mediaphage posted:

even then he just hosed it up by walking in to where the real engineers were and insisting on a launch before they were ready

mediaphage posted:

i’ve only worked a couple but it was mostly classic sexist talk about women “i’d gently caress her” etc. i’m a white guy tho

DarkSol posted:

mediaphage posted:

i mean i’m confident they’re a fine company to launch satellites and poo poo, maybe the best (idk). but i can also imagine nasa being like ok the increasingly unstable ceo is becoming a national security concern

infernal machines posted:

were you out? because i could see that going differently, depending.

Improbable Lobster posted:

Everyone competent left years ago, much like what happened at tesla

mediaphage posted:

probably not in terms of going around talking about it, but i wasn’t closeted either; i don’t generally discuss my personal life at work unless i’m pseudo friends with someone

Tesseraction posted:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tesla-racism-sexual-harassment/

this is how the article starts and it doesn't slow down from here

mediaphage posted:

if you say so, i wouldn’t know

Not a Children posted:

Interviewed with SpaceX in the hopes that they'd fly me out to Austin the week of the eclipse. Didn't manage to make it happen but I did learn that poo poo over there is held together with rubber bands, unpaid overtime, and engineers too young/enthusiastic about rockets to say no

Improbable Lobster posted:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/24/world/spacex-justice-department-lawsuit-hiring-scn/index.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-engineer-alleges-racial-discrimination-harassment-lawsuit-2021-11?op=1
https://www.reuters.com/sustainabil...ism-2024-03-05/

Sagebrush posted:

are you suggesting elon musk doesn't actually have any strategy to get "tesla robotaxis" working by august? you're saying he just...lied??

infernal machines posted:

matt levine wrote about it earlier today. basically, spacex is a private company and they have a lot of leeway with reporting whatever the gently caress they want for profit/revenue

if they're selling launches to themselves at zero cost, or whatever, who's going to stop them?

WSJ posted:

Unlike those corporate giants, SpaceX is privately owned and keeps details about its finances under wraps, as do many other private companies. Some people with stakes in SpaceX have no idea how much money the company makes or loses. Many SpaceX investors view their holdings as a long-term bet and say they aren’t concerned about seeing results.

It is unusual to have a full look at some of the company’s recent results, as the Journal did, including costs and how SpaceX performed based on the traditional measure of profitability. The last public deep dive into its financials occurred more than six years ago in the Journal.

...! posted:

the problem is definitely solved

quote:

The space egg was comfortable and cool on a hot spring day. On an enormous dashboard computer tablet, he punched in a destination a few miles away. He backed out, which the tech requires, and started the magic.

The car… drove. Itself. The Tesla warned him to be prepared to take over. He tapped the steering wheel occasionally, the way one wiggles a mouse to appear active in a Microsoft Teams meeting.

The car switched lanes. The car stopped at stop signs. The car used artificial intelligence and cameras to process images in a fraction of a second to perform road tasks, let’s be honest, better than a lot of humans who are trying to put on a podcast while dipping chicken nuggets in buffalo sauce.

This was impressive, no doubt. I considered how Musk’s grip on the culture left me feeling morally, ethically and intellectually untethered, a la puking after an elated whirl on the Gravitron. In a world where car safety messaging has trended toward anti-distraction — put the device down! It can wait! — here I was, riding inside a giant cartoon phone.

quote:

Howe went to Illinois to watch the eclipse in his Tesla. He did 2,000 miles round-trip on Full Self-Driving. He listened to audiobooks, relaxed. It’s hard to do much sandwich-eating or email-checking, he said, because the car yells at you if you take your eyes off the road too long.

In my colleague’s Tesla, I remembered then, we had been heading back to the office, merging into a left turn lane, when the system made a loud chime. Neither of us knew exactly what it meant, but my friend gripped the wheel and drove the old-fashioned way for a second. Even in the most seamless moments, it seems, it’s still crucial to have control.

Gubbinal Girl posted:

I sincerely don't understand why that is preferable to just driving yourself? You still have to be ready to take over at a moment's notice so what's the point?

Cat Face Joe posted:

https://twitter.com/lindayaX/status/1778620234175512934

Gubbinal Girl posted:

I sincerely don't understand why that is preferable to just driving yourself? You still have to be ready to take over at a moment's notice so what's the point?

DarkSol posted:

Amazon subsidiary Zoox

rotor posted:

because they're not ready to take over at a moments notice

Tesseraction posted:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tesla-racism-sexual-harassment/

this is how the article starts and it doesn't slow down from here

Gubbinal Girl posted:

I sincerely don't understand why that is preferable to just driving yourself? You still have to be ready to take over at a moment's notice so what's the point?

Beeftweeter posted:

also this

meshes with the other class-action suit against tesla brought by other black employees. to be clear it's horrifically hosed up, and this one has sexism to boot, but it's also routine for tesla apparently

Blotto_Otter posted:

it is true that they have a lot more flexibility and leeway in financial reporting as a private company... but there are still limits, they still can't lie or present things in a materially misleading way. and given that musk lies roughly as much as trump, and tends to hire a similar type of dishonest and manipulative sycophant as his employees, i would not be the least bit surprised if the financials they share with their investors are full of misleading tricks and bullshit. (personally I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla's financials turned out to have some goofy poo poo going on behind the scenes, and that's the public company that actually gets audited)

Levine is correct that technically they don't have to follow GAAP, but if they don't, they still have to be clear about how and where they're departing from GAAP or what alternative basis of accounting they're using, or else they are misleading their investors. and they also might not have the same legal requirement as public companies to have their financial statements audited, but it would be very unusual for a company that size, with the amount of debt financing that such companies usually have, not to have banks or investors that demand an audit. it's possible! but also very unusual, and a big red flag if so. (investors in any big company, let alone an Elon Musk-led one, would be fools to accept annual financial statements that aren't audited... but I do realize that people who are still investing in Musk companies in 2024 probably ain't the most cautious, by-the-book investors.)

but if they are doing any book-cooking, it's still the kind of thing that's real hard to prove until a criminal investigation or lawsuits start flying and discovery happens, and no investor is going to want to start making lawsuits until their wallet's gotten hurt, and their wallets aren't getting hurt as long as SpaceX keeps putting out financials that say the business is OK.



typing all of that inspired me to see what financial information is available on SpaceX, and the most recent thing I can find is an Aug 2023 WSJ article that trumpets SpaceX's first quarterly profit after years of "significant but narrowing" losses and "doubling revenues". WSJ says their reporting is based on their review of "documents" - not "financial statements" or "accounting records", just... "documents".

I'm just spitballin' here, but this sounds like:
1) Musk/SpaceX benefit from having perfect idiot bazinga investors who have fully bought into the hype and don't give a poo poo about basic due diligence like "asking to see the company's books once in a while"; and
2) after six years of not leaking anything, someone (I'm putting a $10 bet on someone instructed by Musk, if not Musk himself) leaked some financial "documents" to the Journal for the only quarter that they could manage to make look good, and have not done it again since then, for reasons

Luigi Thirty posted:

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2024/04/12/tesla-driverless-self-driving-promotion-free-florida-elon-musk/

my local paper wrote a… something

Bugsy posted:

how does ai solve the national debt?