ObserverNeutral's comments

> so you'll have to explain where you got the money from anyways

Explain to whom?

> BlueOrigin has the money to do what SpaceX does

No amount of money can give BlueOrigin the freedom which SpaceX has to blow up rockets and telecast failure globally every week like it has happened for the last 5 years.

The CEO of Amazon just can't be associated with such public failures.

For Musk Tesla and SpaceX were parallel efforts, they were never such thing for Bezos, in 2015 when he got serious about Blue Origin , Amazon was already a bigger company than Tesla is now and will ever be.

He simply didn't have that freedom.

> Based on all objective measures they are not.

Q: "How can you become a millionaire mr. Branson?"

A: "Be a billionaire and start and aerospace comapany"

These are not software margins we are talking about, to channel my inner Ricky Bobby: If you ain't software, you are last.

> And the believe that Gates has a veto at the WHO and the UN is nonsense.

Gates can pick up the phone and occupy a week long of Biden time if he wants, same goes for Xi Jin Ping, the WHO director and the climate workgroups at the UN.

This is what happens when you do what others would never do: donate money to philantropic efforts way beyond the marginal PR utility returns of such donations. You get politicians lining up because they know they'd be able to take credit and do vitcory laps after a job well done which Gates would never claim ownership of, that is beyond the occasional Bloomberg conference which only policy nerds attend.

Stark difference with Musk who doesn't do philantropy and frankly scans for causes to inject himself in the loudest possible manner such as the Thai soccer team trapped in the caves.

Musk should thank that Gates is magnanimous enough not bring up the mess which Tesla is when he talks with Biden and John Kerry about climate policy. And Musk attacked him first, because he committed the sin of buying a Porsche so that he'd be able to lap Laguna Seca without the car overheating and exploding such as Teslas.

SpaceX doesn't sell to the public, it doesn't have normie consumers who make purchasing decisions based on brand, at least not as yet.

That can change when they start selling their internet services, but again up to now all the promotional energies to build a brand have not been monetized.

The Free Advertisement and brand rising that you mentioned is only valuable if you monetize upon it. As of NOW the only way they have to monetize is selling advertising space during launches and I suppose they get the ads on Youtube as well.

Whoever will solve it, then the person with the best social competence, speaking abilities and promotional power would get the merit.

And the best placed individual is the POTUS whoever he/she might be.

> That's a problem. The average person on the street has likely never even heard of Blue Origin, or know what they do, while they most likely have some idea of what SpaceX is and does. There is a tangible excitement about SpaceX.

Why is this a problem? There is only one reason in business why you'd want to grab the attention of the average person...and that is advertising .

Will SpaceX start advertising during launches? Maybe...up until then being known to the average person is not an advantage.

Some people claim going public would enable SpaceX to cash in on its fame by offloading loads of stock to the aforementioned normies...but that practice scares away smart/value money so again...until SpaceX starts advertising during launches the only person benefiting from the social media fanfare is Musk who gets to be invited on SNL to show how socially akward he is.

Then Trump would get the glory...regardless the glory of solving climate change and landing on Mars will go to the person who has the best ability to promote their role in such feat.

Musk looks tough on twitter, but he can't speak and his social incompetence shows a lot.

The POTUS (whoever he/she is) and the first person on Mars (whoever he/she is) would outframe him just like JFK and Neil Armstron outframed whoever was the guy running NASA at the time.

He'd be left with a very low margin business , more probably heavily in the red, like the Apollo program was.

Amazon simply can't afford rockets blowing up publicly like Tesla can.

This is all there is to it.

Bezos stepping down and distancing himself from Amazon should provide new lift (no pun intended) and much more risk taking to Blue Origin.

We should all remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. It's not like the frentic months of the software wars where Apple put together the iPhone and its app ecosystem in 48 months and others never caught it.

This is a terrible business (like everything Musk is involved in except Neuralink).

Bezos should learn from Google and understand that there is no shame in killing a project....but I suspect the ego wars against Musk are too big now.

Bezos should have known better. When Musk insults you, you just do what Bill Gates does: You smile, compliment him, stroke his ego a bit and then go back having de-facto veto power in institutions such as the WHO and UN, operating way above Musk head.

> I'm not paying for a device so you can log my every interaction within the world in 4k.

What if following the footsteps of search business model the device comes...hear me out...free of charge??? Whoooooaaaa

Google speakers aren't Android phones let's be real.

They'll never risk bugging billions of Android phones

Really hard to pull this off, people won't accept a camera which spies on them when they are using their phone

No...like the camera being disabled for real unless you give the consent to use it....all that under the penalty of losing the 2 trillion dollar company reputation if you are uncovered doing otherwise.

