Elon Musk

that's showbiz

i updated it, i added new frames of animation, i zoomed in. it was made for 2022. and yet, things had changed. some said that it would have been better if wallogina had never existed at all, but the following day they were on the same page as everyone else - wallogina needed to stay where it was. it didn't need to move like that

"What's he updaaaating in there?" -Tom Waits

I'll tell you one thing: he's not building a playhouse for the children.

or even updating a playhouse for the children...

no new laminate plank floors for the children.

ELON QUIT F'ING AROUND GET BACK TO YER ROCKETS SO YOU CHOADS CAN GET THE HELL OFF THIS PLANET.

now we're on nextdoor

I suppose most of this thread has reached this conclusion long ago, but is it possible this guy is just not good at anything? I'd always believed that if nothing else he was a tireless worker who knew some technical things but I'm starting to suspect he doesn't know jack shit about anything. His public statements are starting to sound like Trump any time he brings up windmills. Like remember how a lot of people were like "Trump isn't that dumb, he just knows how to provoke" and then it turns out he absolutely IS that dumb? Not only that but he's so fucking online in a way that suggests he's spending a shitload of time on Twitter/Reddit/4chan, plus he also seems to be way into several anime series with 7000 episodes, so where does he find the time to actually do like, CEO stuff? Is there any evidence of him being a better engineer than say, any random undergrad?

one could almost take the next step and realize meritocracy isn't real

It's real, but it's a meritocracy of who can amass the best pile of bullshit.

a meritocra-do-u-c

i’d like to think that, jimbeaux, but i don’t see the evidence

Yes, he's an asshole/troll, BUT so far..he has:
* Built up a very successful electric car company (which has so far paved the way for other companies to produce & market electric vehicles)
* Launched one of those cars with a spaceman dummy into outer space like some MTV ad from 1985

So that's not nothing

Gotta hand it to him, Space X is pretty good at what it does. Of course, that's thanks to a ton of talented people.

February 10:

Elon Musk’s Starlink operation lost 40 out of 49 satellites it launched into the Earth’s upper atmosphere on Wednesday, as a geomagnetic storm knocked out the majority of the fleet.

mmm. i hate him and i'm skeptical he deserves any credit for this, but spaceflight is hard and spacex is objectively very good at spaceflight.

yes but like, what has Elon actually done to facilitate sany of those things? Tesla existed before Elon Musk paid to be listed as "founder" and I am pretty sure a lot of their signature technology had already been developed. SpaceX has done some impressive things but the dude gets government grants which he uses to hire some of the smartest people in the country. Maybe I'm wrong but does Elon actually have anything to do with this? The impression I get is that all his companies would be much better run without him. You could argue that being a very visible troll online kickstarted Tesla's success and made them a household name, which I think speaks to jimbeaux's point. from what I see from ex-Tesla employees Musk is a Trump-like figure where half the challenge in working for him is figuring out how to appease all the dumb & unworkable ideas he brings to the table. with guys like Bezos, Gates, Buffet, etc. you at least get the impression that they know things and can get into the weeds on technical details, whereas with Musk I don't think I've ever seen a clip of him that made him look smart.

eh, all granted, but right now i think he's smarter than the twitter board.

The impression I get is that all his companies would be much better run without him.

I'd give the guy some credit for keeping things rolling. He's absolutely a stock price manipulator with his whole online presence, but he pulled the same shenanigans playing investors and the government against the reality of what he was actually able to produce for years. A bunch of electric car companies have failed in the meantime, and on the SpaceX front, he was able to pull together the right group of people and realize launching crap into space was a market that was under-served and comparatively overpriced.

I spend 90% of my time eye-rolling when he comes up, but there's some huckster thing he's actually been able to do that's got him here.

in other news, my tesla-owning friend is about to acquire his third (!) after minor collisions absolutely wrecked the aluminum frames of the first two

presumably he was hit both times and not at fault, but having been a passenger of his in the past, I can absolutely state he drives in a way that makes it more likely people would hit you

A bunch of electric car companies have failed in the meantime

his third (!) after minor collisions absolutely wrecked the aluminum frames of the first two

lmao, thank god elon is here to save the planet

lol, yes

i don't want a thread on "waht does elon actually do?" but even knowing his decision points and his decisions would help i guess.

