While the event itself was trivial, this provides a useful example of how journalists continue not only to repeat but to add to the mountain of bullshit that supports the myth of the real life Tony Stark. Though the tweet Musk was replying to has been deleted confusing matters a bit, this seems to be the sequence:
1. Musk responds to a tweet about an article on nuclear rockets with a vaguely positive comment.
To be clear: good for in-space transit, but not recommended for Earth to orbit!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2019
2. He apparently didn't read article (at least not in depth) nor is he well versed on the topic. The "would be" suggests he didn't realize the research was ongoing. More telling is his lack of comment on the greatly reduced role SpaceX would play in a world of interplanetary nuclear thermal rockets. He's talking about a technology that would make his "starships" obsolete for anything more than ferrying (perhaps limited to large cargo if we continue to see advances in air-breathing rockets), but the apparent contradiction doesn't seem to occur to him.
3. The "would be a great area of research" tweet becomes the headline "Elon Musk Proposes a Controversial Plan to Speed Up Spaceflight to Mars."
This constant nudging toward myth is the original sin of the Tesla bubble, why it started and how it continues to grow despite the accumulation of ever more damning evidence. Even respectable publications go along with at least the minor lies and distortions. They describe Musk as an engineer/inventor. They call him a founder of PayPal and Tesla (both of which predated Musk's involvement). They give him credit for introducing the hyperloop and ignore the fact that his proposal was for a vactrain that traveled on air-bearings, an idea so impractical that none of the "hyperloop" start-ups have even considered it.
Elon Musk is the world's richest man because he convinced a lot of investors that he was a genius without living equal who was personally about to invent all sorts of wonderful, world-changing technology. He convinced them with the help of a large number of journalists who cared more about good copy than good reporting.
Mark:
ReplyDelete"The world's richest man" thing is interesting.
I'd say that the two most convincing pro-Musk arguments I've seen are:
1. Unlike other tech executives, Musk doesn't just build software. He actually builds cars and rockets.
2. Lots of people have been gunning at Tesla stock for years but it remains at near-record highs. This would seem to imply that Musk has a lot to offer, if people value his company so highly even after he's done so many buffoonish things.
How do we put together 1 and 2, while accepting the idea that the hyperloop is a scam? One resolution of this seeming contradiction is to think of hyperloop and other publicity stunts as _just_ publicity stunts, basically a form of advertising for Tesla's coolness.
But . . . there's another way to look at it, and this relates to the "world's richest man" thing. From one standpoint, it seems unlikely that "the world's richest man" could be an empty shell. On the other hand, wasn't Jay Gould the world's richest man, or something close to that, back in the day? And we have no problem thinking of Jay Gould as, at best, an exploiter of the social arrangements of his time: something slightly more advanced than a con man, but not an innovator outside of that. So if we put on our historical spectacles, maybe Musk could fit in that category, as someone who is well enough situated and good enough at moving the shells around that he can stay at the top of the greasy pole . . . ok, I'm garbling analogies now. My point is that the key thing to address with Musk is not that he can get rich on empty promises (if indeed that's what he's doing) but rather that he can stay there even with so many informed people shouting that there's no there there.
I'll need to come back to this later but here are some quick points:
Delete1. Rather than Gould I'd go with the Match King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Kreuger
2. Be careful of cigarettes and cocaine arguments with cars and rockets. Relative to their industries, SpaceX is a huge player while Tesla is tiny but almost all of Musk's fortune comes from Tesla stock and compensation
3. Smart people are screaming "RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!" https://www.ft.com/content/f763ecad-a401-4585-ba9b-f8410ed88de4
4. But "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid"