> "I work in the aerospace industry and know several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX. None of them would agree with your assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work."
Could you expand that more? Like what meaningful work did your acquaintances say Musk did for SpaceX and what valuable engineering work did they think he was capable of doing?
Maybe Musk socially engineered a kind of nerd reputational ant mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill where everyone who works in the aerospace industry knows several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX, none of whom agree with the assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work.
I know he had pocket emeralds when he was a teenager and he bought twitter and made a lot of stupid tweets, but those things don't take much time, maybe in his other time he did amazing things.
For example Jordan Peterson went on stage to say somethink (not exact quote) like: "Elon Musk wow. He wanted to built an electric car which is basically impossible and yet he went on, nobody thought he would be possible and he went on to fouund Tesla and now it works".
In real life though the first electric car was invented in 1881, because electricity and fossil fuels have always been the two obvious sources of energy for making a car.
Elon Musk wasn't the founder of Tesla, he bought it. He played a role sure. But obviously, painfully so, he didn't do the Tesla engineering alone. Tesla in fact pays shitloads of engineers to do the engineering. And Tesla is just one company making electric cars. Elon Musk brought the hype, the money, sometimes the right decisions, sometimes the wrong decisions, sometimes the toxic workplace. And he got lots of money from big government.
And sociology taught us you don't have to be rich when you start your career. But that it sure helps a lot when you have no shortage of money, good education, you are a dude, your mother tongue is english, you know the right people, you are an illegal alien but that's okay because you come from a white supremacist country, and you happen to be here during the california gold rush, I mean the silicon valley in the 90s.
When you check all those boxes, you are much more likely to become a "self made man"
Could you expand that more? Like what meaningful work did your acquaintances say Musk did for SpaceX and what valuable engineering work did they think he was capable of doing?
Maybe Musk socially engineered a kind of nerd reputational ant mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill where everyone who works in the aerospace industry knows several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX, none of whom agree with the assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work.
I know he had pocket emeralds when he was a teenager and he bought twitter and made a lot of stupid tweets, but those things don't take much time, maybe in his other time he did amazing things.