How are you judging SpaceX, Neuralink, & Boring to be successes? They’re fine companies with good products, but none of them have fulfilled Musk’s original stated goals: going to Mars, transhumanism, and networks of tunnels for mass transit, respectively. When people say those companies will fail, I imagine the argument is that they won’t achieve these goals. Which, for the time being, is still true. Although it’s true that at least Musk actually builds things.
(Some bold takes? Level 5 self driving cars the way we commonly envision it won’t ever come to fruition, SpaceX will never go to Mars, transhumanism will never come to pass, and hyperloops won’t either. You can come back in 5 years and gloat if I’m wrong.)
SpaceX is an essentially unprecedented success by any reasonable definition of success in the modern space launch services market.
If you want to minimize their obvious accomplishments based on Musk's own incredibly ambitious long-term (decades out) goals, feel free, but that's pretty dumb because it's essentially meaningless relative to the rest of the market. If ULA were already sending colony ships to Mars, maybe you'd have a point, but they aren't.
> SpaceX is an essentially unprecedented success by any reasonable definition of success in the modern space launch services market.
Sure. I agree.
> minimize their obvious accomplishments based on Musk's own incredibly ambitious long-term (decades out) goals
Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, that’s called “holding people accountable to the goals they set.” And I’m happy to give him decades, he still won’t achieve transhumanism, Mars travel, and the like.
You aren't "holding people accountable to the goals they set" in any useful way—and in return for the "Silicon Valley bubble" comment, which I suppose is meant as a slur against me for saying what I've said here, I'd like to invite you to get over yourself.
Setting extremely ambitious goals and trying your level best to achieve them is a virtue, not a vice. If you let some weird disdain for Silicon Valley (which is in fact a place/state of mind which I do not inhabit and whose culture I strongly dislike) rob you of your ability to get excited about great efforts toward building great things and/or solving great problems, that's nobody's problem but your own.
>Setting extremely ambitious goals and trying your level best to achieve them is a virtue, not a vice.
That only holds true up til the point where your loud (public) ambitious goals are the reason for ticket sales.
Once there is financial motive for setting ambitious goals, you lose credit for the ambition -- it becomes driven by profit.
SpaceX is literally taking queries for the sale of private Mars tickets[0].
I have a hard time considering the sale of tickets to a now-technologically-impossible-future-event that may be possibly hundreds of years away from our present time as altruistic.
If I made a website and sold tickets to the "Nicest place to sit and observe the apocalypse when it occurs." for hefty profits i'd be driven out of town. No way I could know where that might be or when it might occur; the entire premise is faulty.
A guy launches a rocket or two and suddenly his opinion, against the majority of the rest of science and engineering by the way, claims we're going to Mars soon.
Sure, he's more believable than some random person saying it, i'll give you that -- but the promise of Mars is something that I and many others consider to be so unlikely in the immediate future that we view the promise as akin to a lie or fraud; and Musk has done little to assuage the very real technical fears behind the mission other than with vagueties like "Well, it's an engineering challenge." or "We'll have to discover new ways of doing X".
Yes, that's true, new method and procedures will inevitably need to be developed -- but dismissing such feats as minor is not only in poor taste, but short-sighted when trying to plan a timeline for when these events may occur.
I think this shortsightedness is intentional, and for profit. He can claim the world, profit from it, and deliver very minimal results that are nothing compared to the promises.
You see this behavior over and over in the management of early Tesla, too.
Does SpaceX really have the common man lining up to be fleeced for vaporware Mars tickets? Not really, as far as I can tell. They may have taken money from some very rich people who presumably understand the speculative nature of what they're paying for, e.g. the "Dear Moon" thing, which is by the way entirely within the realm of current technological possibility. We already sent humans to the moon, several times. Fifty years ago. SpaceX has definitively proven that they know how to build things that go up and things that come down and things that keep people alive in space. You do the math.
Beyond that, I really just don't see the angle of Musk as a con man. He's a maniac—literally, manic—and that certainly comes through in the aggressive and sometimes unrealistic nature of the promises he makes, but accusing him of being somebody who would settle for delivering "very minimal results" just seems to ignore the reality of the man himself, both the personality traits he's clearly displayed (and I don't mean that in an entirely positive way) and more importantly the results he's already delivered. They are not "minimal". He's delivered unprecedented upstart success and unprecedented innovations at scale in two markets that have been dominated by incumbents essentially since their inception. That's not a man looking to spin a web of lies and hype and then cash out. In fact he seems to be in a very small class of extant business leaders who've actually done something worth talking about besides being very rich and overseeing incremental (valuable or not) progress.
