Elon Musk, SpaceX and PayPal

[Heiwa]

The ISS hoax is entering a new phase today. The ISS has been served by 140 various, manned or un-manned space ships of all kinds the past 11 years sent up by NASA, ESA, JAXA and Roskosmos (and paid for by various tax payers) all explained on the Internet.
Of course the ISS does not exist so it has become difficult to keep up the appearance and keep the secret stunt/scam going. From now on the thing is privatized! Enter Space X company of Hawthorne, California, USA, and its owner Elon Musk.
Space X/Elon Musk has allegedly developed a new rocket called Falcon with a top module called Dragon that will serve the ISS from now on! NASA is happy to hand over the shit to Space X because it is a private US company.

What supposedly happens today is that rocket Falcon takes off from JFK space centre, Florida, and sends module Dragon, unmanned, up to the ISS with 470 kg of supplies (water and bread for the ISS staff) ! Dragon will arrive within 10 meters from ISS and people on ISS will use a hydraulic crane to catch the Dragon. If it works NASA will appoint Space X to carry out another 12 Falcon/Dragon trips at a cost of US$ 1.6 billion. There is no business like empty space business.

But who is Mr. Elon Musk? Apparently born in South Africa 1971 but emigrated to Canada 1989 where he started an Internet Service Provider company that was a success so he sold it four years later and pocketed US$ 300 million. Not bad! Then Musk created Paypal that was another success that he sold for US$ 1.5 billion (to Ebay). That was good! Then Elon started Tesla Motors that sold electric sport cars. Funnily enough there was a Tesla Motors car shop not far from my home in southern France selling these sport cars … but it closed recently. But Space X is apparently aiming for space! Un-manned trips to ISS is nothing. In ten years Musk will sent people to Mars, he says. Musk has apparently five sons. He doesn’t sound real to me. No muskle. Here is a photo of him

[nonhocapito]

Elon Musk. From http://www.autoblog.com/2012/09/07/tesl ... k-q-and-a/

So, this "Elon Musk" would be the CEO and founder of the "SpaceX" corporation.
As we know, SpaceX is the alleged private corporation contracted by NASA to send up provisions to the ISS.
This amazing feat (most amazing since there is no ISS, as we know, and nothing or nobody to send "up" provisions to) was accomplished a few days ago using a spacecraft named "Dragon". (Here on the news: http://www.google.com/news?ncl=dMfjHUGr ... lish&hl=en)

Kudos on the masonic signifcance of the craft's name, BTW. Here's a comment to it. Note the show's title card.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gagDc4z7IQI

It seems obvious at this point that a government-run gigantic enterprise like NASA, because it is directly funded with the citizens' money, cannot be the focus of the whole show anymore, always risking to be too much under scrutiny. Hence the need to transfer crucial parts of the hoax in the hands of made-up corporations, which are certainly run by the same masonic cartels of scammers and control freaks that run NASA: yet nobody can really know how much money are really invested or made by a corporation, and whether all the billions poured on it are spent at all to build spacecrafts, or just used to buy some Photoshop licenses.

No matter what the media say, the main reason why the US "space race" is outsourcing is secrecy. The ease to keep scamming the world without anyone being able or having a right to look at it too closely.

(Same reason why certain military operations are contracted to private mercenaries, like Monsanto's Xe/Blackwaters.)

This post could end here without any further comments on my part, by simply copy-pasting the page about Elon Musk on wickedpedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk.
It is indeed a mind-boggling biography, although not in the sense that they meant it. The biopic is so jam-packed with fantastic lies it makes immediately obvious how this man is a complete fabrication, a front that corporate/military/propaganda interests are using to cover up their operations.

Everyone today hates corporations, unless they are driven by some agent/actor who is good at selling the product and making it look like some self-made epic human driven mythological enterprise, rather than another of those blood-sucking propaganda schemes to keep the people down and busy.

