Category: Musk, Elon

“Self-Taught Rocket Engineer” and Entrepreneur Nimbly Launches “Light Rockets”

(p. B12) On Thursday [August 4, 2022] a spy satellite run by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office shot into space from New Zealand. The rocket carrying it, the Electron, was built by Rocket Lab increase; green up pointing triangle, a U.S.-Kiwi startup founded in 2006 by self-taught rocket engineer Peter Beck.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, satellite-intelligence firm BlackSky asked Rocket Lab for an orbit change just days before it was due to launch, in order to place its satellites more directly over the conflict zone. While changing such missions has traditionally taken months, Rocket Lab pulled it off in 45 days.

These are examples of the new opportunities opened up by governments’ desire for “responsive launch.” While Elon Musk’s SpaceX has spent years revolutionizing the space economy with its large reusable Falcon rockets, a raft of startups have recently stepped in to provide light rockets that are more expensive in terms of price per kilogram, but can send small satellites to specific orbits with extremely fast turnaround times.

. . .

After a year of unrestrained euphoria, when all sorts of “pre-revenue” startups merged with special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, rising interest rates have prompted traders to shun speculative ventures, including fintech innovations, air taxis and, yes, small-satellite launchers.

This has shrouded Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Astra Space, which all went public through SPACs last year, in a cloud of negative sentiment.

. . .

Beyond launching 149 satellites into space so far, Rocket Lab also sent NASA’s CAPSTONE spacecraft on its way to the moon’s orbit in June. A month earlier, it caught an Electron booster in midair with a helicopter—a key step toward making the rocket reusable.

For the full commentary, see:

Jon Sindreu. “Rocket Lab Is Science, Not Fiction.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022): B12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 9, 2022, and has the title “Rocket Lab Is Already Science, Not Fiction.”)

Musk’s Private Starlink Infrastructure “Played a Crucial Role” in Saving Ukraine

(p. A6) KYIV, Ukraine—Elon Musk backtracked on his complaints over the cost of funding Starlink internet terminals in Ukraine and said his company would continue to pay for them, as explosions rocked the Russian-held city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Sunday [Oct. 16, 2022].

Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, pledged to continue funding the Starlink service for Ukraine just a day after he said SpaceX couldn’t finance the service indefinitely on its own.

“The hell with it,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Saturday. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

The 20,000 Starlink terminals estimated to be in operation across Ukraine have played a crucial role in maintaining the country’s communications during the war and are deployed at hundreds of Ukrainian military outposts where they allow commanders to call in artillery strikes or coordinate operations in areas where cell service is jammed by Russia.

For the full story, see:

Matthew Luxmoore. “Musk Says SpaceX to Cover Starlink Costs in Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Oct. 17, 2022): A6.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 16, 2022, and has the title “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Continue to Cover Starlink Costs in Ukraine.”)

Musk Says World Needs More Oil, Gas, and Nuclear Power

(p. A8) Tesla Inc. TSLA 3.60%▲ boss Elon Musk told European energy leaders that the world needs more oil and natural gas and should continue operating nuclear power plants while investing heavily in renewable energy sources.

“I think we actually need more oil and gas, not less, but simultaneously moving as fast as we can to a sustainable energy economy,” Mr. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and largest shareholder, told a conference in Stavanger, Norway.

Mr. Musk said work on developing battery-storage technology is key to making the most of investments in wind, solar and geothermal energy. “I’m also pronuclear,” Mr. Musk said.

“We should really keep going with the nuclear plants. I know this may be an unpopular view in some quarters. But I think if you have a well-designed nuclear power plant, you should not shut it down, especially right now,” he said.

For the full story see:

Jenny Strasburg. “Musk Says the World Needs More Oil, Gas.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2022): A8.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 29, 2022, and has the title “Elon Musk Says World Needs More Oil and Gas.”)

