The One About Elon Musk, Whips and Stealth Rubber

Richard Bradbury: What do you get when you cross a tech billionaire with bull whips and rubber? No, it’s not a riddle. It’s an episode of Mattsplained, which I have to somehow keep out of libellous territory.

Richard Bradbury: I’m hoping that each of these things is a separate story…

Matt Armitage:

• Yes – let’s start with our tech billionaire.

• Any guesses? It’s not really a game. It’s Elon Musk.

• We might as well call this show Elon Watch as mattsplained.

• Every week is a busy one for Mr Musk. But this last one has been busier than most.

• Lots of SpaceX news. A massive flurry of activity over the past couple of weeks.

• Astonishingly SpaceX has launched almost 50 rockets already this year.

• Think about that for a minute: the world used to stop when NASA or another space agency launched a ship.

• Commercial space agencies are doing this every day of the week.

Richard Bradbury: That’s a bit of a stretch…

Matt Armitage:

• Not really – Space X launched 3 missions last week.

• Two on one day alone: a crewed mission for the ISS.

• And a second that launched more than 50 Starlink satellites.

• Then a launch the following Saturday which launched two further commercial satellites.

• For the Falcon 9 rocket that made that Saturday launch, it was a world record 14th lift-off.

• One of the premises for space flight to cheap enough to be commercially viable was that the rockets needed to be reusable.

• It doesn’t seem like very long ago that Space X was having huge trouble getting its boosters to land on their ocean platforms.

• Now we’re seeing these ships being used multiple times.

• It’s quite astonishing.

Richard Bradbury: And while we’re with Mr Musk…

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, Twitter. Once again we seem to be in a fast evolving mode of this story.

• And we’re recording this a few days before broadcast – so apologies if the story has moved about 270 degrees since we recorded this.

• One of the things we mentioned in passing on last week’s show is that even though Twitter and Musk seem to have come to some kind of détente.

• One which would allow the deal to proceed.

• It wasn’t clear whether the banks supporting the deal would be willing to back it any longer.

• According to a report published by Bloomberg last Saturday,

• the consortium of banks led by Morgan Stanley to provide around USD13bn in debt financing for the deal

• Now stand to lose around USD500m if the deal goes ahead.

• According to some reports, the deal with Musk didn’t allow for whether or not the banks would be able to sell that debt.

• Which is typically where they earn fees.

• Of course, since April when this was agreed, markets have been in turmoil.

• Central banks have put up interest rates and investors in the bond maretes are looking for safer havens.

• Around $400m of the projected losses are in high-yield, unsecured bonds.

• Just the kind of thing investors are looking to stay away from in the short term.

Richard Bradbury: Will the banks back out?

Matt Armitage:

• According to most analysts, due to the terms they negotiated with Musk,

• There are currently few to no reasons that might allow them to back out.

• And of course, markets will be aware that the banks will be writing down those loans.

• There is still that USD1bn walkaway clause that Musk can trigger.

• But then Musk also released a statement last weekend saying that taking over Twitter was never about the money.

• Which I’m sure will make the bankers feel even more secure.

Richard Bradbury: Is the trial still going ahead?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, so this is something we mentioned on the last show as well.

• No one had asked the judge to postpone the legal action resulting from Twitter suing Musk to force him to complete the purchase of the company.

• It seems that Twitter is not quite ready to take him at his word, with its lawyers stating that postponing or abandoning the litigation was:

• “an invitation to further mischief and delay”.

• While for their part Musk’s lawyers have expressed astonishment that the trial is to go ahead, branding the company of being incapable of taking yes for an answer.

• There you go – halfway to the break and we’re still talking about the man with the touch of musk.

Richard Bradbury: Let’s go back to that point about making money. Do we know if there is a broader business picture inside Musk’s vision for the platform.

Matt Armitage:

• He has hinted at what it could be. And this is something I’m only going to cover briefly.

• This is something that may be a full episode, or even a substack exclusive.

• He tweeted recently that he sees Twitter as an accelerant for an everything app he’s calling X.

• Now, we don’t know what X is. I imagine it marks the spot.

• And I’m not being facetious – a lot of Musk’s visions seem framed in that golden era of kids fiction.

• So x marks the spot as a pirate reference I can totally imagine.

