In defense of Elon Musk(popularmechanics.com) |
In defense of Elon Musk(popularmechanics.com) |
The narcissism, the childlike behavior of arguing by insulting, constant condescension of everyone else, the incessant lying, deception, and misleading about the company
and
the cult of worship around him.
> People these days bother me, they want to pull apart everyone else, go try do something awesome yourself. reply
I do not think people criticizing Elon musk are criticizing him because of his success. There are thousands of successful people, even in our age/era/generation that are not criticized as such.
2) selling vapor ware (full self driving)
3) stock price manipulation
Yeesh, what an opening paragraph. This, and the rest of the articles, seem to focus on the idea that Elon Musk isn't just a slightly more philantropic than average billionaire with a very good PR department, albeit one he's doing his best to undo the work of.
As one of the articles rightly states, Musk provided some funding for these projects, but is at best one person among tens of thousands actually responsible for _any_ of the achievements of "his" companies - scare quotes intentional, for between the loans and government grants it starts to become unclear what, other than the cult of personality which evidently no longer serves the needs of relatively mature and legitimate enterprises, he actually brings to the table here, beyond being an ideas guy who can afford to throw money behind getting external funding to try things.
Whether he deserves the shit he gets talked about him is a matter for debate, but it's very much a reaction against nonsense like one of the articles here comparing him to Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, two comic-book superheroes defined by superhuman brilliance and superhuman finances, while Musk clearly can have only one of those things.
At the end of the day, though - do we need articles defending a man with a net worth of twenty billion dollars from the average citizen--who's net worth is closer to twenty _thousand_ dollars--'s criticisms? No, we don't. Whatever criticisms might be had, they're clearly not stopping him from doing whatever he likes.
This is not to diminish the minds of those who discovered them, of course, but it is to _temper_ the hero worship. What SpaceX is doing is not enabled by an individual superman, as the comparison with Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark would suggest, but by allocating resources to something made possible by the work of hundreds of thousands of people.
Remove one man from the picture there and that work still exists. Just as other companies are doing the same things _now_, because they are possible _now_, they would be with any individual person removed, regardless of who that person was. The details would be different - without Musk, it would be some other company doing this, without the lead designer, the things themselves would look different, without the lead engineer some components would make different tradeoffs, et cetera - but without Elon Musk, everyone working at SpaceX would still exist, everyone working at Tesla would still exist, and everyone working at other companies doing the exact same things would still exist. We could be a little behind, for sure, the hero worship could well have translated into inspiration for some, or even a lot of, people, but that doesn't make the man himself necessary for any of those things.
I worry that saying things like this comes across as attacking the man, which it absolutely isn't. Without Einstein, we would still have made the same realisations, collectively, eventually. Other people were working on the same things at the same time. Without Edison, we would still have the electric lightbulb, entirely likely invented by, hm, who...
Oh right, Tesla. The company itself is named after one of the most blatant examples of this phenomenon. Musk may even understand - he certainly does, he's clearly not dumb - that he isn't a unique superman. That doesn't make him "bad", but it does mean that we really don't need to waste thousands of words on defending his obviously harmful actions under the theory of "we have to let him do and say bad things or he might stop doing good things too."
Who's "we" and who are you to state that articles should or should not have been written? I don't understand this mindset. I understand disagreeing with the thesis of a piece of writing but I don't understand the notion that a piece of writing "didn't need to have been written."
I'd argue that we would likely be a lot behind. Advancements don't just "happen." Progress can be lost, windows of opportunity can be closed, and risk can be avoided. I'd argue there's a good chance we'd have never gotten re-usable rockets if it wasn't for Musk's (at the time, foolish) risk taking with his personal funds to keep SpaceX solvent. Everyone at the time said it couldn't be done, if you recall, and in that kind of world, nobody is "doing the work." It's just considered not worth working on. It's out of mind. People allocate resources and time elsewhere. It's too risky anyway. We're in a period of relative peace that may or may not last. So there's a good chance no, we may have never gotten re-usable rockets, if the odds of a risk-taker coming along and giving it a shot comes along one or twice every couple of generations.
Our current space program regressing so far is evidence enough that willpower and human decision-making, not just waiting for people to "do the work", constitute a large part of what causes progress to happen.
And if we ever get to Mars, I'll argue it's even more likely that we would have never gotten to Mars without that risk taking. And who knows what potential futures unlock for humanity if that ever happens that can be traced back to Musk's decisions.
Being thankful that people like Musk are out there taking huge personal risks to advance human progress isn't "hero worship", and it doesn't disparage the work of the thousands of people who have helped achieve the goals. You are arguing with strawmen.
Actually I don't. I used to, but ever since he started spouting self driving bullshit in 2016, I have given close thought to what is really revolutionary and what is not.
Everything about Tesla is non revolutionary. It is just a lot of batteries with costly motors and shitty barebones interior sold at a loss (net, not gross). If anybody else was similarly hyped they would achieve the same. The only thing Elon musk has done in Tesla is formed a cult.
SpaceX has definitely broken new ground, but it is despite musk not because of it. Even then, they have only reused rockets once, with refurbishments. Their first double reuse is happening in December. I don't think anybody thought what they have achieved impossible, it is impressive nonetheless.
I truly think Elon musk is a net negative for both car and space industry. Commercializing space endeavour would have led to successful space startups, cheaper batteries by lg and Panasonic would make Bev lucrative anyway, maybe a few years later. But the damage done by this incessant lying about self driving would ruin public opinion. And I am not going to be surprised to know that SpaceX cutting corners led to an accident. I think the worst for Elon musk is yet to come.
As for SpaceX: everybody has accidents, and they'll have their share, too. Space is hard. Still, since everyone has been saying that SpaceX is going to fail, and that they won't be able to pull off the next important step, and every time they did it afterwards, it sounds like the story about the boy who cried wolf now.
And yet I have no kind words for Tesla's fully self-driving project. I fully agree with you here.
One of my issues is them claiming that it was a technical problem and other manufacturers do not want to manufacture BEV because there is some conspiracy. No, chevy bolt barely sells because it is not hyped as revolutionary and futuristic. If you think the solution staring a new cult for GM instead of addressing such FUD that is actually hurting BEV adoption. If these masses who worship Musk turned up for Chevy bolt or nissan leaf, we would have a ton more BEVs.
> everyone has been saying that SpaceX is going to fail, and that they won't be able to pull off the next important step, and every time they did it afterwards, it sounds like the story about the boy who cried wolf now.
I am not knowledgable about rockets but spacex can only use rockets twice till now with refurbishments, and nobody else seems to be pushing new rockets.
I can only wonder if Spacex is doing what tesla did to self driving, take existing technology (like driver assistance/VTVL and costly refurbishment which people could do), use them irresponsibly (call lane keeping assist autosteer and let it steer itself/cut costs using dangerous methods), and then make unsubstantiated claims about the future (self driving taxi networks with cross country summon/biggest rocket ever with thousand times reusability with minimal refurbishments).
I would only believe what they have achieved, which is impressive but nobody seems to have deemed that impossible.