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systemglitch ,

So where did he “admit” this exactly?

mechoman444 ,

Omg! Elon lied to us! Say it ain’t so!

chicagohuman ,

From the article:

“It seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train,” reporter Ashlee Vance wrote in his 2015 biography of Musk. “He didn’t actually intend to build the thing.” Musk’s ultimate hope? “High-speed rail would be canceled,” explained Vance.

tostiman ,
@tostiman@sh.itjust.works avatar

You can’t just post stuff like this without providing a source.

girlfreddy OP ,

This is a cross-post from Mastodon and the source is in the link.

Ricaz ,
@Ricaz@lemmy.world avatar

And the source only quotes a reporter saying what your misleading title implies…

vimdiesel ,

Uh unless they caught him saying it/email/memo this is pure speculation and should be marked as such lol. Not a musk fan but people need to demand sources on stuff like this or you’ll just be lemmings (the bad kind, not Lemmings)

girlfreddy OP ,

This is a cross-post from Mastodon and the source is in the link.

Ricaz ,
@Ricaz@lemmy.world avatar

And the source only quotes a reporter saying what your misleading title implies…

Zellith ,

It was never meant to be built because it cannot work as advertised.

Clbull ,

I miss the days when aristocrats and big business owners were genuine philanthropists and not greedy money-hoarding bastards. Even Edward Colston, a merchant who literally profiteered from the transatlantic slave trade, built homes, schools and other public works.

I’d have a much higher opinion of people like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk if they used the vast sums of wealth they hoarded to build homes, power stations, water treatment plants and other useful infrastructure, not lobby governments for even more tax cuts. Otherwise, they’re chasing privatised space travel pipe dreams that we either aren’t going to achieve, or will be reserved only for the ultra-wealthy.

How can we honestly have dreams to colonize Mars, the Moon, or Venus in the next few decades when we can’t even fix our own problems at home?

jonne ,

They never were. You only think that because philanthropy has always just been an exercise in PR. If you dig deeper into the life and actions of those individuals, you will notice they all suffer from the same pathology.

DrM ,

Then let it be PR. It’s still better than whatever is happening right now. They had at least some dignity and somewhat cared about their image, now it’s just all greed

NukeminHerttua ,
@NukeminHerttua@sopuli.xyz avatar

I think the point is that as long as certain services or fundamentals for living are based on good-will and philanthropy, they are in the end at the mercy of whims or calculated actions of those doing well.

It is PR in the sense that it does not only make the philanthropist look good, it also ties the subjects of the philanthrophy into a bond between the giver and receiver: as a receiver you are forever thankful to the philanthropist and in some perverted way constantly reminded of your subordinate status towards the giver. This strengthens the societal structures that benefit the rich and helps them stay powerful compared to massess. While I am sure that most rich people genuinely donate money to make things better and help others, it is still them who get to choose where the money is spent.

More equal and transparent option is to make sure that there is enough tax revenue to cover these kinds of costs from public spending.

I have also been playing with an idea of a philanthropic fund that allows anyone to donate, but not to decide where the money is spent. If the target for philanthropy could be decided by a group of experts/public poll, money could probably be allocated to places where it is needed the most. However, I am sure there would be a lack of bigger donations as the PR effect would be smaller…

reverendsteveii ,

They had at least some dignity and somewhat cared about their image

They literally hired mercenaries to murder striking workers. It has always been greed. It can only be greed. A library doesn’t change that.

vimdiesel ,

It isn’t bro, go read about the pinkertons, robber barons, etc. It’s not great now, but it is infinitely better than company towns, protestor massacres,pinkertons, and jimmy hoffa. Go read history it is amazing, I’m not calling you dumb, just ignorant of history and how bad things can really get if we don’t hold the line.

BURN ,

It’s not that they had dignity or cared, it’s that news sources were so limited that if they did something shitty they just paid off the papers and nobody was ever the wiser

ProfessorLupinstein ,

This is it. If you Google Andrew Carnegie, he’s listed as a philanthropist who built libraries. If you Google the Battle of Homestead, you can see how people literally died to fight for labor rights against him. These people were never good people. We just forgot the bad.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

rmuk ,

Your last point is something that I often say: we’ll never figure out how to reverse aging, we’ll only figure out how to stop Elon Musk aging.

