completely build and revolutionized. In a meaningful use of the word he created Tesla.
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In magnitude, surely. In terms of positive outcome, that seems pretty questionable.
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Ok, well that, to me, is the Bailey. Upon interrogating the arguments, the Motte ends up being something like "Ok he's hyped up, but he still innovated a lot of stuff" or "But look at how much his companies are worth".
The hell they didn't. They were driving around golf courses for decades before that. People didn't drive them on roads before, because it might no economic sense, and here's the kicker: we still don't know if it makes any economic sense. They're being hyped and subsidized by tech enthusiasts, and clueless green activists, in a futile attempt to do something about global warming, and despite that they're not really enticing when compared to ICE cars.
A completely meaningless achievement, if it's based on promises he will never deliver on, and his company ends up crashing.
Reusability is not a fundamental advancement, it was always a question of whether it's worth the effort, and again, it's even less clear that it is, then in the case of electric cars, since we have no insight into the costs.
I hope you're right, and I end up looking like an idiot, but don't say I didn't warn you, if I don't.
Launch cost per kilogram to orbit became 10 times less because of Musk. That's a enormous achievement and already enough to hold utmost respect towards him. Even if everything Elon's critics say about him is true, it doesn't change this fact.
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I feel like this is maximally negative on huge accomplishments.
And you can do the same thing for Steve Jobs. He invented nothing. Animation and smart phones existed before him. The gap between electric cars and electric golf carts is far more than BlackBerry to Apple. You can always repeat that’s not a big accomplishment. But I think those are big accomplishments.
I'd be happy to! I hate Apple and all it's products! They did invent nothing, all their products are hype, and people willing to pay a premium to look high-status. If someone tried to paint Jobs as a once-in-a-century innovator I'd be on their ass too. But the difference between Jobs and Musk is that Jobs company is sustainable in a way that Musk's will prove not to be. I think he also tended to deliver the products he announced, but I can't say I followed him very closely.
I am curious why are you so driven to go after Musks? I get vibes that are the same as Holocaust Deniers. Where you might be right he’s overrated compared to popular opinion similarly like how a HC might be correct deaths were a good bit lower than reported but the whole obsession with it is backed by a deep hatred of Jews.
My impression is that he believes both that Musk is likely to fail, that his failures are going to be catastrophic for the interests of the people supporting him, and that the resulting risk profile is not properly appreciated by his supporters, who are backing him because they confuse memes for reality. This seems like an entirely reasonable thing to be concerned about, and comparing it to holocaust denial seems pretty inflammatory.
That’s the thing. I don’t think it’s a reasonable opinion at all. The guy has founded three different companies with huge market values. SpaceX trades hands at over $200 billion in private markets, Tesla has a public market value of over $200 billion, OpenAI has a weird market structure as a nonprofit but if was a normal corporate probably would have trades happening at over $200 billion market cap. Now I don’t necessarily need to agree with the valuations specifically, but I do believe in some form of the efficient market. Trying to say he’s a loser when there is fairly obvious signs that he’s very well accomplished. I can see the market being irrational short term but 2 of these firms have been trading >$100 billion for over 3 years.
That’s the only position that I see that feels similar to me.
I would add in he helped PayPal though obviously was pushed out.
But still a guy involved in that many massive companies isn’t luck alone.
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For the record @FCfromSSC is 100% right about my motivation. The difference between me and Holocaust deniers is that I hope I'm wrong. Like I said my pride is a small price to pay for getting to see Earth from orbit, before I die.
Since you brought it up, I'll also ping @Belisarius - this is why my arguments sounded like they're about financial analysis.
Look, my entire point is that the value of his companies is propped up by promises of crazy technologies he's not going to deliver on. When that becomes apparent to the public, it's over, they're crashing. OpenAI is probably exempted, but does he have any actual control over it? I thought it was all Sam Altman.
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Say what you will about Jobs on a technical level (not an iPhone or Mac user myself), but the real genius was positioning the company as a reliable luxury brand that produced reasonably friendly, polished products.
The iPhone was not the first capacitive multi touch phone to hit the market, but it was the first to really gain consumer mind share. I was around to witness "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." on Slashdot in response to the iPod, but despite owning a Nomad myself it's debatable technical superiority meant little in the market.
And I will give Apple credit that their engineers are still really good, and product management keeps a surprisingly small stable of unique parts for a company their size. Without Jobs they seem a bit listless in terms of focus on new product lines (maybe AR will work for them?) but continue to innovate more gradually, and drag the rest of the PC industry along with them: their homebrew processors are supposed to be pretty good although I haven't tried them.
I don't think Jobs was himself a great engineer, but solid product management is underrated and deserves credit.
They're 4-5 years ahead of their closest competitor, Qualcomm (even with the Nuvia acquisition). They're not actually any faster than normal PCs, but they're excellent when it comes to idle power consumption (which is what the computer is doing most of the time).
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My guess is that the combination of Twitter being not really his sort of company with the "Fair Game" notice the Biden administration put out on him in retaliation for buying it is why his star's falling.
If he can figure out how to delegate Twitter, and/or if the massive lawfare stops for one reason or another, he might return to form, but you're right that he's way off it.
Yes, I think that's a significant component of it, but it's more of an accelerant, than the cause. If he actually cracks robo-taxis, or something, his progressive detractors will have no other choice but to quietly seethe. If he doesn't, and all he'll have is a promise of yet-another-awesome-thing, that gimmick would run out of fuel sooner or later.
Not necessarily; they could block it through legal and regulatory mechanisms.
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I don't know about cars or twitter, but SpaceX is killing it.
Starlink turned from a crazy moonshot to: A) being vital for Ukraines defense against Russia and essential for US national security (Starshield)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/musks-spacex-is-building-spy-satellite-network-us-intelligence-agency-sources-2024-03-16/
B) printing money
https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2024-revenue/
Your link is from 2021, and in the last 3 years SpaceX (despite or because of Elons panic) dealt with Starship not being available yet. It will hopefully decrease the cost (and enable larger satellites), but it is not necessary anymore for Starlink being a business. A Falcon 9 launch is as cheap as $20 million (or less) and boosters are now certified to fly 20 times (and they plan to double that).
The relatively short life time for satellites also won't be a problem, this is more to placate people afraid of Kessler-syndrome. For example Amazon Kuiper plans a life time of 7 years for their satellites. SpaceX can easily match that or go higher (propellant is a low amount of the satellite payload). They are still ramping up though and when it begins to be an issue in 5 years they will have Starship available. And if not, then they will launch triple the amount of Falcon 9. And in any case they will have better satellite version (faster speed, direct smartphone connections), so they have to replace older versions anyway.
Artemis is convoluted, but it is that way to make it "congress proof". NASA is very smart in partnering with other countries. The first non-American on the Moon will be a Japanese and Europe is building the Lunar Gateway, these foreign policy entanglement makes it impossible to cancel the project.
And if Starship and an orbital SpaceX fuel depot work, it can only accelerate future Artemis missions (maybe replace SLS).
If you want to bet against/for SpaceX there is a fun Subreddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HighStakesSpaceX/
Thanks for the response!
This one will take some reading / thinking before I have anything to say.
I thought a bit more about it:
It is very easy to prove Elon Musk wrong, because almost everything he says or hypes up will not happen. Like his plan to build a prototype of Starship and have it 6 month later orbital, ugh, that was not only optimistic, that was hopelessly naive! Same es full driving I guess.
And he always makes the same mistake in taking zero buffer into account for problems or "unknown unknowns". He also primarily focuses on engineering challenges: is something against the laws of physics? No? Then it is possible and can be done super quick … or not, because he missed that there is a slow bureaucracy which has to approve it and permits have to be done and environmental reviews have to be studied etc etc. Musk has a big blind spot for politics and social stuff. If he were more clever, if he were a true evil genius, he would forge relationships and network with the (leftist) political elite. He would rub shoulders and finance AOC. He would charm and disarm his political opponents. Instead he shitposts on twitter when Biden didn't invite Tesla to the electric vehicle summit.
I personally don't believe I will see a Mars city in my lifetime (though hope dies last) and I think his Mars presentations should be seen psychologically as Elons "happy place". His castle in the sky which he can build in his imagination unimpeded by real life constraints. But in real life there will be astronomical hurdles, from the biggest technical challenge humanity has ever seen, to needing the US President being on board, to the UN not outlawing Mars colonization, to avoiding a veto by China, and what about public opinion and anti-billionaire sentiment etc etc.
BUT all this said:
SpaceX is on the cusp of making Starship working (next test flight 4 is planned in a week). Starship will enable a fuel depot in orbit. An orbital fuel depot will slash costs for the coming lunar base (which also sounds like a pipe dream, but will be built in the 2030s).
You linked to Destin from Smarter every day. There is a small cute twist here. Destin is a smart guy and does his homework, I bet he could recite by heart every size and dimension of the Apollo Eagle lander (especially as his grandfather worked for NASA). And he surely saw the graphics of the Starship HLS lander. If pressed he would have freely confessed that HLS is bigger and that this is nice and enables cool missions etc, but it wouldn't change his criticism much. Because this is factual knowledge. It is memorizing a few numbers and facts. This is not understanding.
Look what happens when Destin for the first time sees the mockup of the SpaceX rocket, feels the space, and imagines that this is really going to the Moon:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AiZd5yBWvYY&t=2719
NASA 42:25:
Destin 46:25:
Seeing is believing.
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The thing is, from the outside view (also partially as an Elon stan) I remember all these arguments about landing rockets - from Arianespace, half a decade ago. It always had an undertone of desperation - "well, it isn't proven that landing rockets is even possible", then "well, it isn't proven that landing rockets is even financially beneficial" - with the unstated "of course, if it is, we're just dead, so let's not think about that."
