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It's always been my sincere opinion that even if Musk fails miserably I'll still admire him more than most other "tech idols". There are people that say he's al

• chronic193 9y ago
  > I don't care about the money You must not be an investor.
• kumarvvr 9y ago
  > There are people that say he's all talk I really wish there is stronger support for him against these sorts of people. How can he be all talk when we see his rockets going up and coming back down.
  • andrepd 9y ago
    Well first of all they're not his rockets. The engineers and scientists did it, he supplies the money, arguably a meritless in ck prison. Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on: SpaceX targets not met, Tesla still running at a massive loss, Hyperloop being doomed to failure, etc etc. I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
    • kumarvvr 9y ago
      It's really his push, his vision and his risk. NASA had tremendous resources for decades, with some of the best minds of 21st century working there. They didn't produce self landing rockets, and on top of that, it makes complete business and economic sense too.
    • Strom 9y ago
      > Well first of all they're not his rockets. Am I understanding this correctly, that the criticism of Elon Musk being all talk is because he didn't personally perform all the work in achievements like Falcon 9 and Model S?
      • nightski 9y ago
        He is a brilliant business man and gave all of the engineers at spacex the opportunity and freedom to achieve great things. For that he should be commended - we need more business leaders like him in this world! I think at the end of the day though in idolizing Musk you are taking away from the hard work and brilliance of all the other employees at his companies. America has this iron man style obsession with one guy changing the world by himself. But at the end of the day we achieve greatness by working together as a team.
        • TeMPOraL 9y ago
          I think most Elon fanbois implicitly understand that each rocket SpaceX launches involves blood, sweat and tears of hundreds of skilled people. Ultimately, focusing on a leader is a shorthand used in everything. We talk about famous generals, and not about their lieutenants. We talk about presidents and kings, omitting the low-level administrative staff that actually does the work and keeps everything from falling apart. Often it's a bad generalization leading to bad conclusions (e.g. most presidents have little influence on the direction of their countries), but I think it's fair in case of Elon Musk, since it's his strong vision that defines the direction of SpaceX and Tesla. Consider this: if SpaceX went public and Elon decided to step down, the company would lose most of its fanbase for very simple reason - it would most likely turn into a regular company and stop being just the vehicle to get humanity to settle Mars.
    • mmsimanga 9y ago
      You make valid criticisms. However, you have to bear in mind that nothing in this world is perfect. Not even Linux. I bet every sports person gets on the field intending to win but they don't always win. That doesn't mean that sportsperson is a failure. They just lost some matches. I do not think that Musk should get a free pass. His companies have taken on some pretty impressive projects. One day someone will make a better electronic car but much like the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, Musk did lead the way.
    • icelancer 9y ago
      Neil Armstrong didn't build the rockets or the shuttle so I guess he's also a bum.
      • lmm 9y ago
        Armstrong made his way up meritocratically on the strength of his piloting skills, to fighter pilot then carrier pilot then test pilot then astronaut. Many reckoned they wouldn't've been able to pull Gemini 8 out of the spin he got it out of, or successfully find a landing spot for Apollo 11 in the boulder field they descended on. Maybe Musk really is as skilled as all that. Or maybe he was lucky enough to make a lot of money once (with x.com) and hire good people. It's hard to tell since so few people ever get to try having that much money to play with.
        • TeMPOraL 9y ago
          > Maybe Musk really is as skilled as all that. Whatever are his contributions to the rocket design these days (it's obviously a SpaceX secret), one can't deny that his ideas for future of humanity are the raison d'être and the driving force behind the company. He obviously hires engineers smarter than himself to do the work; his own engineering skills only add to the credibility of the company and its goals.
    • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
      What a ridiculous strawman. Do you want him to insert every last rivet and weld every last joint in his cars and rockets before they become 'his' cars and 'his' rockets? Tesla I could still grant but you do him great injustice by simply ignoring how much of his personal resolve is responsible for SpaceX even existing. Feel free to list the number of times a group of engineers have spontaneously teamed up to form a rocket company.