The “Intellect” and “Bravado” Behind the Success of Thiel, Musk, and the “PayPal Mafia”

(p. C7) Next week marks the 20th anniversary of PayPal becoming a publicly traded company. The IPO valued the online payments processor at nearly $1 billion—an eye-opening sum at the time. Back in the day, technology firms marked such occasions with glitzy celebrations. PayPal took a different path. Its youthful employees gathered in the parking lot of their Palo Alto, Calif., office building, where the company’s enigmatic chief executive, Peter Thiel, performed a keg stand and then played 10 simultaneous games of speed chess, winning nine of them.

Jimmy Soni tells that story and many others in “The Founders,” a gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible. His richly reported narrative includes corporate intrigue, workplace hijinks, breakthrough innovation and first-class nerdiness.

. . .

Julie Anderson, one of X.com’s early employees, dropped the company’s California-based telephone customer-service provider and relaunched the service in Nebraska. Why there? Because many of her relatives lived there.

. . .

Confirming a cliché, staffers do spend all night at the office—sometimes sleeping under their desks, though not always. “There’s this massive value that you harness when you’re doing an all-nighter,” says Mr. Levchin, “when you’ve gone for presumably seven or eight hours of work, and you’re really getting up to a point when something’s about to be born—and then you go for eight more hours! And instead of stopping to go to sleep and letting these ideas dissipate, you actually focus on the findings you’ve made in the last few hours, and you just go crazy and do some more of that.”

. . .

Why did PayPal thrive when others—eMoneyMail, PayPlace, c2it—failed? One key was limiting the losses from fraud. If the company had taken a traditional approach, observes a member of the fraud-analytics team, it “would have hired people who had been building logistic regression models for banks for twenty years but never innovated.” Instead it turned to young, open-minded engineers who devised unorthodox methods.

. . .

. . . “The Founders” makes crystal-clear that PayPal’s human capital—a potent cocktail of intellect, bravado and competitiveness, complemented by the occasional keg stand—laid the foundation for success.

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “Making the Future Click.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 12, 2022): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 11, 2022, and has the title “‘The Founders’ Review: Making the Future Click.”)

The book under review is:

Soni, Jimmy. The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Elon Musk Is a “Free Speech Absolutist”

(p. A1) Twitter Inc. accepted Elon Musk’s bid to take over the company and go private, a deal that would give the world’s richest person control over the social-media network where he is also among its most influential users.

. . .

On Monday [April 15, 2022], a day after The Wall Street Journal first reported that a deal was close, Mr. Musk tweeted to indicate that he wants the platform to be a destination for wide-ranging discourse and disagreement.

. . .

(p. A6) Mr. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” said in a recent interview at a TED conference that he sees Twitter as the “de facto town square.”

For the full story, see:

Cara Lombardo, Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells. “Musk Strikes Deal to Buy Twitter.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 26, 2022): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 25, 2022, and has the title “Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s Offer to Buy Company in $44 Billion Deal.”)

Some Texas Firms Resisted the Trend to Enter the Debate on the Texas Bill on the Integrity of Voting

On April 1, 2021, the Texas Senate passed Senate Bill 7 on “Election Integrity.”

(p. B6) . . . , Texas is an important state for big business, with companies and their employees drawn in part by tax incentives and the promise of affordable real estate. Several Silicon Valley companies have moved to Texas or expanded their presence there in recent years.

Apple plans to open a $1 billion campus in Austin next year, and produces some of its high-end computers at a plant in the area.

In December [2020], Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it would move its headquarters from California to the Houston area, while the software company Oracle said it would take its headquarters to Austin. And last month, Elon Musk issued a plea on Twitter for engineers to move to Texas and take jobs at SpaceX, his aerospace company.

Mr. Musk’s other companies, Tesla and the Boring Company, have also expanded their presences in the state in recent months.

None of those companies have so far voiced opposition to the Texas legislation. And at least for now, there is little indication that the growing outcry from big business is changing Republicans’ priorities.

For the full story, see:

David Gelles and Andrew Ross Sorkin. “Big Law Joins Fight To Protect Voting Rights.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 13, 2021): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 12, 2021, and has the title “Defying Republicans, Big Companies Keep the Focus on Voting Rights.”)