This method has been throughly tested in recent years in the world of IT, with Gates and Jobs most evidently.
Not strangely, "Elon Musk" also comes from the IT world, a world where "anything can happen", as we are instructed to believe, thank to the technological advances of the last two or three decades.
Yes "Elon Musk", this brilliant inventor and engineer or whatever he is who, in his words, wants to die an old man on Mars, was the founder of PayPal.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against PayPal, it is a most useful and practical service (as you can see at the bottom of this page ). But on the other hand, how do you make the jump from designing a website to designing a space craft? Is it because they are all realities that only exist in the electronic world? And did Musk even really designed or conceived any part of it?

[The lies and absurdities about "Elon Musk" do not end here. Included is his dabbling with Tesla's pseudoscience (Tesla being probably a global artificial meme to vehicle phony science to the masses). To be continued...]

[nonhocapito]

1) SpaceX


"Elon Musk" with "Obama". From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_ ... _Obama.jpg

According to wicked, SpaceX

was founded in June 2002 by PayPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk who had invested US$100 million of his own money by March 2006. (...) The company has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2002, growing from 160 employees in November 2005 to more than 500 by July 2008, to over 1,100 in 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Background

I am probably very dense about how such a business model would work, but the premises here are really hard to believe. No matter how much money you invest, most of it would go in technological research and experiments that would fail; unless you do not start from scratch, but with laboratories and knowledge and machines already very advanced, how do you make the whole thing profitable? Without ever crashing a launch or making the news with anything but great news? No, I say this is a fantasy for the masses, not a true story.

And sure, SpaceX, like all corporations, is good at making persuasive commercials like this one:


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th6HQ9RtVCE

(True, big things do come all the time: they are lies). Yet when the company started, who was supposed to buy this product? You and me? The federal government? The Spectre?

SpaceX has a lousy website. Feel free to look it up. Despite the vague efforts to give it a NASA-like feel, only with more Sci-Fi attached to it, it seems to be conceived straight out of a template, like most of the phony websites around the 9/11 scam. Very peculiar, coming from the genius guy who first started on the internet. I find it hard to believe that this barely readable crap is supposed to be the page that describes what his company is about: http://www.spacex.com/company.php


Screenshot from SpaceX.com

2) PayPal

As with the PayPal story. The fact that this "Elon Musk" character would be behind it got me thinking about how deep the setting up of this parallel life of ours on the internet must have been planned and designed.
This should certainly be investigated more.
Personally today I have an almost certainty about the fact that all big internet companies, the ones that define the place as a place for business and control, are not simply private companies, but rather integral parts of the network of propaganda and control centered around the media and the military agencies. The names would include Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay etcetera, and of course eBay-own PayPal.

Everywhere I look for Elon Musk's words I find rhetorical bullshit of absolutely no substance, a certain sign of Hollywood scripting. Here's him about the internet:

"In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a... collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Quotes

What kind of a "nervous system" would that be once all the information that flies across it is going to be controlled and more importantly and tragically marked for consumption by the ownership or advertising of some corporation? It would be like a nervous system ridden by big-ass parasites...

[to be continued with Tesla...]

[reichstag fireman]

Very interesting research, nohocapito. Hope you can continue with it

[lux]

+1

[simonshack]

Sharp and superb insights and diggings, Nonho! - as ever.

[fbenario]

Everyone today hates corporations, unless they are driven by some agent/actor who is good at selling the product and making it look like some self-made epic human driven mythological enterprise, rather than another of those blood-sucking propaganda schemes to keep the people down and busy.

This method has been throughly tested in recent years in the world of IT, with Gates and Jobs most evidently.

Not strangely, "Elon Musk" also comes from the IT world, a world where "anything can happen", as we are instructed to believe, thank to the technological advances of the last two or three decades.

Thank you for saying this so clearly and elegantly.

