On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Elon will tell anyone who listens how much he likes to micromanage minor production issues. He brags about it without understanding that it’s not a good thing. It’s like a general bragging about how he micromanages a platoon during an assault.
If you’re willing to take the demotion to lieutenant, put the time in to acquire that skill set, and gain the experience to understand it then that could be a value add but you’d have to stop doing general things. But just assuming that being a general makes you a genius at taking a trench and taking operational decisions away from your lieutenants is dangerous.
There’s not much reason to question whether Elon does that. He brags about doing it and his employees complain about him doing it. The question is whether he is some genius savant who can listen to the basic details of a problem for five minutes, immediately cut to the heart of the issue, find a solution that is practical, simple, revolutionary, and effective, and see it achieved despite having zero follow through. My position is that he is not.
Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower. A year ago you could have cited those engineers as evidence that Musk is a detriment because he's making them chase after stupid goals and lacks the expertise to know if it's possible. But now they are catching the booster with the launch tower so there's that...
Neither of us really have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of either company. You prefer to cite nameless sources on Reddit to show that Musk is a puttering dolt going around fucking everything up. oBlade is asking if that's the case then why have all the other EV and space startups not had anything near the success of Tesla and SpaceX even with Elon actively sabotaging everything. Most people have acknowledged his business acumen and just think he's a cunt in other areas, but there are a couple that won't answer the question because their visceral hatred of Elon doesn't allow them to give him credit for anything.
"Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower."
I'm failing to find a source supporting that claim. In fact I can't find any engineers anywhere opposing this method.
You'd like a source for my claim? Sure, I'd be happy to offer one. It's an excerpt from Walter Isaacson's biography on Musk. I've bolded the portion particularly relevant to my claim
The Falcon 9 had become the world's only rapidly reusable rocket. During 2020, Falcon boosters had landed safely twenty-three times, coming down upright on landing legs. The video feeds of the fiery yet gentle landings still made Musk leap from his chair. Nevertheless, he was not enamored with the landing legs being planned for Starship's booster. They added weight, thus cutting the size of the payloads the booster could lift.
"Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth.
It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it."
A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?"
After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?"
Thank you.
It's exactly what I thought it was: hearsay. Walter Isaacson doesn't have insight into what happened at that "meeting" with "the team", because he can only report from people who were present, Elon Musk himself being one of them. This is precisely how Elon fabricated much of his fantastical mythology over the years, by telling stories which no one could confirm or deny. He made many claims over the years, of which plenty were proven lies. For example he lied about his transgender daughter to toot his own horn, and she was so pissed that she openly called out his lies. And that's only one of many lies he's told over the years. He's willing to harm others to boost his ego. He's untrustworthy. So where does the "majority of engineers in the room" claim stem from? Elon himself? Completely untrustworthy. Anyone else?
Btw just want to point out that the dumbest thing about this post is that the biography came out long before they successfully caught the starship booster with the tower. It could have failed spectacularly and blew up their whole launch tower. In which case you would have come in here and said "see this was Elon's idea and he foolishly ran ahead with it against the advice of his engineers." But because it succeeded you will say "this is all hearsay and Elon had no role in catching the booster with the tower."
If it fails it was all Elon, if it succeeds it was all the nameless engineers he cruelly exploits. It's easy to work backwards from the conclusion you have already decided to draw.
On January 20 2025 08:04 BlackJack wrote: I was just browsing some forums and "reportedly" there is a baby eating cabal in the basement of some pizza restaurant. I trust I don't need to source this and you can all find this information yourself. It's just what's been reported.
Ironic to make this point because pizzagate is one of the idiotic things Elon promotes.
I don't think I've ever disputed that he posts some dumb shit on twitter
Spacex has a history of their things blowing up and Elon never takes responsibility for any of it. It it failed it would have been those same nameless engineers failing, not elons brilliant idea. When Tesla breaks its promises it never addresses them nor apologizes for any of them.
Nothing elon says about anything of substance should give you confidence he understands anything that's going on around him. Him taking an idea from scifi and saying "yeah do that" sounds like a dumb thing he could have figured out but its much more likely it was an idea from an engineer who had read old scifi proposed it and Elon is just taking credit for it.
On January 19 2025 09:29 Magic Powers wrote: I can find info on firing 50% of coders based on lines written pretty easily. Don't know if multiple sources popping up right away counts as "well documented", but it surely doesn't require more than a quick search.
My 2 cents would be that Elon is generally vastly underestimating the abilities of other people (most recently gamers) and vastly overestimating his own. So I can certainly see this kind of overbearing layoff method happening under his thumb.
I know it's tempting to assume that the first thing you google has a source for the claim but if you read the article you've cited you'd realize it says nothing about Musk firing 50% of coders based on lines of code written.