• The speculation is that he means a kind of WeChat type app that encompasses communication, online shopping, payment gateways, access to government services.

• The kind of thing that we have in Malaysia with Grab and a ton of competitors.

• Musk is known to be an admirer of Tencent, WeChat’s parent company.

• So that’s one potential iteration of an X everything app.

Richard Bradbury: Could Twitter anchor that kind of service?

Matt Armitage:

• That’s the argument. And why we can’t get into it too deeply today because it’s very broad.

• So I’ll just touch on some of the bullet points.

• A set of quite unique circumstances have helped to create WeChat in China.

• State control over media sources being critical. So there’s less diversity in the media sphere than you see elsewhere.

• And that consolidation and close contact between the government and commercial entities makes it easier to integrate government and municipal services within apps like WeChat.

• Things like booking a medical appointment.

• And China never developed the card payment systems in the same way that other countries did.

• It went straight to mobile device and QR codes.

Richard Bradbury: How about that social positioning?

Matt Armitage:

• The core WeChat service is also different in that it’s a direct messaging service that was expanded to include a publishing aspect, Public Accounts.

• In more pluralistic countries there are more diverse spaces.

• We have this enormous media universe. And then in the social space there’s Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, TikTok.

• For DMs there’s WA, Signal, FB Messenger, Telegram.

• Plus a diversity of different electronic payment ecosystems – from your Grab, Shopee style wallets.

• So China is a very different market.

• Plus WeChat is ubiquitous in that it appeals to everyone.

• Younger consumers, the ones who are most likely to be technology early adopters, are not of Twitter.

• Couple that with the extremely deep pockets of TenCent:

• To make WeChat an everything app TenCent had to buy or partner and integrate with digital shopping companies, logistics companies, games developers.

• That’s an extremely expensive prospect to do just in the US, with no guarantee of success.

• When it’s quite likely that consumers will pick a rival platform.

• That’s not to say X can’t or won’t be done. But it’s a risky proposition for an acquisition that already looks risky.

Richard Bradbury: What’s next on the Musk do list?

Matt Armitage:

• Nice pun. I told you it had been a bit of a bumper week in the land of Elon.

• When we reported on Tesla’s Ai Day and talked about the progress on Optimus, the company’s humanoid robot.

• It seemed possible that Musk would be selling his own version of JARVIS before the company had put the CyberTruck into production.

ce the truck was announced in: 2019

• And this year Ford launched an EV version of its gazillion-selling F150 line.

• And GMC has revived the Hummer as an all-electric platform.

• We still don’t have the Cybertruck on the near horizon – Musk’s latest prediction is that it will come out next year.

Richard Bradbury: Won’t that hurt its marketability?

Matt Armitage:

• I genuinely don’t know. As a brand, Tesla is a bit like Apple.

• It seems pretty impervious to what its competitors are doing.

• Apple can launch a new phone with features that much cheaper Android devices have had for years and people still go googly eyed and buy them.

• Or rather they don’t go googly eyed – in which case they would buy an Android.

• I see Tesla in the same way – someone who wants a Tesla isn’t likely to buy a Nissan EV.

• Maybe Rivian is more of a direct competitor for the cyber truck than an EV F150 or Hummer.

• I don’t think it will stop the company selling as many of them as it can produce.

• But that’s not the point. One of the points Musk made about his Twitter acquisition was that it’s not like he’s buying a yacht.

• And that he doesn’t own any, anyway. Not that anyone was asking.

• I think it was around the time of the Cybertruck launch.

• Musk mentioned that as the vehicle is technically waterproof.

• So it could make short jouneys over water.

• He seems to have put more thought into the idea and recently talked about adding an electric propeller to the tow hitch bar.

• Which would enable it to move through the water at a few mph.

• Not exactly a speedboat. But, if it makes it from brain dart to production,

• That’s cool functionality for countries where flash flooding is an issue.

• Or you’re off-roading over water or need to make short water journeys.

Richard Bradbury: That’s not much of a story…

Matt Armitage:

• It was only supposed to be an aside. And then we got into the market proposition of the brand.

• It was a throwaway on the journey towards another Tesla truck story.

unced its Semi trucks back in: 2017

• Commercial delivery vehicles. Which is ironic as their delivery has been delayed numerous times.

