SpaceX Is Getting Ready To Test Its Starlink Satellite-To-Cellphone Service - Sl...

SpaceX Is Getting Ready To Test Its Starlink Satellite-To-Cellphone Service

• Re:

• by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @04:43AM (#63369051) Homepage

  This sort of stuff is so frustrating. Musk is a great example for illustrating the benefits of privilege**, but then people like Greytree virtually always come and derail a conversation that they probably would support by trying to substitute some entirely fictional backstory for reality.

  Musk's father Errol was an engineer who worked in the SA mining sector. His parents divorced when he was a child, and his older siblings who had come to understand what his father was like all didn't want to live with him, but Elon was convinced by his grandmother (Errol's mother) to stay with his father, on the grounds that Errol would be lonely without him. He quickly came to regret his decision. Meanwhile Errol increasingly invested in the mining sector (often in a rather shady manner) - most famously a handshake deal with a couple Italian investors that saw him trade his bushplane for a minority stake in a small Zambian (not South African) emerald mine, which ultimately yielded a couple hundred thousand dollars in profit. At his peak, Errol was worth several million dollars (before inflation), though by the time Elon left at age 17 (to put distance between him and Errol and to avoid having to serve in the Apartheid-enforcing South African-military (indeed, for all Errol's (numerous) faults, he too was anti-Apartheid, and at one point ran for office on an anti-Apartheid platform)), Errol's wealth was already well on the decline, and in the years after Elon left he eventually had to file for bankruptcy. Elon's decision to leave was not taken well by Errol, and Elon hated his father, so the two remained almost incommunicado during his early years overseas (where Elon worked first on a relative's farm in Saskatchewan, and later as a lumberjack and at a lumber mill - then later in college on scholarship, with support from his (non-wealthy) mother), though it slowly warmed over time, and his father ultimately invested a low-five-figure sum in one of Zip2's later funding rounds. When Elon became successful, he started supporting his father - according to him, in exchange for an agreement to "stop doing evil", which Elon considers Errol to have broken when among other things Errol started fathering children with his stepdaughter who he had raised since she was a young child. Errol also killed several people during what was reported as a breakin, though he got off on self-defense.

  (The above is pretty much all in agreement between Elon and Errol (though each put their own spin on everything), and backed up by interviews and research from others (such as Ashley Vance))

  Did Elon have privilege? YES!. First off, even having an engineer as a father is itself a privilege when it comes to education. On top of this, his father, as much as Elon hates him, provided him endless access to books and computers, and got him into a good semi-private school (Pretoria Boys High School). And to top it off, Elon's decision to flee to Canada was only made possible first by having enough money to buy a ticket and flee with hundreds of dollars, but also by the fact that his mother was a Canadian citizen (having been born in Canada and moved to SA by her father to search for a supposed "Lost City of the Kalahari", Indiana-Jones style - Maye's father was really weird). And had a distant relative with a farm willing to hire him as a farmhand there, too, until he found a job. What percentage of South Africa's population had this equivalent level of privilege? A few percent, maybe? A poor black child living in a township simply did not have these opportunities. Of course Elon also had some disadvantages - an (according to he and his siblings) abusive father, and having been on multiple occasions nearly murdered by bullies - once nearly drown, once beaten so badly that he spent weeks in hospital, internal damage from which he was still having to have surgically corrected as recently as several years back), etc - and I'm sure this in part goes a long way toward explaining why he's so affection-needy and lashes out. But none of thi

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  • Re:

    You're exactly right, and I wish more people understood that. Wish I had mod points to mod your comment up.

  • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @05:33AM (#63369127) Homepage

    ED: Forgot to respond to this part:

    Others actually started Tesla, he came along and took over the company as part of getting it to actually develop and release an EV. Which was basically an EV built into a purchased and licensed car frame designed to be a gasoline car. At some point he forced out the actual founders of the company, much like he'd been forced out of his first company.

    Since we're covering history, the actual history is:

    Tesla's history traces back to GM's Sunraycer project, which ultimately became the ill-fated EV-1. GM dominated in EV technology at the time, but two engineers from that team - Gage and Cocconi - disappointed by GM's lack of interest in the programme - spun off their own startup, AC Propulsion. With little fanfare, ACP continued making great strides in EV technology, including the revolutionary AC-150 powertrain, the lead-acid tzero mini-sportscar, and the "Long Ranger" self-steering range-extending genset trailer.

