That link is from 2022 presumably about the twitter purchase. People like the guy in the link thought Twitter would go offline hard after firing almost all of the company, instead Elon was right and there was so much fat to cut.
Since he bought it MAU are up 150 million people, and it seems to be more profitable (although that's not as clear in their most recent filings). Company valuation is down, but I think it's generally agreed he overpaid with the 44 billion takeover, current company market price is slightly above what it was before he publicized his intention to buy it.
It's doing a lot better since he bought it as far as I can tell.
Posts like this is why HN is made fun of now in circles where real engineering happens. In reality you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because it would be well over your head.
"Underground tunnels are immune to surface weather conditions (subways are a good example), so it wouldn’t matter to Hyperloop if a hurricane was raging on the surface. You wouldn’t even notice."
Musk, Twitter, 2022
This is, on its face, an utterly idiotic and untrue statement. Look at the subways in NYC anytime it rains
In reality, you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because he's making stuff up and hoping your inability to understand him comes across as genius rather than bullshit.
Sorry, I'm too busy trying to check an algorithm to convert floating-point numbers to strings for correctness to deal with people playing the "I'm a rocket scientist, therefore everything is easy to me" card. And yet somehow Elon isn't that (see his most recent SpaceX, where he quite literally uses that to justify his competence to build orbital data centers).
> I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem.
It might have been medium difficult back in 1985, but the state of the art has progressed in the intervening 40 years. The constraint of correctness makes things trickier because it further imposes three requirements: completeness, uniqueness, and determinism.
Unless the implementer has the skill to prove these properties about the algorithm they've implemented, such an implementation is likely not to achieve those requirements.
We didn't have this definition of correctness until 1990 (due to Steele and White), and it wasn't until the past decade or so that we got a published algorithm (most recently, I think, Dragonbox, due to Jeon when he was still working on his PhD at UCSD), with mathematical proof[0], that satisfied all of the requirements of being complete, being unique, and being deterministic.
(Though, Steele-White expresses these slightly differently, as preserving information, having the shortest possible output, and rounding correctly. Completeness, uniqueness, and determinism seem to be equivalent and are easier to prove.)
--
0: Available at <https://fmt.dev/papers/Dragonbox.pdf>. It's pretty easy to understand either with a numerical analysis background or after having worked through volume 2 of Knuth's TAoCP.
Thank you for putting words into my mouth that I didn't say. Especially when they're quite literally the opposite of my message.
Although, given that I pointed out that Elon literally did the exact same thing, why do you trust him when he does it? Or is it simply that you're unaware that he does stuff like that?
> His companies have made many monumental engineering achievements at his direction.
If you know anyone who has worked at one his companies, especially at a high level, you would know that they made those achievements despite his directions. The SpaceX team was ecstatic when he bought Twitter, because it meant he would be around a lot less.
The policy at SpaceX was basically avoid Elon, and if you had to talk to him, just agree to whatever he said and then not do it. He almost always forgot by the next time he talked to you, and if he didn't, you just said it was really hard.
Since he doesn't understand rocket engineering, it was pretty easy to get away with that.
And the people who worked with him at PayPal would tell you that he knows nothing about software engineering and they basically threw away everything he wrote, but they had to be nice because he had a lot of stock after his company was acquired by PayPal but called a merger.
Elon's main skill is marketing himself. He next best skill is marketing his companies' jobs to talented people and getting them to agree to work there.
That is certainly a critical skill for a CEO, but he is not a great engineer.
His companies making those achievements is not the same as he personally making those achievements. He does have some talent in being a CEO of a company and inspiring employees and investors.
But also don't oversell that: only Tesla and SpaceX have been successes, and he's had to have them bail out is other failed companies: SolarCity, Twitter, and xAI. The Boring Company also doesn't seem to be particularly successful either, and he never got around to building a company to build Hyperloop in the first place.
> His companies making those achievements is not the same as he personally making those achievements.
Those achievements wouldn't have happened without him.
> He does have some talent in being a CEO of a company and inspiring employees and investors.
SpaceX employees are top shelf engineers and scientists. Being able to do that makes Musk a great CEO. Can you name any other CEO who has been able to do anything like what Musk's companies do?
Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when the Second Coming of Jobs occurred. He took the same company, with the same engineers, from near bankruptcy to $347 billion.
Again, same engineers. 90 days from bankruptcy to $347 billion. Jobs was the magic ingredient - like Musk.
What an odd comment. You think because he is the CEO of a rocket company that naturally he is beyond making stuff up and talking BS? Have you ever watched an interview of his?
And why are CEOs as smart as engineers now.
This isn't Twitter. You don't have to suck up to him. He won't ever see this.
You are the odd comment. It's been like this my entire life. I was like 20 when Elon was near bankruptcy when Tesla was basically nothing. Then I watched him found SpaceX and again almost run out of money. I then watched him make electric cars a reality from nothing. I then watched him turn the space industry completely upside down. You think elons a bad guy? Whatever. You lost your moral high ground as soon as you started lying. I've watched him give hundreds of interviews with off the cuff engineering specifics. I don't care if he sees this or not. Tired of humoring morons. This isn't reddit. You don't have to suck up to the commies.