Somebody who's currently taking your lunch money has no need to document their balance sheet. The default assumption, IMO, is that reuseability is very profitable, and so is Starlink. I did some math on it a few years ago, and there's basically no half-way on that service; it's either ruinously cash negative or deliriously cash positive. Given that SpaceX is happily running a hardware-rich experimental launch program right now, I suspect the latter.
(I have no opinion on Tesla.)
Also Falcon 9 launches were both profitable and undercutting the competition by massive margins before SpaceX ever landed a single booster. The space industry was beyond ripe for disruption.
From what I understand we don't actually know that. Do we have any audited numbers on their launch costs?
The thing is, if it's not the case, we have to consider that SpaceX is putting down more launches than the rest of the market put together as some sort of stunt or fraud, which starts to edge into conspiracy theory. Either Musk is a machiavellian genius running a massive misinformation campaign using billion dollars of hardware, or F9 launches are profitable and more launches are more profitable, which would explain why SpaceX literally started a separate company to justify being able to make more launches.
Not if you realize the overwhelming majority of those launches are for Starlink, than it becomes a straight-forward application of using hype to generate more hype to extract as much money from investors as possible.
I unironically believe that this is closer to the truth than the alternative, and that we'll see it soon enough (I'll go with Thunderf00t's 5 year clock, starting last year, though like I said the vibes are telling me it might happen a lot sooner).
Even before Starlink launches began, SpaceX was launching roughly three times as many rockets as ULA per year
That still massively diminishes the size of the "conspiracy theory", and doesn't change the fact we don't have any audited numbers. Like I said, we'll see soon enough.
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Sure, but if they don't publish it, I have no way of confirming that they are, in fact, taking anyone's lunch money.
Sure but if a rocket is worth launching and throwing away, then it stands to reason that getting it back in one piece will be financially positive for you unless you are spending a LOT on refurbishing. The case is very intuitive imo.
Not necessarily. I had a comment about this, but I think it got sucked into the abyss when out database crapped out, but the short of it is that due to the fundamental properties of rocketry, you get the most oomph out of the last bit of fuel you burn. If you reuse your rocket, that last bit will be necessary to bring your rocket back. So there's a simple exercise you can do with an excel spreadsheet that shows you the economics of reusability relative to one time use, and it's not impossible to end up above the break-even point. The Shuttle was barely below, and it wasn't really due to NASA's incompetence.
Hasn't China developed reusable rocket tech? ( despite not owning a single emerald mine!)
Not that I would expect the CCP to be awesome with allocating capital, but if you assume they're not completely incompetent then it would blow up the theory that SpaceX can't possibly gain economic advantage from it.
There's at least a half dozen Chinese companies (plus their government) working on reusable orbital rocket boosters, hopefully to be operational within the next couple years for some, but AFAIK none of them are beyond hop tests yet.
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Thunderf00t is a pompous simpleton, don't believe his click bait.
It doesn't matter how much fuel a rocket uses, or if the rocket uses more fuel to be reusable, because fuel cost are negligible in the grand scheme of things.
The propellant cost of a Falcon 9 is around $300.000 for liquid oxygen and $200.000 for rocket grade kerosine (you also need to buy expensive Helium to pressurize tanks, there is a statement of Musk that this costs as much as oxygen).
https://spaceimpulse.com/2023/06/13/how-much-does-rocket-fuel-cost/
So propellant cost is well under a million dollars. Even the Space Shuttle only used a few millions (but the Shuttle project cost billions every year).
Fuel is nothing. SpaceX sells a launch for $67 million.
Sure, there is the cost for ground infrastructure, but this is a fixed cost and is proportional cheaper the more launches SpaceX does. We don't know the cost for refurbishment, but not throwing the engines away alone must be a big win. The last time the company took investor money was in January 2023 (750 million). Their cost of business/revenue is now guessed as over a dozen billions. This is not possible if they are not cashflow positive. I am unsure if they are profitable altogether because they invest so much in Starship, they are building another launch tower in Texas and two other Starship towers in Florida, but this is just building the machine which builds the thing.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kpK1h4GvGPs
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The trick is that you split the rocket in two halves, and then you end up on the good side of the rocket equation because you mostly only need to brake your engines and your landing fuel, and also you can use a lot of air friction. Now, I refuse to watch an hour long video with that title, lol, but any video that doesn't at least account for these two factors is bullshitting you. (How about link the actual spreadsheet instead of the video, and I'll try to fix it?)
The Shuttle wasn't exactly due to NASA incompetence, because by the time the final plans were drawn up the damage was already done. However, the Shuttle was an still an unusually bad example of a reusable rocket.
Also the fuel costs are basically a nonfactor. SpaceX have an issue in that their F9 rockets are overbuilt and undersized, to the point where they've literally started making their engines worse as a cost-cutting measure by saving on material. Landing is an unusually good value proposition for them, because they already have isp overhang. The rocket equation is simply not a relevant limiting factor for their market.
