He's always been all-in on the winning candidate. His whole business is getting government subsidies. His single principle is sucking up to people in power. He loved Obama when he was in power, too.
Proud to say I've found that asshole annoying since WAY before it was cool.
SpaceX's contracts were absolutely subsidies - the contracted Falcon 1 tests and the resulting Falcon 9 contracts were an expensive moonshot for the USG at first - but even if you discount them, Tesla absolutely hoovered up subsidies like the EV tax credits.
From Wiki [1]:
SpaceX spent its own capital to develop and fly its previous launcher, Falcon 1, with no pre-arranged sales of launch services. SpaceX developed Falcon 9 with private capital as well, but did have pre-arranged commitments by NASA to purchase several operational flights once specific capabilities were demonstrated.
Customers: DARPA, DARPA, DOD/NASA, mass simulator (instead of the intended payload after the first three launches), Malaysia (the intended payload of the fourth flight).
"pre-arranged commitments by NASA to purchase several operational flights" is a subsidy, as were the milestone payments along the way.
I'm a huge SpaceX fan, but let's not pretend they could've done this alone. They very nearly went bankrupt on Falcon 1, per Musk - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex... - and had they needed to self-fund those launches/payloads entirely they would not have survived. It's a beautiful example of how powerful public/private partnerships can be.
I have no complaints here. It's a good use of subsidies. Government should use subsidies for this sort of purpose.
I just take issue with pretending they aren't subsidies, and incorrect assertions NASA/government had little/nothing to do with their success.
I'm an enormous fan of SpaceX - you could probably have heard me scream a mile away when they caught the booster last month - and have a personal dislike for Musk since the Twitter acquisition and his hypocrisy there. Nothing in this thread from my end criticizes SpaceX for being subsidized. In fact, I'm all for it.
Would you call all options and futures subsidies? Are airlines subsidizing oil companies when they purchase oil futures in order to hedge their oil costs?
There is no indication that these commitments were underpriced by the government, so to call them subsidies is at best baseless misinformation.
> Are airlines subsidizing oil companies when they purchase oil futures in order to hedge their oil costs?
No; both parties in the deal have successfully accomplished their respective roles repeatedly before. The airline isn't doing anything new; the oil company isn't doing anything new.
(And they both absolutely get subsidized!)
> There is no indication that these commitments were underpriced by the government...
They got paid for a launch of an untested platform and a student-built payload, regardless of success, in hopes it would result in a good tested platform. What else do you call it?
No question that NASA was pivotal to SpaceX’s success, especially COTS program. However that wasn’t subsides. They only got paid when they could deliver. Had they fail to launch Falcon 9 or cargo Dragon they would have gotten no dimes from NASA.
You can argue that all government contracts are a different form of subsidy, but in common parlance people do not use the term subsidy when describing government contracts.
A government contract paying to send up student payloads on an untested in-development launcher with no requirement for a successful launch (and there were three failures) is absolutely a subsidy.
That contract financed tiny part Falcon 1 and was likely given to the government for an extremely cheap price. Yes, you can call that a subsidy but its one of very few things you can really call that for SpaceX.
"His whole business is getting government subsidies."
SpaceX absolutely dominates the commercial launch market. No one forces companies from abroad to buy launches from SpaceX - only their reliability and lower prices.
For fully subsidized organizations that nevertheless cannot compete on the commercial market, see Roskosmos and Arianespace.
As SpaceX is essentially the only mature commercial launch company with reusable rockets, it should be no surprise that the company gets government contracts.
Artemis' unworkable design is because of the limitations of Starship. I was all-in on "cool, huge rocket go brr" until I realized that it's going to take between 5 and 20 Starship launches per mission just to get to the moon. That's a clear regression from the Saturn V.
That is not actually such a big deal when you realize they are just ferrying fuel on a reusable rocket. They're also doing it well in advance of the mission. There is a massive logistics chain making it possible to buy fuel on your road trip, this is similar.
> That's a clear regression from the Saturn V.
Not exactly, as the fuel provided in orbit by these other missions will allow a much larger payload to reach the Moon's surface and return.
StarShip can already deliver a similar payload to orbit as Saturn V (though a bit less due to reusability) - it is the extra mass to the moon which requires the refuelling.
> Not exactly, as the fuel provided in orbit by these other missions will allow a much larger payload to reach the Moon's surface and return.
Amortized over the number of launches it takes to get a single moonshot.
