I’ll be honest – I’ve never liked Musk. I thought he was overrated back in 2012, I think he’s even more overrated now. Even more so, his ridiculous cult following is made up of people who think if they worship the ground he walks on, he’ll bless them with self-driving. His rockets are also nothing special. If you’re open to learning why Musk is an idiot, then let’s continue. I’m not going to get into every possible example. There are just too many and some actual scientists who know and understand the physics and chemistry better than I do have done a great job covering some specifics and I’ll link to them at the end of this post.
Tesla is the most unreliable EV on the road
If you know me, you’ll know that I think EVs are a waste of time. We should be devoting time into efficiently harvesting the most abundant element in the known universe: hydrogen. But I digress. But if I had to buy an EV, I would literally let my neighbor build one over one built by Musk. If you search around, you’ll find Tesla owners who’s cars were bricked by failed software updates. If you’re counting, that’s FIVE examples ranging from 2017 through 2022. So it’s not an old problem. It’s still happening. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t feel safe in a vehicle that will update itself OTA while in motion and then requires me to get on the phone with tech support while others are zooming past me. Or even worse, what if that happened on a windy mountain road?
Besides their cars, their commercial grade products are also questionable. I don’t think I’d be installing a Tesla Megapack if I was an electric company.
And their batteries have a strange quality. They also seem to catch fire a lot. Like a lot. Like so often, they had to actually look into it.
I purposefully excluded stories from hurricanes because, as it turns out, Lithium and salt water don’t get along. But in our EV obsessed future, get ready for battery fires and home insurance companies either forcing you to fireproof your garage or park your EV at least 250 feet away from your home.
SpaceX is bankrupt without the US Government
“But SpaceX is doing more for space than NASA!!!” all the fanbois exclaim. Truth is, space is expensive. Launching rockets is expensive. And SpaceX is bankrupt without it’s guaranteed government funding – I mean contracts. TL;DR: Uncle Sam gave SpaceX billions of dollars in 2008 to fund development and research for sending stuff to space – including astronauts – as the Space Shuttle program was ending in 2011. Until 2020, the only other country capable of getting astronauts to the ISS and back was Russia. Politically, that has already been rough ground. Good thing SpaceX was there before 2022.
“But Starlink!!!” the fanbois also scream. SpaceX loses money on the terminals. Even after increasing prices (citing “inflation”) and reducing their cost of the terminals, they’re still losing money. And like every other American ISP, there’s a data cap now. And it’s been pointed out the pricing doesn’t make sense… other than it’s a grab for much needed cash:
It will cost you another $250 to get an extra 1TB of data — it would be cheaper to add a second subscription, at least if you don’t mind the cost of an extra terminal.
Engadget article: https://www.engadget.com/starlink-data-cap-peak-hours-151247666.html
And I thought my ISP’s cash grab of “pay an extra $30/month and we’ll turn off the data meter” was ridiculous. Gotta pay off Twitter somehow, I guess.
The Boring Company: it’s boring alright
When Musk said he hated traffic and was going to start a tunnel boring company, he did. And the fanbois went crazy… “Oh mister Musk, bore a tunnel in my back yard!” because Musk was going to do it “faster and cheaper”. The first actual installation was the Las Vegas Convention Center loop. It cost $50 million for 2x 1 mile tunnels. The rough estimate to bore a tunnel is $1 million/mile/diameter. Going off that logic and the rough estimate size of 4 meter diameter, just the boring costs along are ~$4 million. So ~$8 million in Vegas just to drill some dirt. But add on your labor costs and $50 million is about right for 2 miles of 4 meter diameter tunnel. That’s not special.
Oh, and the best part. Musk sold bricks from the extracted dirt. How much do you think he sold these bricks individually for? $0.10? $0.40? $0.75? Wrong. $200 per brick. And idiots bought them. For the same price as 1 Musk brick, you could buy 170 standard bricks. So much for “affordable housing”.
Twitter: Musk is the Chief Twat
And so we conclude on Twitter. The other week, more than likely after a lawyer told him that he had to complete the sale or Parag Agrawal was going to own Tesla, SpaceX, and everything else Musk has as an “asset”, Musk took over twitter. And it’s been going swimmingly. There was a massive revenue drop as large advertisers put campaigns on pause. Then as everyone was praising “free speech”, Musk bans accounts for impersonation of his account. Let me guess… only Musk can speak freely on Twitter? And then there’s the verification debacle costing $8/month. Personally, I never agreed that verification should be a “look at me, I’m more important than you” feature but rather “I am exactly who I say I am” but that’s neither here nor there right now. And then after hastily laying off half the workforce without a thought, Musk had an “oh shit” moment and realized he fired the people actually keeping his prized toy afloat and asked some of them to come back.
And it’s the twitter debacle that many are realizing Musk sucks. He’s a terrible CEO, a lying scam artist, and isn’t that awesome of a role model.
This is how legacy social media dies: in the hands of a billionaire.
Stuff I didn’t cover but worth watching/listening to
And there’s plenty more on those two channels alone.