> Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent.
He's had failures before. But this line seems unfair. He was neither the first person in electric cars (a few notable failures before him) nor in rockets (e.g. Boeing)... but he was able to lead a team that figured out some of the key tech and the business models to make these things viable. Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.
If you want to get an idea, why not listen to some engineers that have worked with him? There are plenty of those around, for example, Andrej Karpathy talked a bit about working with Elon recently - https://youtu.be/cdiD-9MMpb0?t=5668
Unless it was off the record, I wouldn't. There are all kinds of potential conflicts of interests. These include ownership in companies where valuation is directly connected to Musk'a perceived competence and his ability to help/hinder their career.
Andrej doesn't work at Tesla anymore, but it sounded like he would want to leave the option to return open, so presumably he wouldn't want to burn bridges. I think most people prefer not to criticize people they know well publicly, anyhow.
He also started both Tesla and SpaceX with a "fortune" of about $300 million. $300 million is of course a lot of money. The reason I put fortune in quotes is because he was looking to get into aerospace. An industry where NASA, and their near century of experience, ended up paying an aggregated cost of more than $1.6 billion per flight, over 134 flights.
A guy with a vision and a few hundred million, in this context, has what many would have said would be a 0% chance of success. Many people somehow seem to have this view that if you just have enough money you can solve any problem in existence. It's probably just the consumerist mindset taken to its [not so] logical extremes - where literally anything is for sale, even that which doesn't exist.
Tesla at the time Musk took over was literally three guys, a cool name, and some big ideas. He then took over on design, direction, and development - as well as starting to bleed money trying to make it all happen. And ultimately the others would be out of the company before their first product hit production. They deserve a footnote, but their ultimate role in the company was effectively zero.
He effectively did start a new company. Their entire series A funding round was $7.5 million in total, of which $6.5 was Elon. So he became the near exclusive owner of a new company with a few like-minded guys of a similar background.
I don't think he had some nefarious plan to kick them out from the get go. Sometimes personalities and ideas just clash, as theirs obviously did.
It could even be a fucking pet monkey, he still didn't start it.
And that is the fucking problem. More and more shit if coming up about him (latests I saw today was an 'expose' about his degree and maybe even being illegally in the country, which I don't know if it is true or not) but people seem to believe whatever shit comes out of his mouth over facts. Was he pard of the success in Tesla, yes. Was he a founder/started it? Absolutely fucking not. Was Tesla be able to succeed without the government tax credits/investments, absolutely fucking not. But now that it is in a good path, he even moved state to avoid that 'government' issues. He is a fucking liar and a psychopath, but because he has money, people keep gargling his balls like they taste like candy mixed with wild truffles.
He's had failures before. But this line seems unfair. He was neither the first person in electric cars (a few notable failures before him) nor in rockets (e.g. Boeing)... but he was able to lead a team that figured out some of the key tech and the business models to make these things viable. Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.