Thunderf00t has lost last of his marbles and remaining bits of credibility

[PlainName]

Claiming that SpaceX failed to reach orbit with Starship is literally a lie because SpaceX hasn't attempted to reach orbit yet

I dispute that it's a lie. It is factual - they have failed to reach orbit. Doesn't matter if they didn't try, it is what it is. Same as I failed to win £1m on the lottery (which I never entered).

[Yrouel86]

Claiming that SpaceX failed to reach orbit with Starship is literally a lie because SpaceX hasn't attempted to reach orbit yet

I dispute that it's a lie. It is factual - they have failed to reach orbit. Doesn't matter if they didn't try, it is what it is. Same as I failed to win £1m on the lottery (which I never entered).

You're twisting yourself into a pretzel there. You can't fail at what you don't attempt in the first place. But I guess we at the stage of the discussion where even the common english understanding is put into question, harsh symptom of EDS...

By the way according to TF, and yours apparently, bullshit logic also Atlas "failed" to reach orbit for like 15 times before succeeding so it wouldn't even be the record for Starship (as of the time of that post), again according to a completely made up bullshit logic that is...

[tszaboo]

Thunderfoot is damaging the SpaceX fan community (and apparently making himself rich) by making fun of SpaceX constantly moving the goalposts on what each mission is supposed to do? Making fun of Elon Time is now grifting? Come on.

Anyone who thinks TF is "getting rich" off this content has no clue about how much Youtubers make. I can assure you that his videos would struggle to bring in over $100 per video.
As for X, I don't believe he's monestised, and even if he was under the scheme, he'd be lucky to earn $10 a week.
TF is in it for the love of the game.

He gets let's say 2 EUR CPM, with 350M views, it puts him at 700K EUR total ad revenue.
Rich? He lives in the Czech republic, where this is equivalent to 36 years the average salary, or you can get about 2-3 houses for this.
This puts him easily in the 0.1% of the country's income wise.

[PlainName]

Claiming that SpaceX failed to reach orbit with Starship is literally a lie because SpaceX hasn't attempted to reach orbit yet

I dispute that it's a lie. It is factual - they have failed to reach orbit. Doesn't matter if they didn't try, it is what it is. Same as I failed to win £1m on the lottery (which I never entered).

You're twisting yourself into a pretzel there. You can't fail at what you don't attempt in the first place. But I guess we at the stage of the discussion where even the common english understanding is put into question, harsh symptom of EDS...

You are wrong. I have no love for TF and have slagged him off happily in the past. What I tried to do there was prevent you making your argument fail on basic grounds - those that do love TF would see it is a false statement and then consider all the rest of your arguments similarly rubbish. In fact, just as you do to TF.

TF has not lied when he says the things failed to reach orbit. He is twisting it, sure, but he is not actually lying. Because it has failed to reach orbit. It wasn't intended to, but that's just context - the fact is it hasn't got there regardless of reason.

I think you are so embedded in your hate that you think any correction, even those intended to help you, mean the other person must de facto be a TF lackey.

[fourfathom]

TF has not lied when he says the things failed to reach orbit. He is twisting it, sure, but he is not actually lying. Because it has failed to reach orbit. It wasn't intended to, but that's just context - the fact is it hasn't got there regardless of reason.

More than context.  And certainly a lie by implication.  I hope we all recognize that in this context "fail to..." means "didn't reach an intended goal".
Google's AI says:

To "fail to accomplish" means to try or intend to do a specific task, goal, or duty, but fall short of finishing or achieving the desired result

And that's how I read it.

[Yrouel86]

I think you are so embedded in your hate that you think any correction, even those intended to help you, mean the other person must de facto be a TF lackey.

Sure you keep pretending saying "failed to" for something never attempted is a totally normal honest good faith way of phrasing it...
Meanwhile in the real world that's a blatant lie and an obvious disingenuous way to imply that SpaceX had a failure during an attempt which is par for the course for TF bullshit narrative.

[PlainName]

Google's AI says:

To "fail to accomplish" means to try or intend to do a specific task, goal, or duty, but fall short of finishing or achieving the desired result

And that's how I read it.

Yes, and I would agree with you. But if money depended on it (that is, say SpaceX sued Thunderf00t) then it wouldn't pass. And the point is that those who can see no wrong with TF would use that strict interpretation to attack his accusers, which is what I was trying to get across.

It would thus be better not to say that TF lied but to say he twisted the truth, or was disingenuous, or similar that is much harder to deflect.

[Yrouel86]

Google's AI says:

To "fail to accomplish" means to try or intend to do a specific task, goal, or duty, but fall short of finishing or achieving the desired result

And that's how I read it.

Yes, and I would agree with you. But if money depended on it (that is, say SpaceX sued Thunderf00t) then it wouldn't pass. And the point is that those who can see no wrong with TF would use that strict interpretation to attack his accusers, which is what I was trying to get across.

