What Billionaire Tech CEOs Get Wrong About The Future, with Adam Becker

[BlueAbyssal]

And yet you need the experts to build the technology - it is distinguishable from magic after all.

Langley was the expert, supposedly, and was beaten to first flight by the Wright Brothers. Elon Musk was laughed at by virtually everyone in the space industry, and look where we are today. Credentials are not enough. The people I listed above in multiple fields were laughed at by the experts. Recent history in general should amply demonstrate that there are a good many people who have all the credentials you could want, but not a scrap of wisdom or experience to demonstrate their credentials are an accurate signal of expertise.

Getting a higher degree is hard work and being a professional means maintaining standards under the scrutiny of your peers. I'll place more trust in someone who has credentials than someone who's permanently addled by ketamine and trying to attract investment to shore up the immense overvaluation of Tesla. The companies that Musk has bought or established employ some fine engineers indeed, but his claims about terraforming Mars are frankly idiotic and it's a demonstrated fact that time and again he has been wildly inaccurate about his timetables.

As someone with a higher degree working as an engineer, there are plenty of engineers who aren't worth their supposed education. I'll place more trust in someone who has consistently proven that he and his employees can build real hardware over all the experts who have gold-plated credentials but a dearth of practical experience. As for Musk's timetables, I don't really care. I would much rather have someone who pushes hard for optimistic timetables and gets some of the way over someone who gives no timetable at all, spends dramatically more, and performs worse-see the SLS program.

When things like this happen:

It's worthwhile to consult expertise, not PR.

Given your position as displayed here, you appear to prefer 'experts' with good PR to expertise.

 

[Brett Davidson]

They laughed at the Wright Brothers and they laughed at Juicero. What's Juicero? Look it up. For every SpaceX there are a hundred Juiceros. It is absurd to infer a principle by cherry-picking successes and ignoring the far greater number of failures. Thus, 'prefering' amateurs as a class over experts as a class based on that is ridiculous.

In the case of Juicero, some fools were separated from their money and had to squeeze juice the old-fashioned way. In space, if an amateur screws up, people die.

The comparison with SLS is both a false dichotomy and a straw man. You know perfectly well that the two projects exist in widely different political and economic contexts. For one, congressional oversight/meddling means failure would be catastrophic for the programme. If NASA were blowing up SLSs as often as SpaceX, they wouldn't because the programme would be cancelled, so they take the minimum-risk and high-cost path. That's aside the fact that the SLS is made of solid pork and was never meant to be a commercial venture.

Funnily enough, I actually support SpaceX's approach of iteration and reiteration with improvement.

However, to return to the straw man argument, SpaceX's engineers are a pool of credentialed experts, so what exactly is the point?

Musk is not an engineer and he does not design rockets or robots himself. In past years, he was a lucky investor (with the backstop of his father's emerald mine) and a good motivator. Recent poor judgement, the Doge fiasco, bizarre attention-seeking (what did you say about me preferring people using PR?), some very dodgy financial dealings, Twitter's collapse in membership and revenue, Tesla's failure to bring genuinely new product to market for a decade, signs of heavy drug use, and some apparent fraud with Optimus all suggest that continued trust in the man is not warranted. A little less hero-worship of oligarchs - and a little less ad hominem attacks on their critics - would produce a more informative debate.

 

[Brett Davidson]

...

This will be Elon Musk legacy

I certainly hope so. My version of your list just substitutes 'will' with 'might' and adds stuff about putting too many eggs in one basket.

 

[CaseyKnight]

As long as there is energy & thermodynamic imbalance, the entropy could be locally decreased (at the cost of general increase, of course).

Even if you could decrease local entropy to zero, that would also mean there would be no progression of time. Since chemical reactions such as those involved in nerve signalling and muscle contractions (brain and heart), would effectively also not be occurring.

While you would be "alive" as in "not dead", you would be effectively not experiencing anything since that woudl depend on nerve signalling. You can definitely extend life quite a bit, but you cannot extend it indefinitely.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Musk is not an engineer and he does not design rockets or robots himself. In past years, he was a lucky investor (with the backstop of his father's emerald mine) and a good motivator.

This is important. Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller built SpaceX, Elon was just the bag. It's Charles Sorensen and Henry Ford all over again. The experts always win. Sometimes, the amateur investors manage to put the experts in the right place at the right time, and these experts become forgotten, because investors have always been politically and socially advantaged. This is symbiotic in nature but it's important to be able to untangle mythology from history.

Part of the issue with current economic and technological development is that the most powerful people believe their own mythologies.

