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Twitter likely to take idiots offer to buy them for $43 billion

Has someone posted this interesting link? "Elon Musk’s Text Messages Explain Everything", an opinion that billionaires' approach to large sums of money is surprisingly casual. It's a follow-up to am earlier article about messages from Musk's phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence."
. . .
At one point in early April, Musk appears infatuated with his own idea to replace Twitter with a blockchain-based payment-and-message system. In a string of texts to his brother, the entrepreneur Kimbal Musk, he manages to convince himself that the idea could be huge and a way to crush spam while preserving free speech. In this preposterous scenario, users would have to pay a fractional amount of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin to post or retweet. Roughly 10 days later, Musk sends a different text noting that “blockchain Twitter isn’t possible.”
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He'll fix it just as soon as he makes a working self-driving car.

 
blastula said:
He'll fix it just as soon as he makes a working self-driving car.

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I remember in the early 2000s when I got to ride in one of those experimental self-driving cars being developed at Stanford. It was a goofball idea back then, and it is a goofball idea now. The technology is simply not there to fulfill that dream. Self-driving cars are nothing but accidents waiting to happen. The fact that this supposed tech visionary has promoted them for so long speaks volumes about how little he understands the practical limits of the technologies that he promotes. Musk was out of his depth with self-driving cars, but he is even further out of his depth with a mature social media technology like Twitter. Now, let's go back to colonizing Mars. We'll get a working fusion power plant before that happens.
 
Copernicus said:
blastula said:
He'll fix it just as soon as he makes a working self-driving car.

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I remember in the early 2000s when I got to ride in one of those experimental self-driving cars being developed at Stanford. It was a goofball idea back then, and it is a goofball idea now. The technology is simply not there to fulfill that dream. Self-driving cars are nothing but accidents waiting to happen. The fact that this supposed tech visionary has promoted them for so long speaks volumes about how little he understands the practical limits of the technologies that he promotes. Musk was out of his depth with self-driving cars, but he is even further out of his depth with a mature social media technology like Twitter. Now, let's go back to colonizing Mars. We'll get a working fusion power plant before that happens.
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I disagree; I think self driving cars are not very far off. The technology already exists, and the concept is being demonstrated and tested in real world conditions right now. It's not yet compact and cheap enough to be competitive, but that will certainly come with time and with volume production - particularly given the very high cost of human drivers, and their short range and long recharge time (a human driver really can't be effective for more than about ten to twelve hours a day, and requires at least one or two breaks even in that short period of time. A computer can be on the road 24x7, with mo deterioration in performance).

The problem is that Musk isn't going about the technology the right way. Those real world tests I mentioned are nothing to do with Musk or Tesla, and Elon seems hell bent on not doing that (expensive but essential) testing, and instead using his customers as unpaid beta-testers, despite the self evident fact that this will result in some of them dying (and already has).

The biggest roadblock between the current situation and widespread use of fully self-driving vehicles is cowboys like Musk giving the entire technology a bad name, by over promising, under delivering, and blatantly disregarding the safety of the driving public, and the impact that a perception of such systems as highly dangerous will have on customer confidence.

Tesla "Autopilot" is to self-driving cars what Doctor Cure-All's Patent Snake Oil was to early pharmaceuticals - it not only doesn't do what it says on the bottle, but worse, it undermines public confidence in those products that might actually work.
 
bilby said:
I disagree; I think self driving cars are not very far off. The technology already exists, and the concept is being demonstrated and tested in real world conditions right now. It's not yet compact and cheap enough to be competitive, but that will certainly come with time and with volume production - particularly given the very high cost of human drivers, and their short range and long recharge time (a human driver really can't be effective for more than about ten to twelve hours a day, and requires at least one or two breaks even in that short period of time. A computer can be on the road 24x7, with no deterioration in performance).
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Providing the OS is not Windows based.
 
bilby said:
Copernicus said:
blastula said:
He'll fix it just as soon as he makes a working self-driving car.

Click to expand...


I remember in the early 2000s when I got to ride in one of those experimental self-driving cars being developed at Stanford. It was a goofball idea back then, and it is a goofball idea now. The technology is simply not there to fulfill that dream. Self-driving cars are nothing but accidents waiting to happen. The fact that this supposed tech visionary has promoted them for so long speaks volumes about how little he understands the practical limits of the technologies that he promotes. Musk was out of his depth with self-driving cars, but he is even further out of his depth with a mature social media technology like Twitter. Now, let's go back to colonizing Mars. We'll get a working fusion power plant before that happens.
Click to expand...