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In addition to this, there are some less-obvious pernicious possibilities: running the factory to make rockets is, itself, a cost, and doesn't scale amazingly well with respect to cost or quality. One could conceivably develop reusable rockets, meaning you could reduce (first-stage) production from every couple weeks to a couple new units a year, which sounds like a cost savings, but suddenly you need to reorganize your employees and roles are no longer as specialized, your QA folks are dragged into an unfamiliar task every six months, and a lot more time is spent churning on unfamiliar tasks. And good luck running a "do it the same, right way every time" quality program when nobody immediately remembers the last one: suddenly your high-throughput factory is now making bespoke aerospace parts like old-school space programs are famous for, and costs rise accordingly.
I'm not saying that has happened, but it's at least a possibility.
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Most of your analysis is based on economic performance and your negative opinion of how he runs his business even though he has been very successful. Frankly, since this is the culture war thread, why should I really particularly care about the fact that the guy is not the business Messiah? I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis of Tesla, but I also don't think you are even particularly negative about what he is doing. So Tesla is business as usual. Ok, and? It doesn't have to be the best. I don't think there are that many blind Elon fanboys here.
The interesting issue about Musk is more twitter and his influence. Where he as usually overpromised, underdelivered, compromised with powers that be, but I would say his purchase does count as an overall net positive contribution.
Space X is also a very successful company taking parts of a role that one would expect NASA to take. Do I agree, or disagree about your specific analysis, then? Well, I didn't bother to read their financial statements, so I am not qualified. What I know is that Space X is highly innovative and even the American goverment rely on them in regards to part of what they are doing. Or with technology like Starlink.
Your analysis is more like what a random individual who made some research on the issue would provide when trying to suggest whether we should, or shouldn't buy shares on Elon's companies. I can't really answer adequately whether you are correct, or missing something, but also don't think it is something particularly important. I would probably invest in an index fund instead.
Space X, Tesla are successful endeavors even if I wouldn't tell you to buy Tesla shares. Maybe Tesla is in a bubble, but the market so far has stayed irrational more than doubters expected. Elon has a history of overpromising with whatever he does, but still delivering to an extend. Which is how I see his successful business too. The important thing is the influence of buying twitter, not whether it is profitable for Musk. So to summarize bellow Musk's general contributions:
I would say he made an important positive contribution with SpaceX. Tesla is another success story even if not necessarily in practice better than the biggest manufacturers despite its share price. Most importantly he is bellow what I wanted to see happen with twitter, but still an important net positive contribution over the alternative. I disagree with some of his takes, like supporting legal migration, but he does mostly help counter a left wing monoculture on culture war issues. In addition to allowing dissent, and highlighting some people promoting it, there is a value in high profile people promoting such views themselves. There is also a positive side to being a hypeman, even if he overpromises. He promotes a certain sci fi optimism that is missing from other billionaires, especially on space exploration. But even with his business, he helps push things in the direction of innovation. On most issues he is involved, he has made a positive contribution with all his imperfections.
Not quite. My analysis is that claims of Musk's greatness are based on his promises of delivering revolutionary new technologies that will change the world, and I'm saying these technologies are never going to be delivered. There will be no self-driving, robo-taxis, semis, bipedal robots doing manual labor for us, revolutionary new batteries, manned missions to Mars or the Moon. All of these things would make him a great man, if he managed to deliver, but he is not going to. This will also have financial consequences, because the stuff he might deliver is not going to be enough to sustain his companies, and as a result they will crash.
Apologies for the financial emphasis, but the last time I was in a conversation about Musk, someone literally made the opposite argument: "who cares the tech he's promising is hype, look at how much his companies are worth!"
I can tell you why I care: because for some reason Musk is the face of letting techies think outside the box and do whatever they want, and if he crashes we are going to see an unending stream of arguments telling us they gave us a chance, and we have to "color inside the lines" now.
I literally just got "but have you considered space mining" as a response.
Even if you bothered to, you can't. It's a private company.
Ok, cool. On the other hand he has a contract to help NASA go back to the Moon, and I'm nearly certain he's going to fail. All the little and big things that the failure resulted from is going to be talked about non-stop, and anyone whoever believed in Elon is going to be subjected to a non-stop shaming campaign. I'm here to tell you you still have time to get off the Musk hype-train.
No, I don't care about shares. I mean, yeah you probably shouldn't buy, but that's irrelevant. I'm telling you that anyone circling the wagons around Musk will end up in about a similarly humiliating position, as people trying to sell "gender-affirming care" for children.
I agree, but I'm afraid he's going to be ousted, if his companies come crashing down around him. The relative freedom we are enjoying right now might end up being very brief.
I think he should be judged by the promises he's making, and whether or not he can deliver on them. Also on whether or not his companies crash.
He's being judged by the same metrics as Elizabeth Holmes or Trevor Milton, I don't think that's weird.
I think he is good at what he does but not necessarily buy all the hype on any of his particular business. People like Thunderfoot have been predicting Musk to crash and burn for years. I don't believe that will happen in the future like it didn't happen so far.