 

[Brett Davidson]

What would Archimedes do with a laptop? Nothing, once the battery went flat. (Except maybe block the sword stroke of a Roman soldier.)

Who remembers this series?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
Establishing an off-world 'lifeboat civilisation' will be little less complex than creating our own civilisation based on vast supporting networks of skills and capital - all actually or potentially independent of Earth. This is not the same as extending earthly civilisation into space, which is our current practice.

Admittedly, this is an AI or an Artificial Ouroboros, but it harvests a range of discussion.

There's no single magic number, but sustaining a
current-level high-tech society needs tens of millions to hundreds of millions (like 20-100M+ for self-sufficiency in engineering/production), while a basic viable human population for genetic survival needs only a few hundred to a few thousand, but maintaining technology from that point requires massive growth and interventions (like 1000-10,000 for healthy genetic diversity), with advanced tech like semiconductor manufacturing needing huge global populations.
For Current-Level Tech (Self-Sufficient):

• 20 Million+: Some argue a nation of 20 million (like Sweden/Taiwan) can support high tech with global trade, but this relies on international supply chains.
• 100 Million+: A planetary civilization might need at least 100 million to maintain current tech levels, given the number of specialized workers needed.
• 500 Million+: A truly self-sufficient, modern civilization with all its complex industries (like advanced chips) might need half a billion or more for diverse expertise and resource extraction, suggests Sufficient Velocity forum users.

This is surprisingly pessimistic even for me - I'd seen some estimates as low as a million. Still, a million is a bigly number.

How many rockets, all burning money, does it take to lift just a million? Elon promises 100 per Starship, but analysis taking into account mass for life support, consumables, etc. - and tolerance for recirculated farts - takes that down to 10 for a trip to Mars.

I think that for generations, a viable, independent lifeboat civilisation will be a lake that has to be forced through a very, very long drinking straw. Theoretically 'possible' but practically impossible before generations of growth have occurred.

 

[BlueAbyssal]

They laughed at the Wright Brothers and they laughed at Juicero. What's Juicero? Look it up. For every SpaceX there are a hundred Juiceros. It is absurd to infer a principle by cherry-picking successes and ignoring the far greater number of failures. Thus, 'prefering' amateurs as a class over experts as a class based on that is ridiculous.

I said nothing about amateurs, and a lot about practical experience. Experts as a class, especially when their title comes from credentials rather than experience, is what gives us outcomes like Juicero.

In the case of Juicero, some fools were separated from their money and had to squeeze juice the old-fashioned way. In space, if an amateur screws up, people die.

To again descend into sarcasm, it’s a good thing nobody is arguing in favor of amateurs. If you want to complain about genuine amateurs, look at Arca Space.

The comparison with SLS is both a false dichotomy and a straw man. You know perfectly well that the two projects exist in widely different political and economic contexts. For one, congressional oversight/meddling means failure would be catastrophic for the programme. If NASA were blowing up SLSs as often as SpaceX, they wouldn't because the programme would be cancelled, so they take the minimum-risk and high-cost path. That's aside the fact that the SLS is made of solid pork and was never meant to be a commercial venture.

It’s neither. The SLS is a rocket designed and built by ‘experts’ who I have been repeatedly told are nonpareil in their field. If you’re uncomfortable with the comparison, that isn’t my issue. Charles Bolden is infamous for this: ‘ "Let's be very honest again," Bolden said in a 2014 interview. "We don't have a commercially available heavy lift vehicle. Falcon 9 Heavy may someday come about. It's on the drawing board right now. SLS is real. You've seen it down at Michoud. We're building the core stage. We have all the engines done, ready to be put on the test stand at Stennis... I don't see any hardware for a Falcon 9 Heavy, except that he's going to take three Falcon 9s and put them together and that becomes the Heavy. It's not that easy in rocketry." ‘

Look where we are now.

Funnily enough, I actually support SpaceX's approach of iteration and reiteration with improvement.

However, to return to the straw man argument, SpaceX's engineers are a pool of credentialed experts, so what exactly is the point?

SpaceX doesn’t hire people based on credentials so much as they hire based on experience. This is the point I’m trying to hammer home to you-experience outweighs credentials, and not by a little, but a lot. Credentialists are who claim we can predict all problems in advance, that we can use PRAs to prove vehicle reliability, that simulations can suffice when we can’t afford real-world testing. Forgive my mistrust of credentials over experience.