• Well, it seems that we will finally see Tesla lorries on the road very soon.

• The company announced that they would start delivering the trucks to PepsiCo in the US from the 1st December.

• The trucks will have a range of 500km to 800km. And astonishingly will hit 100km/h in about 5 seconds.

• That’s incredible speed for these huge monsters – I wonder if we’ll see some limiting in them by the companies that drive them.

• In any case, if they perform as well as advertised, it could be the start of an EV revolution in commercial traffic.

• With fleets replacing ageing diesel and petrol guzzling land freight with theoretically more environmentally friendly machines.

• And so ends the section we shall call the Fables of Elon.

Richard Bradbury: When we come back, sci-fi meets the metaverse, whips, stealth rubber and space guns.

BREAK

Richard Bradbury: The Fables of Elon may be over but there are still plenty of tall tales on today’s show. I believe we’re heading into the Metaverse next.

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, so I’ve been to a couple of conferences recently where the Metaverse has been on the table.

• And the interesting thing – which we’ve mentioned before – is that there is no common perception of what the Metaverse is.

• Typically, for commercial entities anyway, the metaverse is whatever is likely to benefit them the most.

• It might be a VR paradise, a crypto utopia, a place of digital malls and avatars.

• Typically it involves some kind of walled garden – albeit it vast and lushly featured – that stops you from interacting with the next person’s metaverse vision.

ephenson who coined it in his: 1992

• And his fiction also imagined versions of cryptocurrency as well as virtual worlds.

• Stephenson has founded his own company Lamina1 with the purpose of creating an open and decentralised metaverse built on blockchain.

• There’s a whitepaper you can read on the project on Lamina1.com

• Details are still scant but the core seems to be that Lamina1 would be the core of an open metaverse.

• It would handle operability between the different builds that sit on the platform, while its blockchain handles payments and verifies the identity and authenticity of users.

Richard Bradbury: Do we know what this framework would look like?

Matt Armitage:

• That part doesn’t seem to be too clear yet.

• According to the piece in NS I read on this, there seem to be a couple of options.

• One would be a common open source or partly open-source platform – like the Linux of the metaverse – that developers could build their own metaverse frameworks on.

• The second is a kind of metaverse umbrella where you put up your metaverse tent.

• Both are possible. The thinking from the open-source world seems to prefer the former.

• The idea of lots of different metaverses with a certain degree of interoperability.

• There is already an Open Metaverse Alliance, so it will be interesting to see whether Stephenson’s Lamina1 joins that grouping.

• NS quotes Kalila Lang, the founder of open source metaverse software platform Vircadia.

• Who claims that full interoperability between different metaverse projects is dumb and largely unworkable.

• Because the characters you create and the items you own in one world may not apply to another.

• She points out that you couldn’t take your weapons from Call of Duty into Assassins Creed without breaking the game.

• So the key is to have systems that allow the physical users to move seamlessly between environments, but to retain individual characters or entities in each.

• But yes – it’s going to be interesting to see how the metaverse of Neal Stephenson’s imagination can be rendered into a physical – if digital – thing.

Richard Bradbury: I’m feeling a little uncomfortable about the territory that the show is about to dive into…

Matt Armitage:

• Whips, rubber and guns?

• Don’t worry, it’s all under control. You don’t need to press the panic button that connects you to the legal team.

• The first is s tory I saw in NYTimes.

• It turns out we don’t understand how the human brain learns to control and manipulate a whip.

• Very skilled whip performers can do all sorts of tricks like playing Jenga.

• But how? When you wield a whip it can move in infinite ways, it can rotate, it can turn and twist and ben.

• The leather is flexible and performs differently each time motion and force are applied to it.

• Yet the human brain can become skilled at utilising it.

Richard Bradbury: Is there a point in doing this?

Matt Armitage:

• Well, knowing stuff is always good.

• But yes – a lot of the things we can do and seem very simple,

• Are very complex for machines to replicate. Like tying your shoelaces.

• Or the one we’ve mentioned on the show before with autonomous cars – explaining to a machine how to stop is difficult.

• Because we know when we need to stop. We don’t always know why we know that.

• So breaking that down into discrete steps for a machine to follow is difficult.

• The same with using whips. If we have a better understanding of how the whip behaves.

• And how we process and anticipate that behaviour has potential beyond our simple understanding of the science.