Probably no bipedal robots doing manual labor for us, and maybe not all of the other list, and in lesser extend. My model of Musk as successful, positive force but overpromiser, seems to fit more with his trajectory so far than the one where he crashes and burns. If the man continues being successful promoting some innovations, he can point those and keep hyping new stuff in the future too. The combo of successes + some bullshit can be sustainable.
It isn't really fair to Musk to compare him to Elizabeth Holmes. The man has significant tangible successes.
I think it was last year that he actually started, and he set the clock to 5 years. He's been criticizing Musk for a while, but I don't recall him talking about crashing and burning.
The discrepancy between the hype around him, and what he delivered vs what he promised, is enough to justify the comparison, in my opinion.
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I don’t have time to detail everything I think you have wrong but re SpaceX one thing you leave out as a potential economic case is space mining. Could be insanely valuable.
Also most financial analysts value Starlink quite highly. Maybe you are missing something they are not.
The logistics of sending any kind of vehicle or probe to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt for mining are so ludicrously expensive in terms of energy/momentum spend that the astrophysics community has largely treated space mining as a joke proposal for science fiction books since about the 60s - and that's before you get to the economics problems (there is virtually nothing in space worth mining and returning to Earth that couldn't be extracted more profitably on Earth in the first place). The case for space mining is a complete, unsalvageable disaster. "Short" version:
I don't doubt that SpaceX will happily take the money of anyone foolish enough to ignore all of the above at their own expense and perform their services as advertised. But their business model does not depend on people with more money than common sense - their big moneymaker is, as others have noted, building a novel telecommunications network with broadband-like performance and selling it to the US government, using novel reusable rocket components that cost orders of magnitude less than the previous state-of-the-art and that can be launched quickly and regularly. I expect their next steps for profitability all revolve around expanding the use of this network to things like surveillance satellites, content providers, etc. I grant that they have some appetite for ridiculous vanity projects like the mars launch stuff, but this is ultimately a manageable marketing expense. But for anyone with some rudimentary literacy in the subject, it should be clear that space mining is not a sustainable business, and as a marketing stunt it is extremely boring (heh).
Why would there be californium on asteroids? You might find some plutonium from interstellar dust (although Earth is again a better source of that), but there's no process that generates californium near enough to Sol that it would actually get here before it decayed.
"On" Earth is plausibly not true, although "around Earth" definitely is. The most concentrated reservoir of antimatter in Sol System is Earth's Van Allen belts. Estimates I've seen are that you can't get the price below a billion a gram making it in particle accelerators due to inherent inefficiencies (currently it's more like trillions), while scoops in the Van Allen belts could conceivably do it for millions.
The elements that are most amenable to asteroidal extraction would be tellurium and the strongly-siderophile metals (Ru,Rh,Pd,Re,Os,Ir,Pt,Au), all of which are strongly-depleted in the crust due to tellurides and native metals (the primary forms of these elements) sinking into the core. Some of these are useful and as such humongously expensive. But, yes, there's the issue that you need to refine them on-site because of the delta-V needed for the return trip, and more generally the Space Bootstrapping Problem where a lot of space industries only make sense if there are other space industries to absorb their products.
A couple of mitigating factors I'll note:
if you were to mine asteroids with people, you would not need radiation shielding for the time on the asteroid, because you could use the asteroid itself - digging deep on asteroids is pretty easy energetically. You still need the radiation-shielded craft to get there, though, which sucks.
mass ratios look far nicer if you bite the bullet and start using nuclear. This sucks for takeoff from Earth because people will get apoplectic, but for things like a return mass driver or an orbital-transfer burn there's less of an issue there. This is getting into issues of "do you really think they're going to let Elon Musk buy a breeder reactor and reprocessing plant", though.
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"Getting places in space is convoluted to begin with, and all trips beyond Earth orbit require carefully calculated momentum assists from various heavenly bodies. The error on these calculations is pretty large relative to the size of most asteroids. It's infeasible to pre-plan a route so specific and so accurate that one could send a spacecraft to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt once, let alone reliably at different times. The energy and time cost for any such trip would be enormous as well."
I'm already lost on your first point. NASA has already done this. For both asteroid belt asteroids and near earth asteroids. If you don't swap your inches and centimeters then yes you can go to a specific asteroid. It is not too complex, we understand orbital mechanics.
There is no reason to mine in space while everything we need is much cheaper to obtain on earth. It’s unnecessary science fiction to build “industrial tech” settings that include asteroid mines and lunar helium farming or whatever.
This seems to presume that this state will persist into some unspecified eternity. Politics alone can make space mining plenty competitive. It's the same reason why "peak oil" predictions kept getting bodied.
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There is no need to mine the new world when everything is much cheaper to obtain in Europe. Some have argued that most colonies actually did cost their home countries much more than they brought in, but one can't argue with the results. THE USA!
The new world actually did offer resources not available, or available only in very short supply, in Europe.
Same could be said for space. You can't find 6 trillion dollars worth of platinum laying around here anywhere!