    During this timeperiod, both Eberhard and Musk had had connections to electric vehicles - Eberhard had built a primitive one in college, while Musk had done research in college on ultracapacitors for EVs - but then off to work on other things, each becoming independently wealthy. Musk, of course, famously cofounded Zip2, then funneled the profits thereof into X.com, which merged with Confinity to form Paypal, the sale of which netted Musk 8 figures. But Eberhard too had seen great success with his work on Novumedia, which created the world's first E-book reader, the Rocket Reader, and sold for $187B.

    By coincidence, a former employee of Eberhard's was Cocconi's neighbor, and this led to the always cash-strapped ACP convincing Eberhard to fund the conversion of their tzero to li-ion. Gage and Cocconi then did so (Eberhard regularly butting in and offering "helpful ideas", which the two found to be a distraction), and the converted tzero was a huge success, winning competition after competition and drawing attention to ACP. Among them is a young Stanford engineering student, J.B. Straubel, who starts using ACP technology in his "Long Range EV" collaborative student project, which sought out to make something rather like a stripped-down Tesla Roadster.

    Eberhard then tries to convince ACP to commercialize their technology in a sports car body, but they refuse. They get this idea in their head of making a conversion electric Scion, which Eberhard things is a daft idea. Eberhard decides to go off and do his own thing, and establishes a shell company called Tesla Motors and starts talking to Lotus.

    During this time period, Musk is introduced to Straubel by a former VP of Compaq (who had bought Zip2 from him), knowing of Musk's interest in EVs. Musk is fascinated to hear what's going on at ACP and decides he wants in; he donates to Straubel's project and then gets in touch with ACP. Musk wants to put ACP tech into a sports car - he considers a Noble chassis - but ACP keeps trying to sell him on the Scion idea, which Musk, too, thinks is daft (nobody's going to pay upper-five-figures for a Scion). ACP gives up and tells him, hey, two other teams looking to do what you want to do, and asks if he wants them to put him in touch. One of these is Eberhard's.

    Musk meets with Eberhard's team. At this point, Tesla is still a shell company, with no tech of its own, and not even the rights to its own name - but it does have a business plan and is in active negotiations with Lotus. Musk decides to join forces. There's no dispute over management - Eberhard adamantly wants to run it and Musk adamantly doesn't want to run it (being busy with SpaceX). In the Series A round - despite Eberhard being independently wealthy - Musk puts in almost all of the money. The company buys up rights to its name (with difficulty), and uses various resources from SpaceX to get started. What the company still lacks is any actual engineers, so they bring in Straubel, basically transforming his Long Range EV work into the basi

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    • Re:

      ED: That should of course be $187M, not $187B.

  • Re:

    So you're saying that his "huge unchecked privilege" is being able to get education, and being able to flee to a western country to work as a farmhand there? Maybe you yourself should check your privilege then, because I bet you yourself also had access to education, just live in a western country without having to fight tooth and nail to get there, and I bet you never had to work as a farmhand.
    
    Privilege my ass. Where's YOUR space launch company then?

    • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @11:00AM (#63369693) Homepage

      Nice job omitting half the post.

      * Grew up with a father worth several million dollars (*not* adjusted for inflation), in a country with 1/3rd the mean income and a much lower cost of living than the US
      * Got unlimited access to books, computers, etc
      * Was taught by an engineer father
      * Was sent to one of the best prep schools in South Africa.
      * Was able to flee the country, to a place with vastly more ability to succeed in establishing a tech startup
      * Was able to get a college education from a respectable university (two, actually)

      None of this is to say that his life was given to him. That's not how privilege works. Privilege is like the difficulty setting on a video game. You can play a game on easy and still lose because you suck at it. You can play on hard and still win because you're really good. But the difficulty setting will heavily determine the percentage who manage to succeed, and make it far harder for a person of equivalent skill who has to play on a harder difficulty setting to get as far in the game as their peer who played on an easier setting.

      Tons of people on Earth played on Musk's difficulty setting and didn't come close to getting as far in the game as he has. But the vast majority of the world's players played on a much, much harder difficulty setting, and basically never had a chance by comparison.

      Musk didn't grow up a billionaire and just buy all his companies, and pretending so is wrong. But it's also wrong to pretend that growing up with an engineer father who is worth a couple million dollars while you grow up and funds and promotes your tech education has no impact on your odds of success, nor that having a mother whose citizenship lets you move from country to country seeking your best opportunities, family members to help get you rooted overseas, and a mother who can help put you through college. These were all part of his difficulty setting, and compared to the vast majority of the world's population, that's a pretty low difficulty setting.