On the philanthropy point: We used to have more progressive taxation systems that discouraged wealth-hoarding. For someone of arbitrarily large income, massive philanthropic acts were often ways to avoid paying taxes. They were going to lose the money either way, but by building a library, expanding a hospital, funding a humanitarian project, feeding the poor or whatever they could choose where the money was spent instead and, as others have said, get some good PR and legacy-building at the same time. Now their wealth isn’t threatened by taxation, why would they even consider relinquishing it?

wolfpack86 ,

I think the privatized space launch vehicles push is worthy endeavour. Costs of launching on space x are significantly lower. Lockheed and Boeing weren’t doing it, and there will be benefit to society in the future.

However, that’s about all I can justify as being well meaning. So many other ventures were completely stupid. Instead of buying Twitter, he could have built the highspeed rail and owned that shit, but naw.

FinnFooted ,

I mean, the Russians competed with the US space race at a much lower budget. Privatization of this stuff wasn’t necessary to make it cheaper. The US government is just particularly inefficient with spending at times.

vimdiesel ,

Bro they take 95% of the wealth and then donate back 5% and always have, don’t believe the hype my friend. OR some wait until they die and donate 20% and leave 80% in perpetual trust to keep their descendants rich and they then dribble out small amounts to charity to keep it as a tax haven.

0235 ,
@0235@lemmy.world avatar

Utter shocked Pikachu face. its a concept that has been around for 100 years, and no-one did it before for a big reason.

spookedbyroaches ,

The statement that the Hyperloop was never meant to be built was speculation by a reporter called Ashlee Vance. He said “It seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train.” There is no evidence that the initial intention behind it was malicious. I would say that effectively, he did kill many public transit projects and the article gives a couple examples, but you can’t just put pure speculation in the title. Now fewer people are gonna trust you.

girlfreddy OP ,

Ashlee Vance is the author of Elon Musk’s biography … Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Berramos ,

That just means his opinion is likely well informed. Still an opinion, though.

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some shitting on Musk just as much as the next guy, but the things he has 100% said and done are already egregious. I don’t get why you’d need to mislead people into seeing Musk as something that reality has shown him to be many times over.

Princeofspace ,

I read that book years ago when Musk’s public persona was almost like he came from the future to get humanity back on track. Electric cars, solar, vertically landing spaceships, that time he opened up all of teslas patents to seemingly try and accelerate electric car adoption.

What a bummer how he turned out. That amount of money just poisons your brain. Or let him feel safe lifting the mask. Never have I done such a 180 on an individual. He was supposed to be the one good billionaire solving humanities problems.

jispal01 ,

As someone who has always been into cars and technology, I’ve never been able to find anything about that tech that Tesla “open sourced”.

It’s just another lie that Musk used one time to juice stock prices or something. I’ve never found anything like a Git with any of their tech. There doesnt’ appear to be any way to read about it or download it from any Tesla websites.

I mean maybe someone can finally provide me a link here, I would love that.

To me, it seems like it’s just more empty words. Googling/Binging/Yahooing “Tesla Open Source” just brings up nine year old articles and the “All Our Patents Are Belong To You” press release. And no actual meat. And an interview with someone from Tesla who qualifies that they’re not actually open source because they’re not publishing confidential engineering data.

jarfil ,

You seem to be confusing Patents with Copyright.

All Patents are “open source”, that’s how Patents work: you pay to get a state-approved monopoly on some idea for a number of years, in exchange for making the stuff public.

Don’t need “a Git” to get patents, just patents.google.com

You should ask how much is Tesla charging for licensing those patents to others, or whether they have kept paying for the right to keep the monopoly at all.

Gerula ,

Come on people the hyperloop as a concept is deeply unpractical and impossible to build. It was never to be an alternative to anything in the best case scenario a deluded billionaires dream but it seems it’s more than that it’s also malevolent.

Why are these notions (billionaire, bullshit, malevolent, etc.) So often present in the same contexts?

jramskov ,

I have no idea whether hyperloop is impractical/impossible to build and no intention of defending Elon Musk, but nobody thought landing a rocket was possible and SpaceX has since made it seem like a simple and easy thing. Starship seems completely bonkers to me too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if SpaceX ends up completely changing space exploration with it.

Edit: I wrote “nobody” in my comment, clearly some did, but my point was that the rest of the industry clearly didn’t expect them to have any success.

lasagna ,
@lasagna@programming.dev avatar

When it comes to posts like yours, whatever comes before the but is pointless to read.

jramskov ,

I’ll try to formulate my comments better in the future - English isn’t my native language.

lasagna ,
@lasagna@programming.dev avatar

This isn’t an English issue, your English is great and I couldn’t tell the difference compared to a native speaker even if I looked for it. “But” in a discussion as the you’ve made can be looked as a separator. On the left, it’s a sale pitch. Ground prep for the reader to buy into what’s to follow after the but.

