Fixing the reflecting pool

 

emily miller

@emilymiller

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! Trump’s “pool guy” breaks his silence to deny claims of a “no-bid” contract, budget overruns and excessive profits on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool repairs. Watch:

Contractors behind the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool repairs are breaking their silence. Eddie Wood (Atlantic Industrial Coatings) and Marcus Logan (Mid Atlantic Industrial Coating) set the record straight on the misleading media attacks. • It was a sole-source contract — the government specifically chose polyurea and Rhino Linings. • Not over budget: Still the original $13.1M proposal. Extra ~$1M for added granite work brought it under $15M total. • 20% buffer is standard for this industry. • They’ve never worked for Trump, his companies, or anyone connected. This isn’t a swimming pool — it’s an industrial containment system built for a perfect mirror reflection.

https://x.com/emilymiller/status/2062678453283848612?s=20

Origin of Space X and now (June 2027)

 

Adeo Ressi

@adeoressi

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.

https://x.com/adeoressi/status/2063327234929447277?s=20

____

Muskonomy

@muskonomy

NEWS: Billionaire investor Ron Baron has placed a $1 billion order for SpaceX IPO shares and says he is not selling in his lifetime.

Baron, the founder and CEO of Baron Capital, laid out his case on a client call. His firm has put about $2 billion into SpaceX across 27 employee tender rounds since 2017, a position now worth roughly $15 billion after compounding at 54% per year. He believes SpaceX, coming public at under $2 trillion, will reach $10 trillion to $30 trillion within 10 to 15 years and become the largest, most profitable company on the planet. People inside the company tell him he is lowballing it. On Starlink alone, Baron projects 300 million subscribers and about $1 trillion in annual revenue within a decade, making it worth around $14 trillion on its own.

https://x.com/muskonomy/status/2063582381949452584?s=20

DogeDesigner

@cb_doge

·

1h

SpaceX was one launch away from dying. Three Falcon 1 launches had already failed. Money was running out. Another failure could have been the end of the company. Then Falcon 1 Flight 4 lifted off from a tiny island in the Pacific and became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit. That single launch changed everything. Rest is history.

https://x.com/cb_doge/status/2063713048679047435?s=20

First principles: "Magic Wand Number" and "Idiot Index"

 

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

·

7h

Helpful tool for improvement. It’s just physics thinking in the limit.

Eric Jorgenson  

@EricJorgenson

Everyone can use

@elonmusk

's "Magic Wand Number" and "Idiot Index" They're universal ideas, helpful in any industry.

Bobcat02 ◎

@TxBobcat02

This example is nothing more than an adapatation to Value Analysis & Value Engineering (VAVE) where you aim to minimize cost per function in a design, by simplification of parts and assembly geometries and materials, for example. The FAST diagram is a useful tool in this discipline.

Web3 Celebrity

@web3celebrity

The "Idiot Index" is a rebranded version of "materials are cheap, production is expensive." Engineers have been thinking this way since long before Elon. Look up Toyota's "Five Whys," Amazon's working-backwards process, Intel's constraint analysis, stripping away assumptions to identify the bottlenecks is pretty standard for engineers. Government contractors e.g. NASA optimize for specifications. Private companies optimize for specifications and cost. That's why the final price matters. Engineers building products with 50–200x material markups are often working in government or cost-plus environments where final price isn't the primary constraint. Private companies have a direct incentive to eliminate waste because they're spending their own money.

 Deep₿lueCrypto 

@DeepBlueCrypto

Elon Musk’s first principles thinking—boiling problems down to their most fundamental truths and rebuilding from there—has been the intellectual engine behind every company he leads. At Tesla, Musk refused to accept the auto industry’s incremental tweaks to gasoline engines or early electric vehicles. He deconstructed transportation to its atomic core: energy must be sustainable, batteries are collections of raw materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt whose costs are dictated by physics and chemistry, not legacy margins, and autonomy is ultimately a question of sensors, photons, and real-time neural-net reasoning. From those bedrock realities he engineered the Gigafactory model, 4680 cell architecture, and Dojo supercomputers, proving that electric vehicles could be not just viable but superior in every dimension—range, cost, performance—while simultaneously solving the planet’s energy equation. At SpaceX, the same method shattered the aerospace establishment’s assumption that orbital access would always be ruinously expensive. Musk asked the simplest questions: What is a rocket made of? What do the raw materials—aluminum-lithium alloys, carbon fiber, liquid oxygen, and methane—actually cost on commodity markets? The answer was a fraction of the price NASA or Boeing paid for finished vehicles. Reasoning upward from those facts, SpaceX built Falcon 9 and Starship with ruthless vertical integration, reusable first stages that land like feathers, and a factory cadence measured in days rather than years. The result is launch costs that have fallen more than tenfold, opening the solar system to humanity rather than reserving it for governments and billionaires. Neuralink applies first principles to the most intimate frontier: the human brain itself. Musk rejected the medical device industry’s cautious, low-bandwidth implants. He broke the problem into fundamentals—neurons communicate via electrical spikes, the skull is a Faraday cage, data bandwidth must eventually rival the human visual cortex—and started over. Ultra-thin polymer threads, robotically inserted at speeds that avoid tissue damage, thousands of electrodes per thread, wireless power and data: every design choice flows directly from physics and biology rather than “this is how brain interfaces have always been done.” The long-term vision is not incremental therapy but symbiosis—merging biological cognition with silicon so that humans can keep pace with artificial intelligence rather than be outcompeted by it. The Boring Company took the same scalpel to urban transportation. Traffic, Musk realized, is not solved by wider roads or more buses; those are analog solutions to a digital-era problem. He asked: What are tunnels fundamentally? Holes in dirt and rock. Why are they so slow and expensive? Because machines, processes, and regulations have accreted decades of unnecessary complexity. Stripping away the legacy, The Boring Company engineered the Prufrock machine—faster, smaller, continuously operating—and turned excavated soil into useful bricks. The result is not just cheaper tunnels but an entirely new geometry for cities: multi-level underground loops that move cars at airplane speeds beneath the surface congestion. At xAI, first principles thinking is applied to the most ambitious question of all: the nature of the universe itself. Rather than optimizing for profit, clicks, or corporate alignment, Musk asked what intelligence and truth-seeking actually are at their core—curiosity-driven reasoning grounded in verifiable reality, not training data contaminated by ideology or commercial incentives. From that foundation xAI is building Grok to accelerate scientific discovery, to answer questions with maximum truthfulness, and to help humanity understand the cosmos the way a physicist understands gravity: from first principles up. Just relentless reduction to the bedrock laws of physics and relentless reconstruction toward deeper understanding.