Other What's your take on the past decade?

Dog years innit

 

Sorry to hop in, just wandered what relevance this had with being a "good/bad person" or doing "good/bad"?

 

Tesla full self driving ultimately is working on reducing these numbers.

The media loses their minds every time autonomous driving is involved in a fatality, but somebody driving away unharmed is a non story, so it never gets reported on. Classic publication bias.

Rounding out the good Elon has done with Tesla, it's arguable that Electric vehicle technology has been moved forward 10+ years vs what traditional auto makers would have accomplished.

Lets move on to SpaceX and Starlink.

• Vastly reducing cost of cargo to the space station and expected to fly astronauts in the coming months
• Science mission launches (DSCOVR, TESS, JASON-3, GRACE-FO, etc)
• GPS launches
• Iridium constellation replacement
• Starlink is expected to bridge the digital divide and bring affordable internet to potentially billions of people
• Inspiring a whole generation of people by doing the seemingly impossible
• If starship works, we have a legitimate shot at becoming a true space fairing civilization.

What else is Elon working on?

Boring company: You English chaps seem to like your tubes, wouldn't it be cool if they cost less than half as much?
OpenAI: Lets try not to make the terminator franchise a reality.
Neuralink: Computer brain interface? Sounds cool to me

I could go on. Anyways, the point is Elon is working to make this world less of a dumpster fire and most people out there are content to believe whatever garbage the tabloids print and dismiss the overall positive impact he continues to have on humanity.

 

Musk is working on making Musk richer and richer...

 

You keep harping on about that, but earth has a big shadow and in LEO the flares are extremly brief and happen closer to dawn and dusk, although it can vary depending on the lattitude of the observer.

I havn't been following it closely, but last time I saw something (maybe a month ago?) the shafts were dug in Las Vegas and the machine was on site. As with rockets, lots of permits and utlity serveys are required for tunnels, so you can't exclusivly attribute delays to the boring company.

Elons twitter is 50% cool/informative tweets and discussion, 45% random nonsense (memes/jokes/etc), 4% borderline crazy stuff and the final >1% is your examples above.

It's common knowledge that you don't work for any of his companies if you want a lax job with bankers hours, 6 weeks holiday and a fat pension. Telsa needed to get the model 3 line going asap to survive, so for a while it was barely controlled chaos and a there were injuries; it's sad, but not unexpected. The alternative was the company goes bust and everybody gets pink slips.

I give Elon the benefit of the doubt, but I don't turn a blind eye when he screws up. As the for the flamethrower, I thought it was a waste of money and didn't fancy seeing what customs had to say about importing it.

In any event, I'm happy to continue this verbal quabble, but maybe split it out into a separate thread and lock it for a few days, so we have a moment to decide if its worth continuing.

 

Depending on who you ask, he seems to be doing quite the opposite. From a historical standpoint, all of his PayPal money went into SpaceX and that came dangerously close to bankrupting him.

 

Musky is a "hype man" IMO. Like Flava Flav at an NWA show. He doesn't actually add much to the proceedings, but he is kind of entertaining to look at sometimes.

I believe that he's done some good pushing the concept of electric vehicles (That he bought into, although it might be debatable whether the Lotus effort he bought would have survived being.. Well, being Lotus and all) into the 'cool' and making other, more established, manufacturers look more seriously at EV's before they otherwise would have.

His cars, though.. Eh. For the price, the interiors are ****. The finish issues are going down as far as I can tell, and these days you do seem to stand a better chance of getting a car that doesn't look like it was built by a blind man on a galloping horse, but at the end of the day, the interior still looks like a mid-range sedan with a couple of gigantic screens in it. But at the price of an infinitely nicer vehicle.

EV's are the future, it'd be insane to deny that, but I'm not sure Tesla has a big part of that future with Musky at the helm. He needs someone to slap the phone out of his hand any time he goes near twitter. Or better yet, be removed from the business before he tanks it completely.

