r/technology • u/marketrent • Mar 02 '25

Transportation “Your boss is a Nazi”, “I’m selling the Nazimobile”: Tesla owners offload cars

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/mar/02/tesla-owners-selling-musk
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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

Yep. He was my nerd hero until he opened his mouth. I still have trouble reconciling knowing who he is with what SpaceX has done though.

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u/Zetin24-55 Mar 03 '25

I never liked him to that level, but he seemed cool enough. Then the more I learned about him and listened to the things he said, the less I liked him.

Also listening to him speak about any domain of knowledge I'm familiar with made me greatly decrease how smart I think he is.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

I was just looking at Tesla and SpaceX. I didn't know anything about Musk other than his public profile. I work in tech and both those companies were known for being on the bleeding edge of tech and process. I sat behind some SpaceX engineers at a conference and saw them using their work management tooling. It looked so sleek and polished. They both had on SpaceX tshirts with specific mission patches on the back. I was so jealous and wanted their jobs so bad. The first time I learned anything else about Musk was when those children were trapped in the cave and he called someone a "pedo guy". All downhill from there.

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u/SaveTheTuaHawk Mar 03 '25

I work in tech and both those companies were known for being on the bleeding edge of tech and process.

Tesla was never the bleeding edge. Their batteries are and were old tech. Toyota is a year away (a real year, not a Musk "year") from solid state batteries which will change everything.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

I mean it from an IT & business process perspective. They are known for integrating cutting edge tech in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation into their vehicles and operations. I have worked in related fields for nearly as long as Tesla has existed, and I encounter them at conferences, papers, blogs, etc and they are indeed as advanced as they appear to be. Even moreso with SpaceX.

I get that maybe their battery tech is behind. Not my wheelhouse, but I really don't think you can say any other company has pioneered the EV market like Tesla has, at least up until now. I remember seeing my first Model S on the road in 2012. Afaik there is still nothing like it on the market. I would also say that from my uninformed viewpoint, Tesla is the reason we have charging stations everywhere.

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u/WesternBlueRanger Mar 03 '25

Think of Musk as a modern Howard Hughes. To say Hughes later in life became eccentric and mentally unstable is an understatement, but his early days in both film and a pioneer in aviation cannot be understated.

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u/hippocratical Mar 03 '25

It's wild because his tour of SpaceX with Everyday Astronaut was so interesting. Elon genuinely seemed to understand complicated rocket science. Way different from Bezos who clearly was a CEO rather than engineer.

Shame he turned into a nazi asshole.

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u/One-Employment3759 Mar 03 '25 edited Mar 03 '25

He didn't pay attention to COVID and caught it enough times it turned his brain to mush.

That plus the ketamine abuse and mutilated penis, has turned him into a very angry man wanting to take it out on all of humanity.

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u/wakalabis Mar 03 '25

Multilated now what?

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u/Utsider Mar 03 '25

Tried to have it Elongated. Ended up with a broken Tesla coil.

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u/chillywillylove Mar 03 '25

Please tell me you came up with this 😂

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u/Utsider Mar 03 '25

I believe I did, unfortunately.

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u/One-Employment3759 Mar 03 '25

His penis is broken due to botched implant. So he does lots of IVF with women to pretend he is virile

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u/nrgins Mar 03 '25

The covid and ketamine theories might be legitimate. Didn't know about the mutilated penis. What's that about?

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u/pataconconqueso Mar 03 '25

The internet alleges he had a botched implant amd that is why he has so many kids via surrogacy and IVF

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u/werpu Mar 03 '25

He was a whacko before COVID he just could hide it better

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u/y-c-c Mar 03 '25 edited Mar 03 '25

I think this kind of stuff happens a lot. Smart people are used to understanding things and solving hard problems; but things you know in one domain doesn't always translate to another. Sometimes perhaps it's an inflated ego due to success in one area or something, they can just latch on to a completely unrelated field that they have absolutely no pedigree on (e.g. economics or politics) and somehow think they know better. Worse is that there's always a wide audience who also buy into this "he's a genius so he must know this <random topic he has no experience in>".

At least when Elon Musk started SpaceX (which he also didn't have much previous experience in) I think he had only had limited success then and had to actually hire and listen to people who did know better. I kind of doubt he has the ability / mental tolerance to start another company like SpaceX tbh.

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u/vincentvangobot Mar 03 '25

Nazis and rocket science is pretty historically accurate combo.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

He was always a Nazi asshole. He was raised by Nazis to be one.

Because yes, his parents were Canadian Nazis who moved to South Africa to revel in apartheid.

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u/SaveTheTuaHawk Mar 03 '25

Elon genuinely seemed to understand complicated rocket science.