Stewart Brand Read Rand and Koestler, and Inspired Steve Jobs

At the end of Steve Jobs’s famous commencement address at Stanford, he quoted Stewart Brand’s famous advice at the end of his Last Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

(p. A15) When I first met Stewart Brand at an upscale ideas festival, I expected to engage with an aging beatnik or hippie, the tree-hugging, whale-saving environmentalist I associated with the “Whole Earth Catalog”—that ’60s-era collectanea of books, resources, tools, technologies and assorted products that became the bible of a techno-utopia DIY movement focused on self-sufficiency, education and ecology. But I found Mr. Brand more like Elon Musk than Timothy Leary, and was astonished to witness him make the best argument I’d ever heard for including nuclear power in plans to replace fossil fuels.

. . .

Although many contemporaries dropped acid for the pure experience, Mr. Brand said he took LSD (and other psychedelics) because he hoped they would accentuate his appreciation of beauty, especially that found in the photographic skills he was developing. For him psychedelics were a tool of creativity: “When you design a tool,” he wrote in 1971, “the best you can do is fashion a prototype and hand it over to the local evolutionary system: ‘Here, try this.’ ”

His model was Arthur Koestler’s “bisociation,” the blending of unrelated concepts into something new. Mr. Brand’s ability to discern unlikely complements, along with the organizational skills he’d honed in the military, helped bring numerous projects to fruition: His imagination had him bounce from one to the next; his pragmatic propensities put them into effect. Decades after the “Whole Earth Catalog” project, for example, Mr. Brand published “Whole Earth Discipline,” which proposed integrating nuclear power, geoengineering, genetic engineering, wildlife restoration, species protection and other environmental technologies aimed at creating a sustainable future for life on Earth. He’s a solutions guy, not a New Age guru—his ability to convene like-minded innovators has resulted in the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), the Global Business Network for futurists and business leaders, the Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore, a project to bring back extinct species like passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths.

As for Mr. Brand’s politics, he’s off the spectrum, mostly identifying as a small-l libertarian (he read Ayn Rand at Stanford), committed to bottom-up democracy, with an aversion to orthodoxy of any sort, which means he must adapt when the marginal becomes the mainstream, as in his shift from environmentalism to conservationism, from organic foods to GMOs, and from anti- to pro-nuclear power.

For the full review, see:

Michael Shermer’. “BOOKSHELF; A Man In Whole.” The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, March 29, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 28, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Whole Earth’ Review: A Man in Whole.”)

The book under review is:

Markoff, John. Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.

New York Times Columnist Finds that Trump’s “Truth Social” Platform Is “Less Restrictive than Twitter”

(p. B1) Truth Social, Mr. Trump has said, would “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech.”

The app’s surge in popularity this week caught the attention of Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist. In several tweets, the billionaire noted that Truth Social was “beating Twitter & TikTok on the Apple Store” and blamed Twitter’s rules on (p. B6) speech for birthing the alternative apps.

. . .

To test the app’s claims about political ideology, I published a Truth with a New York Times Opinion article that was critical of the Republican Party, and other posts with news articles about the Jan. 6 riot and how Truth Social’s prospects could be hurt by Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter. None of the posts were flagged as problematic. That suggested the app wasn’t discriminating based on politics, just as it had said it wouldn’t.

I also found some accounts that were not allowed to post on Twitter — like The Babylon Bee, the right-wing satire site that was suspended for misgendering a transgender Biden administration official — posting regularly on Truth Social. It was another sign that the app was less restrictive than Twitter.

For the full commentary, see:

Brian X. Chen. “Upgrade Frees Trump App, But Glitches Hold It Back.” The New York Times (Thursday, April 28, 2022): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 27, 2022, and has the title “Truth Social Review: Trump’s Uncensored Social App Is Incomplete.”)

Could Principled Investors Make the Walt Disney Company Great Again?

Robert Nozick defended firms that maximize profits subject to ethical side constraints. Presumably the ethical side constraints include not capitulating to totalitarian governments that suppress free speech. The recent “meme” investors in GameStop and AMC sparked in me the question whether principled investors loyal to ethical side constraints could return the Walt Disney Company to the principled greatness of Walt Disney, the man?

