Wait, really? Way to be US-centric!
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“Dawn, get on to recruitment. Get them to look for a security team who can work as a team. They may have to escort the current security team from the building for not acting like a team.”
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Oh, so you were right, Elon; your company’s systems are shoddy. Is this taken from the Russian play book where they blame the loss of their flagship on their own incompetence?
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Elno has adult supervision at SpaceX.
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Apparently so - I learned about it on The Vergecast
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Hilariously plausible.
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This is the one thing about finance that bugs me the most. Why should the purchased asset have to take on the debt of the person who bought it? I can see it being collateral, but the buyer should not be allowed to dump all loans on the thingy and walk away.
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The Mob bust-out is the core of the private equity business model. It should be outlawed but the industry throws so much lobbying money at Congress that not only does it remain legal but one of its most notorious practitioners is still regularly touted as “reasonable moderate Republicans’”* best hope for a Presidential candidate.
[* Disclaimer: offer void in United States]
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What’s even the point of taking over a company if you can’t asset-strip it, let it go bankrupt and walk away? /s
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Duly downloaded and filed. Thanks. 
(Your feeling is certainly on the money.)
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Why is that US-centric? It’s Apple-centric, but the venn diagram of the two is surely not THAT large an overlap?
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I think you’d be surprised how pervasive Apple is in the US (and UK, in your case), or rather how non-pervasive it is in the rest of the world. As I said in another thread (the blue and green text one), I know maybe three people who have an iPhone, all of them well earning colleagues. Every time I see pictures of an American college campus I am astonished by the numbers of Macbooks in use by the student body. You would think people living on ramen and booze would not buy an expensive computer. They don’t here.
The reason people choose Apple over the alternatives are entirely cultural, and they never managed to replicate their takeover of the US elsewhere (except in Japan and to a limited extent in the UK).
I’m actually not a fan of this article I just found while looking for hard numbers, because it reduces the explanation entirely to cost, which doesn’t explain why Apple is equally irrelevant in affluent western countries, but it does offer a bit of supplemental anecdotal evidence to what I was saying above:
Every time I make the statement that Android is the most popular mobile operating system on the planet, a certain cross-section of people look at me as though I’ve lost my mind. They’ll also make statements like, “I don’t even know any Android users.” Those people who question my sanity, without fail, hail from the United States.
These are the only numbers I could find. I think iOS is a good enough proxy for overall Apple usage percentage, since Apple users tend to be locked into the ecosystem and can be expected to use other Apple products as well:
As you can see there’s a steep drop off after the UK, with Germany as the fourth most Apple-friendly country coming in at a measly 28 or so percent.
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This is the thing that drives me nuts about Musk!
First of all, I am not defending the guy. He is, and likely always has been, an asshole.
That said, have people watched interviews with him when he is talking about SpaceX? The guy, in most cases, shows that he really does know what he is talking about when it comes to the engineering. Space fanboys were the first Musk fans, mostly because we got a guy who had money, and seemed to listen to engineers, and he understood them! At press conferences, he calls on Eric Berger and Everyday Astronaut over Fox and MSNBC so that he can be asked deep-aero questions about the missions or his plans for upgrading rockets.
We were rooting for him to succeed so hard, a lot of people in the community were willing to ignore that he was/is a complete asshole to his employees at every company he runs. SpaceX has a really high turnover rate.
It drives me nuts.
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It’s entirely possible that he’s doing these interviews with the pre-conditions that those questions he’s already gotten responses ready for are asked.
Interviews with executives at companies nowadays are mostly just thinly veiled press releases.
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FTFY. I suspect, given a day or so to read wikipedia on the subject, that I could also sound like I know what I’m talking about WRT the engineering. That does not mean I can actually do any of it, nor that you should on any account let me make any engineering decisions for actual space flight.
I know some rocket scientists, and Elon Musk is as much a rocket scientist as he is an expert in coding massive distributed systems. Which is to say: “not”.
He’s not an engineer. He’s not a technologist. He’s not even a futurist. He’s a spoiled manchild with money and luck who grew up reading Omni and thinking that thinking something is cool is the same as knowing how to do it. That’s all.
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I’m afraid wasn’t really paying attention to what Musk sounded like about rockets – privatizing space really was never something I could get at all enthused about – but I know he sounds incredibly ignorant when he talks about Mars.
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And yet numerous cogent take-downs of Musk’s myriad claims wrt SpaceX demonstrate that even there the guy is out of his depth (see, e.g. Common Sense Skeptic’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgKWj1pn3_7hRSFIypunYog) He’s also not terribly convincing to more than a few space policy wonks who know what they’re talking about; a few years ago I had quite a few conversations with GWU’s main space policy guru about Musk, and he was not complimentary. Musk uses a lot of impressive-sounding buzzwords, but scratch the surface and there’s no “there” there.
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Good counter. That still does not make it US-centric, but it does limit access worldwide rather more than many of us might have realised.
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Well, my point was that a US based engineer, or “engineer” in Musk’s case, would overestimate how many Twitter users had access to an Apple ID. US-centric wasn’t meant to mean everyone in the US has an apple device or that they’re only found in the US.
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