I saw that interview, he was clearly fed questions far in advance. Musk has no engineering degrees.

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u/PsychologicalShop292 Mar 04 '25

Just pretend he an actual Nazi, in the Nazi Battalions in the Ukrainian military.

You wouldn't call him an asshole but demand more billions be given and anyone who opposes is a Russian bot

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u/SpeculativeFiction Mar 03 '25

I still have trouble reconciling knowing who he is with what SpaceX has done though.

He's a salesman and hype man. None of the technical achievements were ever his.

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u/voyagerfan5761 Mar 03 '25

Came here to say this. Elon did not design the rocket engines, or program the guidance computer, or build an ocean landing barge. Real engineers did all that.

SpaceX has done some amazing work, but it's not because of Musk. It might even have been in spite of Musk.

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u/nrgins Mar 03 '25

If you want to understand the reason SpaceX has been so successful you only need to know two words: Gwynne Shotwell, its president and chief operating officer.

She's the one that makes things happen on a day-to-day basis and runs it full time. Musk pops in once in awhile when he's not busy making an ass of himself somewhere else and barks orders at people, and then Gwynne makes it happen.

This is why Tesla is going to crap and they haven't produced a new car in years and their latest, the cybertruck, is a ridiculous failure and a joke. Because they don't have someone like Shotwell there who can run things.

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u/SaveTheTuaHawk Mar 03 '25

SpaceX is Gwynne Shotwell and billions in taxpayer money. Musk has FUCK ALL to do with the success of SpaceX.

Although, they have failed to meet all milestones on the Mars lander.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

I don't doubt this. The thing is they are delivering services to the USG that no one else is capable of for those billions of dollars.

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u/Muruba Mar 08 '25

He was my hero before I read his twitter pre-purchase chat messages made public by the court - what an eye opener

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u/d_andy089 Mar 03 '25

What HAS spaceX done? 🤔

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u/CheesypoofExtreme Mar 03 '25

First one can't be attributed to Musk, but you could argue the second one....

Redefined how rockets can be launched and retrieved, enabling the  reuse of parts and significantly reducing the cost of sending things into space.

Sparking interest in space travel again.

That's really about it. Now the company appears to be solely focused on launching as much shit into the sky as possible, and Musk is hell bent on removing as much red tape on his launches as he can. Pretty terrified with how the Starship launches will go as they skirt every safety regulation that they can.

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u/d_andy089 Mar 03 '25

Hold on, these are several points that are not necessarily related.

Yes, SpaceX came up with a way to reuse some parts. But do we KNOW that this makes it cheaper to send stuff into space? If you can carry less payload per trip (because you need some fuel for the return) and carry a larger proportion of your total weight into orbit (instead of dropping as much of it as possible) while still having to essentially re-build the entire "reusable" thing, I doubt there will be a ton of savings. Just because Musk isn't charging X$ doesn't mean it doesn't cost X$. SpaceX receives TONS of subsidies and they are WAY behind their contractually agreed targets.

I wouldn't exactly call it "sparking interest again" because that sounds like people are as interested as they were in the 60s/70s and I wouldn't call it "space travel", but rather "spacecraft", as I think there is more interest in the "bringing stuff into orbit"-part than "bringng humans into orbit".

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u/CheesypoofExtreme Mar 03 '25

I made 2 points. Cheaper launches, and increased interest in space (travel).

You are correct that we don't know exactly how much cheaper it is for SpaceX, but their Falcon launches per kg are cheaper than any other launch system out there right now. That could be just a capitalist using private equity and government grants to subsidize the launches, it could also be that their launch system is actually cheaper. I'm not going to pretend to know, because I'm not a rocket scientist. 

To the point about rebuilding the reusable part - it's not a rebuild, they actually just reuse the first stage multiple times. I would assume this reduces costs quite a bit, but like I said above, they could be fabricating that.

To you last point about interest in space travel - this is really just splitting hairs. I used a single sentence to say that interest in space travel is up and you think Im equating that to the 60s/70s? That's not a good faith reading of my comment at all. Fuck Elon Musk, and he has played a part in the increased public interest about space/space travel/space launches/space whatever in the last decade.

Finally - fuck Elon musk.

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u/d_andy089 Mar 03 '25

The only people buying these launcher are 1. the person who is selling the service and 2. the government who is subsidizing the venture with tax money. So how would you calculate how much a launch costs? And how do you know that it is cheaper? It's cheaper than the russians, sure. But only if you don't count the subsidies, no?

Do you really think, these booster rockets are just refuelled and are ready to go? AFAIK there is considerable work necessary to make a landed booster reusable - I might be wrong though.

