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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Twitter wasn't meant to be a profitable business.

Tell that to the people who gave him $10 billion in loans to buy it.

He kicked a four digit number of problem employees and greatly improved free speach on the global public square. That is a major achievement.

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.

SpaceX has been the most successful rocket program since the 60s. F9/FH, the dragon capsule have been true game changers.

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.

Starship is a complete paradigm shift

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?

They made sci fi tech happen

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.

Starlink is almost profitable as is and has 50% growth per year

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.

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.

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.

The launch market has a shortage and the demand is greater than supply.

Again, any links will be appreciated.

The legacy manufacturers don't have anywhere near the experience with electric cars

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.

Tesla was one of the biggest things to happen to the car industry in decades.

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.

Musk became obscenely rich from it.

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