In the last week Elon Musk announced that he had bought about 10 percent of Twitter. And it looked like he was going to join the board of directors. Until he wasn't. Says CNBC:
Billionaire Elon Musk’s reversal of his decision to join Twitter’s board opens the door to a hostile takeover and could lead to additional volatility in the stock, according to analysts.
God, I love that guy. And all the Twitter employees report being "super stressed" about the prospect of Elon Musk owning a good chunk of Twitter. But why should this be? Surely, the Twitterati are providing us the best in social media "healthy conversations" that educated lefty twerps can deliver.
By the way, I just added the following maxim to my catalog of Maxims.
Women: "Shelter in place." Men: "March toward the sound of the guns."
I wonder what that means, cupcake.
Did you see Elon Musk introducing his Starship launch facility "Starbase" in Boca Chica, Texas back in February? The show begins at about 35:00. He begins with the question "why are we doing this... why build this giant reusable rocket?"
His answer is basically, well, you can't be too careful. So it's best to become interplanetary. And really, there comes a point where Jackie Gleason's command "to the Moon, Alice" becomes insufficient. Let's "go to Mars," just to be safe.
Sorry, Elon, we know the real reason. It's the same reason that Edmund Hillary gave for climbing Mt. Everest: "because it's there."
But I had two big takeaways from Musk's show.
First, that he has made a remarkable improvement in the basic Raptor rocket engine from Raptor 1 to Raptor 2. Raptor 2 is smaller but more powerful, with an improvement from 185 to 230 tons thrust.
Second, that he figures that he can make reusable rocket travel cheaper than ordinary long-distance jet travel. Hey, If you can travel from the US to Hong Kong by Starship in one hour, you can have a lot more use of your spacecraft than your average long-distance jet plane. And Musk plans a one hour turnaround for booster and Starship between flights. Musk makes the point that reusability is basic. Hey, he comments: Imagine if your average long-distance $230 million jet plane was not reusable.
Yep. Imagine if Musk could bring off the two-fer of reusable space hardware and an end to censorship on Twitter. Talk about Hope and Change!
Elon is like Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, Henry Ford etc. all in one. It's exciting to be watching history as it unfolds. He may well be the most consequential human for hundreds of years. It will be interesting to see which achievement has the most lasting and far reaching impact. It might be the generation of problem solvers (engineers) he has trained up. "the best process is no process". "the best part is no part". "be less wrong" etc. I'm not sure one can overstate how powerful his culture of innovation is.
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