I used to do this all the time so I don’t blame people who do it too.

I’m not gonna delve too much into SpaceX. To me the accomplishment of that company is largely thanks to the employees. Elon Musk does not strike me as a competent engineer or manager, he’s just a guy with a lot of money and sometimes he makes good use of it. To me, he isn’t worth the benefit of the doubt. It’s your time though and if you think a billionaire is worth it then who are we to judge?

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

nobody thought landing a rocket was possible

You’ve clearly never watched a 1950s sci-fi movie, since half of them involve rockets which land.

It was clearly something people thought was possible.

AnUnusualRelic ,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

It’s not impossible to build. There’s no magical technology in it. Lots of things can be built if you just sink money in the project. But hyperloop is inefficient and insanely expensive. It would carry very few people, would be hell to maintain, with likely a lot of down time, and really isn’t worth the hassle. (and don’t even get me started on his idiotic “let’s add more cars underground” idea)

beelzebeard ,

Fuck Elon, what a tosser.

ramplay ,

Yeah! Get 'em

Suoko ,
@Suoko@feddit.it avatar

Let’s thank him for Tesla and SpaceX reusable rockets, he can disappear now

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

He isn’t a car engineer or a rocket engineer. He didn’t invent the practical electric car or the reusable rocket. He gave people money to develop those technologies- actually, in the case of Tesla, he bought in after the car was already designed.

He’s not an inventor, he’s an investor.

jramskov ,

Of course he didn’t do it himself, but according to people that actually worked closely with him, he’s not exactly stupid and actually knows quite a bit about both.

Why he’s behaving so stupidly and handling Twitter so badly, I have no idea - he’s really a jerk.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

he’s not exactly stupid

That may or may not be true.

and actually knows quite a bit about both.

That I doubt. He has no formal training in either field and it’s not something you can just pick up.

jramskov ,

You can find videos with him discussing rocket engines in details - he’s spent years working together with a lot of brilliant car and rocket engineers. He (again, not alone, of course) somehow managed to build a successful car company and a successful Space company. Both things are by all accounts very difficult. Not likely to be done by a stupid person.

I fully agree he’s a jerk and I would never want to work for him, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid or that I can’t be impressed by what SpaceX has achieved.

GammaScorpii ,

They had a Lotus Elise with a battery in it when he came in. Clearly had influence on the models that actually worked.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Why does that mean he had influence?

GammaScorpii ,

Because he’s product architect at tesla? Lol what’s with this massive hate boner that you have to insist he does nothing. I see this all the time from nuffies online here and on reddit

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

What training does he have in automotive engineering? Where would he get the knowledge? Did he just read some books and watch some YouTube videos and suddenly he’s an electric car expert?

Hazdaz ,

Let this be a lesson to people who time after time after time fall for corporate bullshit. This is why companies should never be elevated above what people - specifically experts - say. Whether it is some social campaign or greenwashing or a host of other “feel good” initiatives that almost universally are there for marketing and nothing more. Companies are here to make money. That’s it.

LordShrek ,

it is true that companies are here to make money. my question is: are there any institutions whose purpose is to benefit humanity, without any hidden maladaptive intent? even the “communicating important scientific work to the public” enterprise is corrupted by perverse incentives. and if not, what is the process by such an institution can come about?

filister ,

There is a lot of open source software, projects, ML/AI models, where individuals have put hundreds if not thousands of hours of work and are offering their work for free to other people.

Then again we also have Linux and believe it or not, the world wouldn’t be the same without it. This OS has been created by one single individual who to this day didn’t want to monetize his creation, otherwise he would have been filthy rich by now.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

He’s pretty rich regardless.

jonne ,

But not filthily.

vimdiesel ,

I don’t, I find so many Marxists online who think via magical thinking the proletariat is just gonna rise up and be better than the status quo. China and USSR failed and are now hellscapes when it comes to liberty and human rights. We have compromises like those in the Scandinavian countries where it’s not perfect, but people generally have good health care, freedom, and generally a good standard of living. Those are the extremes in modern governments. I think the USA can do better, but we are much better off than Russians and Chinese, so far.

Iron_Lynx ,

Let’s face it, he’s trying to build a vacuum tube over many hundreds of km’s. The energy you need to keep that at reduced pressure is more than a Little Boy or a Fat Man. The pods are the size of somewhere between a coach and a railway carriage, with seating built to Frecciarossa Executive Class. It’s propelled using Maglev tech, so you need a not-insignificant amount of power to also move your pods. And getting into or out of your vactube is going to take some extra work.