• Because a lot of the objects in our world are non-rigid and wobbly.

• So understanding how we control those objects can help in advancing robotics, but also by understanding the biomechanics we can also build better prosthetics and other assistive devices.

• Scientists at Northeastern University in Boston studied 16 mostly novice bullwhippers with an almost 2m bullwhip equipped with motion detecting sensors that allowed camera to capture its position and motion at high speeds.

• One of their findings is that speed seems to be a key ingredient.

• And the position of the whip at the start.

• The more stretched out the whip to begin with and the faster the movement of the hand.

• The less potential the whip has for bending or wobbling before it strikes a target in front of it.

• There you go – a family friendly whipping story.

Richard Bradbury: I’m a little more confident about letting you talk about rubber now.

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, so this is another NS story. About stealth rubber.

• Which is not something you use for prowling around in someone’s garden, however it might sound.

• This is a material that can be used to mask submarines from sonar detection.

• Sonar works by bouncing sound waves off objects in the water.

• The discovery was made by researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China

• The material is incredibly thin at around 32mm.

• The team used an AI to create a composite rubber material designed to reflect a diverse range of soundwave frequencies.

• Parts of the rubber have rectangular strips of lead running through them.

• While other parts feature pyramid shaped air cavities.

• In simulations the material absorbed the most widely used sonar with around 95% efficiency.

Richard Bradbury: Doesn’t that mean there are still echoes?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes but they would be very faint or could be confused with underwater structures that exist normally.

• Like reefs, which you would expect to absorb a lot of the waves.

• The team still has work to do to create a material that can be easily manufactured.

• They’re also looking at ways of adapting it further so that it’s more suited to be used at the depths that submarines typically travel at.

• To be honest – I’m not sure if creating the perfect stealth submarine is a good thing.

• I don’t know if we want undetectable machines floating around our seas.

• But interesting advances in materials science is something we’ve always looked at.

• Plus – stealth rubber. What’s not to love.

Richard Bradbury: I take it you’re bringing out the big guns to end with this week.

Matt Armitage:

• And not just in a metaphorical sense.

• This is a story about another commercial space start up called SpinLaunch.

• Which uses kinetic energy projectiles to deliver payloads into orbit rather than using chemical rockets like NASA and most space start-ups.

• Yes – I know what you’re thinking – they’ve built a slingshot or a space trebuchet.

• And I would love that to be the case.

• The giant slingshot they’ve built at the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.

• Actually, looks more like an enclosed centrifuge with a barrel on one side.

• If that doesn’t help, imagine one of those wind-up things you fire hot wheels cars out of…

Richard Bradbury: But pointed at the sky rather than along a track?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, hot wheels for the new space generation.

• The slingshot is actually a vacuum sealed centrifuge. It doesn’t just look like one.

• The centrifuge spins the projectile inside and then hurls it straight up into space.

• The projectiles themselves look like giant darts, which is pretty much exactly what they are.

• The company recently released a video of a test launch – their tenth I think – conducted in September

• and carrying a payload of sensors, instruments and other goodies from NASA, Airbus and various other organisations and companies.

• The goal wasn’t to get them into space, it was to see how they fared until the launch and landing conditions.

• And though an excavator was needed to pull the projectile out of the hole it made in the desert.

• None of the equipment inside the projectile was damaged.

• I’ll put the link to the video in the shownotes. It’s very cool.

Richard Bradbury: Could they use the system to send people into space?

Matt Armitage:

• I’m guessing no. The words vacuum sealed centrifuge don’t seem very conducive to human safety.

• Also, the centrifuge creates 10,000G. So I imagine squishy humans might flex and wobble beyond their integrity limits.

• A bit like a bullwhip.

• But there is enormous potential in this approach. Firstly, there’s the energy saving and environmental factors.

• Plus, you use exactly the same equipment for each launch.

• So the hope is that they could use this approach to cut the costs to about half a million dollars per launch.

• At the moment the slingshot is only reaching heights of around 10,000 metres. So it’s well short off orbit.

• But it’s rapidly getting higher and the company already has contracts in place with NASA.

• And it was listed as one of the Top 100 most influential companies by Time Magazine earlier this year.

• So move over Elon – the Hot Wheels Space Cowboys are coming for you.