I am worried that the good people at SpaceX might decide to abandon ship because of the Musk association. The money might be good, the work fantastic and exciting, but at some point saying "I work at SpaceX/Tesla/whatever" will become dangerous to one's health?
Musk put good people in charge of some of these companies, Gwynne Shotwell is a great example, but his sphere if influence is big enough that the collateral damage could be significant.
> I am worried that the good people at SpaceX might decide to abandon ship
For whom? There isn't another ship. (Literally. Ariane has nothing, ULA is on its deathbed, Blue Origin might do something in the 2030s and nobody is moving from Hawthorne to Xi'an.)
SpaceX remains a jewel of American industry and technological achievement. If you're an ambitious aerospace engineer, SpaceX is the only place where you'll see your cutting-edge work launched.
There's Stoke, Relativity, Rocketlab, Firefly, Ursa Major and a whole bunch more companies (many of which I forgot to mention, sorry) that are trying to come after SpaceX. Now that SpaceX has shown reuse is possible, it's easier to convince anyone that reuse is viable.
Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers to get on this too.
The issue is that space launch is a lot smaller market than EVs with a lot higher unit costs. I think the majority of the companies you mention are going to fail, because the market isn’t big enough for them all. Rocket Lab is most likely to survive because they’ve already got a decent sized business even though it is primarily at the low end, but moving up the market is arguably easier than starting from scratch. The others are competing not just against SpaceX, but also Blue Origin (which despite being rather slow is still way ahead of most of the companies you mention), as well as against Rocket Lab and each other
> There's Stoke, Relativity, Rocketlab, Firefly, Ursa Major and a whole bunch more companies (many of which I forgot to mention, sorry) that are trying to come after SpaceX
These are all smallsat launchers. I have worked with a few of their teams and have mad respect for their work. But between launch cadence, fundraising and mission profile, they’re not comparable to SpaceX.
> Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers
SpaceX has a global commanding position and domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed. It’s fair to say it has a monopoly in commercial launch outside niche operations, e.g. dedicated smallsat.
> they’re not comparable to SpaceX.
Not yet indeed. If SpaceX were to fail for whatever reason, eg. Musk falling out of grace with his orange buddy or whatever else, there is sort of backup now I guess.
> domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed
Agreed, but I think SpaceX showed that reuse could be done before Musk got any political influence (and went off the rails...).
SpaceX is the stoic incumbant by now. They have the launchpads and enough money to fight any challenging patents. If I was an up and coming rocket engineer, they would be my goto stable career choice. If I had ideas, i would shop around.
> I am worried that the good people at SpaceX might decide to abandon ship because of the Musk association. The money might be good, the work fantastic and exciting, but at some point saying "I work at SpaceX/Tesla/whatever" will become dangerous to one's health?
Meanwhile, plenty of people still work in industries such as oil+gas, tobacco, gambling, military tech, etc. No hate, no threats, business as usual.
SpaceX has a clear mission; Tesla not so much. What is the use of building electric cars "to save the planet" while your boss is enabling a ton more environmental damage using the money from Tesla sales and charger network (and his giant compensation package)?
I think we need like a wiki for people to read all the stories that people have posted about working for Musk companies to understand why so many people stay. I have recently seen so much misinformation about Musk being pushed. Its completely fair to criticize a person that deserves intense criticism, it just does a disservice to other readers if the entire context is not explained because it then propagates false assumptions about Musk which he then uses to 'surprise' his critics because they were operating under incorrect beliefs.
At this point, no not going to happen. The money sucks given how much you work, no work/life balance. These people already sacrificed their personal lives to get the company to this point. No other company is getting to Mars first. If you are an Olympic class engineer, would you really just walk away from getting to be a part of history? I guess unless you are at the top of your field you are not going to feel the same as these guys.
Regarding engineers burning out, given that Tesla and SpaceX are some of the most desired companies for new Engineering grads Musk will have a continual supply of engineers to grind down to dust as the old ones become useless to him.
There'll always be young people excited to work on the cutting edge of something they're passionate about, even if it means being horribly overworked and underpaid. See also the games industry, movie VFX, etc.
Thats a good point. I'm thinking how is Musk able to attract so many of them? His payroll obligations are enormous(think about how many he employs across all is factories).
We need competitors to Musk, preferably nicer, that can attract the best of the best. I guess in order to fight a psychopath you need tendencies of being a psychopath yourself?
If they do, what is the net harm? The technology that SpaceX was losing money to for decades is now known. Their moat isn't as deep or wide as it used to be. See Space Pioneer, CAS Space, Galactic Energy, LandSpace, ...
