I don't know . . . the parallels are there, but I still think there are much larger entries on the positive side of the ledger for Musk. He really did, personally, make a difference in the speed of adoption of electric cars in the US.
I'm sure his personal impact wasn't _that_ large, but even a small but genuine change in the rate of technological adoption on a national scale is significant.
I don't want to sound like I like Musk: I think he's a grifter and a conman and would never invest in his companies. But .... he's not a literal mobster, which is what Trump is. OK, aside from that [and what NickS said, which I can only partially support] you're right.
Which .... is damning with faint praise: "you're not a literal gangster, so hey, not as bad as Trump".
My opinion of Musk has never recovered from when he insulted the cave diver for being capable of performing a rescue that Musk's people couldn't.
There was a book I got that made a decent case for the Trump Tower being a genuine achievement by Trump in his early years, even adjusting for the spoon in his mouth. He may have been lucky in who he hired, but it was an ambitious lift and he was ultimately responsible. Of course as he continued he took fewer and fewer risks, and achieved a lot less than par given his starting capital.
People like this are not very rare.
FWIW -- prior Musk thread: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_16579.html
I am somewhat hoping that Tesla implodes before the end of the decade, but I'm also glad that it didn't die before other car companies were convinced that the electric car market is the future.
Musk = Trump + incredible technological achievements + inspiring a generation of kids to dream bigger - for-profit college scams - racist housing policy - corruption.
In the end Elon's overall contribution to the world will end up net positive. They do have some unflattering similarities though. In addition to the ones you mentioned I'd add that they're both very willing to lie to achieve their goals.
7: Plus racist employment practices and transportation vision - buses dirty and yucky. And I'm not sure about the "dream bigger" bit.
Anyway, I'm now saving up for an electric VW instead of a Tesla.
Musk is basically Edison. A ruthless, unscrupulous asshole & relentless self-promoter and carnival barker who also happens to be an absolute genius and excellent at translating designs into products. Largely because of his unpleasant qualities.
He achieves his best results when reality imposes constraints on his juvenile personality (e.g., falcon 9 reusability, neuralink robotic electrode implanter) -- a technical problem that he has to solve -- and his worst results when his personality is allowed to fully express itself (e.g., model x doors, model 3 user interface, everything about the cybertruck).
One real benefit to Tesla is that it laid to rest the notion that hydrogen fuel cells were going to be the future of transportation. That was never going to happen, but was being used relentlessly in the 2000s as an excuse to avoid investing in electric cars.
Spacex is more interesting that Tesla, and a more clear-cut example of his genius. Starlink, which would not be possible without Spacex, will likely do amazing things to address the global digital divide. And this is setting aside the scientific research that Spacex will enable. Can you image what planetary science will look like when a mars rover (or jupiter orbiter) is within the budget of a state university system?
Neuralink is another example of where he really excels. The components that his system is constructed from were known, and the science is not particularly remarkable. But pulling all those components together in that particular arrangement - a massive engineering success not a science breakthrough - is enabling orders of magnitude improvements in brain-computer interfaces. And who knows where that will lead...
Musk is basically Edison. A ruthless, unscrupulous asshole & relentless self-promoter and carnival barker who also happens to be an absolute genius and excellent at translating designs into products. Largely because of his unpleasant qualities.
He achieves his best results when reality imposes constraints on his juvenile personality (e.g., falcon 9 reusability, neuralink robotic electrode implanter) -- a technical problem that he has to solve -- and his worst results when his personality is allowed to fully express itself (e.g., model x doors, model 3 user interface, everything about the cybertruck).
One real benefit to Tesla is that it laid to rest the notion that hydrogen fuel cells were going to be the future of transportation. That was never going to happen, but was being used relentlessly in the 2000s as an excuse to avoid investing in electric cars.
Spacex is more interesting that Tesla, and a more clear-cut example of his genius. Starlink, which would not be possible without Spacex, will likely do amazing things to address the global digital divide. And this is setting aside the scientific research that Spacex will enable. Can you image what planetary science will look like when a mars rover (or jupiter orbiter) is within the budget of a state university system?
Neuralink is another example of where he really excels. The components that his system is constructed from were known, and the science is not particularly remarkable. But pulling all those components together in that particular arrangement - a massive engineering success not a science breakthrough - is enabling orders of magnitude improvements in brain-computer interfaces. And who knows where that will lead...
@10
Get the kia niro EV. Solid, fun car without any "look at me" weirdness and really, really cheap.
Scroll down to "Compare EV vehicles" https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/ev-buying-guide/
The Mercedes Eqs looks like a Ford Taurus from the 1990s.
Dad had a Taurus. Last Ford he ever bought.
I think most entrepreneurs are a few steps away from being con artists...the self-promotion, overconfidence, ask for $, etc.