[fbenario]

I am probably very dense about how such a business model would work, but the premises here are really hard to believe. No matter how much money you invest, most of it would go in technological research and experiments that would fail; unless you do not start from scratch, but with laboratories and knowledge and machines already very advanced, how do you make the whole thing profitable?
...

"In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a... collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Quotes

What kind of a "nervous system" would that be once all the information that flies across it is going to be controlled and more importantly and tragically marked for consumption by the ownership or advertising of some corporation? It would be like a nervous system ridden by big-ass parasites...

Yes, you are quite dense in your understanding of how such a business model would work, at least with respect to mainstream start-up funding. This forum, however, doesn't exist to clarify such matters, and I simply don't have time.

Here's a basic primer on such matters.

How to Fund a Startup

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

The rest of the quoted material is awesome.

[nonhocapito]

Thanks for the encouragement fellas . This is not really a complete research on my part but just ideas for a research. Feel free to expand from them!

*

Fbenario: I can see how in general a startup company gets people to invest in it. I just have a hard time placing the model in such a context, where you create from nothing a company that in 10 years becomes a key contractor for NASA. One so crucial that with a faulty spacecraft could endanger the lives of its actornauts.
How could SpaceX work, make research, make tests and make profit during those years until it landed this very lucrative contract? And at the same time making enough experience to pull this off without a glitch?

How was it not a corporation like Lockheed picked instead? It seems the natural choice, to outsource to a corporation that already has the knowledge, laboratories, connections, liquidity and everything. Why going to the young good-looking inexperienced one, if not because NASA needed a completely Hollywoodesque corporation to sell to the public an idea and nothing else?

The basic argument here is that "SpaceX" is an empty store, an eye-candy, a front. Only in fantasyland one goes from 0 to rocket science in 10 years. Even more laughable, after we have been sold the idea that this was all so incredibly hard the Russians kept messing it up after having had an experience in the field of 60 years.

It must be the italian life with Berlusconi, but I simply don't believe in self-made men. I believe in their invisible friends, though. Berlusconi's are mostly based in Sicily.

*

3) Tesla Motors

As I stated elsewhere, my feelings toward the legend of Nikolas Telsa are of revulsion and deep, almost irrational distrust. Mind you, I know nothing of the science, if there is any, or the person, if it was ever real. I am merely discussing the way this character and his alleged inventions are presented to the public. The tall, idealistic genius loner who figured it all out but was obstructed and hindered by the greediness of the west. The lost, precious notebooks with all his inventions that maybe are in the hands of the secret service that is keeping all the amazing discoveries away from the public.

Once again, this smells of Hollywood. I don't know about you, but I have first heard of Tesla only long after the invention of the internet and only for this I am even ready to accept the idea that he is a complete fabrication, that he never existed nor his inventions ever existed.
But even without going so far, the main feeling is that the character has been built up in order to sell us something. Something that can't be good, if it has to come in the appealing, spooky, hollywoodesque package.

Enters "Elon Musk".

Elon Musk allegedly co-created Tesla Motors, this other successful and supposedly time-changing start-up, back in 2003 (wasn't he busy launching SpaceX at the time? Wasn't that enough work? Wasn't he barely 30 years old? Whatever.)

The company was created in order to "commercialize the T-Zero prototype electric sports car created by AC Propulsion" ... "the Tesla Roadster uses an AC motor descended directly from Tesla's original 1882 design." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors). Good luck figuring out what the T-Zero prototype was, or why everyone has been asleep for 120 years and never noticed that such design could work.
Let's pretend any of this makes sense, like we do when we watch "Armageddon".


Elon Musk presenting the Model S, from http://newshopper.sulekha.com/elon-musk ... 735466.htm

So, in this emulation of the beginnings of the car industry and Henry Ford's "model T", Tesla motors has presented in 2012 the "model S", a completely electrical sports car.
Sure, the two legends are different: Ford's model was all about simplicity and availability. It was not a fancy product or a niche product and this is why it worked. But I guess times are changed, and today a caricature of the absurd needs of the riches is what drives the market.
There is another affinity between Ford's legend and the one that is being created around Musk: Both can be traced back to the court of Thomas Edison, as both Ford and Nikolas Tesla were part of Edison's entourage for a crucial time of their lives as inventors.

