I found this tweet very naive and an indication that Musk really doesn't know what he's getting into.
I don't see how he thinks tweet content alone will be enough to verify the 5% of monthly monetizable users
The other poor indicator was his tweet about sampling _100_ of his own replies to detect bots. That's a horribly small sample and horrible selection bias
The firehose is terabytes a day, add storage + indexes and it's pretty far from "fitting on an USB stick" in order to analyze.
It was a statement by the richest person on the planet on communication channel that he regularly uses to his declare personal and business intent and which is obsessively over analysed and therefore has real effects on business markets. Please use context ;)
Why would you assume ignorance instead of malice when a very smart person advised by smart people with domain knowledge makes an obviously nonsensical claim, while billions are on the line?
> I think there are some things and kind of going back to in some ways back to the Apollo days if you take a look at kind of the environment that NASA had in Apollo it was kind of what Elon has with his young engineers. you had you know people trying things and in what works and what doesn't work I think over the years we've gotten into a very risk-averse profile and we're I call it full matrix engineering that okay that all concerns that anyone can raise have to be chased down a hundred percent before you can make any decision. Okay, so yeah like a full matrix of all the things that may be pertinent to a certain decision and you have to fill that entire array before you can make a decision to go forward and there's times when that makes sense but it doesn't make sense for everything we do. SpaceX uses a sparse matrix okay 51% okay when do when we get to 51% okay enough we're gonna make a decision and then we're going to try it and move on.
> His modus operandi is taking quick decisions and backtracking if he is wrong.
That is the modus operandi with products/services, it's not anything new anyways. It has been named in a bunch of different ways ranging from "agile" , "move fast break things" etc. also less charmingly "Microsoft vaporware products" or "Google graveyard", "Steve Jobs' bluffs"
They all indicate the same strategy: ship something and get feedback, if feedback is ultra-negative then you can always kill it.
However when legal stuff is signed, and especially legal stuff of this magnitude then the only way in which you leave yourself room to backtrack is if there is a clause which lets you do so in the legal document. When legal stuff is signed is not in your hands anymore, you have to treat it as being in the courts hands. Because that is what happens if you backtrack.
For car industry and space industry it is a complete revolution.
From what I understand he can legally backtrack from the deal, but he would have to pay some billion dollars penalty. Not cheap by any means, but he can afford that. And having billion dollars at stake you can try to look for a lot of legal reasons to not pay that billion.
But my guess is that he genuinely thinks that 5% number is not accurate based on his twitter feed comments. His feed comments is mostly crypto scammers. Some independent people also claim that 50% of his followers are fake.
Twitter claim of 5% is very specific and probably accurate in a legal sense. But if you have tens of billions at stake and a deal that looks like a mistake it's entirely reasonable to dig deeper.
> For car industry and space industry it is a complete revolution.
Isn't a bit premature to declare it a successful revolution? Cases against Tesla autopilot are mounting, there is a reason why "move fast and break things" isn't used in fields where the people's lives are at stake. It's the reason why Theranos imploded. Who could have possibly predicted what could have happened if US Govt let Theranos run, maybe they'd have really developed the product in the following iteration of the company?
> From what I understand he can legally backtrack from the deal, but he would have to pay some billion dollars penalty
That is only the case if the FTC or the US. Govt. blocks the deal because of any reason.
I did not know that about the deal. Thanks for the info.
With SpaceX it is certainly a successful revolution. There is whole bunch of new startups that would not exists without SpaceX. Most of them will die, but some will not.
It is also quite clear that Tesla already achieved it's goal of accelerating transition to sustainable energy. Volkswagen shift is certainly linked to Tesla. And Volkswagen actually committed fraud on emissions that probably led to death of many people.
Situation with Theranos and Tesla is completely not comparable. Autopilot works fine. You are safer with autopilot activated on a highway than you are driving in a city per kilometer driven. Whether you are safer on a highway with or without autopilot is debatable and we don't have good enough data to settle it. So, Autopilot is not prefect by any means, arguably not market leading solution in the category of drive assist, but it works fine.
The bigger issue is with Full Self Driving. Tesla can drive you around in a city - so the way they spin what FSD means is almost satisfied. The issue is that it is extremely stressful experience and I'm 100% convinced that you are more likely to get in an accident when babysitting it vs. if you would drive by yourself and pay the same amount of attention.
But I think in 5 - 10 years they may be able to actually deliver proper working solution. They are making progress.
> Volkswagen shift is certainly linked to Tesla. And Volkswagen actually committed fraud on emissions that probably led to death of many people.
Apples and oranges. Volkswagen committed fraud on behalf of the consumer. In the endless war for quality of life as a consumer who has to spend 45k for a car I know that Volkswagen is conspiring on my behalf to sidestep environmental regulations and thus providing a vehicle which is more affordable, more durable with the tradeoff of being less green.
Same goes for oil companies, they are just in the business of extracting oil, they are the ones who take the blame for global warming whereas it's me burning it for quality of life purposes when refilling my Escalade or flying to Cabo for the weekend. I owe them one otherwise the nuts over at Extinction Rebellion or GreenPeace would attack my Escalade and cause trouble to airlines.
Tesla is the opposite of that, it's conspiring against the consumer by making a poorly refined car with a terrible design and lots of problems ranging from faulty Autopilot to sudden braking and unintended acceleration. They want to wash away all such disadvantages with a supposedly green car. But in the end if you understand anything about the industrial economy and power generation you get how Teslas are hardly green cars.
Here you have Dr. Daniel Rasky, a NASA Senior scientist talking about SpaceX and Elon. Daniel Rasky was involved in specific studies that were comparing operation of NASA and private companies. He also has first hand experience from working at SpaceX and with Elon. He is expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials and he was for example involved in decision to select PICA as a heat shield for Dragon, and he explains how that went with Elon.
Here is Elon answering questions of National Academy of Science members about Starship. He explains in detail why he pushed the team towards steel and away from carbon fibers:
Here is Elon discussing with Sundy Munro mass manufacturing and engineering.
Sandy Munro is a veteran engineer from General Motors supplier and directly at Ford. Sandy Munro is now running a consultancy company that tear downs cars and suggests improvements to wide range of clients from the car industry.
He was accepted into it, that’s the important part. But then the internet took off and it was the right time to be in that place. Remember, back then he was just another immigrant kid.
It’s funny how quickly the left changed from loving him for turning the car industry on its head to hating him for taking away the left’s hate machine. Oh well.
To be pedantic, USB sticks do come in TB sizes these days.
Either way though, I expect Musk, the richest man alive, can afford to pay a handful of senior engineers a couple weeks pay to store and run some analysis on the firehose. It's a lot of data, but at "fuck-you" level money it's certainly manageable.
Sure, it's manageable. I mean, trivially, Twitter manages it and Elon is worth more than Twitter, so clearly he can afford to process the data. They question is how long will it take, and how much money will he spend reproducing the analysis done by the company he's about to buy.
This argument has been done to death. I personally find the conga line of analysts and hedge fund managers who appear on CNBC and talk up their book of shit picks a lot worse than the best short selling shops.
There are so many bad companies that are public today, they really need somebody nipping at their heels.
Carbonite - which is rarely mentioned on hn, had a $300M+ run-rate when they were acquired in 2019
I think brand awareness of Backblaze is insular - I remember Carbonite had the strategy of advertising on right-wing radio in the 00's which seems to have worked for them.