I disagree; I think self driving cars are not very far off. T
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Self-driving cars, like cold fusion, is always 20 years away, but oddly, never 19.
 
bilby said:
Copernicus said:
blastula said:
He'll fix it just as soon as he makes a working self-driving car.

Click to expand...


I remember in the early 2000s when I got to ride in one of those experimental self-driving cars being developed at Stanford. It was a goofball idea back then, and it is a goofball idea now. The technology is simply not there to fulfill that dream. Self-driving cars are nothing but accidents waiting to happen. The fact that this supposed tech visionary has promoted them for so long speaks volumes about how little he understands the practical limits of the technologies that he promotes. Musk was out of his depth with self-driving cars, but he is even further out of his depth with a mature social media technology like Twitter. Now, let's go back to colonizing Mars. We'll get a working fusion power plant before that happens.
Click to expand...

I disagree; I think self driving cars are not very far off. The technology already exists, and the concept is being demonstrated and tested in real world conditions right now. It's not yet compact and cheap enough to be competitive, but that will certainly come with time and with volume production - particularly given the very high cost of human drivers, and their short range and long recharge time (a human driver really can't be effective for more than about ten to twelve hours a day, and requires at least one or two breaks even in that short period of time. A computer can be on the road 24x7, with mo deterioration in performance).
Click to expand...


No, the technology is not there to release autonomous land vehicles into the mix with human drivers, but that is a topic for another thread. I'll stand by my statement here with just a simple disagreement based on my experiences after having worked directly with teams researching the capabilities of autonomous vehicles and robots in the past. My point about Musk is that his technical expertise is highly overrated. He has hired a lot of very smart technical people to give him advice on the latest advances in such technology, but most of his success has come from migrating technology designed for autonomous operations over to human-operated vehicles. That is, the technology works best when it augments human judgment, not when it operates on a peer level with humans, especially where dangerous equipment is involved. Tesla cars have some very good features, but they have also been involved in terrible accidents when drivers overestimated the intelligence and safety features built into those vehicles. The technology that drives those cars cannot be scaled up to meet people's expectations for them because it can't be scaled up to behave like it does in movies and TV shows. Human intelligence is fundamentally different from so-called machine intelligence, which is still very much in its infancy.


bilby said:
The problem is that Musk isn't going about the technology the right way. Those real world tests I mentioned are nothing to do with Musk or Tesla, and Elon seems hell bent on not doing that (expensive but essential) testing, and instead using his customers as unpaid beta-testers, despite the self evident fact that this will result in some of them dying (and already has).

The biggest roadblock between the current situation and widespread use of fully self-driving vehicles is cowboys like Musk giving the entire technology a bad name, by over promising, under delivering, and blatantly disregarding the safety of the driving public, and the impact that a perception of such systems as highly dangerous will have on customer confidence.

Tesla "Autopilot" is to self-driving cars what Doctor Cure-All's Patent Snake Oil was to early pharmaceuticals - it not only doesn't do what it says on the bottle, but worse, it undermines public confidence in those products that might actually work.
Click to expand...

I would say that Musk's misunderstandings about the state of the art are very much in line with those of the rest of the industry. If you work in AI research, you see why people tend to make wildly inaccurate predictions of what the technology can deliver on in the short term. The reason is that expectations are extremely high and unrealistic. If you can't dazzle audiences with your modest advances and PowerPoint presentations, then you don't get funded. You have to compete with those who make unrealistic promises and predictions, end up with large grants, and then deliver nothing more than proof of concept demos that don't scale up. Marketing is important, and Musk is very good at that, especially since he sometimes delivers on his promises in ways that pay off in a big way. But that isn't going to lead to fully autonomous driverless vehicles.
 
Copernicus said:
blastula said:
He'll fix it just as soon as he makes a working self-driving car.

Click to expand...


I remember in the early 2000s when I got to ride in one of those experimental self-driving cars being developed at Stanford. It was a goofball idea back then, and it is a goofball idea now. The technology is simply not there to fulfill that dream. Self-driving cars are nothing but accidents waiting to happen. The fact that this supposed tech visionary has promoted them for so long speaks volumes about how little he understands the practical limits of the technologies that he promotes. Musk was out of his depth with self-driving cars, but he is even further out of his depth with a mature social media technology like Twitter. Now, let's go back to colonizing Mars. We'll get a working fusion power plant before that happens.
Click to expand...