And if there’s ever a demand for $6 trillion worth of platinum the same way as for sugar and tobacco, you’ll have a point.
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Just from the sheer energy inputs, space mining rockets will not compete with terrestrial dump trucks while there are any appreciable mineral reserves on earth. When industrial civilization reaches out for asteroids, it will be "resorting" to spice mining, not "advancing" to space mining.
There is also the matter of $5 trillion platinum asteroids and the like, but the price of such metals would crater if you tried to sell any appreciable amount.
Space mining may become advantageous if we have significant material demands in orbit.
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THE SPICE MUST FLOW! It all depends on if how we value energy in the future. We are sitting next to a basically infinite supply of it.
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This goes directly into the big bag of wild ideas the might happen sometime in the future, that could be insanely valuable, and are never delivered. Can he please deliver on any of the other wild insanely valuable things he promised, before we entertain this? Can he at least do ship-to-ship refueling first?
Maybe, but then again, maybe not. I'm not one for "trust the experts" type arguments. It's not like there isn't a long history of eggs ending up on financial analysts' faces, in my short time on this planet alone.
Am I missing something here, or wasn't SpaceX the company that provided, under (substantially although IIRC not entirely) Musk's leadership, reusable rockets? That's a huge deal in terms of proven track record – basically SpaceX did something that the massive defense corporations failed to do for decades.
If Starship works (and it seems likely to) it will absolutely revolutionize orbital delivery. Going back to the idea of using Starlink to create demand, Starship is likely to drop cost-to-orbit enough to create more demand. (I don't think "Starship will work eventually" should be considered an Elon Fanboy Position, it's fundamentally a bigger rocket of the type we already know works! But this is rocket science, and I'm not a rocket scientist, so take that with a grain of terrestrial salt.)
Now, I wouldn't be surprised to see space mining in my lifetime (we know it is technically feasible) but I think the true reason SpaceX will do fine for the short-to-medium future is because space is a key national security concern, and getting moreso. There is a ton of money in national security, and SpaceX is uniquely suited to tap it.
Yeah... if reusable rockets were so great, orbital delivery would already be absolutely revolutionized, you wouldn't have to point to the next big thing that is just around the corner.
I believe the argument is that this is false. There aren't that many people who want to launch satellites, or do that many things in space. Is space tourism supposed to be the thing he'll make bank on?
This is where I disagree. I think he'll run out of hype before he manages to get it to work.
I'd like you to be right about it, but I'd be shocked.
Sure... but the glowies can pay Bezos instead.
It is!
I think quite the opposite – if you get the cost low enough, sending stuff to space becomes a high school science project and everyone wants to do it. Lots of amateur CubeSats in this vein.
Maybe you're right. To clarify, your position is that Starship will never make a successful orbital payload delivery? Or that it will never land successfully?
Right now they can't, can they? New Glenn is having its own developmental issues, leaving the only functional Blue Origin delivery vehicle New Shepard, which is designed for orbital tourism, not payload delivery.
I have a question - if Falcon Heavy is so much cheaper than Falcon 9, why are they relying so much on the latter for Starlink?
Can we do some back of the envelope calculations here? How low does the price have to go, for people to start launching satellites en-masse? How many would they want to launch? How many clients would SpaceX have to get to make a decent profit at such a low price point? How much can they launch before triggering Kessler Syndrome?
The bets I placed are on the former, and I admit that it's not impossible I will end up losing it. Fire-and-forget is a lot easier, after all, but I don't think Starship development is going well.
Hence, why I brought up EscaPADE. If they pull it off, that might trigger questions and concerns from SpaceX investors and clients.
I dunno, but I can speculate – it might be that they have lots on hand. Also, it's good to stress-test reusable tech like Falcon 9 as much as possible to discover potential failures, and less costly to discover them with a smaller rocket.
I'd say we are already launching satellites en-masse. You'll note that Falcon Nine started launching in 2010 and started reusing its boosters regularly around 2018; the steep US vertical ascent starts in 2020. You can also compare to CubeSat launches by year (which is not omnidirectional, but broke 100/200/300 in 2014/2017/2021. Since (AFAIK) the low price point has a profit baked-in, I assume as long as they have demand they are profiting at that rate.
Kessler Syndrome happens on accident, of course. Orbit, especially outside of LEO, is really big, and satellites are teensy-tinsy and decay in orbit. So the answer is "tens of thousands" but also that you do have more risk of Kessler Syndrome as you get more up there. However, even if we reach a point where we say "no more satellites" we'll still need to put more up as the old ones decay. Presumably we'll need lots of rocket launches for whatever space exploration we're doing, and possibly (as discussed) for tasks like asteroid mining or even decommissioning old satellites so that Kessler Syndrome is less of a worry.
Obviously, Musk and his sort want to go to Mars and the rest of the solar system. If you're doing that the demand for mass is much more than could be accommodated by satellites (I would imagine), at least until you get onsite resource production up and running.
