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Comment by kenferry | original | SpaceX catches the Starship to end Flight 15
[−]kenferry · 2026-11-15 Sun 05:33 UTC · link
The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings? You think that doesn't create incentives to claim things are better than they are?
[−]jeswin · 2026-11-15 Sun 06:15 UTC · link
> The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings?

Failing to deliver a ReactJS + web services project, and failing to catch a steel cylinder weighing thousands of tonnes, full of combustible liquids, hurtling down from space with two metal arms mounted on a pole are two different things.

If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.

[−]cheonic639 · 2026-11-15 Sun 07:14 UTC · link
> If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.

Ah, yes. Others should do more for society so I can benefit!

You should just get straight to the point: you want higher taxes on those wealthier than you.

[−]jeswin · 2026-11-15 Sun 07:21 UTC · link
Quite the opposite, I was actually defending people who make super risky bets.
[−]gertop · 2026-11-15 Sun 07:16 UTC · link
I'd rather billionaires not exist at all, personally. Before you say something absurd like "SpaceX wouldn't exist without billionaires" I suggest you check the timeline. Falcon 9 was operational before Elon Musk officially joined the 10 digits club.

Innovation will always happen and Elon didn't personally inject billions into SpaceX either.

Let's cap wealth at 999M and anything over the gets redistributed to poor entrepreneurs.

[−]jquery · 2026-11-15 Sun 08:37 UTC · link
Billionaires are the economic equivalent of software memory leaks.
[−]kenferry · 2026-11-15 Sun 07:40 UTC · link
When was Elon promising ReactJS projects? He promises cars, full self driving, etc. etc. Extremely consistently overpromises and underdeliver.

Anyway, "I want billionaires to fail" is fine, cool, I probably agree, but the question being argued was "is Elon running things inherently safer than the situation that led to Challenger etc.". I do not agree with the idea that Elon's companies have a culture where it is safe and repercussion-free to report that things are busted.

[−]jeswin · 2026-11-15 Sun 08:01 UTC · link
> Extremely consistently overpromises and underdeliver.

That's what I'm saying. Promising to deliver brain-computer interfaces and failing at it is not the same as, pretty much anything else.

> I do not agree with the idea that Elon's companies have a culture where it is safe and repercussion-free to report that things are busted.

And this is different from say Apple (or the majority of large corporates) how?

[−]kenferry · 2026-11-15 Sun 08:10 UTC · link
How is apple relevant? If you read up in this thread, the argument was that Elon is safer than NASA.
[−]jeswin · 2026-11-15 Sun 08:19 UTC · link
I was responding to your broader statements, which as stated were not strictly about the original narrow context about Challenger. Every company has pretty much the same or similar repercussions with respect to speaking up/out. Apple, or say Timnit Gebru at Google.

> If you read up in this thread, the argument was that Elon is safer than NASA.

There's nothing to decide either way. There have been failures at his companies, and at the same time 13 crewed missions on SpaceX rockets without human casualties.

[−]WalterBright · 2026-11-15 Sun 09:51 UTC · link
> Extremely consistently overpromises and underdeliver.

The idea is to set a goal to strive towards.

What he has delivered is incredible.

[−]bumby · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:43 UTC · link
The problem is when internal stretch goals get communicated as business deliverables that drive stock price. There needs to be an expectation of good-faith for the latter.