I found several links, I just only posted the one with the most information. Other links contain the information about 50% layoffs.
You found several sources and decided to share the one that didn't support your claim? Am I supposed to trust that the other sources you found do support your claim? Because I don't.
Please put in some effort, I'm not your mom. Just asking for everything all the time makes you obnoxious, not a good person to argue with. When I said it's easy to find the links, I meant that it's easy enough that I don't feel the need to post every link I can find. It takes one minute for you to find them.
You're not a newbie to TL.net. Sourcing your claims has been standard operating procedures for some time. If you don't have a source you can just say so. Instead you're ironically offering a retort that you'd expect from an antivaxx forum "Do YouR OwN ReSearcH"
I always look up people's claims myself before I ask for a source. That's just par for the course in civil discourse. But yes you're right that I should always expect antagonistic discourse from you at this point. I haven't experienced any civil discourse from you in a very long time.
Note that I'm only posting the links and not making any attempts to confirm or deny any part of the story. I'm not the person to argue with in case you disagree with something in those links. My point is only that the information of 50% layoffs is out there and can be found without much trouble. In fact there are some reports saying it was more than 50% and up to around 80%
And I also distinctly remember you not denying this specific piece of information a few months back when the discussion was about Twitter stock value tanking, which some claimed was a consequence of the mass layoffs. You didn't say a peep back then and now you're suddenly asking for a source.
Do you need any more of the dozens of links that are popping up, son?
Don't worry I do search things myself and I only ask for a source if I can't find a source myself.
You've offered 4 links and only 1 of them support your claim that Elon used "Lines of code written" as his metric. The other 3 don't mention "lines of code" at all as far as I can tell. The one that does is an article from a blog by someone named Bennett Garner. The only evidence he offers is
“Lines of code written in the past year” was his metric.
He puts "lines of code written in the past year" in quotation marks but he doesn't even say where he got that quote from. It's not mentioned anywhere in the article. But he did include a 13 minute long youtube with his blog and because I have nothing better to do I watched the whole thing in order to help you source your own claim.
At 7:24 in the video he offers his source which is a tweet of someone retweeting another tweet by someone named "mcmillen" that says "Reportedly Elon stack-ranked Twitter engineers by "lines of code written in the last year" and fired the bottom X%."
So your source is a blogger quoting a twitter user who retweeted someone that said "reportedly Elon is doing this thing" without any mention of who exactly is "reporting" this.
The fact that you immediately followed that post by calling my excerpt of world-renowned award winning biographer Walter Isaacson "hearsay" shows you are lacking some self-awareness.
I literally told you you're arguing with the wrong person. I didn't make any of these claims, I said there are links to the claims and provided the links. Shoot the messenger much.
On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Elon will tell anyone who listens how much he likes to micromanage minor production issues. He brags about it without understanding that it’s not a good thing. It’s like a general bragging about how he micromanages a platoon during an assault.
If you’re willing to take the demotion to lieutenant, put the time in to acquire that skill set, and gain the experience to understand it then that could be a value add but you’d have to stop doing general things. But just assuming that being a general makes you a genius at taking a trench and taking operational decisions away from your lieutenants is dangerous.
There’s not much reason to question whether Elon does that. He brags about doing it and his employees complain about him doing it. The question is whether he is some genius savant who can listen to the basic details of a problem for five minutes, immediately cut to the heart of the issue, find a solution that is practical, simple, revolutionary, and effective, and see it achieved despite having zero follow through. My position is that he is not.
Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower. A year ago you could have cited those engineers as evidence that Musk is a detriment because he's making them chase after stupid goals and lacks the expertise to know if it's possible. But now they are catching the booster with the launch tower so there's that...
Neither of us really have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of either company. You prefer to cite nameless sources on Reddit to show that Musk is a puttering dolt going around fucking everything up. oBlade is asking if that's the case then why have all the other EV and space startups not had anything near the success of Tesla and SpaceX even with Elon actively sabotaging everything. Most people have acknowledged his business acumen and just think he's a cunt in other areas, but there are a couple that won't answer the question because their visceral hatred of Elon doesn't allow them to give him credit for anything.
"Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower."
I'm failing to find a source supporting that claim. In fact I can't find any engineers anywhere opposing this method.
You'd like a source for my claim? Sure, I'd be happy to offer one. It's an excerpt from Walter Isaacson's biography on Musk. I've bolded the portion particularly relevant to my claim
The Falcon 9 had become the world's only rapidly reusable rocket. During 2020, Falcon boosters had landed safely twenty-three times, coming down upright on landing legs. The video feeds of the fiery yet gentle landings still made Musk leap from his chair. Nevertheless, he was not enamored with the landing legs being planned for Starship's booster. They added weight, thus cutting the size of the payloads the booster could lift.
"Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth.
It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it."
A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?"
After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?"
Thank you.
It's exactly what I thought it was: hearsay. Walter Isaacson doesn't have insight into what happened at that "meeting" with "the team", because he can only report from people who were present, Elon Musk himself being one of them. This is precisely how Elon fabricated much of his fantastical mythology over the years, by telling stories which no one could confirm or deny. He made many claims over the years, of which plenty were proven lies. For example he lied about his transgender daughter to toot his own horn, and she was so pissed that she openly called out his lies. And that's only one of many lies he's told over the years. He's willing to harm others to boost his ego. He's untrustworthy. So where does the "majority of engineers in the room" claim stem from? Elon himself? Completely untrustworthy. Anyone else?
Btw just want to point out that the dumbest thing about this post is that the biography came out long before they successfully caught the starship booster with the tower. It could have failed spectacularly and blew up their whole launch tower. In which case you would have come in here and said "see this was Elon's idea and he foolishly ran ahead with it against the advice of his engineers." But because it succeeded you will say "this is all hearsay and Elon had no role in catching the booster with the tower."
If it fails it was all Elon, if it succeeds it was all the nameless engineers he cruelly exploits. It's easy to work backwards from the conclusion you have already decided to draw.
Elon strictly doesn't have the expertise in engineering that's required to manage SpaceX on the technical level. This is indisputable. It's completely logical to say that his contribution is mainly of a financial nature.
While this isn’t the aforementioned ‘firing people based on how many lines of code they wrote’, it’s not far off in being ridiculous practice and unlike other whispers, this was a legitimate email from Elon Musk that was widely reported and notably not one he ever denied sending.
This isn’t even an issue of Elon Musk not having the capacity to reasonably review such things, very few people could which is why it’s not industry practice, at all and is outright ridiculous.
To assess an individual’s input into any kind of large codebase you first need the technical knowledge of how it all works, which gets harder and harder the more different tech stacks are rammed together. And even if you do have all that knowledge, the sheer scope is fucking huge and even the best code spaces have their own idiosyncrasies, it’s the nature of the beast.
Hell our product is a fraction of the size of Twitter but it’s still teams specialising and working in parallel for the most part. We’ve some bespoke underlying architecture that everyone uses in some way, but that team solely works on that. As do the teams for the various products built atop of it. There’s some serious talent there, but I never encountered anyone who had even passable architectural familiarity to a ‘can review code anywhere’ level. 3/5 was the best, and that was the CTO, and he said it upon visiting us from the States, not me.
Musk was just outright wrong here. He could have taken the L and said something like ‘it takes balls to disagree with your boss, that’s the kinda guy I want in my company!’ Which he evidently did not do on this occasion.
There’s another similar instance although I’m struggling to find the right combo of search terms to recall it. Same kinda deal really, but in this particular instance Elon’s claims versus his employees were actually testable and anyone could check them by using their browser’s inspector tools.
Which I did myself actually, and yeah, fully replicated it.
Frankly I think it’s absolutely sickening that Nikola Tesla’s name has been superseded by a company that is named after him, by a bloke who’s a modern day incarnation of the very things that stymied him in his day. Company should be called Edison really
That aside I mean, guy was a genius but a fucking weirdo who was in love with a pigeon. One can appreciate Tesla’s chops without endorsing his avarian avarice.
So too Elon Musk, or hey anyone really. He can have success stories and have done things you personally admire without having to run defence on literally everything he’s ever done. Or in the inverse one can think he’s a complete piece of shit and make that case without saying he has zero talent or ability and that anyone could be a billionaire with a bit of initial cash.
Musk was just outright wrong here. He could have taken the L and said something like ‘it takes balls to disagree with your boss, that’s the kinda guy I want in my company!’ Which he evidently did not do on this occasion.
Elon just over a year ago told the leader of his Supercharger team to cut 20% of the staff (while organizing an effort for the 50 billion dollar compensation package), and the woman said cutting that much staff would be counterproductive, he proceeded to fire her and the ENTIRE team. And mind you the Supercharger team was one of their most prized teams, actually leading the industry. All because he cant control his ego and or any slight. www.reuters.com
Musk was just outright wrong here. He could have taken the L and said something like ‘it takes balls be bunch to disagree with your boss, that’s the kinda guy I want in my company!’ Which he evidently did not do on this occasion.
