Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.

In my case at a different firm, I happily gave notice than to put up with the "fixer", who had been hired by the other "fixer", both of which were mostly only good at shitting all over the place and driving most of the technical organization out of the company. I got the feeling that was the whole point, so I resigned instead of waiting for my eventual layoff.

My man Nelson Baghetti, sipping big gulps and eating spaghetti

> Why did Tesla work initially?

Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics).

6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in a straight line, and it got 140MPG.

6 years ago. And I've had 0 maintenance outside of tire / air filter changes since. There was nothing anything remotely like it on the market, and it still holds up today. That's incredibly compelling.

Then PedoDiver, and it's been downhill from there... I'll likely get an R3X when it comes out.

Tesla won because Elon is a great seller, the product is mediocre at best but I’ve heard many times from friends that it was the same quality as a Mercedes Benz, so the reality distortion field is very real.

And Americans in general don’t want electric cars for some reason. I’m happily driving my Buzz and charging on my solar panels instead of paying 5 bucks a gallon on diesel. The propaganda here is strong and people buy it.

They must have outcompeted Musk at intelligence and/or insanity with their dedication into maximizing production volume of liquid fueled rocket engines.

Tom Mueller was a VP of propulsion at TRW Inc., which, among numerous other things you know from textbooks, made the Apollo LM descent engine, as well as early Space Shuttle TDRS data relay system sats. Calling Mueller a guy interested with engines having issues with his bosses is like referring to Craig Federighi as a guy interested in designing his own laptop.

I guess now that everyone knows about Elon, and Elon himself probably becoming more paranoid from both age and after SpaceX years and exposure to Twitter infoflood without adequate mental immunity, on top of most people who'd be in position to meet him not being as smart and quietly lunatic as literal Old Space trained rocket scientists, the scheme of temporarily impinging ideas upon Musk so to securely attaching the funding for your own thing do not work so well anymore.

Lucid has eaten all of their high end sales. Their mid-size SUV will likely take a sizable chunk out of the Y too.

It always seems to be companies that Musk has more impulsive interactions with that seem to end up actioning both the good and the bad ideas. Twitter and Tesla being examples of this. It seems like SpaceXs longer term goals has worked out well for them.

I would think because the original founders spent a lot of time planning, researching, and designing combined with decent timing of Musk jumping in with money. Why else would Musk have bought them in the first place if they didn't have incredibly impressive ideas and engineering to sell? When the roadster originally came out, it was expensive, but also had a near 300 mile range which nobody else even came close to offering and boasted very impressive engineering and crash safety. And im sure a lot of that work was put into atleast the next 2 models released.

Of course the quality has fallen faster than the price over time, but initial impressions still hold on for a long time in general.

I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem. The US had tons of graduated aerospace engineers with limited places to go, and places they could go directly in aerospace fields were already committing their funding to established programs. SpaceX startup would of been a dream job for the top aerospace engineers because it was all fresh ground but with a far larger budget than 99.9% of startup aerospace companies. They weren't offered to build one piece of a rocket that may or may not get sold to NASA or someone 15 years down the line, they were offered to work on and put their mark on a completely new rocket design that was going to at the least be test launched. And im sure their early successes helped boost recruitment even further, combined with government contract to keep the money flowing.

We probably don't see many rising EV companies in the US because you need an ass-ton of capital to start an automotive company, and most people holding enough capital to do so know that try to sell cheap consumer cars that most people want is not really the highest margin business. Selling a few hundred or even a few thousand cars still leaves you with a mountain of capital requirements in front of you that your margins are going to have a really hard time climbing. And if you don't climb fast enough, good luck fighting established auto makers and their lawyers with every cent tied up into trying to scale and engineer.

How is Tesla falling apart? Cybertruck was a flop, but Model Y is still one of the best selling cars in the world, and very well reviewed.

I can't find one at the moment, but I recall seeing several interviews where people claim that SpaceX is structured with "handlers" or "stage managers" to keep Elon away from where the real work was being done. SpaceX has had Elon the longest, since the beginning, so they're just the most experienced with it. Though, now that people have discussed that publicly, I wonder if Elon ever caught on...

> That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.

Thankfully I've never (yet) had to experience "planning by management tweet". That does sound like absolute bullshit to deal with.

> Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.

Hate this. My boss: “Hey, why is it doing that. Who did this?” You did, you clueless idiot. You asked for it.

I wish i could have a machine to detect workforce like you and not to hire those people.