It would thus be better not to say that TF lied but to say he twisted the truth, or was disingenuous, or similar that is much harder to deflect.

We are not in court.

If someone said "Timmy failed his driver exam" everyone would understand it as Timmy having made some sort of mistake during the exam, not that Timmy never had the exam in the first place and that someone would be called a liar especially if they had a history of making stuff up to make Timmy look bad.

[Sorama]

Claiming that SpaceX failed to reach orbit with Starship is literally a lie because SpaceX hasn't attempted to reach orbit yet

I dispute that it's a lie. It is factual - they have failed to reach orbit. Doesn't matter if they didn't try, it is what it is. Same as I failed to win £1m on the lottery (which I never entered).

That’s quite a twist…

[wraper]

Claiming that SpaceX failed to reach orbit with Starship is literally a lie because SpaceX hasn't attempted to reach orbit yet

I dispute that it's a lie. It is factual - they have failed to reach orbit. Doesn't matter if they didn't try, it is what it is. Same as I failed to win £1m on the lottery (which I never entered).

You cannot fail what you did not try to do.  So I'll write a few examples showing that your argument is ridiculous:
PlainName has failed to become a nurse. PlainName has failed to donate his home to the Russian government. PlainName has failed to kill his mom and dad. PlainName has failed to become a serial rapist.
According to your logic, all of the claims above are true and normal.

[PlainName]

Yep, none of that's happened.

[wraper]

Yep, none of that's happened.

Now think about what would be someone's impression about you if they read it in the news article about you without any prior knowledge about you.

[PlainName]

Yep, none of that's happened.

Now think about what would be someone's impression about you if they read it in the news article about you without any prior knowledge about you.

Well, I would be quite upset for them twisting things, wouldn't I. And, I might add, that seems to be the modus operandi of rags like the Daily Mail to get page views.

[EEVblog]

Thunderfoot is damaging the SpaceX fan community (and apparently making himself rich) by making fun of SpaceX constantly moving the goalposts on what each mission is supposed to do? Making fun of Elon Time is now grifting? Come on.

Anyone who thinks TF is "getting rich" off this content has no clue about how much Youtubers make. I can assure you that his videos would struggle to bring in over $100 per video.
As for X, I don't believe he's monestised, and even if he was under the scheme, he'd be lucky to earn $10 a week.
TF is in it for the love of the game.

He gets let's say 2 EUR CPM, with 350M views, it puts him at 700K EUR total ad revenue.
Rich? He lives in the Czech republic, where this is equivalent to 36 years the average salary, or you can get about 2-3 houses for this.
This puts him easily in the 0.1% of the country's income wise.

What part of my numbers didn't you understand?
I'm not making this up, the income from the Elon videos doesn't even pay for his time to make them.

Take my recent 250k video, it's about $0.70 CPM

[EEVblog]

Claiming that SpaceX failed to reach orbit with Starship is literally a lie because SpaceX hasn't attempted to reach orbit yet

I dispute that it's a lie. It is factual - they have failed to reach orbit. Doesn't matter if they didn't try, it is what it is. Same as I failed to win £1m on the lottery (which I never entered).

You're twisting yourself into a pretzel there. You can't fail at what you don't attempt in the first place. But I guess we at the stage of the discussion where even the common english understanding is put into question, harsh symptom of EDS...
By the way according to TF, and yours apparently, bullshit logic also Atlas "failed" to reach orbit for like 15 times before succeeding so it wouldn't even be the record for Starship (as of the time of that post), again according to a completely made up bullshit logic that is...

The FAA license they have had for previous flights did not allow them to go to orbit. So They couldn't have just decided arbitrary "we're feeling lucky today, let got for full orbit". Flight 14 next week is actually the first flight that has full orbit FAA approval.

It's important to remember that SpaceX deliberately chose a high cadence test flight schedule, on average one flight every 2 months for 3 years. So it's not fair to compare them with any other rocket program because it is very different.
Other program have worked based on flyign a few qualification flights and then freezing the program until operational flights. Starship is continuous rapid iteration which has no historical comparison.

[Yrouel86]

Claiming that SpaceX failed to reach orbit with Starship is literally a lie because SpaceX hasn't attempted to reach orbit yet

I dispute that it's a lie. It is factual - they have failed to reach orbit. Doesn't matter if they didn't try, it is what it is. Same as I failed to win £1m on the lottery (which I never entered).

You're twisting yourself into a pretzel there. You can't fail at what you don't attempt in the first place. But I guess we at the stage of the discussion where even the common english understanding is put into question, harsh symptom of EDS...
By the way according to TF, and yours apparently, bullshit logic also Atlas "failed" to reach orbit for like 15 times before succeeding so it wouldn't even be the record for Starship (as of the time of that post), again according to a completely made up bullshit logic that is...