I don't particularly think Starship development is going poorly. Falcon 9 had a number of failures on early launch tests. Both of its first two launches failed in the recovery phase, and of the first seven, four had some form of a failure. Yet, as I think we've shown, it's matured into a tremendously successful launch vehicle. Musk's whole "move fast and break things" shtick, as I understand it, is built around accepting more risk up front in exchange for faster results. Starship has had three launches so far, with what appears to my untrained eye to be progressive improvement. Unless the costs of these failures are high enough to cause SpaceX to run out of funding (which I doubt – they're made out of stainless steel!) my presumption is that they will simply move past the failures, as they did with Falcon 9. Now, I wouldn't say it's impossible that Starship is found to be unworkable, or retired for other reasons. I just know that accepting and moving past failure is something SpaceX has historically done (and is normal in aerospace development) so without specific reasons to think otherwise I sort of assume that that will be the case here – although I can certainly imagine a number of reasons it might not be.
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I could be very wrong about this, but as I understand it, Falcon Heavy is designed for high-mass launches. F9 launches are usually volume limited; being able to put more Starlink sats in orbit won't help you if you physically cannot fit more of them in the fairing.
You're correct about the volume limitations. They're currently working on an extended fairing option, but that's not to try to get the Falcon Heavy price/volume ratio lower than Falcon 9 - the bigger fairings won't even be reusable like their standard fairings are - it's to support a few bigger individual launches like conjoined Lunar Gateway modules as well as a few National-Security, Might-Be-Declassified-In-50-Years payloads.
But, I would say FH is designed for higher-mass launches; it was only originally that they thought that was necessary for high mass. FH design started before the Falcon 9 version 1.0 (with max payload to LEO of 10.4 tons or to GTO of 4.5 tons) even flew, and that wasn't enough for the DoD contracts they wanted, and they thought FH was the best way to get there ... but then improved Merlin engines and stretched tanks pushed the F9 payloads to 22.8t and 8.3t (fully expended, but for the prices DoD is willing to pay that's fine), and FH took them a lot longer than they'd hoped, and they ended up with a rocket they barely needed (9 launches so far, vs like 350 for F9, in part because a lot of "so heavy it needs Falcon Heavy" payloads ended up riding on upgraded F9s instead) but which they couldn't even cancel (IIRC Musk wanted to, and Gwynne Shotwell had to talk him out of it) because they already had those DoD contracts.
Despite agreeing to the extended fairing development, their internal strategy for fixing volume limitations is to forget about Falcons and finish Starship. 50% more mass capacity than FH with 550% more volume should be more than enough to ensure the latter limit isn't binding.
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Starlink brought in $4B in 2023, up from $1.4B in 2022, latest estimate $6.6B for 2024. Development via investment dollars is much faster than via cash flow alone would be, but it's not a necessity.
The bright side of having a problem so bad you want to graph it on a semilog plot is, it gives you room for multiple revolutions.
And your prediction came true - the first revolution did already absolutely happen, even with launch vehicles that are only partly reusable! I used to summarize this as "first place is SpaceX, second is the entire country of China, third is the rest of the world put together", but looking at the latest numbers, that still understates things. Q1 2024 saw launch upmass that was around 86% SpaceX, 6% China, 7% the rest of the world put together.
The thrilling news from Blue Origin so far this year was that they launched two BE-4 engines (original ETA: 2019) on the first Vulcan Centaur test. Again, "understates things" understates things here. The thrilling upcoming news is that they might launch New Glenn later this year (be sure to go to the New Glenn wiki page for that, though; the BE-4 page still says "The first flight and orbital test is planned for no earlier than late 2022,[27] although the company had earlier expected the BE-4 might be tested on a rocket flight as early as 2020.", because apparently editors there have the appropriate level of excitement here), and if they evolve it twice as fast as SpaceX did once they got their first partly-reusable launcher to orbit, they'll have a Falcon-9-killer by 2030, tops. Hopefully I'm being too pessimistic here, but Bezos himself shares my pessimism: see "Amazon buys SpaceX rocket launches for Kuiper satellite internet project" from last year.
Very nice, now show me their costs so we can calculate the profits...
The overwhelming majority of their launches is Starlink itself, a project of unknown profitability / sustainability.
To Mars... on first attempt...
So... what's your estimate on Starship being functional under those assumptions?
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I've always thought of Elon Musk as being essentially the world's greatest tech recruiter. Maybe for a while he was also great at sales at marketing, but like you said, the reception to him has really turned a corner recently- people have started to notice that he never delivers anything like his promises and are openly mocking him. Plus it doesn't help that half of silicon valley now hates him for ideology reasons.
But the one thing he does still have in spades is to attract talented young engineers in spades who will work overtime for sub-market rates. Even at the boring company, which is literally boring and is out in the Nevada desert, they seem to be flooded with talent. Even if most of his ideas fail, it seems like all the talent he has working there should be able to make something worthwhile. It turns out that young engineers really want to work on sci-fi hardware, not manipulating data to sell ads.