One thing that I’ve seen being pointed out by some critics is that a maglev system is often quoted to cost about a billion per unit distance, while high speed rail is quoted at about 500 million, about half. But then the Hyperloop shows up and is quoted at 250 million. How do the economics of that work? I mean, you take a maglev, which is twice as expensive as conventional but very precise regular railway, but by adding a vacuum tube, which is an added system that takes a ton of energy to even get it start making operational sense, you somehow cut costs in half from effectively a regular railway? I’m no economists, but that makes no economic sense.

The tech looks really snazzy in CGI renderings until you start to look into the engineering and physics to make it actually work. At which point it becomes awful.

So what if we tried?

First thing, the vacuum tube has to go. This is the number one obstacle preventing it from ever working. We’ll still accept the special right of way for high speeds though, we’ll just make our pods amazingly aerodynamic. Given the fact that our constraining factors may just become simpler, we can rig our pods to form a hyperpod chain, which allows us to bundle power and improve reliability and efficiency via an economy of scale. We can lower the seating quality in some of these pods and sell those seats for a lower price, making up for it in volume. We can still power everything with green energy, we’re still using our own hyperway, with a very narrow path that our hyperpods can take, so rigging up an electrification scheme via an infrastructure power supply is quite easy. If we want to deploy quickly and make true on our 250 million quid per unit distance, we may have to rely on proven technology, so we probably base our new hyperway structure on two steel beams being kept a fixed distance of 1435mm apart. Bonus: there’s a lot of largely compatible infrastructure at both ends that we can now use, as well as a giant pool of trained professionals around the world, so we can cheap out on stations and hyperway maintenance can be quite cheap and quick.

I just invented a train again, didn’t I?

Elon is a con artist and I will take no criticism.

MenacingPerson ,

The energy you need to keep that at reduced pressure is more than a Little Boy or a Fat Man.

For what unit time? Source?

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever ,

The vacuum aspect is something that a lot of companies are working toward optimizing. One of the more popular examples is that company that basically made a giant centrifugal slingshot as a lower cost way to get stuff into space. Same with some cooling and material science efforts related to computing. There is obviously a LOT of questions on the viability of those efforts too, but this is the kind of problem that “great minds” are working on

But yeah. Even with all the magitech… it doesn’t actually provide anything better than a train.

max ,

Wasn’t that slingshot rocket launch thing a scam as well?

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever ,

I think the jury is still out.

People very much point out that it is a scam and will never work. And Spinlaunch have done a pretty good job of explaining the solutions to that.

But, at least to me: I still don’t see a great use case for it. It is significantly cheaper than chemical rockets but it has very limited payloads. It is potentially really awesome to get supplies to construction setups in space (e.g. building a ship to go to Mars), but a catastrophic failure is a LOT more expensive to recover from and I am generally Team Space Elevator for those roles.

But my point is more that “efficiently maintain a vacuum” is something that a LOT of companies are working toward. Which is probably how some of the pie in the sky efforts are getting funding at all.

benfell ,
@benfell@lemmy.world avatar

It is weird that Elon Musk was so worried about California’s high-speed rail project because it had the look of a boondoggle from the beginning. It’s horrendously expensive and the promise of an alternative to air travel has been diminished as they’ve decided to use more existing rail (you can’t run high speed on it) to save money.

Smokeless7048 ,

I dont think Elon was worried that the high speed rail would be a boondoggle, i think he was worried it WOULDNT.

benfell ,
@benfell@lemmy.world avatar

If Elon Musk was worried that rail service between San Francisco and Los Angeles might diminish the demand for Teslas, then I think we have a more serious problem with delusion than I thought.

SubArcticTundra ,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s what I was thinking. Surely he isn’t so narrow minded to have LA-Silicon Valley commuters as Tesla’s principal target demographic?

Sarcastik ,

But it was for the first 10 years of Tesla’s existence.

People are quick to forget.

PushSurname ,

Musk, a noted public transit hater

Does anyone have a source for that?

abhibeckert ,

He once described Public Transport as “rubbing shoulders with serial killers”.

fortune.com/2017/…/elon-musk-public-transport/

orphiebaby ,
@orphiebaby@lemmy.world avatar

Why should you get downvotes? For all anyone knows, this is a sincere, non-rhetorical question.

power ,

i don’t have a source but elon’s twitter history at least is FULL of public transportation bashing, and calling the idea useless

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