The more I am exposed to Musk the less I like him as a person. With that being said I really hope that Space X and Tesla succeed and do well. At this point I honestly don't know if he is even helpful in these companies actual missions.
Here is what Musk was good at. Inspiring very smart people to work towards a goal that is mutually agreed upon. Musk was essentially free advertising for both his companies, a great cheerleader for those goals and purposes, but he got mired down in the muck of ego to the point where he is becoming potentially detrimental. I thought this before he bought Twitter.
I don't think fame and being constantly in the public eye is good for people.
I don't know what Musk is like as a person, but he has said some asinine things. The comments he made about the Thai divers, for example, are awful. I think he's had some great, even genius ideas, but the sad thing is, he's in the public eye because he is unique. Very few powerful people have a hopeful view of the future. If politicians & other corporate types were building new and great things, coming up with awesome ideas, inspiring Americans to live up to our potential, we'd barely notice Musk. He'd be that engineer guy who came up with some cool spaceship & car plans. .
I question how genius he actually is. His real strength seems to be getting people to buy into his ideas. He doesn't really invent things, he finances and sells things. There is a big difference. I don't want to downplay Elon's success in motivating people and selling ideas because he is undoubtedly good at that.
My issue is that his own egotism seems to drive him more than anything. With all the money he has it seems like he is surrounded by people that do not challenge him.
There was the Thai Diver situation, but that situation is much worse than Musk just calling the driver a "pedo" he also hired a private investigator to try to find dirt on the diver. This private investigator ended up scamming Musk. This shows bad judgement. Musk could have just apologized.
Then he made a whole series of terrible predictions and reactive claims at the beginning of the pandemic, doubling and tripping down on many of them.
He tries to claim he is an advocate of Free Speech but he is also dedicated to not being critical of China/CCP because of business interests he has there, even going so far as to make a statement about Taiwan that was essentially pro CCP.
He is also quick to promote conspiracy theories and wildly speculates and doubles down on really dumb ideas/again doesn't apologize or correct himself.
Then recently under the guise of "free speech" defended the Dilbert guy.
Honestly I probably wouldn't even be annoyed at Musk if he was just a friend of mine or something, I would just ignore their eccentric flights of fancy. The thing is Musk is actually doing cool stuff with Space X and Tesla. How cool is it that there is a new successful American car company that makes electric cars? How cool are some of those reusable rockets!
None of this was invented by Musk, but his force of personality, and salesmanship made it possible, so therefore his force of personality and his drifting into indefensible positions actually threatens some very important and cool things.
I think the re-usable rockets were Musk's idea. He may not have engineered them, but he reasoned out that this was the best way of accomplishing his goal of getting people to Mars at a lower cost. Tesla was a great marketing innovation because it made electric cars cool. Priuses and other hybrids were a good idea, but they were not cool. Very few people would have bought an electric car that was dumpy and didn't go as far as gas-powered.
Twitter has been a great source of information about the lab leak since Musk took over. The CCP has been trying to shut that down. So has the American government. Whether COVID was modified in the lab or not is not as important as the fact that it almost definitely was created by 'virus hunting' virologists dragging diseased specimens from remote caves into leaky labs in crowded city centers. It really is important for people to know this.
We should make a teleportation device that can get us to anywhere we want instantly and for free. There I invented something. Of course that's a simplification and I would deserve more credit if the engineers I hired actually built the wild idea I just had. My point is that there is more to invention than just thinking of an idea. Many, many people thought of flying machines well before the Wright brothers actually invented a real workable airplane. The difference between Musk and say Elizabeth Holmes is that Musk hired better engineers...well that and he didn't fool investors for like a decade.
I agree Musk is a great marketer and that Tesla made electric cars cool. Musk deserves lots of credit for that and again assembling great engineers together.
Twitter is really good at pumping out information, true and false quickly. Twitter has to be the worst source of information that exists for highly partisan topics. Which these days is just about everything. This includes anything COVID related. The lab leak hypothesis has at least one prominent book, scientists have spoken to the government of the UK about it and Fauci stated he was open to the possibility that it was a lab leak all before Musk bought Twitter. Musk has never spoken about it. The entire reason the lab leak is a current newsworthy topic is because two US government agencies have "with low to medium confidence" come to the conclusion that COVID was a lab leak. WHO consistently disagrees with this. Just recently an academic paper was released that indicated the virus likely came from Raccoon Dogs. Twitter remains a terrible place to get any of this information because it boils down to people making largely unsourced bite sized claims back and forth.
Of course there is a valuable debate to be had about point of viral research. The US has been barred from the king of research you describe since 2014 or maybe earlier. This of course doesn't doesn't stop other countries from doing it. It seems dumb to me personally, but I am not an expert. I don't know if COVID was a result of a viral jump between animals and the CCP covered it up or an accidental lab leak and the CCP covered it up and if It want to read about either of those topics, especially if I want to read about it in a way not clouded by partisanship I have far better sources than Twitter.
