@ldrs
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I organized an intervention to stop Elon from starting SpaceX. Here is the story...
Twenty five years ago, Elon and I sat in a car on a dark stretch of Long Island highway, two neurodiverse geeks staring at the night sky and wondering what came next. We had both experienced substantial exits and felt the weight of possibility ahead of us.
When I joked about 'space' while gazing upward, neither of us imagined we were planting the seed for what would become the largest IPO in history. We spent the next two hours debating why space was so hard. In the end, rockets are fuel and metal. We also debated where to go, and it was crystal clear that Mars was the only real destination.
Upon returning to NYC, we embarked on a global tour of space, meeting space agencies and luminaries worldwide. This opened our eyes to an industry stuck in bureaucratic thinking. If things continued at that pace, it was clear that we would never explore space in our lifetime.
So, we launched Life to Mars to show the world that two ambitious young men (29 and 30 years old), could send life to Mars without any government backing or support. We planned to send and grow plants on Mars, though some were pushing us to send mice.
We had a $50 MM budget that rested on our purchase of two Russian ICBMs for $7 MM each. We assumed one ICBM would fail, and we would learn and fix everything before launching again. When Elon went back to actually buy the ICBMs, the Russians tripled the price, bringing out launch costs from a total of $14 MM to $42 MM.
Our ambitious Life to Mars plan was no longer viable.
As you might imagine, Elon was not pleased. So, he decided to start SpaceX and create his own Mars rockets. Now, this is a crazy idea, both now and at the time, so I organized a large panel of top space experts, and we ambushed him at the Georgian Hotel one morning. It was set up like an intervention for an alcoholic, but for space.
Elon looked me in the eye when leaving the room and said, "I am going to do this." The intervention failed. Elon was committed. The rest is history.
I am excited to see this IPO after 25 years of hard work. What SpaceX has done is a testament to human will and overcoming insurmountable obstacles. It's nothing short of amazing.
Congratulations, E. Amazing.
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True, when we were stuck in traffic on the way back to NYC, Adeo asked me what I was going to do after PayPal/X and I said I always wanted to do something to advance space, but didn’t think there was anything private individuals could do.
The origin of SpaceX was doing a philanthropic mission to get the public excited about life on Mars, so that NASA’s budget could be increased to achieve that goal. There was no commercial ambition at the time.
The $50M was from the proceeds of the sale of PayPal to eBay.
After learning more about the limiting factors for humanity in space, it became obvious that the issue was a lack of advancement in rocket technology, in particular the failure to develop a fully reusable rocket, without which expanding consciousness beyond Earth is impossible.
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@ldrs retuiteado
Chun Wang will take the first Starship commercial human spaceflight trip around the Moon to "ignite the fire and build momentum for Space travel"
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@ldrs retuiteado
If self-driving cars are 8x safer than human drivers and we refuse to deploy them because of one bad case, we are choosing to let hundreds of thousands of people die per year to protect our feelings about control.
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There’s a special kind of wonder that comes from experiencing autonomy not in a polished demo video, but on the exact streets you drive every day. This is a review of my second unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi ride that I took last April in Austin.
That is feels so capable, so *natural*, didn’t happen by accident. Several deep, compounding strengths showed up in quiet but powerful ways.
The car perceives everything through its cameras alone. There's no bulky extra sensors, no spinning LiDAR on the roof, no radar arrays. Just a clean, elegant vehicle reading the visual world the way humans do. That choice creates a system that feels integrated rather than bolted-on, and it performed beautifully in the mixed lighting, tree cover, and urban clutter of Austin.
That visual intelligence is trained on something no one else has at anywhere near this scale: billions of miles of real driving data collected from Teslas all over the world.
The situations I saw on my ride — busy intersections, pedestrians, cyclists, tight spots — aren’t rare edge cases in a simulator. They’re variations the AI has already studied thousands of times in similar real-world conditions. You can feel that collective experience in how confidently and proactively it drives.
Equally important is *how* it makes decisions. The autonomy stack uses end-to-end neural networks that map raw camera input straight to smooth vehicle controls. There’s no layer of brittle if-then rules trying to anticipate every possibility.
The result is driving that feels holistic and context-aware — exactly what you want when the car has to resolve a real parking or departure challenge on the fly, the way it did for me near Riverside Drive.
None of this capability appears without serious computational horsepower dedicated to training on massive video datasets. Purpose-built infrastructure for processing driving data at enormous scale has made it possible to turn raw fleet experience into rapidly improving intelligence. Every unsupervised mile contributes to the next leap forward.
It also matters that this intelligence lives inside a vehicle platform that was designed for deep, continuous integration. The Model Y has evolved alongside the autonomy software through years of over-the-air updates. That tight coupling between hardware and software — refined on the road, not just in the lab — is what lets the car feel responsive and reliable instead of hesitant or overcautious.
What stands out most is the clear destination the work has been pointed toward all along: genuine unsupervised operation on ordinary public roads. Not perpetual supervision, not limited geofenced zones, but the confidence to let the vehicle handle complex, dynamic city driving without a safety driver present.
Feeling that trust validated in practice — relaxed in the passenger seat while the car just… handles it — turns “someday” into something you and I can experience today in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, Texas.
And because the system keeps learning, the car I rode in last April is already smarter than the one from last month. Fleet-wide updates roll out regularly, folding lessons from rides just like this one into every vehicle. It’s a living technology that gets better with use rather than one that ships and then slowly ages.
As I finished this ride, that forward-looking excitement was everywhere — the same gold Cybercab energy that has me genuinely counting down to purpose-built robotaxi vehicles designed from the ground up for joyful, efficient, autonomous mobility.
The unsupervised rides we’re taking right now in current models are the essential bridge to that next chapter of Cybercab.
My in-car podcast episodes aren’t just tech demos for me. They’re a way of documenting a transformation I get to live inside my own city of Austin, and sharing the real wonder (and occasional delighted “wait… it just *did* that?!” moments) with all of you who are following along.
Cheers, Gail Alfar
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Let's never forget to give love every day, it's free and it multiplies🥰🌹🌹🌹🌹
Flowers Magic@_flowersmagic
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While in a Tesla Robotaxi In Austin, I noticed the attention to detail in the graphics on the screen. It’s the little things that all come together that allow people to love Tesla so much.
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Replies that brightened my day and I hope they brighten yours.
@RaccoonCharm @Rahabtheharlot3 @senihaozgur @jgump730 @KL1GS @JoanKathleenMa3 @CLDorsey26 @intpress @indimasala @rrvictorious @ATHE1STP0WER
🏛Architectolder@Architectolder
Something to brighten your day. The wait is almost over. Nature’s glory unfolds.
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@paranoidream @Z_XSophie You will be fine and you will learn so much once you learn to recognize the face behind each mask
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Ohhhh my it’s Gorgeous
Muse@xmuse_
This is the most beautiful kitchen window view ever! 🩵 📍La Bergerie, IsolaBella Suite, Sicily 🇮🇹
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