🇺🇸 Do you think spending $2,358 per deportation is worth it to carry out Trump’s mass-deportation plan?
🅰️ Yes — enforce it 🇺🇸
🅱️ No — too expensive 💰
Cast your vote! 🗳️
A director who doesn't come up to the builder's heels makes a four-hour film about him.
Yesterday in Venice, Alex Gibney's nearly four-hour documentary "Musk" had its world premiere. It is a classic case of someone who has spent a career telling other people's stories taking on a man who actually builds those stories with rockets, cars, satellites, and infrastructure, not slides.
Alex Gibney is an acclaimed documentarian. An Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, Emmys for Going Clear on Scientology, high-profile films on Enron, Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. His specialty is exposing corporations, cults, and frauds. He does it skillfully and with a thesis. The problem starts when he applies the same method to someone who is not selling an illusion, but hardware that either flies or blows up in front of the entire world.
Gibney's fuel is controversy. Elon's fuel is the pursuit of truth hard, engineering truth, the kind that either works on the test stand or it doesn't. It would have been enough to make a film based on facts. Instead we got another rut that fits the slogans of provocation: megalomaniac, confidence man, threat to democracy, an AI avatar reciting old quotes, ex-wives, his father, a former partner. Musk said in 2023 it would be a hit piece. After the premiere, a large share of reviewers effectively agreed with him.
I don't know about you, but four hours of falsified formulas would bore me. Instead I watch how much Elon has already done. His energy is extraordinary. Tesla changed the car industry. SpaceX brings rockets back. Starlink works. Starship stands on the pad and prepares for the next flight. This is not a PowerPoint. It is steel, fuel, engines, and people who cannot hide failure in the edit suite.
A weak documentary like this is a crumb on the shoulder of his jacket. Now it depends on us when and how quickly that blown-off crumb a utopian attention vampire is simply starved of attention. You could list the names of people who tried to take Elon's energy. Energy is the most precious thing we have. Anyone who steals it with slogans, gossip, and a four-hour indictment that excludes the main subject is sowing under his own feet.
Gibney: you reap what you sow. If you have a shred of shame, look at the list of Elon's accomplishments. Look at what kind of person he is for the world and what he does around himself so that things get better cars that drive, internet from orbit, rockets that return, attempts at a brain-computer interface, AI that is supposed to be more than another chatbot. You can dislike his tweets, his political alliances. You cannot honestly erase the scale of what was physically built.
A good documentarian should stand, at least for a moment, in the shoes of the person he is portraying. Gibney did not just fail to do that. He took a measure cut for Enron and Holmes and held it up to a man who lands rockets. He left Elon's shoes in the edit suite. Elon walked on barefoot and kept building.
One man tells stories about the world from an editing chair. The other moves that world. A four-hour film will not change that. At most it will confirm what people who already disliked Musk already believed. Everyone else can blow the crumb off the jacket and keep going.
History does not judge a man by the length of a film. It judges him by what is still in the air when the camera has stopped running.
Controversy feeds on attention. Building feeds on repetition. One vanishes when you look away. The other keeps flying.
You can cut a man together in four hours. You cannot cut a landing together.
A documentary can be switched off. The work cannot.
I have spent 23 years documenting the global LED transition of city lighting from space.
Across my 4 missions to the ISS, I have photographed every major city on Earth, building a data set of the gradual replacement of sodium vapor lighting with LEDs.
The warmer, yellow-orange of gas discharge lamps has been phased out worldwide to multi-colored LEDs, citing energy savings and environmental reasons.
Widespread adoption has markedly changed the way our cities look from orbit, and as many have pointed out, how they feel to those on the ground!
Here is a collection of the most striking before-and-after photos I have observed:
📡 Our new cooperation on satellite connectivity takes off today.
With immediate results.
North Greenland will see massive improvements in internet access in the coming days.
And by October, remote communities in East Greenland will also have better, faster internet!
Palantir CEO Alex Karp says the rise of Germany's AfD party is due to "very deep and large migration into Germany without the buy-in of the German people, and without an honest discussion of the consequences."
"AfD is much stronger than they appear. I have friends who 5 years ago were telling me they would never vote for the AfD, who are voting for the AfD, who are social democrats."
"And then when the AfD is polling at 40%—there's another 10 points above that that would vote for them if they weren't the AfD."
Via Mathias Döpfner
Starlink with @MinCapHum_Ar and @ENACOMArgentina will provide 6,000 kits to rural schools in Argentina, giving thousands of students and teachers fast, reliable internet.
Teachers can build lesson plans with digital resources, while students can join online classes, use digital libraries, and learn through a variety of tools that were not accessible before.
BREAKING: Starlink’s high-speed internet is now available for Hawker 700, 800 & 900 jets after AeroMech received FAA approval.
Operators can get up to 1 Gbps downloads, 100 Mbps uploads and latency as low as 20 ms over land, water and remote areas.
This was the mission that launched Elon Musk’s original Tesla Roadster into space.
On February 6, 2018, Falcon Heavy made its first-ever flight, sent Starman into orbit around the Sun, and landed two boosters side by side.
Eight years later, the Roadster is still flying.
Today we completed our 700th successful Falcon mission! Proud doesn’t even cover it. The @SpaceX team continues to raise the bar on reliability. Thank you to all of our customers for flying with us! Extra fun to celebrate yet another major milestone with @SES_Satellites