You and "many others" are free to think whatever you want about the technology, and I'd probably agree with you to some extent on many points, but it kind of undermines your status as an impartial skeptic when you show so clearly that you have an axe to grind. And why? I really just don't get it. I would never work for Musk in his current form, and I don't own any products made by any of his companies, and I think he's guilty of treating some of his factory workers quite badly, but I give credit where credit's due and you should, too. It's not about endorsing him, what he stands for, how he treats workers, his opinions on COVID-19, or whatever else—it's simply about seeing the world clearly.
> SpaceX is literally taking queries for the sale of private Mars tickets[0].
The only thing close to 'private Mars tickets' is the footer which says: "For inquiries about our private passenger program, contact sales@spacex.com". That sounds like a very generic "If your problem is having too much money, we can help!" kind of sales pitch.
> If I made a website and sold tickets to the "Nicest place to sit and observe the apocalypse when it occurs." for hefty profits i'd be driven out of town.
If you're a company that sells private bunkers and you have a page on your website about a possible apocalypse, then no one will fault you for having a generic "For inquiries about our private bunker program, contact sales@bunkerx.com" footer.
They've already mass-produced orbital rockets which are the cheapest way to space, put a payload out past the orbit of Mars, landed multiple orbital boosters simultaneously and produced the first production full flow staged combustion engine. Alone those are incredible achievements but they also have a viable pathway to Mars, the Moon or other bodies in the solar system. I expect they'll land cargo around 2024 and send humans in the next few synods after that on a demo mission.
SpaceX is ridiculously successful. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are now as reliable as the best competitors and are so much cheaper than their competitors it's not even funny.
SpaceX didn't lower Falcon 9 launch prices because the market is willing to pay their current price, but they sell something that costs them about $20M for $70M (competition's price is at $100M) and they sell something that costs them about $40M for $150M (competition's price is at $400M).
ULA (Boeing and Lockheed Martin partnership that used to have US monopoly) only exists today because the US federal government needs dissimilar redundancy, so that if something bad happens on a launch, the other provider's system can launch stuff while the first one is investigating and fixing the issue. Without this requirement, ULA would have been closed. Same for Boeing's CST-100. Same for Northrop Grumman's Antares and Cygnus. Same for Orbital's Dream Chaser. Boeing's SLS and LockMart's Orion cash cows will be shut down if Starship proves reliable.
Starship is much more speculative/ambitious and will require a bunch more iterations before they make it work. There will definitely be failures along the way, hopefully without loss of human life but that's not guaranteed. If they don't go bankrupt before they make it work, a fully rapidly reusable Starship (150 tons to orbit for just a few million bucks) will make all other rocket technology completely antiquated, 100x cheaper is too much to bear for national pride reasons.
SpaceX is unquestionably a success at this point, although their end goal is probably something that will take longer than a single lifetime. Boring and Neuralink are still early, and Neuralink may also be one of those century-long things.
Tesla and SpaceX have both achieved their original nearer term vehicles, Dragon/ F9/FH plus Model S, X, and 3. Full reuse and full autonomy currently are still out of reach, but both of those are incredibly ambitious that no one else is super close to doing, either.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are very successful, but of course Musk keeps raising the bar on what he considers success.
Like I said, they’re fine companies. And they’re doing innovative things!
But you’ll have forgive me if I hold Musk to public promises he’s made, especially regarding self driving cars & Mars. At a certain point, what’s the difference between making a bold promise and telling a lie? It’s difficult to judge people’s intentions.
Is it a lie to set as a goal for your company something that will take longer than one lifetime?
It’d be a lie if they weren’t taking steps necessary for that goal. It’s not a lie to have a large, even an unlikely, goal.
Starship, in particular, isn’t really needed for a conventional space business case. Falcon 9 is sufficient for that. Starship (as envisioned) is either too big or too reusable. The only thing it makes sense for is the grand, multi-generational vision.
> His stated goal is to do this by 2050. That’s within his lifetime (I hope).
(Responding to your claim elsewhere since reply isn't allowed there)
Incorrect. That's not Musk's stated goal. What he said was:
"Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync" - [0]
Nothing at all about having a million people on Mars in 2050. To get a million people to Mars requires ten Earth-Mar orbital syncs, or 20 years. Adding 10 years to get to that 1000 Starships/year cadence. That means they have to achieve 100 Starship/years by 2022 to have a shot at sending a million people to Mars by 2052 (because the next orbital sync is 2022)
Starship hasn't flown yet with the first orbital flight hopefully some time next year. It will be well into 2020s, at the earliest, to get to 100 starships/year production rate. Musk knows that and he didn't state otherwise.