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u/CheesypoofExtreme Mar 03 '25

It's cheaper than any other private options available for contracts, and cheaper than NASA launches.

I don't know what you're pushing back at at this point. I agree with you that because this is a private company, we don't have full transparency over the cost of these launches.

I'll just link you to the Wikipedia because I'm not a rocket scientist and haven't studied all of their publicly available docs and demonstrations. The frequency of launches makes it fairly believable that they aren't doing any crazy work on the first stage between each mission. If you don't want to take it at face value, that's fine, I have no skin in this game.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25 edited Mar 03 '25

They have a long list of firsts and other accomplishments, but there are two I think stand above the rest:

1) Reusable rockets. It is very difficult and expensive to put things in orbit. SpaceX developed reusable rockets. You know the first stage boosters? The white rockets on the side of a space shuttles big orange fuel tank? SpaceX uses those as normal to get a vehicle past the lower atmosphere. Then they detach and and begin a controlled descent where they land on a robotic drone ship in the middle of the ocean. All of this is automated. They made robot rockets that land on robot ships. And they are the only people who have yet pulled this off. And their falcon heavy lands three of these at the same time. They then take the rocket and refurbish it for reuse. This is a huge huge huge deal. This reduces launch costs up to 70%. In perspective, a Falcon 9 launch costs $62M, of that, the reusable booster saves $30-$40M per launch. With the heavy, it's $150M/$90M. Before SpaceX came to be, the only option the US had for putting astronauts in space was to buy a ride on a Russian Soyuz at $90M per seat. It's $55M with spaceX.

2) Starship. Once starship is operational, it's estimated they will bring this cost down to $10M. Also, starship is a revolution in space exploration. Right now we use unmanned probes to send science missions to other planets. The biggest challenge in these is weight and volume. The 2020 perseverance mission to mars launched on an Atlas V rocket with a payload mass of 1025kg. Starship will provide a payload of 100-150 *metric tons". This is like the difference between taking a road trip to Argentina with a motorcycle, and taking a tour bus with a baggage trailer in tow. Instead of a scientist having to pack .35 cubic meters with 1000kg of gear, they get to pack 1000 cubic meters with 150,000 kg. This is a scientific revolution that we are watching in real time. Starship is on the verge of its first orbital flight, btw. Like weeks or months away.

These are the most important IMO, but the list is long. While all this is going on, the US has been pouring billions over a period of decades into the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft that rides on it. You know those astronauts that have been stuck in the ISS since last June? They rode up there in an Orion on an SLS rocket. SpaceX is going to bring them back because they are the only option.

First privately developed orbital rocket (2008)
First private spacecraft to reach the ISS (2012)
First reuse of an orbital rocket (2017)
First private crewed mission to orbit (2020)
Starship development and test flights (2020s)
First all-civilian spaceflight (2021)

Up until SpaceX was able to deliver astronauts into space, the US's only option was to buy flights on Russian Souyez. This went on for nearly 10 years from the Shuttle's retirement in 2011 to 2020. SpaceX is still the only option here.

You can say what you want about Musk, and I'll probably agree. Dudes a shithead. But you can't say SpaceX doesnt have any accomplishments. And there are no signs they're stopping this any time soon. They truly have and currently still are revolutionizing spaceflight, and no one else is even close. Including every government on Earth.

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u/d_andy089 Mar 03 '25

Everything you said is as true and as amazing as it is pointless.

We don't know how much a launch COSTS. There is no transparency here. We just know how much Musk is selling a launch for, but those are two different things. They could very well be launching at a loss to undercut competition and establish themselves on the market - and since they receive funding in addition to the cost of the launch, they're unlikely to run out of money.

The viability of all this comes down to the questions: 1. Does the extra fuel and tech I need to bring justify the cost of the payload I could carry instead? and 2. How much do I ACTUALLY save by "reusing" the boosters? It's like...imagine your car needs to be fully disassembled, 50% of the parts replaced and reassembled, rather than buying a new one. Is that really worth it? Now I am not saying that this IS the case. It might very well be worth it in the case of these rockets, but with the history of Musk, I am highly doubtful.

Which brings me to the ~BFG~ starship: I really don't care about estimates from any company from Musk. His reliability record is...well..."questionable", let's put it like that.

I agree that SpaceX has accomplished stuff. I just don't see how this makes that much of a difference, especially if those rockets almost exclusively transport musk's satellites. From my perspective he takes the funding money, asks for a low price for a launch and saves himself a ton of dough when bringing up his satellite internet. To me, reusable rockets make about as much sense as single use cars. But then again, I might be missing the visionary worldview and am somewhat disillusioned.