Musk seems to be a genius at hiring and lying to great engineers and promotion.
 
Copernicus said:
bilby said:
Copernicus said:
blastula said:
He'll fix it just as soon as he makes a working self-driving car.

Click to expand...


I remember in the early 2000s when I got to ride in one of those experimental self-driving cars being developed at Stanford. It was a goofball idea back then, and it is a goofball idea now. The technology is simply not there to fulfill that dream. Self-driving cars are nothing but accidents waiting to happen. The fact that this supposed tech visionary has promoted them for so long speaks volumes about how little he understands the practical limits of the technologies that he promotes. Musk was out of his depth with self-driving cars, but he is even further out of his depth with a mature social media technology like Twitter. Now, let's go back to colonizing Mars. We'll get a working fusion power plant before that happens.
Click to expand...

I disagree; I think self driving cars are not very far off. The technology already exists, and the concept is being demonstrated and tested in real world conditions right now. It's not yet compact and cheap enough to be competitive, but that will certainly come with time and with volume production - particularly given the very high cost of human drivers, and their short range and long recharge time (a human driver really can't be effective for more than about ten to twelve hours a day, and requires at least one or two breaks even in that short period of time. A computer can be on the road 24x7, with mo deterioration in performance).
Click to expand...


No, the technology is not there to release autonomous land vehicles into the mix with human drivers, but that is a topic for another thread. I'll stand by my statement here with just a simple disagreement based on my experiences after having worked directly with teams researching the capabilities of autonomous vehicles and robots in the past. My point about Musk is that his technical expertise is highly overrated. He has hired a lot of very smart technical people to give him advice on the latest advances in such technology, but most of his success has come from migrating technology designed for autonomous operations over to human-operated vehicles. That is, the technology works best when it augments human judgment, not when it operates on a peer level with humans, especially where dangerous equipment is involved. Tesla cars have some very good features, but they have also been involved in terrible accidents when drivers overestimated the intelligence and safety features built into those vehicles. The technology that drives those cars cannot be scaled up to meet people's expectations for them because it can't be scaled up to behave like it does in movies and TV shows. Human intelligence is fundamentally different from so-called machine intelligence, which is still very much in its infancy.


bilby said:
The problem is that Musk isn't going about the technology the right way. Those real world tests I mentioned are nothing to do with Musk or Tesla, and Elon seems hell bent on not doing that (expensive but essential) testing, and instead using his customers as unpaid beta-testers, despite the self evident fact that this will result in some of them dying (and already has).

The biggest roadblock between the current situation and widespread use of fully self-driving vehicles is cowboys like Musk giving the entire technology a bad name, by over promising, under delivering, and blatantly disregarding the safety of the driving public, and the impact that a perception of such systems as highly dangerous will have on customer confidence.

Tesla "Autopilot" is to self-driving cars what Doctor Cure-All's Patent Snake Oil was to early pharmaceuticals - it not only doesn't do what it says on the bottle, but worse, it undermines public confidence in those products that might actually work.
Click to expand...

I would say that Musk's misunderstandings about the state of the art are very much in line with those of the rest of the industry. If you work in AI research, you see why people tend to make wildly inaccurate predictions of what the technology can deliver on in the short term. The reason is that expectations are extremely high and unrealistic. If you can't dazzle audiences with your modest advances and PowerPoint presentations, then you don't get funded. You have to compete with those who make unrealistic promises and predictions, end up with large grants, and then deliver nothing more than proof of concept demos that don't scale up. Marketing is important, and Musk is very good at that, especially since he sometimes delivers on his promises in ways that pay off in a big way. But that isn't going to lead to fully autonomous driverless vehicles.
Click to expand...


I think he's dumb for making such a push on "self driving cars" and should put the focus on the climate. He ought to drop the "full self driving" talk and just promote it as the best cruise control on the market. Then find a way to make batteries better for the environment as well or purchase companies full of engineers developing cleaner energy. Full self driving is such a stupid hill to die on when Tesla is making strides in lowered emissions.

Edit: That money he spent on Twitter could have gone towards developing cleaner Energy for his car company, back up power company & cock rocket company. What a goof.
 