Musk is not an engineer and he does not design rockets or robots himself. In past years, he was a lucky investor (with the backstop of his father's emerald mine) and a good motivator. Recent poor judgement, the Doge fiasco, bizarre attention-seeking (what did you say about me preferring people using PR?), some very dodgy financial dealings, Twitter's collapse in membership and revenue, Tesla's failure to bring genuinely new product to market for a decade, signs of heavy drug use, and some apparent fraud with Optimus all suggest that continued trust in the man is not warranted. A little less hero-worship of oligarchs - and a little less ad hominem attacks on their critics - would produce a more informative debate.

You know, it’s always people who don’t know Musk personally who say he isn’t an engineer. The people who know him best, such as Tom Mueller, say otherwise. Why should I listen to you over Mueller? DOGE has been pretty good, not going far enough though; X’s subscriber base has been booming, and their profits are going up; as for new products, what’s Cybertruck? The Semi is being tested out by clients, they’re pouring a lot of time and energy into FSD, they’re developing Robotaxi and gradually expanding it; it’s clear your information sources are heavily biased against Musk based on your language, and not particularly well-balanced or informed. Fewer assumptions about things like ‘hero worship’ and more emphasis on experience over credentials would produce a dramatically more informative debate.

 

[BlueAbyssal]

This is important. Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller built SpaceX, Elon was just the bag. It's Charles Sorensen and Henry Ford all over again

The people closest to him at SpaceX say otherwise. Shotwell and Mueller were/are both integral to SpaceX’s success, but saying Musk just provided money is preposterous.

 

[Brett Davidson]

To again descend into sarcasm

Why do you depend on this so often if you decry arguments that you characterise as emotional and give credence to unfulfilled promises?

Why should I listen to you over Mueller?

Because he might find himself looking for a new job if he said otherwise?

Credentialism...

A straw man argument. The correct word would be professionalism, which means accreditation and membership of a professional body that ensures standards and manages liability. Professionalism requires degrees but is not just a claim to a shiny badge or nebulous 'experience', it means that one has demonstrably met the industry standard and is regularly tested by an external body to maintain that one continues to meet that standard. I would not trust an electrician, let alone a doctor, who is not licensed, no matter how much 'experience' they claim.

Twitter booming? Cybertruck? Probably not the best examples... OK, in the case of Cybertruck, I should have said 'a safe and reliable product successfully brought to market.'

 

[BlueAbyssal]

You accuse me of strawmanning you, yet you do it to me repeatedly.

Mueller is both wealthy and the head of his own company, so the threat of looking for a new job is meaningless.

EDIT: you keep editing your post instead of responding to mine. This comes off as dishonest. Given your general attitude, I see no reason to continue conversing with you, as you appear unable to get past your biases and assumptions. No doubt you'll play whataboutism and accuse me of doing the same. Farewell.

 

[shin_getter]

We explore the predictions made by billionaires and futurists who claim they’ll build space empires, conquer death, and upload human consciousness.

Marketing is marketing. Still, marketing works.

Your flowery language and attempts to produce an emotional response simply do not address the actual issues and problems, and the "techno-optimism" without actual technology solutions, let alone any actual "plan" is simply vainglorious boasting.

From a business perspective, problems often is a question of budget. Spend the money and engineers will figure it out. Make the pitch and the money will come in and the engineers get paid.

If it doesn't work, well we've tried. In any case the pitch comes first.

Eh but there literally is no "economic" return to drive colonization of space. At all.
You say there were "non-economic" drivers for colonization which were so far and few that they really are not a valid argument. I'll ask for some examples please.

There's literally nothing in space worth going out there to get at any current or projected prices for access...

Now me, I very much want space exploration/exploitation/colonization to happen. But there's no chance any time soon of the latter two and we need way more of the first to even be able to characterize the other two before we can even really begin.

If you want to make it happen, just spend the money and poll other people that want to make it happen. People with more money than they need to live can spend money on things they don't need, from candy bars and hookers to yachts. For multi-billionaires, spaceships is just, like, a fast car for you or me.

In some sense, doing things because it has a reliable return is lame poor people thinking. If you have enough money, do things because you want to.

Why do it? Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

(Also nothing displays superiority than extremely wasteful risk taking... the peacock's tail in human form)

Musk is not an engineer and he does not design rockets or robots himself. In past years, he was a lucky investor and a good motivator.

Sometimes, the amateur investors manage to put the experts in the right place at the right time, and these experts become forgotten, because investors have always been politically and socially advantaged. This is symbiotic in nature but it's important to be able to untangle mythology from history.