(p. 1) It has been a year since Mat Bowen, who was the pastor of a small church in Gibson City, Ill., had the dream — the one where Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, urged him to buy Dogecoin.

Mr. Bowen had just begun to dabble in investing. He soon discovered WallStreetBets, the online forum on Reddit where throngs of small investors were plotting to buy shares of GameStop, the troubled video game retailer, in a bid to teach Wall Street a lesson. Some hedge funds had bet that shares of GameStop would fall. Instead, they took off, as the investors banded together last January to drive the price up more than 1,700 percent.

Caught up in the frenzy, Mr. Bowen bought GameStop, too. In July [2021], he quit the church to become a full-time trader, convinced he was joining a fight against financial injustice.

The beliefs underpinning last year’s meme stock phenomenon are stronger than ever. For a large number of individual investors, the stock market has become the battleground on which they join forces to right perceived wrongs and fight the powerful. So much so that when the stock market seesawed this past week, many small investors were undeterred. Falling prices were another opportunity to buy more shares of their favorite companies.

“The reason I am still in this, and the reason I am willing to ride these stocks to zero, is for my fellow citizens,” said Mr. Bowen, who received his master’s degree in divinity (p. 7) at the Princeton Theological Seminary. He cast the so-called meme stock fight in moral terms. “The battle of good versus evil is not just limited to the walls of a church or a synagogue or a mosque,” he said.

. . .

Jesus Gonzalez was drawn into the meme stock trade by what he saw as a power imbalance. Mr. Gonzalez, 22, had invested in stocks off and on as a teenager, but “AMC and GameStop are different from any other play in the stock market,” he said. “We have never seen a congregation of retail investors who have collectively come together on the internet and formed the largest, most powerful decentralized hedge fund in the world.”

Mr. Gonzalez, who graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in finance last month, is buying more shares of GameStop and AMC, even though his $220,000 portfolio is off 37 percent from its November [2021] high, he said.

His 34-year-old sister, Ruby Gonzalez, a behavioral health therapist who works at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and is studying to become a nurse, followed her brother’s lead and invested most of her savings in the two companies. “I want to change market manipulation,” she said.

For the full story, see:

Tara Siegel Bernard, Emily Flitter and Anupreeta Das. “How GameStop Turned into a Fight for Good vs. Evil.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, January 30, 2022): 1 & 7.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 29, 2022, and has the title “Buy GameStop, Fight Injustice. Just Don’t Sell.”)

Robert Nozick’s libertarian masterpiece is:

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974.

Tesla Could Switch Chips By Internally Modifying Software Code that Other Car Companies Had Outsourced

(p. 1) For much of last year, established automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor operated in a different reality from Tesla, the electric car company.

G.M. and Ford closed one factory after another — sometimes for months on end — because of a shortage of computer chips, leaving dealer lots bare and sending car prices zooming. Yet Tesla racked up record sales quarter after quarter and ended the year having sold nearly twice as many vehicles as it did in 2020 unhindered by an industrywide crisis.

Tesla’s ability to conjure up critical components has a greater significance than one year’s car sales. It suggests that the company, and possibly other young electric car businesses, could threaten the dominance of giants like Volkswagen and G.M. sooner and more forcefully than most industry executives and policymakers realize. . . .

Tesla and its enigmatic chief executive, Elon Musk, have said little about how the carmaker ran circles around the rest of the auto industry. Now it’s becoming clear that the company simply had a superior command of technology and its own supply chain. Tesla appeared to better forecast demand than businesses that produce many more cars than it does. Other automakers were surprised by how quickly the car market recovered from a steep drop early in the pandemic and had simply not ordered enough chips and parts (p. 12) fast enough.

When Tesla couldn’t get the chips it had counted on, it took the ones that were available and rewrote the software that operated them to suit its needs. Larger auto companies couldn’t do that because they relied on outside suppliers for much of their software and computing expertise. In many cases, automakers also relied on these suppliers to deal with chip manufacturers. When the crisis hit, the automakers lacked bargaining clout.