Edison means electricity. In fact, here we have an electric 416 hp sportscar that very few can afford, but that nonetheless is perfect to lure and persuade. Persuade us to what? Well, that the times have changed and we are saying goodbye to petrol. At least this is the moral that i infer from this lousy movie. One could argue that, in the spirit of times, electricity is a much better fuel not because it is cleaner (it isn't) but because it allows much more control on the amount of energy anyone of us can use and share. Control is the spirit of times.

Will free energy for everyone ever come out from the "Tesla Factory" in California? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Factory)
I am more inclined to expect designs for a world where less and less travel is accomplished independently, individually, with at least some remains of personal freedom. Just like this other fancy thing...

4) The "Hyperloop"

Hyperloop is a theoretical mode of high-speed transportation proposed by inventor and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Musk has envisioned the system as a 'fifth mode' of transportation, an alternative to boats, planes, cars and trains. The system would, in theory, be able to travel from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop

How come this vague fantasy has its own page on wikipedia? Why anything this person says has to have all this relevance? Don't you have the same feeling when you first see people like "Lady Gaga" being quoted on the media, long before anyone has even familiarized with their music?

*

References AKA places where fakery is likely to be found:

SpaceX youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/spacexchannel
Tesla motors youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TeslaMotors
"The lost journals of Nikolas tesla": http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tesla ... urnals.htm
...and another zillion of similar pages about Tesla to be found in Google.

[lux]

Tesla cars aren't cheap as you can see here.

And, if there is any truth to this CBS News article, Tesla Motors isn't just selling cars but selling a new way to sell cars that bypasses independent car dealerships and allows the mother corporation to sell direct and thus gobble up all the profits ...

Will Tesla eventually shift to a conventional model of independently owned dealerships? Or will it bring about a change in the way that state laws are written — laws generally written decades ago, when there was far less competition in the marketplace and states wanted to put big automakers on more equal footing with smaller ones?

That is, yet another way to crush small business ownership to be replaced by a global corporation.

[reichstag fireman]

Tesla Motors has the same feel about it that 80s cut-out, DeLorean Motors did. And shares a similar income source, perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_Motor_Company

[nonhocapito]

Not to sound too backwards, but let's skip ahead to a future in where all cars in the world are electric. Everyone gets back home from work and plugs the car into the outlet next to the cellphone. In this scenario, new situations emerge:

1) it has become next to impossible to fix or improve the engine of your own car. People depend now entirely on the system to provide working vehicles.

2) Individual transportation depends now on the same grid of distributed energy households and businesses depend on. When the grid breaks, everything breaks. When it is shut down (because of a fake solar storm, for example, or a fake EM weapon) everything shuts down.

Do we really need a third...?
OK, here it is:

3) The amount of electricity that needs to be produced constantly skyrockets. Yet the market of alternative energy sources does not evolve equally fast, simply because there are profound, hard limits to the ways energy can be harnessed efficiently. Suddenly, the price of electricity start rising and rising just like the price of petrol used to do. Only now it affects directly all the other activities that depend on electricity. Predictably, the masses end up all but emancipated.

Sorry for the catastrophic scenario here, but you gotta take a Hollywood script to its consequences.

[hoi.polloi]

I want to reply to the ideas. I don't discourage your exploration or your cynicism - which I would call "realism" at this point - nonhocapito. But please allow me to politely refute (with my own speculation) some of the ideas broached.