The FAA license they have had for previous flights did not allow them to go to orbit. So They couldn't have just decided arbitrary "we're feeling lucky today, let got for full orbit". Flight 14 next week is actually the first flight that has full orbit FAA approval.

It's important to remember that SpaceX deliberately chose a high cadence test flight schedule, on average one flight every 2 months for 3 years. So it's not fair to compare them with any other rocket program because it is very different.
Other program have worked based on flyign a few qualification flights and then freezing the program until operational flights. Starship is continuous rapid iteration which has no historical comparison.

To clarify it's not like SpaceX wanted to go orbital and the FAA said no, SpaceX decided to not attempt orbit until they were confident they could reliably deorbit Starship.

Anyway, preaching to the choir here... you might want to explain it to TF though...

[Psi]

Anyone who thinks TF is "getting rich" off this content has no clue about how much Youtubers make. I can assure you that his videos would struggle to bring in over $100 per video.
As for X, I don't believe he's monestised, and even if he was under the scheme, he'd be lucky to earn $10 a week.
TF is in it for the love of the game.

I disagree because his patreon is set to 'per video', rather than the usual per month, and he has 2,602 members.
The tier options are between $1 and $100.
Assuming the average per-person is between $3 and $5, that's around  $7,806 - $13,010 per video.
His YouTube channel does around 24 videos per year, so $187,344 - $312,240  a year  + his YouTube income.
That's a pretty nice USD income for someone in Czechia. I think the avg yearly income in Czechia is around $30k.
So he kind of is "getting rich" off making content. He can likely save/invest a pretty large % of his income, even if he's spends 2x or 3x the average person.

I am of course making some assumptions here about what he gets average per user. but I think $3-$5 is fair. Assuming most users on $1 or $3 and all the high rollers drive the avg up a bit.
His video count per year is likely higher than 24. I'm sure he will have patreon-only video's that I've not counted. I simply looked at his YouTube channel and counted everything that said 1-yr ago and 2-yr ago, then divided by 2 to get the 24 number.
 
So he is making money and likely has a really good savings account.
I think he's generating lots of bad karma by stoking hate for cash, but meh, he's free to make his own decisions.

[EEVblog]

I disagree because his patreon is set to 'per video', rather than the usual per month, and he has 2,602 members.

2600 members also includes the free membership tear, which the vast majority are on.
Based on mine and other creators Patreons I know about, Phil would be luck to have 1000 paying members.

And if he was really trying to "make bank" with a per-video revenue model, he'd be pumping out Elon hate videos like there is no tomorrow.
But he's not even doing one a month, hardly an example of being in it for the money.

His video count per year is likely higher than 24.

It's not, he's done 11 videos in the last year, three of which are the recent science ones.

I'm sure he will have patreon-only video's that I've not counted.

He doesn't. There are no exclusive videos on Patreon, he only posts the ones that are public.

And the constant comments he gets on videos it's fairly clear that people subscribed and pay because of the science and busted videos, not really because of the Elon hate videos.
If anything the 20 Elon videos in a row probably cost him a lot of paying Patrons. His Patreon posts get very low engagement (not uncommon), sometimes only two comments.

If he really genuinely cared about the income he gets and was "in it for the money" then he'd wouldn't have made 20 Elon videos in a row potentially pissing off a lot (majority?) of his audience. It's the topic of this very thread.
What he would do instead is more general busted videos on other topics and more science videos to round it all out.
I just counted 28 videos in row Elon related, as a creator you clearly wouldn't do this if you were in it for the money, you wouldn't take the risk alienating your audience. Instead he's doing it for the love of the game.

[Psi]

I disagree because his patreon is set to 'per video', rather than the usual per month, and he has 2,602 members.

2600 members also includes the free membership tear, which the vast majority are on.
Based on mine and other creators Patreons I know about, Phil would be luck to have 1000 paying members.

That's a good point, I wasn't aware free members counted as being Patreons in the number.

His video count per year is likely higher than 24.

It's not, he's done 11 videos in the last year, three of which are the recent science ones.

I intentionally didn't use this year because it's not finished yet.
Hm.. You mean he isn't posting the science ones on patreon so they don't count as income.  Ok, fair enough.
I just discovered that the patreon search allows you to see number of videos published by year.  It should be a much better reflection of videos that count towards his patreon income.
2025 was 15 videos
2024 was 25 videos
2023 was 37 videos
2022 was 43 videos

So avg 120/4 = 30 videos a year average.  But there's the obvious downward trend. Not sure why. Perhaps as he gets more patreon subscribers he feels a bit guilty making lots of videos as the income per video keeps going up. He might be reducing the number of videos to keep the income around the same while getting more free time, dunno.

