Comment by inglor_cz
17 days ago
Neither was reuse of rockets and I remember the ex-boss of Arianespace laughing at those bozos of SpaceX who try to pretend that they are a serious space business.
Musk made some bad bets, but also some good ones (Falcon rockets, Starlink) and some at least promising ones (Starship, Neuralink). And Twitter bought him enormous political influence - I wouldn't consider this a failure either, from the realistically-cynical point of view. That cannot be measured by revenue alone.
Twitter was a "success" for musk sure, it was also a catastrophic failure for the rest of western civilisation.
Musk has been coasting on his successes from 10+ years ago. He has nothing good to offer anyone in 2026.
I think the jury is still out on the impact of all the other social networks.
If the connection between fast falling birthrates and smartphone addiction is proven, the total global loss of life (in this case, never born life) due to the products that many of us here helped craft into perfection may rival that of Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan, and Twitter/X is hardly the worst offender in that group. Even Twitter's impact on the balance of left/right politics in the world is relatively transient and small when judged against this horrible development whose aftereffect will stalk the world for a century.
Yes, it wasn't an actual intent of people like Zuckerberg, but as far as catastrophic failures of civilizations go, they don't have to be intended.
Falling birthrates predate smartphones. Where did you come up with that lol
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>90% of the launch market and a great WORLDWIDE isp.
Then there is the role of Starlink terminals in an actual war.
The losses caused to the Russians by drones using Starlink for connection are pretty painful, and when SpaceX switched off non-whitelisted terminals in the theatre of war, the Russian army was thrown into disarray due to sudden failures of communication between their units. AFAIK they haven't yet fully overcome that problem.
The Russians certainly wish to have something like Starlink right now, in 2026.
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> He has nothing good to offer anyone in 2026.
Falcon launches cost dramatically _less_ than comparables like Ariane. In Fact, Ariane had to beg europe of subsidies to keep the program competitive.
Meanwhile, Starship is well on it's way.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Wait, you think Elon solved these problems?
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For most of his sucsessful ideas he had sophisticated investors, VC's, to judge the idea and take the bet(at an early stage).
Would any VC(one without a conflict of interest) invest now, for the long term, based on those visions?