I liked your article and I appreciate your comments. I think we agree a lot on Musk. My point is that he has much more riding on his comments and actions than the vast majority of people. He has done really well to make Tesla and SpaceX he shouldn't let his ego or Twitter shenanigans allow to undermine his other clear strengths. Yet I think his ego won't allow him to not shoot himself in the foot.
Kenny, where I would dissent from your assessment of Musk is that my understanding is that with SpaceX and especially Tesla, Musk did in fact do a lot of engineering and technical work himself. He didn’t just hire other people to do all the work while he sired his 10 children and gave some of them goofy names.
I may have overplayed the "Musk didn't invent anything" card. He has 10 patents, most of which were filed after he was the head of Tesla and Space X. Although he was one of a few people who has a patent for phone communication over the internet from way back in the 1990s.
I'm mostly interested in the lab leak issue because I'd been researching this tech for my sci fi book, The Eternity Prize, about a doctor in 2080 who gets swept up in the government's search for eternal life (and power) by implanting their consciousness in a robot. One of his experiments created a nano-monster that almost ate the Bronx, so he's not enthusiastic about participating. Along the way, I learned a lot about mRNA tech, PCR tests, CRISPR and lipid nanoparticles. I love lipid nanoparticles, ask me anything about them. It's why I was enthused about the vaccine. But I also know how dangerous virologists research can be.
I was doing all this in 2019, before people were aware of COVID. I saw some hinky research papers, (look up Ralph Baric) I got ads for brain slicing machines, mail order viruses & humanized mice, CRISPR classes, Turnkey PCR tests. I kind of understand how this little niche area of science works, and it's kind of alarming.
That sounds very interesting. A lot of that is fascinating stuff. I do think that a lot of future innovations are going to happen in with genetics and biotechnology. This creates a wide variety of both utopian and dystopian possibilities.
I fear that Musk as a person just doesn't have good moral values and decent ethics at all. Super extreme secular types like him tend to be that way. They just can't untangle Good vs Evil at all since they reject the Bible. Also his personal life has some suggestions about how he is as a person... and they don't suggest well. https://pagesix.com/article/elon-musk-children/
The more I am exposed to Musk the less I like him as a person. With that being said I really hope that Space X and Tesla succeed and do well. At this point I honestly don't know if he is even helpful in these companies actual missions.
Here is what Musk was good at. Inspiring very smart people to work towards a goal that is mutually agreed upon. Musk was essentially free advertising for both his companies, a great cheerleader for those goals and purposes, but he got mired down in the muck of ego to the point where he is becoming potentially detrimental. I thought this before he bought Twitter.
I don't think fame and being constantly in the public eye is good for people.
I don't know what Musk is like as a person, but he has said some asinine things. The comments he made about the Thai divers, for example, are awful. I think he's had some great, even genius ideas, but the sad thing is, he's in the public eye because he is unique. Very few powerful people have a hopeful view of the future. If politicians & other corporate types were building new and great things, coming up with awesome ideas, inspiring Americans to live up to our potential, we'd barely notice Musk. He'd be that engineer guy who came up with some cool spaceship & car plans. .
I question how genius he actually is. His real strength seems to be getting people to buy into his ideas. He doesn't really invent things, he finances and sells things. There is a big difference. I don't want to downplay Elon's success in motivating people and selling ideas because he is undoubtedly good at that.
My issue is that his own egotism seems to drive him more than anything. With all the money he has it seems like he is surrounded by people that do not challenge him.
There was the Thai Diver situation, but that situation is much worse than Musk just calling the driver a "pedo" he also hired a private investigator to try to find dirt on the diver. This private investigator ended up scamming Musk. This shows bad judgement. Musk could have just apologized.
Then he made a whole series of terrible predictions and reactive claims at the beginning of the pandemic, doubling and tripping down on many of them.
He tries to claim he is an advocate of Free Speech but he is also dedicated to not being critical of China/CCP because of business interests he has there, even going so far as to make a statement about Taiwan that was essentially pro CCP.
He is also quick to promote conspiracy theories and wildly speculates and doubles down on really dumb ideas/again doesn't apologize or correct himself.
Then recently under the guise of "free speech" defended the Dilbert guy.
Honestly I probably wouldn't even be annoyed at Musk if he was just a friend of mine or something, I would just ignore their eccentric flights of fancy. The thing is Musk is actually doing cool stuff with Space X and Tesla. How cool is it that there is a new successful American car company that makes electric cars? How cool are some of those reusable rockets!
None of this was invented by Musk, but his force of personality, and salesmanship made it possible, so therefore his force of personality and his drifting into indefensible positions actually threatens some very important and cool things.