Reaching Mars in 4 years is the goal. He has always thought that was a stretch goal, as has been clear on every single presentation he has given on the topic. (BTW, NASA has a stretch goal of 2024 for landing people on the Moon; they acknowledge it is a stretch goal, and it probably also will be years later. Does that make NASA liars?)
But I'd say there's a greater than 50/50 chance of SpaceX landing people on Mars in Musk's lifetime. But that's not even THAT remarkable... Their actual goal (self-sustaining Mars civilization of at least a million people) is 5-6 orders of magnitude grander than that, and almost certainly won't occur in Musk's lifetime. Musk acknowledges that.
No. It makes them not-successful. Which also applies to SpaceX in that regard.
> Their actual goal (self-sustaining Mars civilization of at least a million people) is 5-6 orders of magnitude grander than that, and almost certainly won't occur in Musk's lifetime. Musk acknowledges that.
His stated goal is to do this by 2050. That’s within his lifetime (I hope).
It's a lie when they tell you you can buy a car ready for full self driving when that will take longer than one lifetime, yes.
SpaceX promises or goals or whatever are less egrigious. It's clearly providing a useful service (stuff to orbit for less money), but nobody is giving them a bunch of money today for a ride to Mars maybe later. Same with the Boring Company; it'll become egregious if they trick a municipality into paying for something, or leave an unfinished tunnel sitting around for years and years (but longer than the Seattle tunnel, cause even non-imaginary tunnel machines have problems)
Becoming an inter-planetary species doesn't happen in a year.
I want SpaceX to succeed and they have a track record of execution such that I now believe they really can. I was hopeful before (and if you listen to Musk talk about it he didn't think they'd be able to really pull it off early on either but figured they'd at least make progress towards it even if they failed), but now I think a mars colony is a real possible outcome.
It's not a bold take to just state something is impossible until it happens, that's pretty much the default.
The bold take is to look at what might be possible and execute goals in pursuit of that.
For SpaceX this means reusable rocket technology to bring costs down (massive success here has them ahead of everyone else). Starlink as a revenue source is also a really good approach.
For Tesla it's the 'master plan' of roadster -> model s -> model 3, reinvesting in infrastructure and battery technology with vertical integration to build out superchargers and drive costs down. This has been massively successful and their EVs (particularly the model3/y) have no equal at any price point EV or gas. The level 5 autonomy was really a bonus on top of that EV transition that they've added to, and if anyone can pull it off it will be Andrej Karpathy and the fleet of Tesla's they can train with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8).
Bullshit and really big ideas can sound similar, but that doesn't mean they are - there's a lot of value in being able to tell the difference.
In the case of Nikola, they're just lying to enrich themselves and taking advantage of those that can't see the difference between a person like Trevor Milton and a person like Elon Musk.
I agree with you that they’re working towards these goals. And there’s obviously a ton of daylight between Musk and Milton.
But the point I’m making is more specific than that: you can’t call them successes because they haven’t achieved their goals yet. (But they haven’t failed yet, either. The jury is still out.)
Nothing bold about saying people won’t achieve goals and then disclaiming it saying people can gloat in 5 years if you’re wrong. That’s cowardly, the opposite of bold.
Musk said the first passengers could go to Mars in 2024, which is 4 years from now. So I’m being generous. Hasn’t he repeatedly proved everyone wrong? Where does the quote “Never bet against Elon” come from? I’m being quite bold.
But you’re right on the other points —- I’m willing to extend the timeframe for self driving to 10 years and transhumanism to 20. And to be even bolder, I’ll let you pick a timeline for the Hyperloop.
Musk has been really bullish on AI. In 2015, he seemed pretty sure we’d have super intelligent AI in 5 years (ie now), and he worried about it which is why he started Neuralink. So he probably was hoping for transhumanism by 2021. That’s why I discount those who think Musk was scamming about self-driving being available soon. He was naive and he tricked himself. Don’t believe his time projections about anything like AI.
Doesn’t mean those goals won’t be achieved, even if they are late, tho.
(Some bold takes? Level 5 self driving cars the way we commonly envision it won’t ever come to fruition, SpaceX will never go to Mars, transhumanism will never come to pass, and hyperloops won’t either. You can come back in 5 years and gloat if I’m wrong.)