I'm sure he will have patreon-only video's that I've not counted.

He doesn't. There are no exclusive videos on Patreon, he only posts the ones that are public.

Ok, it was just an assumption as most people do that on patreon.

If he really genuinely cared about the income he gets and was "in it for the money" then he'd wouldn't have made 20 Elon videos in a row potentially pissing off a lot (majority?) of his audience. It's the topic of this very thread.
What he would do instead is more general busted videos on other topics and more science videos to round it all out.
I just counted 28 videos in row Elon related, as a creator you clearly wouldn't do this if you were in it for the money, you wouldn't take the risk alienating your audience. Instead he's doing it for the love of the game.

I wasn't suggesting that he's only in it for the money.  I just disagreed with the comment that he's not getting rich

Even if you assume he only has 1000 patreons who pay.  And the payment is at the low end of $3 avg.  So $3k per video, that would correlate to this
2025 was 15 videos - $45,000
2024 was 25 videos - $75,000
2023 was 37 videos - $111,000
2023 was 43 videos - $129,000  (Yes I know he probably didn't have the same number of patron's back then, this is just ballpark guesstimate)

And that is extra income above his normal job that most likely covers his bills/food
I think most people would consider that "getting rich" off his videos to some degree, even if that isn't his goal.
To be clear, he has worked for that money, making videos is hard and time consuming. But anyone getting that money above their normal salary is accumulating wealth at a rate way higher than the vast majority of people who live paycheck to paycheck, or close to it.

[tszaboo]

Thunderfoot is damaging the SpaceX fan community (and apparently making himself rich) by making fun of SpaceX constantly moving the goalposts on what each mission is supposed to do? Making fun of Elon Time is now grifting? Come on.

Anyone who thinks TF is "getting rich" off this content has no clue about how much Youtubers make. I can assure you that his videos would struggle to bring in over $100 per video.
As for X, I don't believe he's monestised, and even if he was under the scheme, he'd be lucky to earn $10 a week.
TF is in it for the love of the game.

He gets let's say 2 EUR CPM, with 350M views, it puts him at 700K EUR total ad revenue.
Rich? He lives in the Czech republic, where this is equivalent to 36 years the average salary, or you can get about 2-3 houses for this.
This puts him easily in the 0.1% of the country's income wise.

What part of my numbers didn't you understand?
I'm not making this up, the income from the Elon videos doesn't even pay for his time to make them.

Take my recent 250k video, it's about $0.70 CPM

I understand your numbers, but I worked with a different calculation. 0.7 USD CPM is very low end, I'm not sure why you are getting such a low number. I worked with the average number for vlogs, which is probably his category. And just multiplied it with his total viewcount, and this is the number you get.
Not worth his time is also relative. Income varies wildly per country, and he lives is a country which has 1/4th of the average income as Australia. So if he can slap together a video in 2 hours just rambling into a microphone, and then give the editing to a local university student, it's well worth it.

But let's work with your numbers, getting rich is also relative. The average liquid (not in your house) net worth in the Check republic is about 4000-6000 USD. Even with 0.7 USD CPM and 350M views, that's 245000 USD. The locals would call that rich.

[Psi]

Being rich is very subjective. Yes.

[EEVblog]

Hm.. You mean he isn't posting the science ones on patreon so they don't count as income.  Ok, fair enough.

He IS posting the science ones on Patreon, and they get more comments comments then the Elon ones. The SpaceX IPO video got zero comments on Patreon. It's kinda clear that his Patreon audience are a bit sick of all the Elon videos and want  some other busted topics or science stuff.

I wasn't suggesting that he's only in it for the money.  I just disagreed with the comment that he's not getting rich

He's a Youtuber that has done well for himself, for sure, but if you think he's milking the Elon thing because it makes him more money, you are wrong.
If we was trying to milk it for all it's worth then he's be pumping out videos because his Patreon model is per-video, but he's not. He would also publish them on Patreon the instant they are up, or even before, but he's not, in fact he's always saying sorry for posting a Patreon video up late.
It is very obvious that the 28 Elon videos in a row were costing him subscribers, most likely Patrons, and reputation. He doesn't care because he's in it for the love of the game, not the money.

[EEVblog]

So if he can slap together a video in 2 hours just rambling into a microphone, and then give the editing to a local university student, it's well worth it.

He doesn't, his videos take lot of work and he edits them himself.

[Psi]

Yep good video editing takes way longer than people think.

I've only done it a few times in my life but yes, it's very time consuming.

I did this Space MacGyver / SG1 mashup 17 years ago. https://youtu.be/m45YqOin2sg And that was all using preexisting footage except for the 3DstudioMax font animation/explosion thing.
Anyone who has to record all the footage themselves has it even harder again.

[EEVblog]

New video. 4 in row now.