Comment by dzonga
5 hours ago
Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him.
e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
5 hours ago
Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him.
e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
Too early to write closing arguments on this. A vengeful future administration might make us realize that the entire transaction was a huge mistake.
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> Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
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On the other hand, buying twitter was the turning point for his public image. Before that, he was Tony Stark. Now he's Lex Luthor.
Key word being public. People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.
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Is he though? I find he still has a STRONG positive image among younger tech people..
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No by then his public image would have be damaged by the cave diver incident
Nah, too much hair to be Luthor. Bezos is Luthor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBuxoLHV6M
Ironically, I'd say that Musk is still Stark, in a lot of bad ways: both show narcissism, overconfidence, impulsivity, ego-driven decision making, control issues, disregard for consequences, and volatility.
And all he really did was gut the censorship engine.
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Did the total of fines the US gov't was looking to levy on Musk total up to more than the $44Billion he spent on Twitter?
$44B is peanuts for a soon to be trillionaire
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When you are the richest man in the world, you can afford to do things out of spite. But we won't know - he got rid of the people who could have fined him.
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Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
Needs context otherwise you appear hysterical.
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I don't believe in racial essentialism myself but I know someone who does
*ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*
Obviously Trump was not going to be a champion of clean, renewable energy. If he knew the "Trump thing" was coming -- which thanks to his position inside Twitter he probably did -- then the rational thing to do was, in fact, what he did. Suck up to Trump to try to avoid or shape the outcome.
What he didn't need to do was alienate his existing customers by acting like he enjoyed it. Did he actually think he was going to sell a lot of EVs to Trumpers?
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways. Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries. The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops.
I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
I heard this was a thing at Tesla, figure out how to redirect while the grown ups were actually building stuff
I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures.
Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself.
Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course.
Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
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> I'm not convinced he's all that smart
We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"
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