As far as cars being controlled and shut down, that is already possible. Since cars are already being manufactured in such a way that you need special proprietary tools just to open them up, I don't think going electric will change that. Also, I happen to know a few really excellent mechanics who have seen a lot of cars and they know that cars are pretty abstracted from the average car consumer already. This process has been going on a long time, and electric cars will probably not change that. In fact, it is speculated they could improve it because a system that works more like a computer works on fewer dependencies. There is a nice company (admittedly in the reaches of the creepy "research triangle" on the East Coast of the USA), which not only sells you electric scooters but also will not give it to you until they've tried training you how to build and repair it yourself - so they don't have to! It's win-win in that situation, as far as I'm concerned. Which leads to my third point about electric cars not changing much -- computers are installed in, and basically operate, (almost?) all new cars now. The government can shut your car down with a magnetic blast as it is. Electric motors might put a bit more responsibility to learn the complex systems and tools we are using on the consumer. Which I think is a good thing. I would prefer it if we all ran individualized linux stuff that we knew thoroughly instead of so much proprietary, pre-built things with back doors nobody knows about. It's kind of a dream right now, as people are today and have been throughout our (little) known history lazy receivers of power, and perhaps it is "too little too late" as microscopic microchips and genetic engineering are used to enslave us completely, but I think it gives hope. Hackers will always exist. The more complex the device, the more people will want to pry it open and watch it tick.

As far as electricity not being cleaner than oil or anything else, I am not so sure. Perhaps not the way electricity has been developed, and not inspired by pranksters and hucksters like Tesla (posthumously absorbed into that execrable IEEE council responsible for so much protection of phony science lately), but science is science. And whether we trust each other with it or not, it is a fact that it has changed the way we live our lives.

Also, as far as there not being suppressed and beneficial science, I suspect there actually is a lot of suppressed science - partially because of the unknowns of new discoveries. From a government's standpoint, you may be able to say factor "x" will not produce more than a certain number of changes to present conditions, but "x" is potentially exponential and if it interacts with the new conditions presented by x, there could be infinite potential and changes. Look at how the "industrial revolution" played out. Look at how computers continue to get faster and easier to make, but their artificial cost (pricetag) continues to be the same with each improvement - and usually with "planned obsolescence" or other built-in scams that drive the invention's actual worth into the ground.

Just listen to the motors of the SUVs struggling on 7 miles per gallon, and you know something is wrong with the design of a vehicle that previously ran at 30 or 40 in an earlier incarnation. The true value of technology is always usurped by a collaboration between the greed of the market and those who wish to maintain true control. Technology is watered down at the same time it's developed because people don't buy for every consideration in their lives (except smart consumers) -- they buy for a few concerns that diminish their ability to judge the other factors. They want a higher roof and more cup-holders, damn the gas mileage or the worth of the frame.

What I am worried a bit about is the proposal that cars are about to start driving themselves! Presented by Google! If an invention the powers that be wanted in place led to more accidents, we wouldn't know because the newspapers would be rigged in its favor. I imagine this could cut down on some drunk driving, I guess?

Also, a real problem with all of this for me -- besides the hoaxes tied up with the name "Elon Musk" as you rightfully point out -- is the incredible mining and pollution caused by all this industry and the loss of our wilds and our health as a result. How bizarre that it's all due to an artificial sexuality subconsciously evoked by the name "Elon Musk" which sounds like erotic musk, and the name "SpaceX" which has the sound of "sex" in it. It is literally as if NASA were, as you suggest, trying to seduce the viewer into a hypnotic departure from big government hoaxes into unbelievably small "privately owned" ones. (Deceptive, because it's run by the same folks as always).

[nonhocapito]

Probably we should not turn this thread into a debate over alternative energy, but anyway! A couple of months ago my bicycle got stolen. Since then, I have been walking back and forth from the small town where I live to the bigger town next to it, almost every day (the two towns are more or less 3km apart). This takes me 30 minutes instead of 10 but so what? This is to say that I am not a fan of cars. However, I also own a 10 years old FIAT petrol car that I rarely use, but that I would not change for a more modern "hybrid" or electronic car even if they just gave it to me.

