At a dinner party a while back some Elon Musk fanboy said something to the effect of ‘You guys must HATE it that Space-X is having all this success’ – as if the organization I work for was somehow in competition with them- in reality we finance a lot of what they do- I explained that in that first demonstration of the booster launching and then returning work came to a stop as a large fraction of us watched it happen and cheering at its success.

He is another useful idiot billionaire that was manipulated by appealing to his ego to work for Putin’s goals… just like our last president.

I can appreciate some of the things his companies like Tesla and Space X do, while at the same time recognizing that he is a shitty human being… and a true danger to our nation.

In an uncharacteristically brazen Twitter outpour, Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested that Ukraine should give up parts of its territories and other rights to reach a peace agreement with Russia — or else risk a bloody end to the conflict, culminating in a full blown “nuclear war.”

In short, even for Musk, it’s exactly the kind of opinion absolutely nobody asked for. Even his most ardent supporters were taken aback.

“Please snap out of it, E,” suggested SpaceX aerospace engineer Sid Chambers.

“You are using [P]utin propaganda talking points,” she added. “Fix this.”

Renata Konkoly, one of Musk’s most outspoken boosters on Twitter, issued a rare rebuke.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has weighed in on Elon Musk — and unsurprisingly, he’s bullish.

“As far as private business and Elon Musk is concerned,” Putin said at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum, per a Reuters translation, “he is undoubtedly an outstanding person. This must be recognized, and I think it is recognized all over the world.”

Putin added that he thinks Musk is “an active and talented businessman and he is succeeding a lot, including with the support of the American state.”

Though he didn’t mention it explicitly, the Russian president’s comments come just days after Musk revealed that he’d denied a Ukrainian request for Starlink internet access on the front lines of its war with Russia — a denial that essentially sabotaged Ukraine’s military in its defense against the invaders.

Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin’

Now, despite the setbacks Russia has suffered on the battlefield, Hill thinks Putin is undaunted. She sees him adapting to new conditions, not giving up. And she sees him trying to get the West to accede to his aims by using messengers like billionaire Elon Musk to propose arrangements that would end the conflict on his terms.

“Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin,” Hill says.

But some… some people get a thrill out of that- they seek it out… I never understood that. Its a perversion, in my opinion. A couple of times I was faced with a choice- which way I would go. So far I have thankfully been able to choose to work for research, exploration, increasing humanity’s understanding…

I don’t kid myself… almost ANY work – particularly work using lasers in the way I use them- has ‘dual-use’ potential- a knife wielded by a surgeon can save lives, but if in the hands of a thug it brings death… But I like to think that- by working on the projects I have worked on- I have kept my hands somewhat clean.

I guess I can see the attraction to working on the ‘dark side’- it pays better, you have access to more resources, you get to work on the literal bleeding edge of technology. I can see how the thrill of that challenge would be seductive. To work on solving challenging problems that %99.99999 of humanity is not even aware of… you could become so intoxicated by that, that you manage to forget that the end goal is to kill people.

Its not so much that I fear it would be too hard to work on such things… I fear that I might find it too easy. I don’t want to discover that I am a person that can do that and sleep well at night.

My job description oscillates between scientist and engineer- the line between the two is fuzzy. You are correct that pure engineers have a higher percentage of conservatives in their ranks than the scientists. Maybe it has to do with the fact that scientists are more likely to embrace ideas and ideals – a long term view that all knowledge is useful in the long long term, while engineers are more focused on near term applications…

I once worked at (but not for) an institution that did a lot of defense related work (my work was NOT defense related)… A talk was given there by the scientist leading the Event Horizon Telescope project (this was ~2010 long before they got that famous image of the black hole). At the end of that fascinating talk, some A-hole asked him contemptuously “But what practical use is all this!? That a lot of brain power being spent on something that has no practical uses!”

The scientist gave some examples of how the work required advancing technology to make it possible and how that advancement could benefit other areas … but finished by saying something like “But I am NOT going to apologize for basic research, its worth doing solely for improving our understanding of the universe”

I clapped harder for that than I have for any other talk I have been to. For some brilliant neanderthal who spends his life and his gift of genius working on better ways to make a more lethal weapon to belittle the work of someone trying to unravel mysteries of cosmology was infuriating to say the least.