Gerry Hudak

SpaceX millionaires 4,000 x $1mil , 400 x $100 mil Every employee who joined before the first succesful launch made (unless they sold early) more than $100 million. SpaceX lists June 12 at ~$1.75T. Work backward from the cap table. At $1.75T, clearing $100M takes ~0.0057% of the company. - 2002–2008, first ~500 in: joined at a ~$50M company. Held to $1.75T = a 17,000x. The core of the club — maybe 150–250 left holding - September 2008, SpaceX has first successful launch - 2010–2016: joined at $1B–$10B. Needs a senior grant — directors, principal engineers, early Starlink. ~100–200 - C-suite + board: Shotwell, Johnsen past $1B. A layer of SVPs below them clears $100M on equity, not salary. ~20–40 - Post-2016: joined at $20B–$350B. To hit $100M you'd have needed ~0.4% of the company. Impossible for an employee. This is the millionaire tier — almost none reach $100M The tally: ~400–500 at $100M+ A few dozen above $500M A handful of billionaires past Musk Same building. Same mission. Two orders of magnitude apart — set entirely by what year you walked in. Early isn't a strategy. It's a date stamp.

NEWS: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation. It's linked to Jeff's Project Prometheus AI startup, which aims to build AI products for engineering and manufacturing in fields like computers, aerospace and automobiles. (via WSJ)

"The most important thing in the next 3-4 years is data centers in space. In every way, data centers in space, from a first principles perspective, are superior to data centers on earth. In space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day. The sun is 30% more intense, which results in six times more irradiance than on Earth. So you don't need a battery. The cooling in these data centers is incredibly complicated. Space cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. Link satellites with lasers, and you have a faster and more coherent network than any data center on Earth."

Working on root cause Starlink checks out, of course it's perfect, working flawlessly when I hooked it up to a power supply. What an amazing piece of technology. Should have never doubted it. Starlink team reached out and provided valuable insights on SNR. The fiberglass enclosure was bone dry. You can see the absolute overkill epoxy potting I did around the Starlink itself. It's 3m film adhesive bonded to the fiberglass lid, acting like an RF transparent radome. Problem is somewhere upstream, in the entombed wax filled box. I wasn't seeing any voltage from my mosfet that was delivering 28v to the Starlink channel. Something somewhere failed. And an intermittent failure at that. Maybe wax expanded and popped the FET off the PCB. Lots of questions that'll only be answered if I melt it all out. What a mess. It did it's job however. I'm on the fence about doing another rev of electronics. Maybe I will eliminate the PCB altogether? I'll dig through the onboard data and see what the heck was going on during the comms outage. It seems like the Pi and all sensors were online and happy during the entire trip. Batteries were fully charged and cameras were on when it was recovered. Super lucky to have it back. I'm through the trough of disappointment and now ready to get it back on the water. We made it 10 miles and the rudder, prop, and stability were great. No reason it can't go thousand if we fix electrical/software.

I don't know how many different ways to explain it man SpaceX has a reputation for: 1) overworking employees 2) having a crappy office culture 3) paying below market rate (I've talked to numerous students that didn't go to SpaceX because they got better offers elsewhere) Plus Brownsville and McGregor aren't exactly exciting destinations for someone in their early 20s I'm not making this stuff up. Students talk to each other and this is what a lot of them think. And it's not unique to UTSA. It's on SpaceX to change that perception if they want to open the aperture of their talent pool Or don't, I honestly don't care