> StarShip can already deliver a similar payload to orbit as Saturn V
But Saturn V's purpose was not getting things to orbit. We have plenty of rockets capable of getting to orbit. And given that satellites have differing needs when it comes to orbital trajectories, it's unclear whether we even need that capability. By analogy, we've had jumbo jets for decades, but most air routes are not flying on jumbo jets, because the demand isn't there.
> Amortized over the number of launches it takes to get a single moonshot.
Saturn V was completely destroyed by each launch with only the payload surviving. It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison when you compare # launches.
Those 10-15 launches of StarShip will be a lot cheaper than a single Saturn V launch because at the end you still have all the StarShips you launched and all you used was some methane and oxygen.
> Those 10-15 launches of StarShip will be a lot cheaper than a single Saturn V launch because at the end you still have all the StarShips you launched and all you used was some methane and oxygen.
Minus the maintenance for the wear-and-tear of expending (ahem) astronomical amounts of energy to propel the largest rocket ever built into space and then return through atmospheric re-entry ten or more times. Just because you have built a machine that might, at scale, be more economical than an expendable rocket does not mean that the economics will actually materialize such that it ever makes sense to realize that scale, especially if you dectuple your expected operating costs.
> But Saturn V's purpose was not getting things to orbit.
The way rocket staging works - each stage delivers the next stage to a predefined orbit / trajectory or energy level. It is not Saturn V that went to the moon, it just lofted a payload (final stage) into orbit that could perform a TLI.
In orbit refuelling with StarShip is a major innovation, meaning that we don't need to separate payloads into parts and assemble them on orbit. Instead we can refuel a reusable boost stage.
Can you expand on that? Biden's space policy was remarkably and suprisingly similar to Trump's. A little bit more money for planetary science, and that's about it AFAICT.
Ah yes, I guess only Mayflower descendants can call themselves Americans. Or maybe only natives (er, which ones). Or something. Your comment is really insulting to Americans like me who are Euro/Native mutts.
No, absolutely not! Almost exactly the opposite meaning was intended, and I didn't think for a second that it could be interpreted as you say there. I wrote the comment quickly, thinking the sarcasm was obvious, I apologise for not being more explicit.
The comment I responded to (which has now been removed, I think?) referred to how proud the commenter was that Musk is "American". I found this to be totally preposterous, as his cultural background is so immediately and obviously mixed.
Claiming him as "American" is a strange thing to do, is what I was thinking. Anyway, again, I sincerely apologise, and shouldn't have thrown out the comment when I was in a rush.
Why wouldn’t he be considered an American? He is a naturalized United States citizen. The only thing he can’t do per the Constitution is run for president because he was naturalized.
I would think that NOT claiming him as an American is an even stranger thing to do.
The fact that "Dutch English Canadian American" isn't used as a demonym by anyone anywhere is the reason I thought the joke was "obvious" (this isn't meant as a justification for the comment, just to elaborate in the hope of making it more clear).
Oh and last point - Dang is one person, not an army of people. The Trump thread is very very busy, so I presume he is busy. It's unreasonable to expect real-time or even "quick" addressing of every issue you perceive.
> we probably shouldn't be cheering on billionaires going all in on political campaigns
It is, after all, a direct violation of the principle that all political power should come through the popular vote, not back room deals. Politics should operate in plain sight. Always.
Err he's South African, probably shouldn't even be in the US if judged by the same standards as any other immigrant, Cybercab is a shit show and the campaign support was the sort of thing we'd expect from a Russian oligarch.
If you're going to give anyone credit, the thousands of SpaceX staff who keep this thing on the rails are who need some love.
Edit: so by the downvotes I would assume that people are happy to violate immigration laws, try to buy elections and completely pave over the achievements of the staff to be a billionaire simp? Enjoy your future under the boot.
There are plenty of engineers that won't work there because of Musk. Being divisive and unpredictable is not a good characteristic and not how you run a business.
Basically there are better ways without making the sacrifices that have been and will be made.
> providing a social media platform that doesn’t suppress conservative viewpoints
Now amplifies ONLY them, which if you were claiming to be an impartial champion of free speech (as Musk repeatedly said) is equally as bullshit as what was happening on the platform before.
Instead, this bastion of free speech now considers "cisgender" a slur.
Musk in 2022: "Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic"
Honestly? I'd first prefer he hadn't gone off the deep end. I feel the same sort of sad that I did when Notch (of minecraft) turned out the way he did.