I think like Trump he has realized that IOKIYAR, but his vision is more about awesome futuristic tech instead of petty feuds and tacky status symbols, which does make a big difference.
Did someone update the site? First time I have ever seen this message:
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20: That can happen if you accidentally double-click on "Post".
19 but Musk loved himself some petty feuds
I think most entrepreneurs are exactly con artists. It's just some cons incidentally work to produce gains for society.
@23
Some with vast Stocks, and little Pains
Jump'd into Business of great Gains
Terrible as Musk is, he founded a startup, even if it was mostly luck that it turned into PayPal. Trump continued his father's preexisting business: to the extent he did anything interesting as a businessman, it was systematically cheating contractors. Tesla and SpaceX, even if Musk didn't invent anything, exist.
For now. Trump used to be a superstar developer, a rich man of grand designs!
I mean, I know nothing about SpaceX, but imagine it'll stick around; Tesla I'd bet on going under.
What will Elon Musk's reality TV show be?
Well, his grand design was to go up from being a developer of interchangeable apartment buildings in Brooklyn to a developer of flashy towers in Manhattan. Same business, but a substantial difference. (He was fortuitously helped by a Brooklynite his father knew becoming mayor at a crucial time, apparently.)
Musk has some interesting tweets. Recently he had Grady Booch questioning him about software engineering. He said something correct about volume 1 of Capital being the only volume Marx published in his lifetime.
My dad wanted a Taurus, settled for a Tempo. Turned out to be a damned good car.
The worst car we ever had was a Ford Granada.
Did neuralink actually accomplish anything that others haven't aside from killing more test animals?
29: He later tweeted a racist boomer meme summarizing it as "Gib me dat for free".
("Later" being two years after he said he was reading the book and found it interesting. Self-cartoonizing!)
Neuralink is another example of where he really excels. The components that his system is constructed from were known, and the science is not particularly remarkable. But pulling all those components together in that particular arrangement - a massive engineering success not a science breakthrough - is enabling orders of magnitude improvements in brain-computer interfaces. And who knows where that will lead...
Wrong.
Did neuralink actually accomplish anything that others haven't aside from killing more test animals?
Right.
I'm not going to look up what Neuralink is, but testing it doesn't sound like a good way to die.
Better or worse than getting hit by a self-driving Tesla?
Gonna go with worse:
In the lawsuit, the committee alleges that staff at the university "removed pieces of the skulls of rhesus macaque monkeys and inserted electrodes into the animals' brains."
The lawsuit alleges that monkeys were not provided with adequate veterinary care and that an "unapproved substance" known as BioGlue "killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains."
That's why I didn't want to look it up.
I don't know shit about electric cars or entrepreneurship, but the span of my career has mostly* overlapped with the development of chronic in vivo electrophysiology, and the claims made for Neuralink frankly reek of fraud. I'm test-driving the same kind of high-density silicon probes in rodents that Neuralink uses in primates and if I killed as many rats with no results as Neuralink has monkeys, I'd have already had my lab shut down. The whole field is still trying to decide whether this new tech is worth the considerable downsides, but Elon is out here promising robot mind-reading in a decade, ffs, and it's nonsense.
This is why I can't even bring myself to engage with Elon bros; this emerald-diapered bullshitter is happy to pour macaque bodies and junior scientist careers into the woodchipper for no better reason than his own embiggenment. I agree with the OP premise to the extent that Elon and Trump are both psychologically damaged shitheel liars who should never be taken at their word and beyond that I can't get interested in debating the differences.
*I was not around for the wild-and-wooly days of sticking insect pins into cat brains, thank heavens
If Elon raises an army of cybernetic monkeys controlled through 5G, we're all fucked.
I mean, Musk hasn't been tested yet to see what he would do with his own army.
Swope!!!
44: he did challenge Ramzan Kadyrov to single combat, iirc, which honestly makes even pre-2016 Trump seem pretty statesmanlike. In general 5 is correct, though. Musk has a certain amount of nerd cred that I grudgingly acknowledge, and the meet-cute story with Grimes is actually cute. Still, the racial-discrimination lawsuit against the Tesla plant here has basically ensured that I will never seriously consider buying a Tesla. (I also now have a pet Lucid Air that follows me around town and it's super gorgeous. I have no knowledge of labor conditions at Lucid. You can ruin my fantasy if you love stomping on people's dreams.)
NickS: From what I understand, sure Tesla did some good in the West. But the big electric car players are in China, and they were ramping up completely independently of Tesla. At least, that's what I've read. So sure, Tesla brought electric cars to the public eye in the US, maybe a bit in Europe. But it would have happened, only with Chinese cars instead.
Now, maybe it's a good thing Tesla did it, b/c it's so poorly-run that GM/Ford/whatever have a chance to catch up, whereas if it'd been Chinese companies, they might have just crushed our domestic makers. Maybe that's a good reason for Tesla: b/c it protects our big car companies from their own incompetence and narcissism.