I've heard anecdotally that, like snowflakes, no two Tesla vehicles are the same... super erratic in construction and parts

some car magazine did a feature on it - there was no consistency in the bolt patterns and they deemed some of the vehicles super unsafe. virtually everyone I know who has one has had some weird "never seen this before in another vehicle" type of issue. to Tesla's credit they do tend to fix these free of charge (though it often takes weeks to get your car back), though my brother actually was banned from buying another one because the one he bought bricked within 100 miles

I am guessing that answers the question of "what does Elon do", since the demands to forgeo QC to pump out more units than they can handle probably came directly from him and it did wind up being good for their stock price

I think a large portion of it was his brave experiment to reinvent the idea of the assembly line from first principles and change up designs on the fly
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/business/tesla-factory-musk.html

Established car companies master the process with assembly-line workers, and then find ways for machines to take over some of the work. Tesla did the opposite. It designed a highly automated production line populated by more than a thousand robots and other assembly machines.

In a very tangible sense, Tesla views its production line as a laboratory for untested techniques. In recent weeks, company executives concluded they could produce Model 3 underbodies with fewer spot welds than they had been using. The car is still held together by about 5,000 welds, but engineers concluded that some 300 were unnecessary and reprogrammed robots to assemble the steel underbody without them.

tl;dr from multiple articles -- Tesla started out doing things the opposite way other automakers do, by attempting to do as much possible with robots and pumping out inconsistent product instead of starting a mostly-manual labor assembly line, ensuring it produced consistent cars, and then ramping up automation and production levels

supposedly the results of this big experiment will be clear once the Austin assembly line, which takes all of the things they're learned into account, ramps up production. that's assuming that all of the bespoke hacks and workarounds in their crowded Fremont facility they did to keep things going are actually documented and can be implemented in a structured way, though?

love 2 experiment with 300 fewer welds in the chassis

as long as someone else is driving it

I already posted this in the quitting twitter thread, but icymi: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-25/black-tesla-employees-fremont-plant-racism-california-lawsuit

I guess some things don't need reinventing

I found this a good read
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-elon-musk-bought-twitter

reminded me of this:
https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Tesla-market-cap-v-top-10_2021-10-25-.png

totally man

Quintuple revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028.
In his pitch deck, Mr. Musk claimed he would increase Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year.

Cut Twitter’s reliance on advertising to less than 50 percent of revenue.
Under Mr. Musk, advertising would fall to 45 percent of total revenue, down from around 90 percent in 2020. In 2028, advertising would generate $12 billion in revenue and subscriptions nearly $10 billion, according to the document. Other revenue would come from businesses such as data licensing.

Add $69 million in subscription revenue from Twitter Blue.
Mr. Musk plans to boost Twitter’s subscription revenue with services such as Twitter Blue, for which users pay $3 a month to customize their experience on the app. According to the pitch deck, Mr. Musk expects $69 million in revenue from Twitter Blue by 2025.

Elon Musk’s vision for twitter includes *very* aggressive growth over the next three years — we got ahold of his pitch deck to investors

here’s a breakdown of the numbers

w/ @LaurenSHirsch @PreetaTweets https://t.co/yG4McSTffx

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) May 6, 2022

lmao wow

I feel like "got high on his own supply" might be the solution to the mystery of ~why elon bought twitter~

like sure the richest man alive might pay $3 a month for twitter lol

69 million users huh

There's definitely a market for people who'd pay $10/mo to tweet without seeing people post the pig poop balls image in response but I don't know if a billion people work in the media.

damn hardcore software engineering wow

If Twitter acquisition completes, company will be super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware https://t.co/m2HseK0TXl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2022

Deal still hasn’t closed and he’s qualifying with “If.”

*buys grocery store* we are getting to work on selling food

You could argue that being a very visible troll online kickstarted Tesla's success and made them a household name, which I think speaks to jimbeaux's point.

If anything, I think that taking on both the National Automobile Dealers Association and the United Launch Alliance monopolies needed a colossal troll - succeeding at it may be more of an accomplishment than actually building electric cars and reusable rockets.

super focused on hardcore food sales

hardcore software engineering: creating an alternative to OnlyFans

This is one of the worst worlds

Earth 666

Say what you will, but even after the pummeling we've given it, the toxins we've poured into the air, water and sky, the sixth mass extinction we've instigated, and the evil we do to one another, our earth is a fucking paradise, a garden of Eden, a staggering miracle of breathtaking magnitude, and a sacred vessel of life worthy of our worship unto our dying breath.

and elon musk can eat a bag of dicks

Hear hear! Why just this morning I fondly observed the mating ritual of a couple of fruit flies.

(If anyone happens to be wondering, I don’t even know if I’m being sarcastic any more. Irony is dead.)

If you can show me a more habitable planet anywhere in the universe, I'll buy it for you. I'm willing to pay up to $10,000 more than we paid for this one.

switching my focus to hardcore terraforming

Who could've thunk this would be on the list?

BREAKING: Elon Musk said on Tuesday that he would allow former President Donald Trump back on Twitter if the Tesla CEO follows through with his plan to buy the social media company. https://t.co/JLwe00ztzE

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 10, 2022