Posted on 01/22/2020 6:49:18 AM PST by Moonman62
MUSK MAN BAD!
Musk is a showman. So is Trump.
Musk also has other exceptional traits that makes him successful, as does Trump.
The next Starlink launch is set for Friday.
[ Did taxpayers subsidize Edison? ]
I wouldn’t be surprised if he did have some government help for passed as government help back in the day.
Geniuses....
Trump: Stable Genius.
Musk: Unstable Genius.
Musk has invented nothing.
I disagree with the president on this one. Edison did most everything on his own, or private money. Musk has done most everything on government (yours and my) money.
This is actually a rather clever insult. Edison is largely see now as a shameless self promoter that clung to a flawed technology out of hubris and waged PR war to and destroy his opposition
Thanks Moonman62. I've heard the Swiss are cheesed over his statement. /rimshot
Whatever you think of his politics and/or methods, the man is a visionary - watching those rockets land should be enough to convince folks that he has a lot of brainpower.
No question, he’s eccentric but when NASA was saying it would take a generation or more to get back to the moon and lost the ability to launch anything manned Musk said “Hold my beer, I’ll do it” and created his own rocket ship that works. That’s no dummy there.
I think Absinthe was more the rage back then...maybe laced with a bit of opium just for “giggles”.
Lots of folks have smoked dope and still done great things...Edison was a much bigger thief than Musk...which says a bit...
Edison gained early fame for some very clever inventions but once he was established he employed an army of researchers to do tedious experiments on projects until something worked. Trial and error and not done by the sweat of his own brow. Then he patented what worked.
So while he did actually invent some things, a lot of the intellectual property credited to him personally was really the work of a dedicated research team he was paying for.
““You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that came up with originally the light bulb and the wheel and all of these things. “
Protect the people that came up with the wheel? :-)
I have been to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory at Hawthorne several times. Thirty years ago I was a frequent visitor (being a manufacuring contrator/consultant) at all the big aerospace manufacturers at the time, from Aerojet to TRW. So I have some grounds for comparison.
What Musk has done is less Thomas Edison than Henry Ford. He figured out how to make his process cheap and reliable. Its not by high tech that SpaceX has done this, but by good old engineering, industrial methods, process design, standardization, cost controls, and mass production.
In the old days, and among his current competitors, too much was and still is one-off, custom, its always some sort of prototype. Musk has done real things, great things.
He electrocuted an elephant...
Possibly, I have no idea.
Musk is a genius, but also a genius at tapping into huge amounts of govt(taxpayer) money.
Yeah we should of given those energy subsidies to Dem insiders and Chinese industry instead. And obviously paying a fixed price for actual space launches are way better at siphoning cash out of NASA than for example spending 10x as much on endless "studies" to prop up the space-industrial complex (and diversity goals) while never launching a single f***ing payload on a US sourced rocket.
I see this gripe time and time again. Musk worked the system just like all the competition but never let that become a primary goal. It was necessary but ancillary to getting where they are now. Not everything was successful either.
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