This thing would only work at 2% of its potential unless you also give users an excuse to use the front camera much more frequently and move the ads from search towards the aforementioned front camera environment.

They have a whole lot of social engineering to do which has to go along with the proper engineering.

I guess efficiency and customization junkies would love a GoogleDocs UI which is optimized for their gaze so you can be upfront with them

This has incredible potential to disrupt the ads business, marketplace business, as well as the software UI business.

In one word. It would completely disrupt the data mining business.

They only know when you click on something nowadays. With this tech it would completely change the data mining business and the info it can extract on the levels of engagements.

I predict there will be a system in place to prevent the cam being used at all times though.

Google can come up with something on Youtube streams where the streamer is using the front camera or maybe revamp GoogleTalk with ads, bottom line is giving the user a reason to use the front camera and then capture the gaze

Entrepreneurs aren't rockstars or popstars

Nobody loves/hates Sergey Brin, Lawrance Page, Jim Simons, John Overdeck, Clifford Assness, Andrew Beal etc...

If you worked in the promotional industry you'd know that rockstars/popstars have to be dragged kicking and screaming , away from drugs and parties, to do interviews and media appearences.

Entrepreneurs who want to be famous such as Musk and Trump...nobody is dragging them, they are the ones who want to do it.

As per the article, master promoters, because they know their business is not capable of making it on their own merits.

I remind you that Microsoft never ever took VC money, just organic growth and re-investing revenues. People who do it the proper way don't need the flashes, quite the contrary they are busy hiding their margins to avoid other people getting in the space.

Point being. Will all Musk bootlickers be around when Tesla "succeeds" but is a paltry 87 billion dollar automaker company and Musk goes way down in the Forbes list?

My guess is no. People want to talk about success and success is measured with marketcap and net worth. 99% of people who know Musk name have really no business knowing his name and care very little about electric vehicles.

My guess he also can't handle going back to 2014 levels of social relevancy and will try and run for governor or some other thing like that.

Musk is fundamentally an attention whore, he pumped the marketcap before the company was mature, it's not like Tesla marketcap grew spontaneusly.

> He's delivering astronauts to the Space Station via his "startup". This is not something someone "full of BS" achieves.

Great! What are the margins? Most likely terrible because you have to build real stuff.

You know who ISN'T full of bullshit? Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

They just STFU, present modest outlook to set the stage for the company to knock it out of the park Quarter after quarter.

I could care less about the rockets, the truth is in the boring numbers, not the showmanship

You are crazy if you think Tesla margins are different than other automakers.

They do the exact same thing, and building cars is the worst business there is.

Regardless...now is the moment when the rubber meets the road. Market cap cannot grow more than 1 trillion, Musk now has to start posting margins in line with such marketcap.

Absolutely, inflation you can hedge against, for climate change you need the whole world to play ball. It's something people say in the social setting to look cool and hip, but when the curtains are closed they buy the cheapest stuff no matter the source.

Also at the individual level the only good move is to secure that you'll not be affected by climate change. How? By becoming rich, which is a natural consequence of not losing out to inflation and also by profiting off the appreciation of BTC.

No way. The vast majority of people who invest in crypto do so because in the back of their mind they are afraid of inflation

That's the spring which compels them to invest: hatred towards the Fed policy of 2%, the public would really love a -2%.

The sentiment is so strong that they accept the consequences of the vastly inferior settlment mechanism which is BTC as well as all the headaches.

People don't have the same hatred and concern for companies which Eth aims to disrupt. People by and large love their user experience on Amazon, Google, Youtube, Robinhood etc. whereas Eth and DeFi is overtly complicated with 0 liquidity

The only bull case I can see for DeFi is that nerds with money and cryptopunk attitude would think that regular people would want to exchange JPMorgan and RobinHood for DeFi...in that case of course price will pump because a whole lot of people anticipate something, but it won't happen for real, just as an appreciation due to people betting and projecting that everybody is wired as them.

Mad respect to Bob Dylan, he's the best at what he does and this inteview proves it, because he touches the social and human aspect.

You need these capabilities to write great songs.

To me the reality is much simpler. A rock n roll song needs more time to be appreciated compared to other styles of music.

Modern society goes much faster than the 60s and 70s. Also competition with other forms of entertainment...music quality has remained essentially the same compared to the 60s...whereas the quality of video based story telling (TV, movies, live sports etc.) improved from distorted out of focus sporadic content to 8K whenever you want

How does this compare to another book on present day Decadence from Ross Douthat

I think at least some people in here are familiar with it, it's called:

"The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success"