That your comment is grey but has no replies speaks volumes.

Their alignment is probably more strategically built in during the training phase.

At least I assume Xi Jinping doesn’t just call up DeepSeek on a whim and dictate what they should have in model context (like Musk apparently does at xAI).

Of all the valuable metrics on that site, all of which grok does badly at except one, you managed to pick that single one.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models

> Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry

(Not the person you're replying to, so caveats about me speaking for them, but) no, they're not. They're highlighting how Grok _isn't_ accurate/unbiased/whatever, by giving examples of how it distorts the truth to fit Elon's narrative.

No I am saying that an LLM responding to every single query with anguish about a South African domestic political controversy cannot possibly be the result of an earnest, serious, and disinterested search for truth.

It is simply not possible. It disproves the thesis. Either the search for truth is illegitimate in principle or it’s so poorly executed that it’s illegitimate de facto.

You think he wants Grok not to sound extremely snarky, sarcastic, and full of cringelord humor?

Are we talking about the same xAI/Grok/Elon here?

Yea his ideals demand something much more pure: a 4chan commenter

[dead]

Thanks, I can very much agree with that.

Re Oppenheimer: I know. My point was that he very much knew what his work was being used for, as should people working at xAI at the moment.

He works pretty hard to destabilize democracy

> This is the first time I hear someone equate furries and trans with “results-oriented personalities.”

Technically, it's the zeroth time because I never even implied that. I said that the field itself is results-oriented. You usually can't get very far in the career without demonstrating competency at it. Where plenty of other fields had strong unspoken rules of "...as long as you fit in", this one's traditionally been comparatively open to talented people even when they don't look and act like everyone else.

That's... not what was written there. Better read gp again slower.

And Apple a premium Unix derivative?

yet.

Because so far if we left it to AI they would be much quicker to do it [1]

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516885-ais-cant-stop-r...

if you want to make the world a better place as OP stated perhaps you can get a normal job in maybe less evil corp?

I never claimed any techology is good or bad; you also seem to be in agreement with me that technology used in warfare _can_ have "good" applications (I mentioned that the benefits are secondary to their applications in war, that doesn't sound like me saying there are no benefits).

Lastly, the only point I was trying to make is that the argument that researchers do these things for "pro-social" causes is kind of a facade; the macro environment that incentivizes technological development *is* mostly due to government investment. Sure, the individuals working on it may all have different motivations, but they wouldn't be able to do so without large sums of money. The CIA [1] literally has a venture capital firm dedicated to the investing in the development of technology - do you really believe they are doing that to help people?

- [1]: https://fortune.com/2025/07/29/in-q-tel-cia-venture-capital-...

Different kinds of claims, it's not self-referential

Is ad tech and the like really causing so much suffering? The government work, mass surveilance, killing people etc. doesn't actually pay that much, typically.

so do oil and tobacco people, no?

Is there anything from Dan Luu you could point me offhand at about Twitter's culture? The only thing I recall was a blog about technical issues but that didn't seem to have much bearing on the culture.

My understanding is Twitter always had cultural issues but it was not very different from other tech companies of the time, and what most of us would consider "directionally correct." I have it on pretty good authority from a very senior engineer who left before Elon took over (so no grudges other than, you know, "because Elon") that a lot of the things he said publicly about Twitter's technology was highly misleading or downright false. Like, IIRC, something about them not having CI/CD. Total lie.

He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

I don't understand this take. Do people think engineers go in to work to turn handcranks to keep the machines running? It's actually a credit to the automation built by the engineers he fired that it kept running!

At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.

It was significantly worst, could not keep ads, became overrun by bots. The quality went down significantly. And earnings too.

Poor SpaceX employees whose options got diluted by Twitter. :/

Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs.

Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest?

Honest question, I’ve worked for public $BigTech but haven’t been at a company pre IPO

No, the ones suing his ass.

What % of that is owned by employees that aren't named Elon Musk?

He’s saying that it’s easy to say good things when the market’s on an upswing.

It was obvious at the time too.

It's possible. I don't know. My tone comes off as support Elon, and I do not, at all. I've seen first-hand almost all of these tactics while I was at <Elon Company>. I'm observing that some people seem to do OK at Elon's companies, and for many years, and never seem to get the boot or be abused in other ways. Therefore, Elon is probably not quite as bad a manager as he is made out to be. This is all I am saying. Since I have firsthand knowledge, I believe my opinion has value. Those that disagree? Show me your Source of Truth. Thank you.