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Gospel said:
Copernicus said:
bilby said:
Copernicus said:
blastula said:
He'll fix it just as so
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I think he's dumb for making such a push on "self driving cars" and should put the focus on the climate. He ought to drop the "full self driving" talk and just promote it as the best cruise control on the market.
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This bothers me in particular, as I've spent most of the last 2 years of my life working with actual self-driving cars. Testing them in the field. Giving feedback to engineers and product planners. Solving problems and working through "edge cases." I was part of the team that took our cars from cautiously navigating neighborhood streets at 25mph, to confidently cruising down busy city streets at 45mph. A little over a year ago (after many years of development) we gave our first driver-less ride. Now we're launching over 100 robo-taxis every day in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin. Is it perfect? No. If it was, I wouldn't have a job. But it is very, very good, because you have some very smart people (way smarter than me) working on this extremely complex problem.

Elon? He sells something called "full self-driving." What are the qualifications for being a beta tester? If you have enough money to buy the feature. That's it. How is that working out?

Not so good.

The driver told police that he had been using Tesla’s new “Full Self-Driving” feature, the report notes, before the Tesla’s “left signal activated” and its “brakes activated,” and it moved into the left lane, “slowing to a stop directly in [the second vehicle’s] path of travel.”

Just hours before the crash, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had triumphantly announced that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” capability was available in North America, congratulating Tesla employees on a “major milestone.”
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I've been in similar situations (car decides to change lanes or come to a sudden stop) and while stressful in the moment, an accident can be avoided if you know what you're doing. Training kicks in, and I could recover something like this in a split second. Afterwards, you escalate the behavior to engineering, and they have many meetings where they try to figure out what went wrong. If there had been an accident (I had one, not our fault), there is an entire incident response process that goes into action immediately, and we're trained in that as well. Reams of documentation. Multiple people reviewing the video, data from the sensors, code from the "stack" that controls the car, etc. etc. etc. I've worked with our incident response team, and I'm kinda angling towards joining them if I can.

All of this happens because we know that one accident that leads to injuries or a fatality can end everything we've worked for in a heartbeat. It happened with Uber.

It is my professional opinion that Musk is being wildly irresponsible by having untrained customers test this poorly-named "self-driving" system. At the very least, until this crash is sorted out, FSD Beta should be disabled in any Tesla that has the option installed.
 
I just don't understand why Elon can't see how much less issues he'd cause (not just for Tesla but his customers) by not marketing it as Full Self Driving. Just call it Ludacris Cruise Control and limit it's ability until he spent that Twitter money towards the advancement in AI for automobiles. It's not like any other automaker is in the position to compete. Keep doing things the way it's being done now and they will catch up.
 
marc said:
Gospel said:
Three questions, Where did I say he created Tesla?
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My apology. From the statement "Considering that Elon is CEO aka the original money bag for Tesla" it seemed to imply the impression that he was responsible for creating Tesla.

As for the rest, any success of Tesla seems to be at least somewhat in spite of Elon's control, rather than because of his actions. He was good at getting government money for it, which is good. But his tendency to overpromise, and spend time and money on his other projects rather than making Tesla an even better, seems to hamper the company. I WANT Tesla to be a leader in EVs, to make them common. As it is his actions with the company are not helping. And the shit-show that is his managing of Twitter, is undermining confidence in Tesla (plus his huge stock dumps to pay for his Twitter habit caused drops in the Tesla stock)
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100% Agree. It's why I called him money bag because that's really all he was to Tesla. I'm inclined to believe the same occurred with SpaceX/Starlink. The real talented engineers behind the scenes did all the work while Elon brokered deals like the one where Nasa awarded SpaceX money even though they hadn't done anything remarkable yet. I always tended to separate Elon's goofiness' from his investment decisions because they were respectable investments. Until Twitter that is. :unsure:
 
Gospel said:
I think he's dumb for making such a push on "self driving cars" and should put the focus on the climate. He ought to drop the "full self driving" talk and just promote it as the best cruise control on the market. Then find a way to make batteries better for the environment as well or purchase companies full of engineers developing cleaner energy. Full self driving is such a stupid hill to die on when Tesla is making strides in lowered emissions.

Edit: That money he spent on Twitter could have gone towards developing cleaner Energy for his car company, back up power company & cock rocket company. What a goof.
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And he should focus on quality. Teslas aren't up to the standards of their price point.
 
Thread re-opened.
Electric Vehicles discussion split to its own thread.

Discussions about Musk investments (self driving, space x) still here
 
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