Engineers is not the rate limiting character in the story, schools produce them in the millions not unlike any assembly line as physics don't change, just need to download it into brains. Any knowledge that have accreditation is well understood to nearly reduce to sheer effort. (and possibly reduce to GPU time if trillions in investment is saying something)

Company builders have to navigate the unique socio-economical-political landscape, and innovation have to happen on undefined domains to make something new. It takes weird and unique people to build a new, specific kind of company. MBAs are found to be generally inferior to the "founders" with their own obsessions that fit the zeitgeist.

Engineering, as a field, is likely more important for tech companies, but as far as individuals go, the leaders are the unique pieces of the puzzle.

---
The undertones of a lot of this discussion seems to be about the social status of so called billionaire tech ecos but never really explicitly discussed. For one thing, are we suppose to think of engineers as high status, ever? (when you just need to ask a women about it~)

 

[Volkodav]

Techno-pessemists are desperatedly trying to regain their former status of wise prophets - after peoples finally realized that they were just a bunch of fools, pretending to be wise by scaring peoples with dark omens.

True.

They believe their own propaganda that they are rich because they are smarter and work harder than anyone else. They like to leave out the bit about wealthy parents, grandparents and often great grandparents who often made their money from dubious, if not outright criminal, endeavours.

 

[Volkodav]

You need a mix of expertise. When everyone comes from the same bakery, using the same cookie cutter, they will usually be very similar in their thought processes and experience base. They will tend to come up with the same types of ideas and miss the same things.

They will create systems that suit people like themselves and exclude those who do not conform.

It's not about who or what is better, it's about diversity of thought, innovation and about recognising and advancing good ideas.

I work for an organisation that has wet dreams about the value of non-technical project managers, i.e. the ones who come up through admin and clerical, learn on the job and get an MBA. It's all about budget, earned value and critical path. While it's great to have some like that in the team, it is almost all of them, and they ignore engineers, worse than that, both they and the engineers ignore the techos and specialist professions.

They all look down their swimlanes, no bottom-up thinking, no strategic planning, no concept of what is happening outside their scope. Transverse specialities and requirements are beyond their comprehension. Cookie-cutter PMs and Engineers ruling the roost and missing everything outside of their experience. Even worse, there's another layer, age, if someone is deemed to young or too old, they are ignored. I've watched one role be filled four times in less than three years by people the PMs and engineering managers like, passing over the competent people doing the work. Three have failed and left, the fourth, another nice guy, has no experience in the field, and the experienced guy they have passed over twice, who is training him, is looking to leave.

My team has very smart people who have master's degrees, and some have PhDs, but they are almost always doubted and ignored because they aren't PM's or engineers. My greatest challenge has been learning enough of their specialty so I can, with the help of external experts, sell their value to the powers that be.

There's the problem, if I was a billionaire tech bro, I wouldn't need to jump through those hoops, I would just be able to say, "do what I tell you, or you can find somewhere else to work". I'm not, so there is either a lag of a couple of years before someone else who carries some weight suggests what my team has, or the project reaches the point that blind Freddy can see it needed to happen.

It's not about who is smartest or the most qualified, it's whether the organisation has diversity of thought, and good ideas can actually be implemented.

 

[Archibald]

I knew this would drive the worst SpaceX fanboys crazy. Well... it surely did. Here is a typical answer by a passive-agressive, obnoxious ignoramus.
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=64003.msg2743250#msg2743250
No respect, just barking at whoever disagree with your POV - and precious Elon POV, obviously.
Thespacecow is not so much an attack dog than an attack chihuahua LMAO.

 

[BlueAbyssal]

Tendentious partisanship that heavily relies on strawmen shouldn’t be respected, but instead excoriated.

 

[RanulfC]

Let's face it Elon Musk action let enter him into history books

Likely yes, but not in a good way.

TESLA revolutionised Electric Car market and soon Robots with AI.

Musk invested in Tesla and then kicked the founders out of it and proceeded to use their business plan which was the only reason for Teslas initial growth and market share. Since hitting the end of that plan, (the model Y) Musk has floundered with constant failures to deliver on new vehicles and allowed the competition to bypass his market share. He THEN pivoted to trying to make robots and is about a decade or two behind the companies actually working on real robots. He then pivoted to AI which is also a decade or more behind companies actually working on AI.

SpaceX revolutionised Spaceflight with Falcon 9 and Starship.

