(p. A14) “In the history of space flight,” Scott Pelley intones in a “60 Minutes” segment, “only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the Earth—the United States, Russia, China and Elon Musk.”
For the full film review, see:
(Note: the online version of the film review was updated April 7, 2022, and has the title “FILM REVIEW; ‘Return to Space’ Review: A Double Booster.”)
(p. B1) Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are cheering for a decentralized social network. Supporters of Donald J. Trump hope that the former president will return to tweeting. Some free speech advocates envision an end to censorship. And loyal fans of Elon Musk are betting that the billionaire will innovate.
. . .
. . ., Twitter has lodged itself into the fabric of society. The platform’s future under Mr. Musk has become a symbolic receptacle of people’s desires to push the world (p. B5) in the direction they want it to go.
Few tech executives elicit the kind of blind adoration that Mr. Musk does. His fans — known variously as Muskies, Muskites, Muskrats and Musketeers — defend even his most questionable moves. His deal to buy Twitter has had plenty of critics, including the company’s employees, some lawmakers and disinformation researchers. Many fear what he will do with the platform, over which he now has more or less absolute power as its owner. But on Musk-focused message boards, Discord servers, blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels, the deal is a triumph.
“Him buying Twitter is pretty awesome,” said Bryce Paul, the host of the podcast “Crypto 101.” Mr. Paul does not consider himself a Musk fanboy but believes the billionaire is a “genius” and a “modern-day da Vinci.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 28, 2022, and has the title “For Many, Elon Musk’s Buying Twitter Is a Moment of Celebration.” In the print version, the title “It’s All Musk’s and All Changing” covered two separate articles that each had their own subtitle.)
(p. A24) Have you ever gotten an email at midnight from the boss with an ominous subject line like “a fork in the road”? Granted, email etiquette today says we’re not supposed to get midnight emails from bosses at all. But Elon Musk is no ordinary boss, and it’s safe to assume he didn’t get the memo on empathetic leadership. So, true to form, as chief executive of Twitter, after laying off nearly half of his staff, bringing a sink to work and proclaiming he would be sleeping at the office “until the org is fixed,” Mr. Musk recently issued this late-night ultimatum to his remaining employees: From this point forward, Twitter was going to be “extremely hard core.” Were they ready to be hard core? They could select “yes” — or opt for three months of severance pay.
To Mr. Musk, “hard core” meant “long hours at high intensity,” a workplace where only the most “exceptional performance” would be accepted and a culture in which midnight emails would be just fine. I’d wager that more than a few workaholics, bosses or otherwise, weren’t entirely turned off by the philosophy behind that statement, and yet it immediately conjured images of sweaty Wall Street bankers collapsing at their desks, Silicon Valley wunderkinds sleeping under theirs and the high-intensity, bro-boss cultures of companies like Uber and WeWork, with their accompanying slogans about doing what you love and sleeping when you’re dead.
For the full commentary, see:
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 23, 2022, and has the title “The Worst Midnight Email From the Boss, Ever.”)
(p. B3) Elon Musk said more companies should consider running lean like Twitter.
. . .
“There’s a potential for significant cuts, I think, out of companies without affecting their productivity,” Musk said, adding that staffing cuts could increase productivity by speeding up operations. “At any given company, there are people who help move things forward and people who sort of try to slam the brakes on.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 24, 2023, and has the title “Musk Urges More Companies to Shrink Like Twitter.”)
(p. B3) WILMINGTON, Del.—The scale of concern among Tesla Inc. board members about how to keep Elon Musk‘s attention trained on the electric-vehicle maker loomed large during a weeklong trial over the chief executive’s pay package.
A desire to motivate Mr. Musk to focus on Tesla triggered a monthslong pay negotiation that culminated in the shareholders’ approval of a 2018 CEO equity grant valued at roughly $48 billion at recent stock prices.
That deal—and the process under which it was put together—have been the subject of the trial in Delaware’s business-law court, where testimony has underscored that current and former Tesla board members have long viewed Mr. Musk as irreplaceable.
For the full story, see:
(Note: the online version of the story was updated November 19, 2022, and has the title “Tesla Board View That Elon Musk Is Irreplaceable Emerged in Pay Trial.”)
(p. 9) At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.”
. . .
At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.”
. . .
The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (. . .), calls his roiling anger “demon mode” — a mind-set that “causes a lot of chaos.” She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done.
. . .