I obviously don't have any person relation to him, but Elon seems to be deeply disturbed. He went from a pretty normal somewhat eccentric millionaire 5 or 6 years ago to his evil villain arc. Maybe he was like this all along, but I feel like he's been too stressed and too us vs them for too long that he no longer has a grounded view of reality.
I still remember when we could not even flush the toilet because CT ran out of water and there were fights breaking out at public water pumps. Then came the electricity crisis and constant blackouts which South Africa has only just gotten out of. Not to get started on the crime...
To be fair, Cape Town has better climate and is extremely beautiful. Tourists generally like it, I can see why someone would have a nice impression without knowing much about what's behind the facade. It could be paradise if not for the politics and general state of things in SA.
But yeah, comments like the above are bizarre. Moving to SA is relatively easy, I lived there myself. If it's so great as some foreigners online seem to think, why don't they give it a try? Why do educated people and skilled workers generally move in the opposite direction and leave?
For South Africa, someone like Trump would be a huge improvement. Their governance is just abysmal, bad even for African standards. For example, you get much more reliable grid in Kenya than in SA.
> a two tiered justice system is dangerous grounds
We don’t repeal citizenship on such flimsy grounds for anyone. The solution is to amend the law to include a statute of limitations on repealing citizenship.
Denaturalization, explained: how Trump can strip immigrants of their citizenship - A new “denaturalization task force” raises questions about who really counts as American.
Many YC founders did the same thing. They worked on their own startups with no salary under a student visa, and applied for H1B/O1 visas once they got funding. Is this illegal?
Yes, working on a startup without pay under a student visa (such as F-1) can be legally problematic. While student visas allow some employment (like CPT or OPT for F-1 students), “self-employment” is generally restricted, especially if it involves day-to-day work or responsibilities without proper authorization. Founders may violate visa terms if their role in the startup constitutes “unauthorized employment,” even if unpaid.
For H-1B or O-1 visa applicants, founders need to prove an employer-employee relationship with their startup and show funding or sufficient structure, which complicates the path from student visas.
Sources:
• USCIS Policy Manual on Employment for F-1 Students
• 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(f)
Seems he cares about it a great deal, he wants to make sure America is still a country where you can innovate and explore without the state blocking you at every turn. See Arianespace for how things would look if Elon had to deal with infamous European bureaucracy and red tape, the FAA is already bad enough.
You should have seen his Lex Fridman interview then where he talks about exactly that and brings up things like the need to kidnap a seal (twice!), strap it to a board, and force it to listen to sonic boom noises to comply with braindeas government environmental regulations.
He cares about freedom and the spark of consciousness, of which he requires a foundation of a strong and free country; maybe you're being perfectionistic, e.g. The Selfish Gene?
The main thesis of The Selfish Gene is that evolution is best explained by a gene-centered model, rather than an organism or species model. I'm confused what that has to do with not being a perfectionist about Musk.
Since when does he care about freedom? He was shadow banning content that he disliked on X, all the while boosting takes he approved of. Sure, he owns X and can do whatever he wants with it, but he doesn’t care about freedom.
I for one do not care about Mars, the science, all his expensive toys. I'm here on earth trying to make ends meat. What has his rocket done for me?
Who's praising the engineers who are grinding their souls to accomplish? It's not Musk accomplishing this. He just stuck up human with money. Like all.
And as an environmentalist in my spare time, why are we trying to get to some red rock of a planet than fixing the climate where we all live?
He's not contributing anything to the real matter yet we are all happy to bitch about climate change and then dish out praise when we allow someone to go and frack for oil. [0][1]
Sorry if it upsets you that I don't want to be under servitude of some egotistical nit. And, as well also sorry that yourself are too stuck in the fumes of fallacy of one who's causing more issues for this planet for his future for one you yourself will never reach.
> Who's praising the engineers who are grinding their souls to accomplish?
I always credit the SpaceX team for their accomplishments, fully aware they are successful despite Musk, not because of him. He’s good at getting attention and funding.
>I for one do not care about Mars, the science, all his expensive toys. I'm here on earth trying to make ends meat. What has his rocket done for me?
I mean at least for me personally it gave me excellent Internet access when I was on vacation in the middle of nowhere and didn't even have cell reception. And if there's a big disaster in my area I'm sure it will be excellent for maintaining communication.