      • salawat 9y ago
        I disagree. It's not a straw man at all. Your assume that A) big things can only ever get done by companies. B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets. I'll give credit to him for creating and acquiring funding for the organization. I'll give him credit for publicizing his vision. Each and every rocket/car however, was massively subsidized by taxpayer dollars, and made feasible by hundreds of people WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOAL. The practice of abstracting away hundreds to thousands of people's hard work and financial support, involuntary or not, is disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst. Abstraction is evil. Abstraction is what turns "people" into "human resources". And before the inevitable "That's not practical!" or "That's unreasonable!": It really isn't. Most people have just gotten so used to credit for their own work being sacrificed to someone else that nobody points out how incredibly screwed up the practice is.
        • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
          It is a strawman because it is reliant on a literalist interpretation that no one is actually arguing for. Of course the rockets are not literally his just as Obamacare wasn't literally Obama's. > B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets. Never made the claim nor does it seem relevant here. No one is talking of actual ownership. When it comes to ownership and accounting of a company, there are already well-established metrics and practices to figure that stuff out. Yes, the rocket is designed by engineers and put together by technicians and mechanics and thousands of souls have come together to achieve this task, and no one is denying their contributions. But none of that would have existed without Elon. And he is being praised for that vision and steely resolve while others work on their PhDs from Armchair University. This leadership is not trivial and it is central to something like SpaceX even existing.
    • saiya-jin 9y ago
      Yes he didn't delivered every single item he ever talked about, but even if he won't achieve anything anymore, he gave whole mankind more than most other SV 'disrupting' founders doing just another crappy social app together. At this point, it's pretty clear that mankind will either reach the stars ASAP, or mankind will face slow or fast decline and death on this little blue planet (albeit life will go on, just without us). He is tackling this on many fronts, where others didn't dare to risk their wealth or considered it too hard/impossible. It feels like you have some personal issue with him (or good ol' trolling), and that's your problem. Most of us see him very positively, and for damn good reasons. Failing in some moonshots is natural, i'm sure any person with enough life experience can understand this.
    • kemiller 9y ago
      My understanding is that he personally learned a ton about rocket science and actively contributed to the design, as well as providing business context, which is itself no mean feat.
    • nickik 9y ago
      That is just false. Elon is one of the lead engineers of the Falcon 9 rocket, he knows as much about it as anybody. He also came up with the idea, he gathred the people, he gathered the investors and did about 100 other things needed for the success of SpaceX. Elon is still in control of SpaceX, so the Falcon 9 and FH rockets are his by any reasonable definition. > Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on: What matters is overall progress and not progress relative to elons timelines. Also, most of those were not promises but rather announcments. > SpaceX targets not met Yeah, he only took like 15 years to launch more rockets then China or Russia. Build the largests commercial launch buissness. But of course what we should focus on is that he is such a failure because he said 5 years ago that the FH would fly a bit sooner. You really need learn to evaluate things on its own terms. > Tesla still running at a massive loss Poor Elon, 500000 reservations that any other company would kill for. Revenue stream for 1-2 years even without new reservations. What a failure. > Hyperloop being doomed to failure, Whitepaper without company behind it not successful. More big news at 8pm. > I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes. Yeah, the guy who revolutionised space launch, landed fucking rockets and created reusable rockets is 'mostly talk, with some success'. Honstly people can't see the trees because of the forest. This is so fucking bizar.
  • falcolas 9y ago
    Why does Elon Musk need popular support? He's not a politician who relies on popular support for his very job. He's not an actor who relies on popular support to bring money to his films. He's a CEO. All the support he needs is to deliver on his promises. From my exceptionally limited point of view, he's at about 35% there: Space X: 100% (Reusable, self-landing rockets. Fuck yeah!) Tesla: 40% (Prototype in decent shape, promised production capabilities of model 3 still seems a long ways off) The Boring Company: 0% Hyperloop: 0%
    • kumarvvr 9y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oia53xOLDmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oia53xOLDmw
    • Retric 9y ago
      I think you could add. Paypal: 75% (Much hate, still good option for many things.) Solar City: 75% (Over expanded, not sure if that was a bad thing and was bought by Tesla. Still it installed 870 MW of solar in 2015 alone.) Steve Jobs had close ties to fewer companies, Pixar, Apple, NeXT and did a similar purchase of NeXT by Apple. However, while dubious Apple greatly benefited from NeXt. So, I am willing to bet Solar City could be a similar net benefit. The boring company is still to early to judge. Hyperloop is not yet a failure and considering it was simply a short paper I think 0% is overly harsh.