He is mostly preoccupied with his businesses, where he expects his staff to abide by “the algorithm,” his workplace creed, which commands them to “question every requirement” from a department, including “the legal department” and “the safety department”; and to “delete any part or process” they can. “Comradery is dangerous,” is one of the corollaries. So is this: “The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”
Still, Musk has accrued enough power to dictate his own rules. In one of the book’s biggest scoops, Isaacson describes Musk secretly instructing his engineers to “turn off” Starlink satellite internet coverage to prevent Ukraine from launching a surprise drone attack on Russian forces in Crimea. (Isaacson has since posted on X that contrary to what he writes in the book, Musk didn’t shut down coverage but denied a request to extend the network’s range.)
. . .
Isaacson believes that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because he had been so bullied as a kid and “now he could own the playground.” . . . Owning a playground won’t stop you from getting bullied.
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated Sept. 11, 2023, and has the title “Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.”)
The book under review is:
Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.
(p. A1) Capella Space, a San Francisco-based start-up, is building a fleet of small, inexpensive satellites that can track enemy troops as they move at night, or under cloud cover that traditional optical satellites cannot see through.
Fortem Technologies, a small aerospace company in Utah, wants to supply the Pentagon with a new type of unmanned aircraft that can disable enemy drones.
HawkEye 360, a Virginia-based firm, has used private equity funds to launch its own satellites that use radio waves emitted by communications equipment and other electronic devices to detect the presence of enemy troop concentrations.
Each of these systems is getting real-world testing in the war in Ukraine, earning praise from top government officials there and validating investors who have been pouring money into the field.
But they are facing a stiff challenge on another field of battle: the Pentagon’s slow-moving, risk-averse military procurement bureaucracy.
When it comes to drones, satellites, artificial intelligence and other fields, start-up companies frequently offer the Pentagon cheaper, faster and more flexible options than the weapons systems produced by the handful of giant contractors the Pentagon normally relies on.
But while the military has provided small grants and short-term contracts to many start-ups, those agreements often expire too quickly and are not large enough for young companies to meet their payrolls — or grow as rapidly as their venture capital investors expect. Several have been forced to lay people off, delaying progress on new technologies and war-fighting tools.
. . .
(p. A8) From the early months of the war, SpaceX’s Starlink, the Elon Musk-founded satellite internet service, had played a critical role for frontline Ukrainian troops. But small drones and a denser collection of satellites are also helping to provide the capacity for pervasive surveillance, allowing Ukraine to identify and track threats and targets constantly.
A new generation of cheaper and more precise attack drones carrying bombs can loiter in the air autonomously until they find their targets. Artificial intelligence-backed computer systems can fuse this collected data and other feeds to make targeting decisions, faster than any human.
The Ukrainians have also innovated a great deal themselves, impressing Pentagon officials as they have converted commercial drones, for example, into mini bombers.
Taken together, said Thomas X. Hammes, who studies war-fighting history at the Pentagon-backed National Defense University, the developments represent a “genuine military revolution,” and one that is happening much more quickly than the shift from infantry that traveled by foot in World War I to the motorized and mechanized armies of World War II.
. . .
(p. A9) Perhaps the most revolutionary use of American technology in Ukraine has been the application of software that uses artificial intelligence, made by Palantir, to help with targeting efforts. The company’s chief executive, Alex Karp, traveled to Ukraine last year to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“If you go into battle with old school technology,” Mr. Karp said this year at an event to discuss artificial intelligence tools in warfare, “and you have an adversary that knows how to install and implement digitalized targeting in A.I., you obviously are at a massive disadvantage.”
Some experts say that artificial intelligence, which has been used in Ukraine to help sift through the massive loads of data being accumulated from surveillance, will ultimately prove as disruptive to the nature of war-fighting as nuclear weapons.
. . .
For Primer, the small artificial-intelligence firm based in downtown San Francisco, it was a breakthrough moment.
Not long after the war in Ukraine started, its engineers, working with Western allies, tapped into a tidal wave of intercepted Russian radio communications. It used advanced software to clean up the crackly sound, automatically translated the conversations, and most importantly, isolated moments when Russian soldiers in Ukraine were discussing weapons systems, locations and other tactically important information.
This same work would have taken hundreds of intelligence analysts to identify the few relevant clues in the mass of radio traffic. Now it was happening in a matter of minutes.
The findings were quickly matched up with other so-called open source intelligence streams, like geolocation data pulled from social media accounts, giving updates on the location of troops or equipment, that could be matched with surveillance video from drones or images from satellites.