Again, satellite net has existed since years. He
made it accessible to others which has its merits. But then goes boasting egotistically acting other lesser-evil, almost like sabotaging others with not caring.
Competition always drives down the price. It's not the first satellite in space. You could of had satellite internet prior. But again, like electric cars these companies have been blind and moronic for not moving in making it available for the people.
Google tried with their own fibre not as they're any better in merits.
I don't trust it. I'd rather be without than with but again however I do live in a country where it isn't as critical.
The needs of, and I don't rule out the positive of, I would just prefer it to managed other than himself but, or actually showed some professional qualities owning to it.
To me, the internet now is a commodity; I'm a nerd with colocated servers.
I'm not scared of it, I just don't like it. The person in charge, his agenda does not benefit anything positive To the folks.
Eh, starting off with an ad hominem shows you're lacking emotional regulation and your emotion is going to be clouding your logic; meaning you're not going to be as rationally logical, meaning you're more likely irrational in your conclusions.
You don't appear to know any of the backstory to that situation re: Musk calling the diver a pedophile, just latched onto, probably from confirmation bias, what the media perpetuated/propagated arguably as propaganda to demonize to attempt disempower Elon, an actual threat to the establishment - and you're clearly looking into things at a biased ideological level; lucky for us he has gained/earned enough resources and power to be able to acquire Twitter, and provide the world the Twitter Files for us to know the US government was colluding with big tech to censor voices including highly credentialed experts.
From my understanding Musk had hired a private investigator to look into the diver. The investigator told Musk that the diver was a pedophile - of which is relatively easily believable on the surface based on the known "tourism" - which may or may not be more or less a stereotype. Musk then repeated that.
Perhaps the investigator lied to Musk? Or perhaps the situation isn't that the investigator lied, maybe he did conclude the diver was a pedophile and therefore Musk was relaying the truth, but maybe at minimum the investigator wasn't able to provide any concrete evidence to confirm in a court of law to counter a lawsuit, to help prove that the person was indeed a pedophile (do you have any evidence to the contrary? Or maybe the diver found 15 year olds to have sex with - a quick Google search says is the age of consent in Thailand - unknown if there are other nuances to the law; so maybe by law in Thailand the diver wasn't a "pedophile" - but in America it would be considered illegal-unethical?
I imagine too that the more sophisticated-suave snake oil salesmen/grifters of the world will try to target people like Musk; or is Musk a superhero in your eyes and should be immune to such vectors of attack? So perhaps instead you should be grateful then you've not been competent enough to rise to such a position to attract such scammers - otherwise perhaps develop your critical thinking, do the thought exercise of putting yourself in other peoples' shoes far more often so that you can develop compassion and be less angry and resentful of the world.
You seem to believe the world is far less complex than it is.
This is why propaganda works so well. The vast majority of people won't spend adequate time to understand a situation, if it actually warrants a serious attempt at uncovering the truth - instead ideologues will make conclusions they will put the full weight of their belief behind - acting as if it is 100% true, and without dispersing or distributing the drive of their passion properly across the landscape of their understanding of the world; that usually means they don't have the ability to "let go" and allow emotions-stress to calm and quell completely to their very baseline stress level of perfectly calm, instead they learn to suppress and repress unprocessed or under-processed emotion - which is in fact unhealed trauma, starting in childhood as an abnormal-unhealthy coping mechanism vs. properly processing the emotion to
I'm guessing you also haven't weighed into your conclusion about Musk to include the actual creation of the submarine that where if the water levels hadn't lowered again, that it would have arguably assured that all of those young boys would have survived.
You also probably think his father owned an emerald mine - and haven't read Isaacson's autobiography - because who has time to study a person you appear to think must be very dangerous for society? And incongruently you'd likely not take into account that if Elon could have such eccentric behaviour, then couldn't his father as well have made up an easy lie of having significant shares in emerald mine in order to gain favour in potential business or attracting women?
And I'll steel man your argument for a moment, and echo what others in this thread have commented: what if it requires someone who's as much of an "egotistical megalomaniac" as Elon is but that understands the need for freedom of person, to give them the drive to fortify all of society against tyranny? What's that worth to humanity? Invaluable, no
And what if you could have compassion for Elon instead of imbalanaced judgement, to try to understand where do you think his drive may have come from? Could it have stemmed from immense stress and/or self-esteem issues that most, if not all of us have - whether we know we have them or not, whether they drove us to succeed to the same degree or not? Maybe you've been "fortunate" to not have to experience that or that that the way you coped with it led you on a different path than Elon's trajectory?
