Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.
I think this is taking it too far. There are a lot of money and hype guys out there, none of the rest of them transformed the automotive and space industries. Most of them were shoveling money into "disrupt laundry" startups instead.
> Just to be clear, you're saying that Shotwell has contributed more to SpaceX than Elon?
Which contribution do you believe that Elon Musk had on the development of reusable rockets?
Let's put it this way: if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Would we have reusable rockets in the same timeline as SpaceX, absolutely not. The proof is all the other rocket companies that have failed to do so, including government entities.
So yah obviously if Musk never founded SpaceX, we would not have reusable rockets right now.
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
> do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Correct.
You don't need a hypothetical, it's not like SpaceX is the first rocket making entity in the world. Why were all the other darlings incapable? SpaceX didn't invent a new branch of rocketry after all. And they hired from the pool of engineers who could have and did work at all the other rocket companies.
How did this same pool of scientists and engineers end up with a viable reusable rocket with 300+ successful landings only when they came together at SpaceX?
There are many reasonable points of criticism one can make for Musk. 99% of Musk-hate I see on HN isn't among them though. It's more reminiscent of the kind of nonsense articles Tesla short sellers used to publish back in 2016-17.
The original Tesla guys recognized and agreed Musk was a founder as part of their settlement, and this is now both the formal and legal truth of Tesla. I think some others were also recognized as founders too. The two initial guys didn’t really achieve anything prior to Musk and other early people joining.
Calling SpaceX Gwynne’s baby is just straight up misinformation. Talk to actual employees from SpaceX, especially early on. They’ll tell you that Musk actually does get involved in various deep aspects of the vehicles. You might not be aware, but Gwynne Shotwell was in BD not product.
I'm sure Elon does get involved. The question is, does he get involved in a constructive way.
All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage".
I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.
His two first successful business endeavors were web-based services (i.e. software), and he had no real experience with or education in cars or rockets before he joined/founded Tesla and SpaceX respectively (he’s got a bachelor’s degree in economics and one in physics).
I think he’s probably a smart guy who’s worked hard to learn as much as possible about the fields he’s entered into, but I find it hard to believe that he’s a world-leading technical mind at either. The reason he’s struggling comparatively with Twitter is partly that he doesn’t take it seriously, and partly that he has other ambitions for it (“X the everything app”) than what it actually is.
The main attributes behind his success are his obsessive desire to achieve certain goals, and his willingness to take on a very large amount of risk over and over again (he could easily have gone bankrupt several times, but so far things have mostly gone his way).
Edit: Another reason he’s had a tough time with Twitter is that he’s acted out of spite and alienated people and organizations he should have been on good terms with, mainly advertisers (Twitter’s actual customers).
This is such a poor hot take. Literally every single person that has personally dealt with him disagrees this narrative. It's only popular on reddit/hacker news boards and among some journalists. Karpathy has a good discussion on it that I've heard several employees at his other companies agree with.
Or even Shotwell herself for that matter and how she has expressed how she and Elon subdivide the work.
Elon Musk is not nice person, but he gets things done and he's deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of his companies. I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes.