Those stupid tunnels are another debacle. With pitiful throughput and they're downright dangerous. Their only function seems to be to suck up all the effort and energy that could be put towards actually useful (and carbon mitigating) mass transit. This is downright harmful.
When this came up before my line was that if we have to have billionaire egotists, ones who are sincerely trying to solve major world problems are the best kind.
As well as Tesla and SpaceX, Starlink is now doing great things in Ukraine. The news that they were shipping a load of Starlink terminals there a few months ago was greeted here with universal scorn. People here confidently asserted that it was all lies, not a single terminal would ever end up in Ukraine. Now it's keeping Ukr artillery in the fight. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/04/starlink-ukraine-elon-musk-satellite-internet-broadband-drones/
47 overestimates the threat to the US market from Chinese car manufacturers, many of whose products are barely even legal in the US.
Was Elon Musk not born on top of a pile of apartheid money? And wasn't PayPal essentially a criminal enterprise? Not that this is an unusually morally-suspect background for a plutocrat. Just checking.
Twitter says Musk has dithered long enough. Do the lawsuits start now?
When this came up before my line was that if we have to have billionaire egotists, ones who are sincerely trying to solve major world problems are the best kind.
Could be, but his inability or unwillingness to understand basic principles of transportation (like induced demand) makes me think his efforts have a high potential for making things worse, when it's anything more complex than "fossil fuels bad".
Well, when that turns out actually to be the case, let us know.
It's hard to judge his projects. Starlink seems like a real good. I have rural coworkers who use it and it has measurably improved their lives. Fast rural broadband is a huge deal! (Of course, it comes with the Musk heedlessness of polluting the night sky....) But the traffic tunnels, whatever they were called, were something that made me think "maybe Musk is as dumb as Atrios says." Genuinely moronic.
The theory I've seen about the traffic tunnels is that it's technology he's interested in for trying to set up a Mars base -- who knows if that's correct.
@41
"the claims made for Neuralink frankly reek of fraud."
Okay. So is this an implicit acknowledgement that the claims made for Neuralink, if true, would amount to an incredible advancement in BCI? Here is the language from the Neurolink paper (and yes - Musk claimed sole authorship b/c he is an asshole):
We have built arrays of small and flexible electrode "threads," with as many as 3072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads. We have also built a neurosurgical robot capable of inserting six threads (192 electrodes) per minute. Each thread can be individually inserted into the brain with micron precision for avoidance of surface vasculature and targeting specific brain regions. The electrode array is packaged into a small implantable device that contains custom chips for low-power on-board amplification and digitization: The package for 3072 channels occupies less than 23×18.5×2 mm3. A single USB-C cable provides full-bandwidth data streaming from the device, recording from all channels simultaneously. This system has achieved a spiking yield of up to 70% in chronically implanted electrodes.
How many channels in a Utah array? What about a Michigan probe? Is a Medtronic DBS electrode less invasive?
UC Davis says that of 23 monkeys, two of the monkeys were sacrificed for histological results and 6 for veterinary reasons. I highly doubt that a similar failure rate would get an investigation if you were doing chronic mouse experiments.
If he digs enough tunnels, especially in Vegas, he also stands a chance of losing all his elite cred by making some other elites, or at least celebrities, die in a fire.
58 I guess we'll have to wait to see who those victims turn out to be before we decide whether it goes in the for or against Musk column.
My favorite part of this is how they always say "sacrificed" like they're doing a brief ceremony each time, followed by throwing the monkey down the steps of the pyramid.
In grant-speak, "Indirects" means upkeep on giant pyramid for the animal lab people.
kia niro EV
I've driven a Niro hybrid for 5 years (~90k miles) now, and it has been rock solid.
You guys barely have a winter though.
My current car is 16 years old with less than 90,000 miles.
I think we're going to try to buy a hybrid minivan before we drive to Montana this summer.
A minivan is kind of a van-station wagon hybrid to start with.
I remember driving across the country in a van, with a cooler of drinks in the back.
25% of non human primates sacked for veterinary reasons (ie you made them too sick/injured to humanely let them live, or they just died) is an enormous rate in the pharma business. If you kill a dog it's a notable event since rat/mice should let you avoid that. If you kill one monkey it requires some serious explanation. I can't imagine a project that killed six being allowed to continue by the animal welfare committee.
Dad in the driver's seat smoking Winston's, mom holding a map.
@70
This isn't pharma. It's not a question of whether your compound has unanticipated side effects or toxicity. This concerns a chronic implant that includes a percutaneous data connection. And the experiment has been going on for years.
Looking at the Neurolink blog post, the deaths were primarily due to infection of the implant site, as I suspected:
These reasons included one surgical complication involving the use of the FDA-approved product (BioGlue), one device failure, and four suspected device-associated infections, a risk inherent with any percutaneous medical device.
