Trump says Elmo isn’t allowed to fire people anymore.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/trump-cabinet-musk-025093
Elmo to trump: You’re fired!
Agree in full: I add bolding:
I understand he did some troubleshooting at Tesla and SpaceX as well. Both were in difficult industries and required some tricky executive decision making. Let’s not forget that Elon succeeded where Amazon’s Bezos and Virgin Air’s Branson did not. If this were easy, the 2 industries would look very different.
So A++++++++++ for Musk’s organizational genius and F- for self-awareness.
Some of this applies to DOGE. It shows terrible business judgment insofar as it applies the private equity playbook to the federal government, which is an entirely different beast. But it also reflects his organizational skillset as he effectively motivated 20-something hackers to expose themselves to legal liability. Those were the dudes that showed up at various agencies and ordered criming. That’s motivation! Lining up former hackers and evading FBI scrutiny also shows the ability to recruit key members of this legally (dark) grey operation. The right men with the right stuff for the job!
Elon’s middle-aged operators at DOGE weren’t that sort of point men: they had families and quite possibly greater life experience (in addition to greater familiarity with Elon).
Some folks say that. But when the big boss comes by, any engineer worth their salt is going to butter that boss up, whether he is actually helpful or not.
Stereotypes of social inept geeks aside, many engineers do have some notion that sucking up can be a successful career strategy.
And note that the actual engineering breakthroughs at those two companies were made by Eberhard and Tarpenning (Tesla) and Tom Mueller (SpaceX).
Apparently that sort of “help” has not produced results at Neuralink or the Boring Company or Twitter, where he did not, as I noted earlier, partner up with somebody who was actually in charge of the technical end.
Somehow, when he takes the technical reins himself instead of leaving it to somebody else, things don’t go so well.
And Facebook succeeded where MySpace faded away.
And VHS succeeded in the US where Betamax failed.
It’s a post-hoc fallacy and a pernicious one. A lottery winner must have had some special quality that led to those riches, right? That’s how this works? Success is its own evidence of worthiness?
You and I have different definitions of “organization”. I say that’s more the cheerleading / motivation end. It’s comparatively easy to motivate a small team of early 20’s male hacker types. Silicon Valley is full of companies like that. The difference here is that those folks have been transplanted to DC and getting their names doxxed.
DOGE isn’t ‘organized’ in the traditional business sense. Quite the reverse, based on the results we’ve seen so far.
Great_Antibob: at this point we would have to drill down into the fundamentals of some of the companies. And I’m not going to buy a bio about Musk.
No, Musk isn’t an engineer. But Tesla did make the correct decision by choosing ramped up laptop batteries (proven technology) rather than a number of other possible technologies to power their car. SpaceX did make some saavy efficiency decisions.
On Twitter - Musk didn’t want to buy the company: he only bought it because he was losing a lawsuit that was going to force him to buy it (because, you know, he agreed to do that, I suspect while on a drug-fuelled binge). He made a bad managerial decision at Twitter when he torpedoed the platform’s reputation among pricey ad-buyers. He correctly understands the property to the extent that he grasps that it will only work economically as a front end for some other business like payments or AI. Amazon makes its profits on cloud services after all, not selling consumer items.
Agreed, you need to drill down into the particulars. To answer your question, yes success is evidence of worthiness, but it’s not sufficient on its own. Serial success provides stronger evidence, and no when we’re discussing high tech industries with high failure rates, a few duds won’t outweigh the successes, simply because the background failure rate is so high.
Summarizing, I’ve made what I think is a highly plausible case. But you need to look at Elon’s actual chain of decisions to move to a firm conclusion. I haven’t done that and I’m not going to.
A lion can run real fast. Cut that lion’s legs off, it can’t run so fast anymore.
Aristotle was a genius at math and a moron at biology.
This whole debate over whether Musk is good at business and whether he’s massively skilled at tech misses that 1) life is not immutable - you can go downhill, and 2) genius is not infinite nor all-encompassing.
If y’all want to argue against 1 or 2, then by all means proceed with the debate, but assuming that they are true statements then you can just safely trust that there’s no difficulty in reconciling Musk’s record from history with the output of today. Acting otherwise is just arguing against 1 and 2.
This just isn’t some big mystery.
Or you know, past performance is not an indicator of future results.
After all, you won’t know when you’ve encountered something that was in your mental blind spot until it smacks you in the head.
It should be noted however, that Grok was built firmly in Elon’s flop era and yet it seems to be a legitimately impressive business, independent of all the drama. Grok v3 seems like a legitimately impressive LLM that is at or near the cutting edge and people I respect have a lot of good things to say about it.
Back in November, they raised $5B at a $50Bn valuation and, while some of that seems to be an Elon premium to suck up to him, $50Bn also seems like an eminently fair valuation vs comparable peers. Far more foundational LLM companies have spent far more for far less results.
Sure, he’s “just” finding good people and letting them work relatively hands off but this “just” is the hardest thing about building a business. Theoretically, the entire job of a board of directors is to find a person who can do that and they fail all the time. It’s the dream of many startup founders to eventually replace themselves as CEO and transition to executive chairperson but what stalls them is that ultimately, they can’t find anyone who can manage the business as well as they do.
Call me when it actually starts being a profitable business and not just a soak for VC.
“People don’t actually hate me bro, it’s dead Jews plotting against me from beyond the grave, trust me bro I’m the best at sex and video games”
NASA media conference again confirms that Trump and Musk statements about the Starliner astronauts, were false.
Neither spoke to NASA or the Biden administration, as they claimed. All garbage, all the time, intended for the stupid.
Also said it was the batteries on the new Crew Dragon capsule that failed certification, and delayed the Crew 10 mission.
