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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – SpaceX edition “Most people still think SpaceX is ‘just’ a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk ‘way’ of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.”
– Stephen McBridge, at The Rational Optimist Substack.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Reading articles like that gives me hope for the future.
If you want to understand SpaceX (and Tesla, and Boring and Neurolink) engineers I highly recommend Walter Issacson’s biography of Musk. It is pretty easy reading, and extremely revealing on what he and his companies are about. It is not at all a hagiography, on the contrary Issacson and many of the people in the book (including Musk himself) describe Musk as an asshole or similar words. It is also completely outrageous the way he treats people. They say he loves humanity a lot more than he loves humans. Issacson had unprecedented access to Musk for three or four years and was “in the room” for a lot of it, including the Twitter purchase. But what it is, is a story of how one man can take people who are already the very best, and bring out 100% more.
I think a fair comparison is the Navy Seal training, but for engineers. They say that just when you think you have had enough you still have another 40% in you. And the attrition rate is shockingly high. But what comes out the other end are engineers without peer both in their excellence and their ridiculous work ethic. You really have to read the biography to understand just how deep and intense and unforgiving it is.
To be clear, I would not want to work there, but I really think the best comparison is to the Navy Seals or engineering.
FWIW, I do not agree with the OP with respect to Los Angeles. It is clear than the center of gravity of Musk Enterprise is moving solidly to Texas, and for sure a large part of the reason is that Musk realizes what a shit show of a place Los Angeles is.
I think it is one of the most interesting biographies I have ever read, and its main fault is that it finishes with the Twitter purchase and does not cover DOGE and the 2024 election. But highly recommended.
The epigraph quotes Musk from SNL I believe, and this sums it up:
He did not reinvent the economic dependency of his product on government mandates and carbon credits. I think Steve Jobs is a far better example of a man whose product, the smartphone, has had a monumental beneficial impact on the world.
Don’t know about SpaceX, but I’ve encountered a bunch of startup founders who are ex-Tesla. Very similar vibe to ex-Apple and ex-XeroxPARC.
Excellent.
Elon Musk is a political centrist. It’s a bit much to expect a centrist to act like a doctrinaire libertarian and turn down money from the government.
@TMLutas
Elon Musk is a political centrist. It’s a bit much to expect a centrist to act like a doctrinaire libertarian and turn down money from the government.
I’m a hard core libertarian, and I am happy to write off my mortgage interest and property tax as a tax deduction. When my kids were in college I managed to wrangle the tax system so that I got a $2500 per year tax credit. Doesn’t mean I think taxes are good. Doesn’t mean I don’t think these “society shaping” tax laws are good. But I do want to pay as little tax as I possibly can. Last thing I wanna do is give money to those bastards.
I think any sensible business has an obligation, a fiduciary duty in fact, to use the law as it is written to maximize the return on their shareholders’ investment whether it is minimizing their tax obligation or making a product that has an end user price reduced due to the purchaser’s tax credits. They have no right whatsoever to allow their personal politics to shape this.
I understand that people here like to hate on electric vehicles, I guess because they are global warming adjacent. I like to evaluate things on their merit not on whatever dog whistles you might think they blow. Global warming? Mostly total crap used as leverage to empower the worst kind of people. Tesla cars? Spectacular — they are the reinvention of the automobile in a lot more ways than how the energy is stored.
If you think Elon Musk is carbon neutral you might consider that he just blasted off a rocket burning enough methane that it produced more power during lift off than is consumed in the whole of the UK power grid, and he plans to ramp up launch cadence to one every hour. And that he has his own gas powerplant to generate electricity for the Colossus data centers.
“Tesla cars? Spectacular — they are the reinvention of the automobile in a lot more ways than how the energy is stored”
Not referring to the clustertruck are you?
@Mark
Not referring to the clustertruck are you?
I presume you mean the Cyber Truck. For sure it is my least favorite of the Tesla line up. It was definitely designed to be an experiment, if you read the book I referenced above you’ll learn a great deal more about it. And if you think there are not some really interesting ideas and features in that machine, I’ll respectfully disagree and think you are allowing your ideology to guide your judgement.
If by “clustertruck” you mean the Tesla Semi, I could not disagree more. It is a completely revolutionary product that, in the next ten years, is going to transform ground transportation. Especially so when they add a few Optimus robots to do the loading and unloading.
I’ve had at least one truck in my stable for 50 years. Big, small, cool, rattletrap . . .
And if I still had my own garage – i.e., a charging station of my own – I’d have one of those Tesla trucks.
I’ve driven a couple. They are . . . nice. Very nice.