Overall, I think Musky has made some worthwhile contributions to the EV market and the solar market, but I think he makes too many bold promises that he then can't follow up on - Or, even worse, tries to follow up on with unsafe 'solutions'. See: Boring company detailed by Gareth. The computer/controller/fancyecu upgrade that he initially said would be free (And I did see someone get it free, so it was at some point) that is now going to be a paid upgrade. Walmart solar installations catching fire. Flint still not having safe water (Although a very strong argument exists for that needing to be solved by the government, and not a private company..). The dumbass submarine ego-bloating thing for the cave situation. The "armour glass" breaking. Although, frankly, I'd want the glass breaking if I was an in accident driving a self-oxidisng fire.

His MO seems to be over-promise, under-deliver, distract. With an (un)healthy dose of inappropriate tweeting thrown in there.

Which, let's be clear, is often the MO of companies - But most companies aren't contending with his ridiculous ego and tweets blowing smoke.

And that's not touching on the ungood working conditions in his companies. I seem to recall a story about interns being handed high vis vests and being made to build cars with no experience and very little, if any, training. Not sure I'd want to work there. Or drive a car built by someone who doesn't know what 'torque to spec' means.

Fortunately for Musky, he has plenty of adoring fans he would no doubt use as slave labour in a heartbeat to slush his funds, should the opportunity arise.

I do have a product idea. A brick with wheels drawn on in chalk, and an 18650 battery taped to it for $4000. I bet he'd sell a few of those.

 

Now i thought at least one 'businessman' may get mentioned in this thread but i wasn't expecting two pages about Musk.

 

Who doesn't love ol'Musky?

 

Just to pick this out for a second: surely the point of Musk's chat about the Boring Company being able to do things so much quicker and cheaper than traditional methods is actually a right old load of pish, because, as your example here shows, by far the largest proportion of the time and money costs associated with such tunnelling is due to planning, surveying and other "red tape". And the Boring Company isn't going to be able to do anything to reduce these costs. Sure, their fancy tunnelling machines might be quicker and cheaper than what's already out there (CITATION NEEDED) but when this is just a small fraction of the overall costs then it just doesn't translate to the sort of revolutionary savings that Musk has boasted about.

And it feels a bit like you're trying to have your cake and eat it here - if it's not Musk's fault that the planning stage took so long, then he can't simultaneously be delivering savings on this part of proceedings, can he?

 

I'm sure this exact argument played out with the advent of gas and electric street lighting centuries ago. Other than a few areas of Scotland, the UK looks like a light pollution wasteland.

Funny, that's almost verbatim what ULA, Roscosmos and Ariane Space said about SpaceX 10 years ago. Probably what most auto manufactures said about electric cars and Tesla too.

Injuries and fatalities in the workplace happen all the time. Why arn't you screaming about the 4.7 million days of lost time due to injury in the UK?
https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/dayslost.htm
So long as Tesla is continually improving their safety record, I don't see the problem. It's almost a givin as a manufacturing line matures.

Now you're just talking out of your arse.

Yes, givin the results, any of his missteps have been well worth a few injuries and hurt feeling. By your logic the channel tunnel should be demolished and any managers or politicians still around should be publicly flogged for the fine safety record on that project.

Oh, and thats 2 F9's, a heavy (an Atlas V too, just because I like rockets, even if its not one of Elon's), plus a new model 3 in the family (I'm only a part owner).

Sadly I have neither the time the money, nor youth to spend on an engineering degree. I honestly really hope Starship works, as otherwise this planet is going to become rather boring, especially if it's populated by close minded folk such as yourself.

The majority of his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, which he can't really sell much of without risk of tanking the stock price.

 

I'm not going to draw any conclusions with a current sample size of 1ish.

 

right, y'all take this discussion to another thread as it's very clearly off topic.
Also, Musk is an ass, Cook is an ass, Jobs was an ass, Gates is an ass, end of discussion.

 

But the topic is people's thoughts on the last decade...

...and clearly several people think one of the defining things of the last 10 years is what a colossal bellend Elon Musk has shown himself to be.

 

There should be an award for that...

Knob Of The Decade!

 

"Dick of the Decade", as awarded by Channel 4's The Last Leg, went to David Cameron.