Does anyone have any tips on getting hired by Elon?
SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
201–210 of 283 posts
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#202- it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners - so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people. Governments basically do this by providing schooling and health care to children till age of 18 or so. I mean the RoI on teaching Elon to read was fairly high. I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings? - if MMT is right, then the problem is not li…
> I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings? It’s not the primary school teacher that made the investment. It’s whomever was bankrolling salaries and expenses for teachers, cafeteria workers, buildings to house the activity … The “lien” on future income would likely be “taxes” (assuming public school here.)
Yes - I agree I was just trying to find my way towards
"the human economy is a whole, even within countries seeing government as a cost to be minimised, taxes to be avoided and private investment as somehow privileged"
is a poor analysis.
I mean such a huge amount of private spending is trying to alter "predominant cultural norms" - advertising etc. yet breakout successful companies tend to break at just the right time that their PMFit barely needs advertising.
Less dinosaurs trying to look cool and more evolved companies would help - and it would help in that we have constant turn over of companies would mean we were measuring actual productivity better - very useful in MMT terms.
Somehow I am feeling towards our tournament style approach of allocating the power to allocate resources is false. We have young democracies, but work in dictatorships - and invest in similar ways.
I think basically we need to find better ways of "doing democracy". imagine voting on internal projects? it will hurt but if we think democracy works then open discussion and decision making actually will result in stronger companies - or just a return of capital !
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc. Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themse…
Then that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades. If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.
"More revenue solves all known problems" -- Eric Schmidt
"The only thing that matters is product-market fit" -- Marc Andreesen
Being in a good market with the first product that can satisfy that market solves all sorts of management sins. Look at Twitter, Zenefits, Uber, WeWork, Zynga, Digg, etc. Or for that matter - how do you think Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA started looking like jokers?
Dominance in a market is usually an anti-signal for management quality, because it means you can get away with stuff that you couldn't in more competitive markets.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#204- it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners - so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people. Governments basically do this by providing schooling and health care to children till age of 18 or so. I mean the RoI on teaching Elon to read was fairly high. I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings? - if MMT is right, then the problem is not li…
> I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings? It’s not the primary school teacher that made the investment. It’s whomever was bankrolling salaries and expenses for teachers, cafeteria workers, buildings to house the activity … The “lien” on future income would likely be “taxes” (assuming public school here.)
This poses a bit if an interesting quandary for society.
Which society paid for Musk to be educated? He grew up in South Africa. How much tax does he pay there relative to where he built his stuff? Where should he pay his taxes?
What about other people who grow up elsewhere and move? Is it ok to hire a load of doctors from other countries?
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies. And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same t…
I've learned to be super careful about what senior people say about other senior people. Because it actually reflects well on you to say nice things about already respected people, it's a free PR boost. It makes them sound generous and also knowledgeable. But, I've seen this happen a lot in big companies, someone will say "Well X is a fantastic engineer" or "X does great work" and my first thought is "Well that's int…
I don't know man. What breaks that argument is that multiple people make the same positive claims about Elon: That he can handle unimaginable amounts of stress that would break others, that he seems to have a breath of deep knowledge in various different engineering disciplines and that he is committed to his vision. Your theory would make more sense if everyone was making up random praise about him but the interviews with the three people I mentioned were conducted years apart and weirdly all mention these same praises. Its possible that there is some coordination going on but across so many people from his different companies? There must be some sort of truth to the statements.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies. And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same t…
Musk himself is somehow schizoid .. he can be wise at times and then .. he tweets the most retarded thing possible.
Extreme aspergers?
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#207Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful. Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game…
Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies. And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same t…
Quality Assurance is one of the hardest things at any manufacturing company, because it absolutely doesn't care about "rock stars" or any other fluff. If your employees are tired and burned out, then yelling at them won't fix anything because it's not about whether they get it right that time, it's about getting it right every time.
Which means rested, attentive employees who are not going to be "rock stars", they're going to do the job correctly and then go home because that's what's required.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies. And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same t…
Quality Assurance is one of the hardest things at any manufacturing company, because it absolutely doesn't care about "rock stars" or any other fluff. If your employees are tired and burned out, then yelling at them won't fix anything because it's not about whether they get it right that time, it's about getting it right every time. Which means rested, attentive employees who are not going to be "rock stars", they're…
I'm inclined to agree with this. Its just amazing that they still haven't fixed these issues even to this day when it has become a running joke at this point.
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it failing? Poor management or not viable? Vertical farming seems key for our future.
We still aren’t fully utilising horizontal farming which is significantly cheaper
Setting the topic of weed aside, are there pharmaceutical crops that would make sense economically to grow in a controlled environment ?
Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it failing? Poor management or not viable? Vertical farming seems key for our future.
> Vertical farming seems key for our future. This has never made sense to me. Vertical farming is just greenhouses except with artificial light instead of natural sunlight. Presumably the renewable source of energy for that artificial light would be solar panels. So why not just build normal greenhouses?
They have only ever managed to grow lettuce with vertical farming. Produce out of farm gate is at the bottom of the supply chain. It will never be profitable unless people are willing to be 4-5x what they pay for lettuce now.
CA field grown lettuce gets the farmer less than half a dollar per head. Meanwhile: https://www.montereyherald.com/2022/12/16/11-for-a-head-of-l...
Expect price increases and food shortages this year because of rains in CA. We are not allowed to plant for 45-60 days after last rains so field can dry out.
The truth is that we do have a real food shortage situation now. The vertical farms won’t make a dent in making up the gap. Not even close.