Also, with your ad hominem as the start of this message, does that make you any better than Elon for offhand calling someone a pedophile? I'd argue your judgement and emotional regulation ability is at minimum equal to his, but probably worse, but that you also have resentment and don't put much thought into things - you just have to impulsive write 3 short sentences to quell whatever amount of emotion that you couldn't instead just let pass you by - to "let go" of it, instead venting on HN in a drive-by comment.
P.S. In your profile you say you should stop being bothered by your karma score. I'd argue it's not a problem itself, however what you do need to - would benefit to work on - are emotional regulation practices, e.g. developing stress regulation skills for your body and mind, where there's a biofeedback loop: stressful thoughts cause stress in the body, stress-filled body causes stressful thoughts - so you have 2 avenues to address and learn to : your body and your mind. Note that as you begin to find practices that allow your body to calm that will allow space in your mind for old trauma-stresses to arise, old-unprocessed memories that you probably don't even realize are there and are still causing you stress and directing your behaviour will surface, and you will need to learn how to process those.
P.P.S. You can either cower by the mob, and coddle yourself, avoiding the possible flood of downvotes that can occur when you respond in threads about Elon Musk or other "hot topics" - attracting the gaze and often knee-jerk reaction of downvotes and replies by the ideological mob who despises Elon, to keep your "precious" karma score regulated and avoid it going down - a fear , or ideally you learn to regulate yourself and learn to discern if people actually replying to you with words have any valid logical counter-points to what you've written - or if you're willing to be so gracious and potentially willing to be embarrassed, you can spend time to explain yourself and counter what they've said - or perhaps learn something new; of which your reply just let us all know that your use of ad hominem tells us a lot about you, but really nothing serious to consider about Elon.
And no, I didn't write any of this for you, although I'd be grateful if any of it began to resonate with you - a blessing for you if your reactivity didn't cause you to recoil and avoid my words for long enough that you can maybe take a moment to focus on your breathe up to a 10 count or until you notice your body and notice that your stress has at least stabilized, if not begun to calm down, so then you can begin to read again, rinse and repeat - the practice and exercise first perhaps being noticing how just reading words are causing a physical reaction in your body; or perhaps your body is so locked up in stress that you aren't even able to notice the stress changes in your body, and so then I'd recommend a holistic health practice like 75-90 minute Bikram hot yoga classes to kick your ass and break through your hardened shell that's a disservice to you by blocking nuanced signals for you to discern with; the most subtle and nuanced of signals arguably being when you develop practices to the degree of having the ability to have such a still mind the the most subtle pieces of memory or strands of thought that haven't yet been processed are able to be felt, essentially the feeling of cognitive dissonance - perhaps only recognized as a queer or off feeling that you haven't yet even come to understand yet to label yet as cognitive dissonance, which then hopefully will then allow you to consciously direct your attention to discern to see if there is cognitive dissonance; this is what blocks most people's development, that off feeling instead of consciously examining it, they instead develop an avoidant coping mechanism.
And some evidence towards this idea, that even if Elon is a megalomaniac, it is far better for us - and he knows it is far better for him and society as a whole - that he isn't a no holes barred megalomaniac, that he won't make a deal with the devil - a far easier path to riches and maintaining so-called power - control - than if giving into the methods of honeypots and blackmail-extortion that catches a web of easily manipulable-weak individuals who must now toe the line of some invisible puppet masters, who often use providing children to be raped as their lure and temptation offered-provided: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1854339192794251529 (of which we now know the Advertising Industrial Complex is a clear pathway for funding-rewarding those toeing the line as part of the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus that the globalist cabal has required ; and if anyone's reaction to anything I've written above is to ask me how tight my tinfoil hat is fitting, or use conspiracy theorist as a defamatory slur, examine your conscience and your heart deeper - for otherwise you are currently more than less easily manipulable by bad actors you want to fortify against.
Thanks for the opportunity to keep my mind busy - the excruciating pain I have to try to cope with today especially is near killing me; if you care to know why I'll spend so much time understanding something, it's not because I'm obsessed or a "fanboy" of Elon as I could preemptively predict could be your next flyby comment.
I'd recommend you feel more-better, connect to your body, so then you can think more-better.