Additionally the swapped Crew Dragon capsule still has open issues, because it was not originally prepped for a NASA mission. Some steps were skipped that NASA requires.
Application of the heat shield tiles was not done under NASA supervision and inspection. And the capsule thrusters did not have protective coatings reapplied before installation.
Additionally the loss of a Falcon booster a few days ago was due to a piping leak on ascent that sprayed fuel onto hot engine parts. So NASA wants to see the mishap investigation on that before certifying the Crew 10 launch.
NASA is reviewing SpaceX documentation to clarify if the work meets NASA standards. They are still hoping to launch on March 12.
If this is true – and I have no idea how accurate this is – it would likely be because companies like OpenAI were trailblazers that pioneered LLM technology when it wasn’t even clear how successful it would be. Now that it’s mature, impressive technology that has evolved through multiple major iterations, Elmo is, typically, stealing as much of it as he can and undoubtedly stealing engineers from other companies, not always successfully.
Wait, are you the same guy who claimed earlier that Elmo is a business genius? Why, yes, now that I look back at the thread, yes you are. So this is just more of the same, unsurprisingly.
You can’t steal employees from another company, they’re not chattel. If an employee by their own free choice is choosing to leave you to join a competitor, you have to ask what you’re not providing that prompted them to leave.
Um. if you look back in this thread, I’ve made fun and been negative of Elon 90% of the time and only stepped in to correct people when they’re spewing blatant misinformation or going off on objectively incorrect tangents.
correct people offer a different opinion
Regarding which your counterparties are free to remain deservedly skeptical.
It is all right there in The Protocols – the secret Jewish section that gentiles are never allowed to see.
Poland seems serious about calling Musk’s bluff on Ukraine… Musk isn’t helping by taunting them, he tweeted this at their Foreign Minister:
“Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink”
Good grief! Musk is at least as immature and vindictive as lying philandering felon Trump.
There is not a speck of diplomacy, decency or honor in the Trump admin.
(but we knew that from the first term).
After blowing up a lot of stuff, by the way they describe it, it is a bit like the Russian approach to rocket engineering. Expect blow ups and learn from them. Of course, with regulations going out of the window, it does not look promising for future astronauts when Musk has access to the office that does the regulations. .
As John Oliver would say, a billionaire that tries to go around regulations, is like the CEO that killed himself and other millionaires in the Titan submarine.
SpaceX: You can learn from mistakes. One of the oddities of US politics is that if the government makes a mistake, it’s a scandal. If a corporation makes a mistake, it’s another day at the office.
SpaceX has led a vast expansion of the US space industry. BlueOrigin hasn’t (though they are a player). Neither did Branson’s operation. Check out the gap between US with SpaceX and US without SpaceX. It’s an impressive track record.
Now we’re here to fight ignorance, so it’s possible that BlueOrigin could pull ahead within 10 years. Second mover advantage is a thing. But so is `first mover advantage.
Should Elon be put in charge of the regulators of Tesla and SpaceX? Lol, hell no and that’s what is happening now. Attacking Musk is pretty easy and I’ve done it upthread. But he has a strong but narrow entrepreneurial skill set. It’s the job of government and society to wind such people up and point them in a productive direction. As opposed to having them lead governments.
Ok, but given Musk’s clear talent and genius he certainly deserves to be the richest man in the world right? Snort. Most people in practice believe this though. Of course the productivity of the organization is traceable to the figure on top! It’s common [non]sense.
From Smapti:
Musk is blaming “Herbert Sandler,” among others, for secretly financing the protests and Tesla dealerships over the last few weeks. Sandler died in 2019.
The wannabe tyrants are feeling some heat. Good.
Trump wants a cease fire between Bannon and Musk. Bannon isn’t playing along:
Trump Plays MAGA Civil War Mediator for Bannon and Musk
A White House chief strategist during Trump’s first administration, Bannon has repeatedly implied Musk, the world’s richest man, is an insincere corporate interloper who doesn’t really believe in the movement’s values and is instead out to give a leg up to the super wealthy.
Of note, the immigration hardliner has attacked Musk, who is the de facto leader of the Trump administration’s radical cost-cutting task force DOGE, for his support of H-1B visas got high-skilled migrants.
“He’s still not a populist nationalist, he’s a globalist,” Bannon told the Times, in an interview conducted in February. “He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable.”
To be fair, if I set up a group to destroy Boulder, CO, set up funds, and choose a leader for the group - all just before keeling over - then I am to blame for the destruction of Boulder. Pointing out my death doesn’t much affect that.
As I understand it, Musk blamed something like 5 different people for funding groups that he viewed as harmful. 1 of those people is currently dead but did, in fact, fund the group and is guilty of it.
Poor journalism and “gotcha ya” political messaging are, in some big way, to blame for Trump’s success. I don’t personally see an end to the craziness while that’s still a popular methodology, even among those who should know better.
@Sage_Rat: Dude. 5 rich guys fund ActBlue along with literally millions of small donors. ActBlue funds Tesla protests, which almost certainly would happen regardless of their funding.
ActBlue is a organization that provides a front end for thousands of project funding pages. It goes beyond that though. ActBlue was the front end for small donations to 5 separate groups, which each have some link to Tesla protests, as alleged by Musk.
Musk isn’t alleging that Soros funded the Democratic Socialists of America. (He didn’t). And the Democratic Socialists of America does a lot more than fund Tesla protests. Musk’s argument is ridiculous: it’s a smear. Soros has as much to do with the Tesla protests as anybody on this message board: the link is preposterously tenuous.
The right wing has a tradition of this though. They did it with the Tides Foundation, another funding conduit. It’s utter bullshit, designed to bamboozle the gullible.
You know who also is a funding conduit for the DSA? Paypal. Blame yourself Musk: you support the DSA more than Soros does, by your crazy logic.