Just a few years ago, analysts saw Mr. Musk’s insistence on having Tesla do more things on its own as one of the main reasons the company was struggling to increase production. Now, his strategy appears to have been vindicated.

. . .

“Tesla, born in Silicon Valley, never outsourced their software — they write their own code,” said Morris Cohen, a professor emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in manufacturing and logistics. “They rewrote the software so they could replace chips in short supply with chips not in short supply. The other carmakers were not able to do that.”

“Tesla controlled its destiny,” Professor Cohen added.

. . .

Doing more on its own also helps explain why Tesla avoided shortages of batteries, which have limited companies like Ford and G.M. from selling lots of electric cars. In 2014, when most carmakers were still debating whether electric vehicles would ever amount to anything, Tesla broke ground on what it called a gigafactory outside Reno, Nev., to produce batteries with its partner, Panasonic. Now, that factory helps ensure a reliable supply.

“It was a big risk,” said Ryan Melsert, a former Tesla executive who was involved in construction of the Nevada plant. “But because they have made decisions early on to bring things in house, they have much more control over their own fate.”

As Professor Cohen of Wharton pointed out, Tesla’s approach is in many ways a throwback to the early days of the automobile, when Ford owned its own steel plants and rubber plantations. In recent decades, the conventional auto wisdom had it that manufacturers should concentrate on design and final assembly and farm out the rest to suppliers. That strategy helped reduce how much money big players tied up in factories, but left them vulnerable to supply chain turmoil.

For the full story, see:

Jack Ewing. “Tesla’s Edge in Pandemic: Superior Command of Supply Chain.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 9, 2022): 1 & 12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 8, 2022, and has the title “Why Tesla Soared as Other Automakers Struggled to Make Cars.”

“People Come to This Country to Build Amazing Businesses”

(p. 1) WASHINGTON — ADW Capital Partners would appear to be the kind of hedge fund that Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee would like to tax more heavily: small but growing fast, with $330 million in assets, an incorporation in Delaware but doing business in Florida, and an offshore “feeder” corporation shielding some of its clients from U.S. taxation.

No wonder, then, that its owner, Adam Wyden, has come out as a vocal and vociferous critic of the tax increases being pushed by the committee’s chairman, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — his father.

. . .

(p. 25) “The issue is bigger than my father. I’m not interested in discussing anything personal,” he said in a brief phone call before declining to go further. He said he was “not a Trumper” and “not an Ocasio” — referring to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, an icon of the Democratic left. He is a libertarian, he said, raised in Washington, D.C., who moved to Florida “to get away from the food fight.”

But he has gone public with his grievances against his father’s proposals, in an appearance last month on CNBC that he recommended for viewing, and in a tweet responding to the elder Mr. Wyden’s assertion that Elon Musk and other billionaires should not get to decide whether to pay taxes based on a Twitter poll.

“Why does he hate us / the American dream so much?!?!?!?!” Adam Wyden said in the Twitter post last month. “Reality is: most legislators have never built anything … so I guess it’s easier to mindlessly and haphazardly try and tear stuff down.”

. . .

“Thankfully, I think I can compound” investment gains “faster than my dad and his cronies can confiscate it,” Adam Wyden wrote.

Lauded on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” he elaborated on air. “Amazon, Netflix, Google, Tesla: I mean, we are the envy of the rest of the world,” he said. “People come to this country to build amazing businesses, and I want that to continue.”

Without referring to his son, the elder Mr. Wyden suggested a possible reason for his stance: “Many millionaires perhaps may consider themselves tomorrow’s billionaires.”

For the full story, see:

Jonathan Weisman. “Rift Between Senator and Son Shows Challenge of Taxing the Ultrarich.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 12, 2021): 1 & 25.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 11, 2021, and has the title “Rift Between Senator and Son Shows the Challenge of Taxing the Ultrarich.” The online version says that the article appeared on p. 24 of the New York edition of the print version.)