I understand roughly a mechanical engine, and the problems it can have. I am not saying I can fix it, but I am not completely lost if I have to talk to a mechanic. And most people I know usually understand more than I do, because there is today a culture spontaneously evolved over many decades in understanding with basic simplicity the parts of an engine (even if the science and engineering behind it is very sophisticated and beyond the reach of most people and certainly me).

An electronic computerized engine, whose parts can only be replaced and never even taken apart, requires an entire other life to be learned. It is like fixing the little computer of a washing machine. I tried once, and it burned.
You are right in saying that we are already there, that cars like computers are purely abstract to most people -- however there are still old cars around, and one can make a choice. I was imagining a near future where we are not given the choice anymore. Probably just a bleak or cynical fantasy, I agree, but it can be useful to describe the dreams of the pigs in charge, sometimes it helps us better see where they are trying to herd us.

The way I see it, the answer to consumption and pollution is not in any fancy new technological discovery. I don't think there are secret solutions to the consumption of energy. Energy is energy and to harness it is costly one way or the other. For example solar panels, like computers, would maybe require compounds based on minerals that in turn require the enslavement of entire regions in Africa or South America because we need lots of it and we have to keep it cheap. Same as it happens with oil. Or an hydrogen-based engine would require hydrogen to be separated from water, and that would be incredibly costly too.

We are accustomed to wait for the genius solution to fix our lives, but the answer to our problems is right where we want it and we can have it tomorrow.

The solution to excessive consumption is to consume less. End of story.

Instead of wasting billions or fake billions to sell us the new thingamajig that does not make noises as it goes, all that is needed is to change this demented sub-culture based on consumerism, this madness of little gadgets and radiowaves, new shiny things that don't last.
Me, I don't want anything new. I don't need anything new. We have too much already. I want everyone to slow-the-heck-down and learn to be content. We don't need this constant stream of new things mixed with abundant lies.

But I understand the reason for all this folly: it is the desperate desire to put an end to the ugly sides of a privileged life that disgusts us, without having to renounce at the benefits. So we call on new objects or fancy ideas to cover it up, to push the ugly aside. But the ugliness is still there. Foxconn. South African miners. Shell's Nigeria. Carbon energy plants surrounded by wastelands. Etcetera.

My suggestion to the inventors of tomorrow would be to skip anything too fancy if they want to be taken seriously.

I present to you a paradox, once again about electricity. Here in the EU the choice in lightbulbs is limited now between the extremely pollutant and dangerous electronic energy-efficient bulbs, that sometimes take minutes before fully lighting up and would need a special treatment to be recycled, since they are laden with toxic components (but people just throw them in the garbage), and the halogens that seems to be decent but are also very toxic.

So, here's the paradox. If one was to invent today Edison's incandescent lightbulb, with its basic one-century-old design (now banned in the EU), that instantly switches on, can be customized in all shapes and forms and colors and intensities, can be recycled easily, does not emit radiation and is largely less toxic than all the other kinds of fancy new lightbulbs, this would be welcomed as a real progress. At least it should be in my book.

"But it consumes more electricity". So it does. Then we'll remember to turn it off more often.

[hoi.polloi]

I agree. Consuming less is a good answer that stops the encouragement of the broken system. "Vote with your dollar".

By the way, the knew spiral bulbs are also toxic when exploded because the mercury vapor flies everywhere. If any of you breaks such a bulb (and they are easy to explode by seemingly tapping a slightly faulty one just a little wrong, even after its QA ("Quality Assurance")) then please step away from the area and ventilate there with a fan for 15 minutes. I am not being sarcastic. It really is toxic. Don't buy them.

Environmentally friendly! Ha! It's greenwashing. Elon Musk is also greenwashing our basic problems. This is a term that means it is marketed as environmentally friendly, but it is not in fact actually so. Original bulbs are a little better. But like I said before, people shop based on some qualities rather than all qualities. This is why junk sells.