The Falcon had the desired effect for which NASA was paying to accomplish which was to break the mistake that the DoD created with the ULA monopoly but it didn't actually "revolutionize" spaceflight and (as I noted over on althistory.com) business mistake such as drafting well over half the current Falcon 9 launch market to Starlink payloads which are not profitable for SpaceX and competition coming on line are going to take a lot of the market share of SpaceX away. This mostly due to the Starship debacle, which in itself is not going to be commercially viable since it is not being designed or built to do anything but carry Starlink V3 satellites. If they can get it to work at all.
(Again a major mistake by Musk)

Starlink provide Internet worldwide.

Which failed to deliver for the government contracts that funded it and are still not likely profitable and are actually losing customers due to not delivering on Musk's hype of the system.

The Boring Company provide fast and low cost tunnelling.

Ya, no. Not at all as the one tunnel they have actually dug was both more expensive and took much longer to complete than using a standard boring machine would have. The "company" is essentially shut down as they have no work or possibility of work.

Neurolink will one day help disable people.

Not before any of the companies and research groups doing actual work in this area. Worse, just like SpaceX Musk has driven off the very experts that would have made anything workable or usable.

Musk doesn't made this for charity, he made this for own Profit (and his footprint in History)

Mostly because any "charitable" effort Musk has ever made was neither completed nor actually workable and he put profit over actual "help" at every step of the way. Being known as a serial failure and grifter is likely going to be the "footprint" he leaves behind.

But also to shake up the World, who became after Apollo "lazy" for progress and exploration.

Eh no, he's not done a single thing to "shakeup" the post Apollo world. Zubrin has done more than Musk and he at least was able to articulate and actually make viable (somewhat) plans. Musk speaks a lot but says very little and has never had an actual "plan" to go anywhere or do anything. (Got some really good CGI artists, though he's also using "fan" made stuff because again he has no real "plan")

His plan for Mars colonisation will give new impulses and Dreams.

No he doesn't have a "plan", as noted he's got pretty pictures, unrealistic and unworkable vague claims and generally is no longer even trying to push the idea of going to Mars. He certainly isn't going so why should he bother. He is, after all the only one who matters.

Even if this failed, it will left Orbital infrastructure and industry on Lunar surface

"The Moon is a distaction, a side note and of no use"
Musk often said that, and occasionally still does. He's essentially dropped the facade of working on the HLS contract, Starship isn't even being worked on as anything but a Starlink V3 launcher and in fact the HLS contract DID have a time limit which SpaceX can no longer meet. There is no "orbital infrastructure" as Musk specifically has avoided putting that anywhere, ever.

Jeff Bezos follow with Blue Origin similar plans, but focus on O'Niel Cylinder colony

And orbital and lunar infrastructure which is required by such an effort. Bezo's rockets work where as Musk's don't.
(Keep in mind that Falcon 9 and Dragon were built to NASA specifications for NASA use and Musk has not seen fit to expand beyond that)

and other will follow in China, India and every Nation get access to heavy Launcher service.

Not from Musk they won't. And as foreign launch providers eat away at SpaceX's market share, things are just going to get worse for SpaceX.

This will be Elon Musk legacy

No it won't, Musk's "legacy" will likely be one of overreach, overhype and failures to deliver on promises or expectations. And that's sad because it will end up overshadowing the one thing he actually got right.

Randy

 

[RanulfC]

The people closest to him at SpaceX say otherwise. Shotwell and Mueller were/are both integral to SpaceX’s success, but saying Musk just provided money is preposterous.

He doesn't. He deliberately sets up his companies so that they can't run without his direct input. Not design, engineering or anything actually useful mind you, but simply as an "idea man" (usually wrong) and director.

If you actually know anything about him you should know he was pretty happy that none of his companies will continue once he's gone.

Randy

 

[RanulfC]

Mueller is both wealthy and the head of his own company, so the threat of looking for a new job is meaningless.

Uh he said that WHILE at SpaceX, he no longer works at SpaceX and no longer talks Musk up either. He literally got "let go" by Musk.

Shotwell still works for SpaceX and still fawns over Musk and is dependent on him.

Randy

 

[galgot]

It would be hilarious if it were the billionaires themselves who cut off access to space, and therefore to Mars.

View: https://youtu.be/b66ZZ05wKC0?si=eqXjZYCwktaSrb2b

here is link to the paper : https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09643

 

[publiusr]

A depot rupture is what kicks the whole thing off--that's my guess. That or a solar storm.
Mike Griffin was right to not trust depots.

A long time ago, there was a sci-fi event called Earth*Voyager:

Jump to 23:14 to see what I would call "the Elon Belt"