Isn't 4 of 23 pretty high for infections? Maybe they need a sign "Employees must wash hands before conducting brain surgery. "?
Or signs clearly indicating which knives can't be used to cut bagels.
I don't see why they need to use monkeys. With a mortality rate of only 25%, I'm sure Elon could recruit plenty of human volunteers.
I think Musk more basically intelligent and well-read, and actually capable of doing things. If I was forced to spend an evening with one, I would pick him. I honestly have no idea who would win in my usual "quick, to whom do you throw a baby from the window of a burning roof?" Thought experiment --- Trump usually loses but Musk is pretty weird to me, especially around little kids. The cave diver thing creeped me out because all these guys are projectionists. Net long term positive impact for world? Musk has more potential either way.
But they're both awful and every generation is different so the basic OP thesis still sees plausible. .
This was an interesting thought experiment because it reminded me that Trump was not always an old grotesque. I can easily imagine Musk aging poorly into a caricature but as of now, he looks like a well-tended normal person. So maybe Trump did too and people who like him mostly see that. I don't want to get hugely drawn in to having an opinion on Musk, but he clearly fails DSquared's one-lie test and I think people should just fucking leave space alone and stop trashing it so Musk doesn't have much that appeals to me. My brilliant friend is working his heart out trying to get Tesla's home solar stuff to be good and I do trust him.
Elon is worse than Trump because Trump at least has a sense of humor about his hair.
The only times I hear anything about Starlink are when astronomers complain about it ruining their images.
It's hard to do birth charts correctly with satellites messing it up.
Hooboy, the nonhuman primate research thing. I hate to break this to you, but lots of research primates die, and lots of primate studies are planned to be terminal. It's extremely rare in academia, but very common elsewhere. Pharma doesn't "do" a lot of primate research because they outsource it. It's true, that having a possible drug toxicity is a huge deal, but there are so many other reasons research primates need to be euthanized.
Self-injurious behavior is common, because keeping primates in cages is shitty, no matter what agency is defining space and enrichment requirements. Some animals develop behaviors requiring euthanasia. Implants and medical devices often require complex management - an animal could scratch an itch or pick at stitches. Paired animals can fight, even if they've been determined to be compatible. They can really hurt each other. Bad reactions to anesthesia happen, and equipment doesn't have to meet as stringent requirement as for humans. You know who performs anesthesia on primates? I can guarantee you it's not an anesthesiologist. It's also not a veterinarian, for the record. It's probably a guy who trained for a couple of weeks.
Sometimes devices or compounds are compromised in a way that's impossible to understand before using them. What if paperwork guaranteeing sterility of a material is based on bad data? What if experimental devices can't be sterilized with known methods because they're a prototype and validating sterilization on an experiment that may fail is hugely expensive.
Just like human research is governed by IRBs, animal research is governed by a committee overseeing ethics (IACUC or ACUC). Different sites have very different attitudes and approaches.
This all sucks. It would be great if we could find another way. There are some really cool research facilities that have amazing primate habitats and some research primates that live for decades. But that's mostly not how it works.
76: If I was forced to spend an evening with one, I would pick him.
Aha! A poll!
If you ask if you can have any leftover monkey steak, they will deny the monkeys are ever killed. I know because I used to have an office on the floor below the animal lab.
Maybe, but it was $2.50 a rabbit. $2.00 if it had lipstick on its fur.
I don't know if this is a hot take but I think most primate experimentation should be paid human experimentation. Primates can't consent and if they could, they probably wouldn't.
I think we should teach sign language to more primates because I want to find out of it's just Koko that was a big fan of nipples or if it is common.
77: What's "DSquared's one-lie test" ? I feel like this is something I once knew and have totally forgotten. This is happening to me a lot these days.
90: I wasn't sure either. I thought about the classic DSquared post Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101 and it includes this (which isn't a one-lie test, but maybe adjacent).
Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make inaccurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can't use their forecasts at all. Not even as a "starting point". By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford's Law.
Application to Iraq This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than "some" or "some but not enough to justify a war" or even "some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs". My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.
91: oog,. Thanks. That whole link is setting off all kinds of "things I was once familiar with and have somehow ejected from my mind" vibes. I guess my efforts to stop obsessing with "what could we usefully have done differently to change people's minds and not invade Iraq?", for the sake of my mental health, has had some tangible effects on my memory. Not sure that's quite what I was going for.
people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had
That is one hell of a way of describing Scott Ritter.
(Dsquared seems to have been rather confused about Andrew Wilkie. Wilkie was an Australian military intelligence guy who thought that Iraq definitely had WMD but that it wasn't enough of a threat to justify an invasion; reaching the right conclusion from the wrong assumptions, basically. He resigned in the run-up to the war. )