“It’s getting situational awareness,” said Sean Gourley, the founder of Primer.
Yet at the same time, the Pentagon was still deciding when to move ahead with major purchases of its technology. The company was burning through its cash reserves too quickly, so Mr. Gourley laid off engineers and other staff members.
“These engineers are great at creating solutions to solve these problems, which is what matters,” Mr. Gourley said. “But there is the uncertainty: When is this contract going to close? It’s very, very hard to justify that spend.”
Mr. Gourley said he decided instead to invest more money in a government relations push, hiring a former top aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee to help the company promote its business in Washington.
“The big defense companies, they don’t really kind of invest in the tech,” he said. “They just invest in how to navigate this bureaucracy. That kind of sucks, but that’s how you’ve got to play this game.”
In interviews, nearly a dozen top executives of technology-oriented companies shared stories of stalled efforts or frustration.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 21, 2023, and has the title “Start-Ups Bring Silicon Valley Ethos to a Lumbering Military-Industrial Complex.”)
(p. A3) A suspect was arrested in connection with the fatal stabbing in San Francisco of Cash App founder Bob Lee, police said, more than a week after the tech executive’s death shocked Silicon Valley.
Nima Momeni, 38, was arrested by San Francisco police Thursday morning and booked on a murder charge, said Bill Scott, the San Francisco police chief.
Mr. Lee, 43, was fatally stabbed in the early morning hours of April 4 [2023]. The suspect and the victim knew each other, said Chief Scott. He declined to elaborate on the motive for the killing.
. . .
Some tech-industry executives slammed San Francisco over crime after Mr. Lee’s murder. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted, “Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.”
For the full story, see:
[Note: ellipsis and bracketed year added.]
(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 13, 2023, and has the title “Suspect Arrested in Fatal Stabbing of Cash App Founder Bob Lee.”)
(p. B3) What is wrong with American corporations? Elon Musk says too many M.B.A.s. are polluting companies’ ability to think creatively and give customers what they really want.
His comments criticizing M.B.A.s came amid a broader conversation about leadership before an online audience during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual summit, where he also encouraged executives to step away from their spreadsheets and get out of the boardroom and onto the factory floor.
“I think there might be too many M.B.A.s running companies,” the Tesla Inc. chief executive said. “There’s the M.B.A.-ization of America, which I think is maybe not that great. There should be more focus on the product or service itself, less time on board meetings, less time on financials.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: the online version of the story was updated December 9, 2020, and has the same title “Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America.”)
(p. A8) LONDON — Billionaire Elon Musk told the BBC that running Twitter has been “quite painful” but claimed the social media company is now roughly breaking even after he acquired it late last year.
In an interview also streamed live late Tuesday [April 11, 2023] on Twitter Spaces, Musk discussed his ownership of the online platform, including layoffs, misinformation and his work style.
. . .
After acquiring the platform, Musk carried out mass layoffs as part of cost-cutting efforts. He said Twitter’s workforce was slashed to about 1,500 employees from about 8,000 previously.
“It’s not fun at all,” Musk said. “The company’s going to go bankrupt if we don’t cut costs immediately. This is not a caring-uncaring situation. It’s like if the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job.”
Asked if he regretted buying the company, he said it was something that “needed to be done.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 12, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)
Nobel-Prize-winner F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom wisely worried about the independence of the press when it is funded by the government.
(p. B6) Twitter on Tuesday [April 5, 2023] evening added a label to National Public Radio’s account on the social network, designating the broadcaster “U.S. state-affiliated media.”
. . .
Twitter’s guidelines define state-affiliated accounts as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” Other news media accounts with the label include RT of Russia and Xinhua of China.
According to cached versions of Twitter’s published policy, for much of Tuesday the guidelines noted that NPR and the BBC of Britain did not receive the label because they were “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence.” The reference to NPR has since been deleted from that policy.
. . .
Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment, and an email to Twitter’s communications department was returned with a poop emoji autoreply. Mr. Musk tweeted in apparent support of the move, posting a passage from Twitter’s policy and saying it “seems accurate” in a reply to a user pointing out the label on NPR’s account.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the same date April 5, 2023, and has the title “Twitter Labels NPR ‘State-Affiliated Media,’ in Change to Policy.”)
Hayek’s book mentioned above is:
Hayek, Friedrich A. von. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