She's a mechanical engineer, not a rocket scientist (though the term is overrated anyway, there are plenty of "rocket scientists" who do very boring things).
No, we can hate Musk all we want, but we shouldn't rewrite history because we despise him. He is a complex individual, and he still deserves the credit for founding SpaceX and being chief engineer.
> He is a complex individual, and he still deserves the credit for founding SpaceX and being chief engineer
Musk founded SpaceX. He hasn't been a chief engineer in anything but title for a long time. To the extent he deserves respect, it's in giving its team the insulation he's denied Twitter and the American people.
Who made the bets on Merlin and Raptor engines, Falcon 9, reusability and Starship?
SpaceX employees online say he was heavily involved in engineering, as chief designer; but even imagining he did not, just allowing those crazy ideas to actually happen has incredible merit.
This will go down in history as the most shameful descent into madness of the 21st century. I sincerely hope he gets hospitalized for his drug addiction or whatever is going on, allowing others to take back command of these companies before they run into the ground.
As someone who has followed Musk for some time, I agree. He seemed mostly normal in the early days. But when the money supply became large, he appears to have lost his mind. As many others, I suspect he is on some seriously potent drugs.
His fate may not be all the different from Howard Hughes. A wealthy and influential figure from not so long ago who lost his mind towards the end.
The problem is when someone becomes that rich, they remove anyone from their circle who tells them no. And for Musk, even all legal consequence has been fully removed now. We all need guardrails otherwise our worst basic instincts start to take over. You mention Hughes, but I also think about someone like Hsieh.
Sadly, the similarity is there. Hsieh and Musk were both quite happy nerds and then they became very rich very quickly and drifted off into drugs. Both are/were really into Ketamines and openly talked about it. Both are/were strunggling with depression. Both had friends warn them that they are on a bad path. Let's hope Musk will manage to stop the drugs before they stop him.
There is absolutely no chance Starship is developed using steel without Musk. There is absolutely zero chance that Mechazilla would exist without Musk. These are massive elements of the Starship program.
Now, it's true enough that he didn't literally _build_ these things. He is the CEO. Steve Jobs didn't build the iPhone.
But these programs are very obviously shaped by Musk to a large degree.
> no chance Starship is developed using steel without Musk
What are you basing this on? It was carbon fibre or steel. SpaceX tried carbon. The bake was too inconsistent, so they went with steel. This was the stated and obvious design path since Falcon Heavy’s design trajectory plateaued.
Steel is by no means obvious. No one else in the industry uses it. (No one else in the industry uses carbon fiber, either, except things like fairings).
The obvious choice that everyone uses is aluminum, or various alloys, like aluminum-lithium.
So you think he had no hand in the engineering decisions and work surrounding Starship? On what are you basing this? Because most sources I've seen seem to indicate he is very involved.
I think the most obvious answer is that he was both heavily involved in key strategic decisions and not as technical as someone holding the Chief Engineer title usually would be. And is evidently less involved now, as he's doing more other stuff (SpaceX also appears very focused on "things that make a profit in near-earth space" rather than "things that might be needed for a near tern Mars mission"...)
Certainly he's more useful to organizations when he goes in with the approach of listening to engineers' ideas to build stuff than when he goes in with the approach of gutting the organization in revenge for things he's taken exception to.
Do you think engineering managers are doing a ton of technical work day-to-day? Because a "Chief Engineer" is a level (or two or three) above that. Of course the Chief Engineer isn't doing a ton of low-level technical works, that's not the job.
In a larger company a chief engineer isn't doing low level technical work, but they are normally an engineer with deep domain knowledge of the low level work being done, and not a CEO-type also responsible for other companies and the company's commercial priorities. So no, I don't think the design of Starship looks any different if he decides he's too busy to attend design meetings because of his other five jobs. Their other top level execs are very, very good engineers.
SpaceX also wasn't very big in the early years, and the CTOs and chief engineers of the space launch startups I know absolutely do involve themselves in the low level technical work. I don't imagine Elon did much of that even when he did make a point of interviewing every new hire and sitting in on meetings about low level purchasing decisions.
Musk was heavily involved in the engineering efforts at SpaceX. NASA struggled to keep up with his continual and extremely detailed stream of questions regarding engineering choices, with an obsessive and relentless focus on blueprints.
The list of engineering achievements and innovations (often unorthodox) is too long to list in a comment, but I highly recommend the book The Space Barons by Christian Davenport [0]. It's a fantastic read.