      • falcolas 9y ago
        As someone who has lost money to PayPal, I have a hard time agreeing with the 75%, especially when you consider all the caveats associated with it. That said, I won't argue the point. I could swear that the rush for solar via Solar City has dropped precipitously. It seems like those who want it have it at this point. Its business model is also heavily dependent on US grants, and has seen some major downturns in terms of litigation and has been operating at a net loss for its lifetime. Let's put it closer to 50% The boring company is simply trying to make underground highways - a task which makes very little practical sense in a world where highways already exist, and their downsides are well known. Not to mention, no execution or proof of concept exists. As for the Hyperloop, again with the lack of execution or proof of concept. Anybody can make a whitepaper, but Elon Musk has put his weight behind the concept, to no practical end. But sure, let's remove it because you're right, he made no promises behind it; didn't start a company around it. We're still only around 40%.
  • wils1245 9y ago
    How can you look at the valuation of Tesla and think that Musk lacks public support? The company is worth more than Ford, while delivering a fraction of the cars. The difference in output is made up by faith in his promises.
• Klathmon 9y ago
  Musk isn't a PR guy, and I think a lot of people respect and like him for that. He makes crazy "moonshots", he has a vision and doesn't tone it down nearly as much as others do, and he's not afraid to be "wrong". The SpaceX community has a running joke about "elon time" being set to mars time, because his predictions and goals are almost always late (and are often under delivering), but I honestly respect that. Him and his companies aren't taking the "easy way out" of making easily achievable goals and then making them again and again. They are shooting for unlikely and in some cases almost impossible goals, and getting 70-90% of the way there, and they aren't exactly ashamed of it. IIRC there was a reddit thread a while back that was "bashing" Elon and Tesla and SpaceX about only hitting something like 70% of the goals they set, but I read it differently. They set out to revolutionize 3 different industries (cars, space, and now "boring" and public transport), and even if they can only get to "70% revolutionized", it's still a massive win in my opinion! He's not perfect, I hear lots of bad things from many employees about the work environment, but overall I really respect the man and the companies he has created, and I think he has and will continue to do a lot for humanity.
  • kumarvvr 9y ago
    >He makes crazy "moonshots" His back of hand calculations on the viability of self-landing rockets, while coming back from a trip to Russia after a failed attempt to purchase a launch vehicle certainly wasn't moonshot. He is a technology man in and out and knows the capabilities and limits of technology. I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Indeed. Musk is a tech guy. The real tech guy, not the usual CEO of a tech company, who really does mostly marketing and management. He knows his physics and is involved in engineering decisions. For me personally, it's Musk who defines what does it mean to be a "tech CEO", and most companies we discuss here every day don't even qualify. > I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible. My view is that he focuses on what should be possible from first principles, ignoring whether or not our short-sighted markets find it desirable at the moment. It's a good strategy if you have a non-monetary goal in mind and resources to bankroll the efforts at forcing the markets into accepting your work.
• Already__Taken 9y ago
  I don't really care either way for the man but something he said to the effect of "Technology doesn't just get better, it takes hard work and will and money" and the general building the future you want to live in. I mean sentiments like that. It's just right in the feels ya know? It's a reason to go even read the news in the morning.
• awj 9y ago
  He's arguably already had legitimate and impactful successes. Building a business even remotely capable of commercial spaceflight is a huge deal. What Tesla has done, both in batteries and in getting the major auto makers to put focus on EVs is a huge deal. Musk arguably does significantly more talking than doing, but his goals are lofty enough that even failing to make it halfway still means significant advancement.