Elon Musk

A friend of mine sent me this link to an article by Albert Burneko, who tried, not entirely successfully, to mock Elon Musk.

Musk may be a high-functioning autistic (as he said on SNL) anti-semitic rightwing asshat, but the same week that he was being interviewed by Sorkin, he was finalizing a multi-billion dollar deal with Amazon to use his rockets.

Burneko derides the explosion of the SpaceX Starship but ignores the historic goal that Musk is shooting for here: as wikipedia says,

Starship is a two-stage super heavy lift launch vehicle and spacecraft under development by SpaceX. It is the heaviest, tallest and most powerful space launch vehicle to have flown. Starship is intended to be fully reusable, which means both stages will be recovered after a mission and reused.

Largest spacecraft ever? Reusable? C’mon! Of course early tries are going to “fail”. His second launch was already better than the first. We should want him to succeed.

How about Starlink? It’s record in the Ukraine war is not perfect, but Ukranie clearly needs it, and I want them to beat the crap out of Putin’s empire.

I dislike Musk for his politics and especially for sponsoring Max Verstappen, another asshole.

But I love the idea of destroying Twitter, which I strongly dislike, and admire his rockets, which can actually land like Flash Gordon’s did.

Albert Burneko can make all the fun he wants of the Boring Machine project, but we should all hope that it works because it could transform our planet in a good way by moving transportation underground.

And, given that it’s kind of important that we move away from fossil fuel transportation, I think we can arguably say that Musk has done more to moving towards electric vehicles than just about anybody else. Who cares about his ugly truck? It’s his thousands of charging stations that will soon charge almost all EVs that is his real ongoing contribution, no matter what happens to Tesla vehicles.

IMNSHO what I’ve written here is more interesting and far more informative than Burneko’s article.

love, ge