SpaceX specifically might pay off if it can land a big military contract. Get the government to pay him an oversized for providing a service that no one else can do.
But yes I've been thinking for a while that Tesla is in trouble... vaguely considering buying some puts there. They've been in this game a long time now, still selling very few cars, and are now getting tons of competition from foreign car makers selling good EVs for cheaper prices.
And how long do you think that's going to last? As a techie, I can tell you techies can indeed accept overtime and submarket wages, but they want to actually build stuff. They want to point at the cool thing everybody is going crazy about, and be able to say "I built that". When they catch on you're dealing with vaporware, they're probably not gonna sign up, and definitely not for a sub-market wage. How long do you think they'll keep signing on when they hear you can get fired from one day to the next, like what's happening at Tesla?
It's another meme. My post was already long so I didn't go into it. The company that wants to revolutionize the world with cheap tunnels makes tunnels that aren't cheap.
Well, another issue he has is that even when he attracts talented people, he doesn't seem to listen to them. Listen to this Twitter space with George Hotz. Hotz sounds like exactly the kind of guy that Elon should hang on to for dear life, but what happened is that Hotz's ideas were ignored (probably for financial reasons), and he left after a few months.
I kind of have the idea this might already be happening with Starlink, behind the scenes, but I'm not sure it's enough to keep the lights on in perpetuity. But the whole problem with SpaceX is that it's pretty opaque, so who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
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Twitter wasn't meant to be a profitable business. He bought it because it needed reform. He kicked a four digit number of problem employees and greatly improved free speach on the global public square. That is a major achievement.
SpaceX has been the most successful rocket program since the 60s. F9/FH, the dragon capsule have been true game changers. Starship is a complete paradigm shift. It is going to be atleast a decade between Falcon 9 doing a successful landing and anyone else repeating the feat. They made sci fi tech happen. As for starlink they are a global scale ISP with capacity that is several orders of magnitude above everyone else. Starlink is almost profitable as is and has 50% growth per year. There is a lot of potential left with millions of more potential clients. While starship will take several years to get operational it unlocks a giant market as it allows regular cell phone users to send text messages globally and use basic services everywhere in the world.
The launch market has a shortage and the demand is greater than supply. Spacex has costs that are substantially lower than the competition, and demand is growing.
As for Tesla it is probably overvalued but it is in a better position than a lot of legacy car manufacturers. The legacy manufacturers don't have anywhere near the experience with electric cars and face major issues as they have to sunset large portions of their company. Tesla was one of the biggest things to happen to the car industry in decades. Musk became obscenely rich from it. I believe his interest in Tesla will fade away and he will use his Tesla money for other projects.
Tell that to the people who gave him $10 billion in loans to buy it.
Yes, which is why I put it at the top, as the least problematic of his companies. If he could do that after winning Twitter in a lottery, and not having to pay for it, or if there was no advertiser boycott in response, I'd say things have gone quite well for him.
I guess this is another part of the Motte and Bailey that I mentioned - the things he already did already were revolutionary. Ok, cool. Show me how it's paying for their bills, though.
No, it is not. Maybe it will be one day. This is the thing that drives me a bit nuts in discussions about Elon, people are acting like he already achieved what he promised.
The other problem is that "the paradigm", such as it is, falls apart after you want to do anything beyond LEO. 15 refuelling launches to get 1 rocket to the moon is a little bit excessive, wouldn't you say?
What they did was cool, but not mind-blowing. It's not even clear there's much benefit to reusability. In either case, again, show me how that will satisfy the investors.
Can you give a link to breakdown of their numbers? I'd be interested in seeing that.
Growth in itself doesn't necessarily mean much, if you have to keep launching satellites to expand service.
But... most people don't go around to "anywhere in the world", they tend to stick to their local population hub. Their phones tend to already have perfectly fine Internet access, and when they don't, and need a satellite connection, it's not exactly clear why they would be willing to pay more just to get their latency a bit lower.
Again, any links will be appreciated.
This is only a problem, if we're all going to switch to electric cars. I can already tell you I don't want to. The EU played with the idea of forcing people to switch, but even if they go through with it, the Chinese are providing perfectly fine alternatives.
Teslas are still a rarity, and it's not clear how long they will stick around. Their sales numbers have gone down, and they have competition now, so even if electric cars will stay, it's not clear that people will keep buying Teslas.
Yeah, through people buying meme-stocks on the back of wild promises he never fulfilled. Do you think people will see "but Musk got rich from it" as an argument in Elon's favor, if Tesla crashes with no sign of semis, self-driving, robo-taxis, bipedal robots, or revolutionary new batteries?
I don't have a WSJ subscription so I can't confirm the details, but it looks like Starlink turned profitable ~4 years after thet started launching the satellites, which is a pretty crazy turnaround given the massive amount of capital poured into it: https://www.wsj.com/tech/behind-the-curtain-of-elon-musks-secretive-spacex-revenue-growth-and-rising-costs-2c828e2b?page=1
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