Elon just over a year ago told the leader of his Supercharger team to cut 20% of the staff (while organizing an effort for the 50 billion dollar compensation package), and the woman said cutting that much staff would be counterproductive, he proceeded to fire her and the ENTIRE team. And mind you the Supercharger team was one of their most prized teams, actually leading the industry. All because he cant control his ego and or any slight. www.reuters.com
Frankly I think we’re all just myopic Leon Skum haters, haven’t sourced anything whatsoever and he’s actually a super genius beyond our comprehension. Not just in his business dealings but in his personal life.
Sorry, I don’t make the rules. We live in a world where Donald Trump is electable and people think Elon Musk is a polymath genius.
Musk was just outright wrong here. He could have taken the L and said something like ‘it takes balls be bunch to disagree with your boss, that’s the kinda guy I want in my company!’ Which he evidently did not do on this occasion.
Elon just over a year ago told the leader of his Supercharger team to cut 20% of the staff (while organizing an effort for the 50 billion dollar compensation package), and the woman said cutting that much staff would be counterproductive, he proceeded to fire her and the ENTIRE team. And mind you the Supercharger team was one of their most prized teams, actually leading the industry. All because he cant control his ego and or any slight. www.reuters.com
Frankly I think we’re all just myopic Leon Skum haters, haven’t sourced anything whatsoever and he’s actually a super genius beyond our comprehension. Not just in his business dealings but in his personal life.
Sorry, I don’t make the rules. We live in a world where Donald Trump is electable and people think Elon Musk is a polymath genius.
probably posted this here before, but I used to be a big fan of Elon, and funny enough watching spacex land rockets and help nasa send space exploration probes got me out of my anti-intellectual phase. "oh people are still do amazing things and science is cool".
tho his current downward spiral is depressing and puts us on a dangerous path, it also cements me realizing i need to keep my media literacy and curiosity up or i may end up like him mentally. its also funny that elon does or did have some really positive aspects and now every day he will further erode his and paint over his previous credibility. tho he gains the new maga idiot fanbase, he loses the intellectuals and thoughtful people. and those are the ones he desperately wants to like and adore him.
probably posted this here before, but I used to be a big fan of Elon, and funny enough watching spacex land rockets and help nasa send space exploration probes got me out of my anti-intellectual phase. "oh people are still do amazing things and science is cool".
tho his current downward spiral is depressing and puts us on a dangerous path, it also cements me realizing i need to keep my media literacy and curiosity up or i may end up like him mentally. its also funny that elon does or did have some really positive aspects and now every day he will further erode his and paint over his previous credibility. sure he gains the new maga idiot fanbase but at the cost of the intellectuals and thoughtful people. and those are the ones he desperately wants to like and adore him.
On January 20 2025 09:24 Sermokala wrote: Spacex has a history of their things blowing up and Elon never takes responsibility for any of it. It it failed it would have been those same nameless engineers failing, not elons brilliant idea. When Tesla breaks its promises it never addresses them nor apologizes for any of them.
Nothing elon says about anything of substance should give you confidence he understands anything that's going on around him. Him taking an idea from scifi and saying "yeah do that" sounds like a dumb thing he could have figured out but its much more likely it was an idea from an engineer who had read old scifi proposed it and Elon is just taking credit for it.
Here is Musk taking direct responsibility for Falcon 1 blowing up:
So Falcon 1, this is where we started out. You know, a lot of people really only heard of SpaceX relatively recently, so let me think, say Falcon 9 and Dragon just instantly appeared and that's how it always was, but it wasn't. We started off with just a few people, who really didn't know how to make rockets, and the the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer, or chief designer, that's not because I wanted to, it's because I couldn't hire anyone yet. Nobody good would join so I ended up being that by default, and I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. Fortunately the fourth launch - which was the that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1 - the fourth launch worked, or that would have been it for for SpaceX.
So Falcon 1, this is where we started out. You know, a lot of people really only heard of SpaceX relatively recently, so let me think, say Falcon 9 and Dragon just instantly appeared and that's how it always was, but it wasn't. We started off with just a few people, who really didn't know how to make rockets, and the the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer, or chief designer, that's not because I wanted to, it's because I couldn't hire anyone yet. Nobody good would join so I ended up being that by default, and I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. Fortunately the fourth launch - which was the that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1 - the fourth launch worked, or that would have been it for for SpaceX.
Having to go back to 2017 to find some evidence, only for it to be a talk where Musk is giving a post-success retrospective in which he claims they had and could get nobody good so he just had to be the lead designer against his will, isn't exactly doing much to prove he's a down to Earth guy who can admit his faults. Kinda the opposite, actually.
If he did more of the design work on that rocket than he did the levelling work on his PoE2 character he can have the credit for that, but let's not pretend looking back and saying what is almost equivalent to "yeah I wasn't even trying but made a billi anyway" is someone being humble and admitting fault lmao
EPT