I think the re-usable rockets were Musk's idea. He may not have engineered them, but he reasoned out that this was the best way of accomplishing his goal of getting people to Mars at a lower cost. Tesla was a great marketing innovation because it made electric cars cool. Priuses and other hybrids were a good idea, but they were not cool. Very few people would have bought an electric car that was dumpy and didn't go as far as gas-powered.
Twitter has been a great source of information about the lab leak since Musk took over. The CCP has been trying to shut that down. So has the American government. Whether COVID was modified in the lab or not is not as important as the fact that it almost definitely was created by 'virus hunting' virologists dragging diseased specimens from remote caves into leaky labs in crowded city centers. It really is important for people to know this.
We should make a teleportation device that can get us to anywhere we want instantly and for free. There I invented something. Of course that's a simplification and I would deserve more credit if the engineers I hired actually built the wild idea I just had. My point is that there is more to invention than just thinking of an idea. Many, many people thought of flying machines well before the Wright brothers actually invented a real workable airplane. The difference between Musk and say Elizabeth Holmes is that Musk hired better engineers...well that and he didn't fool investors for like a decade.
I agree Musk is a great marketer and that Tesla made electric cars cool. Musk deserves lots of credit for that and again assembling great engineers together.
Twitter is really good at pumping out information, true and false quickly. Twitter has to be the worst source of information that exists for highly partisan topics. Which these days is just about everything. This includes anything COVID related. The lab leak hypothesis has at least one prominent book, scientists have spoken to the government of the UK about it and Fauci stated he was open to the possibility that it was a lab leak all before Musk bought Twitter. Musk has never spoken about it. The entire reason the lab leak is a current newsworthy topic is because two US government agencies have "with low to medium confidence" come to the conclusion that COVID was a lab leak. WHO consistently disagrees with this. Just recently an academic paper was released that indicated the virus likely came from Raccoon Dogs. Twitter remains a terrible place to get any of this information because it boils down to people making largely unsourced bite sized claims back and forth.
Of course there is a valuable debate to be had about point of viral research. The US has been barred from the king of research you describe since 2014 or maybe earlier. This of course doesn't doesn't stop other countries from doing it. It seems dumb to me personally, but I am not an expert. I don't know if COVID was a result of a viral jump between animals and the CCP covered it up or an accidental lab leak and the CCP covered it up and if It want to read about either of those topics, especially if I want to read about it in a way not clouded by partisanship I have far better sources than Twitter.
I liked your article and I appreciate your comments. I think we agree a lot on Musk. My point is that he has much more riding on his comments and actions than the vast majority of people. He has done really well to make Tesla and SpaceX he shouldn't let his ego or Twitter shenanigans allow to undermine his other clear strengths. Yet I think his ego won't allow him to not shoot himself in the foot.
Also maybe none of this matters at all.
Kenny, where I would dissent from your assessment of Musk is that my understanding is that with SpaceX and especially Tesla, Musk did in fact do a lot of engineering and technical work himself. He didn’t just hire other people to do all the work while he sired his 10 children and gave some of them goofy names.
I may have overplayed the "Musk didn't invent anything" card. He has 10 patents, most of which were filed after he was the head of Tesla and Space X. Although he was one of a few people who has a patent for phone communication over the internet from way back in the 1990s.
https://insights.greyb.com/elon-musk-patents/
I'm mostly interested in the lab leak issue because I'd been researching this tech for my sci fi book, The Eternity Prize, about a doctor in 2080 who gets swept up in the government's search for eternal life (and power) by implanting their consciousness in a robot. One of his experiments created a nano-monster that almost ate the Bronx, so he's not enthusiastic about participating. Along the way, I learned a lot about mRNA tech, PCR tests, CRISPR and lipid nanoparticles. I love lipid nanoparticles, ask me anything about them. It's why I was enthused about the vaccine. But I also know how dangerous virologists research can be.
I was doing all this in 2019, before people were aware of COVID. I saw some hinky research papers, (look up Ralph Baric) I got ads for brain slicing machines, mail order viruses & humanized mice, CRISPR classes, Turnkey PCR tests. I kind of understand how this little niche area of science works, and it's kind of alarming.
That sounds very interesting. A lot of that is fascinating stuff. I do think that a lot of future innovations are going to happen in with genetics and biotechnology. This creates a wide variety of both utopian and dystopian possibilities.
I fear that Musk as a person just doesn't have good moral values and decent ethics at all. Super extreme secular types like him tend to be that way. They just can't untangle Good vs Evil at all since they reject the Bible. Also his personal life has some suggestions about how he is as a person... and they don't suggest well. https://pagesix.com/article/elon-musk-children/
Page Six?
Oh, not a good enough source for you? ;-)