Here’s a list of SpaceX’s patents. It’s not exhaustive, but includes a lot of patents for antennae, as well as at least one for a fuel injector tip or something–I’m no rocket scientist.
Dude is a hot mess, but both Tesla and SpaceX have incontrovertibly advanced their fields. Him being a hot mess isn’t predicated on him having had no successes.
Is it incontrovertible? Take a look at those antenna patents, for example. Most of them were developed by Shahrzad Jalali Mazlouman when she was a postdoc at Simon Fraser university, and SpaceX presumably paid to have exclusive rights to them. But at no point, as far as I can tell, did she actually work for SpaceX.
Seems to me we can add a new aphorism to the long and hoary list:
Money corrupts. Absolute money corrupts absolutely.
Yeah. He’d be considered one of the greatest* people of our times, if he’d just shut the fuck up.
(Greatest, not necessarily best. Henry Ford was of the greatest people of his time, and he was a Nazi.)
True. With him, and with a certain other unpleasant Very Influential Person of recent years, I’ve noticed a certain tendency to take a position of denying that they may have got done anything right ever, no matter what, and they just stumbled by dumb luck into their achievements. At the very least in a couple of areas Musk picked a winner to invest on (and it profited him greatly). That is a statement of fact, not an expression of moral approval.
There’s no question that Elmo was (and is) an ambitious entrepreneur, although his direct contributions to his successes were more obvious with his early, smaller ventures. Undaunted by failing to get a job at Netscape, he started Zip2, a sort of internet-based yellow pages service that became quite successful, and then later X.com, a payments processor, which eventually led to Paypal. But even in these smaller ventures, he was ousted as CEO and replaced by more experienced and level-headed executives, and to the extent that he did hold leadership roles, his asshole-ish nature was constantly creating turmoil.
In the era of Tesla and SpaceX, it becomes increasingly unclear to what extent, if any, Elmo was much of an individual contributor, other than taking wild gambles, hiring great engineers, and throwing vast sums of money at the various ventures. It’s certainly clear from the chaos at Twitter that he’s an absolutely terrible leader. He’s an arrogant, incorrigible asshole who treats his employees with utter contempt, rages about having to pay taxes, and promotes far-right fascism. He’s accomplished a lot, but every bit of the disdain for him in this thread is well deserved.
I didn’t ask about SpaceX’s patents. I asked about Elmo’s patents.
Can you identify the part of the SpaceX plan that relies on Elmo to invent a bunch of stuff by himself? SpaceX is doing extraordinary things, maybe they’re doing it because of Elmo, maybe in spite of Elmo, but the man said “we are going to space” and damn they are going to space, as well or better than anyone else around.
If you have the greatest rocket scientist the world has ever seen, it seems a waste to not use him.
The part where its reputation is based around Elmo supposedly being some sort of revolutionary genius that inspires people to say things like “He reduced space transportation costs.”
So what Elmo brings to the table is that he says things?
I’m no fan of Musk, but this is starting to feel like a reach. Would Steve Jobs fare any better under such analysis?
Remember how cool it was that Elon launched his own convertible into space with a mannequin in a spacesuit, and sent it on its way? That guy was cool.
Now we have Agile Elmo. Sigh.
Right. And irritatingly, we know, that was the same person with the same flaws that have been known all along. Just that as time progresses he has increasingly let his freak flag fly entirely unmoored, and by Og we really don’t like that flag.
At the risk of having to put up with more stupid ‘Agile’ digs, Elon Musk has said that he doesn’t believe in patenting his stuff.
That’s actually a ‘progressive’ attitude that most of you probably would have thought was awesome until you learned that Musk was a hated ‘other’.
This is not just hot air. Tesla actually has a pledge to not pursue intellectual property claims against its tech:
Isn’t this what progressives want?
Steve Jobs was a gigantic, epic, world-class douchebag.
He went on to add that those grapes were probably sour anyway.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that progressives are opposed to patents. It’s certainly not something I’ve heard any progressives talking about.
Probably conflating stuff like “progressives are opposed to extortionate prices on cheaply produced lifesaving drugs” and “progressives favor patent reform” with “progressives are opposed to patents.”
Which is a common conservative tactic, right?
Progressives: “We need to reform the criminal justice system.”
Conservatives: “They want to let murderers walk the streets!”
P: “We need to reform immigration”
C: "They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
P: “We need to reform the patent system.”
C: “They want to abolish patents!”
Etc etc etc.
Yeah really. We oppose the sort of abuse of the Intellectual Property system that threatened the virtual obliteration of Fair Use and the Public Domain and leads to products essential to patients’ survival remaining proprietary and expensive for an entire lifetime. But it’s a fair cop to claim the fruits of your creativity for a reasonable time (and support for “open source” technology does not mean opposition to intellectual property, either)
Elon scorns patents because it means that if someone else invents something he needs for his projects he then has to pay for it…
Steve Jobs is literally dead because he believed his own hype instead of the science.
@Sam_Stone It’s a good thing to do, I would say. While people are entitled to make money off their inventions, it’s always great when they opt to let something be public domain.
But your example seems to be him trying to have his cake and eat it, too. I mean, Tesla still had the patent granted. They just pledge not to sue. Such a pledge can be rescinded in a way refusing to patent cannot.