this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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And I heartily encourage people who loathe Elon Musk to do this. Perhaps then it will be easier to discuss subjects like reusable rocketry or electric cars without so much "but the Twitter!" digression.
He’s not designing the rockets, dude. He’s on ketamine posting rot about The Jews. The world does not need Elon Musk to have technological progress.
So doesn't that make it even more reasonable to not constantly jump in with how awful Elon Musk is when discussing SpaceX's rockets?
No, fuck him
He's very much involved in the designing of those rockets. That's a fact, not opinion
There is exactly one patent with his name on it and it's the shitty door handle that breaks all the fucking time. I'll believe he's involved with the rocketry division the moment he develops any kind of engineering experience or skill that he's willing to show the public, which if he had it, given that he's an ego driven megalomaniac, the public would definitely have seen.
Anyone capable of dispassionately studying this subject even one level deeper than the headlines can quite easily find a ton of sources proving he's both personally involved in the design progress of these rockets as well as quite competent on many fields relating to it. It's understandable that people hate him but spreading lies is where I draw the line.
I would argue that anyone capable of dispassionately studying this subject can equally easily find that Elon Musk is not a reliable source of information (I'd dare say a liar) , eg:
I don't know whether Elon is a genius or not - but when somebody, who is proven to be somewhat creative with the truth, also claims that he is a genius - specially in the "I know more about manufacturing than anyone else alive" manner - I don't think it is unreasonable to have doubts.
The discussion was about wether he's personally involved in the design of the SpaceX rockets or not.
This is what I'm arguing against.
Yes?
I'm often reminded of a SpaceX render they put up on the 'Tube back when they were still working out the reusability thing. Commenters had a lot of questions about how the particular flight plan impacted on their fuel budget. And so, Elon himself waded in with the answers. Except he was talking about the dollar price it cost to buy the fuel. He was like 'why are you worried about fuel, it's not that expensive, guys' because he didn't understand the questions. He didn't understand why the amount of fuel and the mass of the fuel would be significant to anybody. Guys, I think he doesn't understand the rocket equation. He doesn't understand the central problem of rocketry. I think the guy might be full of it.
A bunch of ass-kissers and people who don't work there think he's an engineering genius are quoted in a Reddit post and you think it's true.
They had a whole group babysitting him into making the correct decisions. Just look at the design disaster that truck is, do you think he can find his behind with his both hands when it comes to space rockers?
Lol
Henry Ford was an antisemitic loon. Should we abandon mass production of cars? Wehrner von Braun was a literal Nazi, should we abandon efforts to land on the Moon?
Elon Musk is a terrible person, yes. But the technologies his companies work on are not affected by his terribleness as a person.
You suppose his terribleness has zero impact on the technologies his companies work on? That is the whole issue of him owning Twitter.
One shouldn't trust a black box technology (e.g. software) in the first place but even moreso from his companies.
Based on the comments about him online, I find that he is simultaneously in complete control of every aspect of his companies and their technologies, and also an idiot rich kid who bought every company fully-formed and relies entirely on the people he hired to get anything done.
You can dictate what your employees do in a company you own, that much is self evident
He can tell his employees to go one way and ignore (or fire) them when they raise objections
So he can be in total control and still be a spoiled rich idiot, those things are not mutually exclusive
The question people are usually arguing about is whether he gets "credit" for his companies' successes. If he's got total control but he's an idiot, how are his companies doing so well?
Well, aside from Twitter. But nobody's good at everything.
You can be inteligent and an idiot. All companies are a combination of skill and luck.
You say that like some mix of seemingly contradictory ideas can't exist simultaneously. Are you 9?
Do you think someone can be in complete control of every aspect of their companies when they spend all day shitposting on Twitter?
I think some simple logic can tell you which of those is the truth.
Ford should have been forced to step down because of his bigotry. Ford also didn't control all mass-production of cars. You might have heard of some other companies such as Chevrolet.
If we couldn't do it without the help of Nazis, we shouldn't have tried. But there were plenty of American rocket scientists too. Robert Goddard pioneered rocket science and he wasn't a Nazi.
The difference between those two things and now is that those two things happened back when it was acceptable to most people to be out-and-out bigots. Of course no one was going to do anything about them in the era of Jim Crow. It's 2023. We don't have to forgive bigots anymore.
Yeah but that doesn't make anti semitism good you idiot.
His rockets suck and his cars suck.
His cars really suck, the amount of build quality problems on those cars is way too high for a car that costs as much as it does
And that's something that can be discussed entirely without jumping to "Elon Musk says bad things about people."