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Musk said he was going to automate the factory and he is going to automate the factory, no matter what. Musk is a visionary, he lives in the future. For him th

Musk said he was going to automate the factory and he is going to automate the factory, no matter what. Musk is a visionary, he lives in the future. For him the future is as real as the present, and has a clear pathway for it. He is going to make mistakes and some pathways are impossible to transit, but the goal remains the same and he will find a new way to go there. No matter if it takes five years and it is not possible now, but he will do it. Field is a different kind of person. Things are the way they are, if nobody has done something before, it is impossible. For him not being able to automate things at first is a proof that he is right and Musk is wrong and things are impossible to automate further, forever. Obviously both personalities are going to clash, only one can prevail. It happens in every single company out there. If two co founders have different values and ideas of what the company should do, there is a clash. Being the most shorted company in Human history, there has always been a huge economic interest in portraying Musk badly and making shares go down. If what the article says is the most serious thing they could find, I don't see the problems. I have worked in the industry as an engineer in Europe and we had way more serious problems every single week.

cromwellian 5y ago
Look at SpaceX/Starbase. The dude is crazy. He accelerated development over a week or two and the time series of photos of the site show epic progress. They installed 29 (!) Raptor engines in a single night with incredibly complex plumbing. They had 23 people working inside the diameter of the rocket. Granted, he is rushing the SuperHeavy orbital build with reckless abandon, and a bad weld or connection somewhere means a multi-kiloton bomb blowing up on the launch pad (See Russian N1 launch), but you have to admire how fast SpaceX does things compared to ULA. I mean, how many decades were people promising satellite internet? Iridium? Bill Gates Teledesic? OneWeb? etc. Starlink has put up satellites at a record pace compared to those projects. Again, with problems no one considered 10 years ago, like fucking up ground based astronomy. Blue Origin hasn't even made it to orbit yet, but SpaceX has landed boosters 100 times, created the Falcon Heavy, the Crew Dragon, etc How many times has Starliner failed and been delayed? It's not even as capable as the Crew Dragon either. I'm just saying, Musk has a "move fast and break things" iteration approach, the opposite of waterfall. He develops cars and rockets almost like people slap together websites. And it seems to be working, despite being a dickhead to employees, he's created a huge EV car company, and a huge world leading aerospace company.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  Left out of your comment is the true hero of SpaceX: Gwynne Shotwell, who saved SpaceX from Musk's excesses and turned it into the highly profitable company it is today with a string of successful launches. Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims. Every launch failure that SpaceX has had in the past few years? That's Musk, gallivanting in at the last minute and interrupting the processes Shotwell set up to ensure successful launches to satisfy some silly little last-minute whim. All of Musk's "successes" at SpaceX are literally just him waltzing in and stealing the credit for the work she's actually doing.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    I don't think you can separate the two. It's like separating Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and giving 100% of the credit to Woz or Jobs. Certainly Shotwell has made the business and operational side of the Space Falcon business smooth and helped win commercial/government contracts. But do you really think it is shotwell who is aggressively asking people to throw away designs, delete components, and iterate quickly by getting rid of testing steps? She is more of a Tim Cook than a Steve Jobs. Look at this 1 hour q&A at Starbase, time index 13:30, there's no way this five stages of engineering comes from Shotwell. It's not her personality, but Musk's instincts here are absolutely correct. And it's the number one reason why SpaceX made it to orbit, and Blue Origin didn't, and why Starliner is taking forever. Musk doesn't care about blowing up 29 raptors and blowing $50 million on a test that will most likely result in a RUD. Shotwell would never have authorized that, she is much more concerned with keeping SpaceX's finances in order and the contracts flowing, and Starship simply doesn't have many launch customers who need 100t in orbit, and where launching on Falcon 9, or Electron's is good enough. > Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims. Really? Based on what? The reason why they could pull that off is because Elon forced a shitload of SpaceX employees to be relocated from other parts of SpaceX to meet an arbitrary and unnecessary deadline. You think Shotwell would have ordered 24/7 round the clock booster assembly? Keep in mind that it is Musk who insists on production automation, because his #1 priority is $/kg thrust, and so Raptor engines are pointless if you can't mass manufacture them. There is currently no economic reason for SpaceX, as a business, to mass manufacture these engines which have never been to orbit, even on a prototype demonstrator. Again, this had to have been Musk pushing for this, not a seasoned CEO/businesswoman looking to keep the company on track. The entire Starbase is like a Google X, or Xerox PARC, it's a CEO running a big profitable company smoothly, so it can fund the crazy R&D ambitions of something else. That part Shotwell is responsible for, but there's no evidence of her involvement at all @ Starbase. She's never even been recorded being there AFAIK.

cromwellian 5y ago

Look at SpaceX/Starbase. The dude is crazy. He accelerated development over a week or two and the time series of photos of the site show epic progress. They installed 29 (!) Raptor engines in a single night with incredibly complex plumbing. They had 23 people working inside the diameter of the rocket. Granted, he is rushing the SuperHeavy orbital build with reckless abandon, and a bad weld or connection somewhere means a multi-kiloton bomb blowing up on the launch pad (See Russian N1 launch), but you have to admire how fast SpaceX does things compared to ULA. I mean, how many decades were people promising satellite internet? Iridium? Bill Gates Teledesic? OneWeb? etc. Starlink has put up satellites at a record pace compared to those projects. Again, with problems no one considered 10 years ago, like fucking up ground based astronomy. Blue Origin hasn't even made it to orbit yet, but SpaceX has landed boosters 100 times, created the Falcon Heavy, the Crew Dragon, etc How many times has Starliner failed and been delayed? It's not even as capable as the Crew Dragon either. I'm just saying, Musk has a "move fast and break things" iteration approach, the opposite of waterfall. He develops cars and rockets almost like people slap together websites. And it seems to be working, despite being a dickhead to employees, he's created a huge EV car company, and a huge world leading aerospace company.

gamblor956 5y ago
Left out of your comment is the true hero of SpaceX: Gwynne Shotwell, who saved SpaceX from Musk's excesses and turned it into the highly profitable company it is today with a string of successful launches. Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims. Every launch failure that SpaceX has had in the past few years? That's Musk, gallivanting in at the last minute and interrupting the processes Shotwell set up to ensure successful launches to satisfy some silly little last-minute whim. All of Musk's "successes" at SpaceX are literally just him waltzing in and stealing the credit for the work she's actually doing.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  I don't think you can separate the two. It's like separating Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and giving 100% of the credit to Woz or Jobs. Certainly Shotwell has made the business and operational side of the Space Falcon business smooth and helped win commercial/government contracts. But do you really think it is shotwell who is aggressively asking people to throw away designs, delete components, and iterate quickly by getting rid of testing steps? She is more of a Tim Cook than a Steve Jobs. Look at this 1 hour q&A at Starbase, time index 13:30, there's no way this five stages of engineering comes from Shotwell. It's not her personality, but Musk's instincts here are absolutely correct. And it's the number one reason why SpaceX made it to orbit, and Blue Origin didn't, and why Starliner is taking forever. Musk doesn't care about blowing up 29 raptors and blowing $50 million on a test that will most likely result in a RUD. Shotwell would never have authorized that, she is much more concerned with keeping SpaceX's finances in order and the contracts flowing, and Starship simply doesn't have many launch customers who need 100t in orbit, and where launching on Falcon 9, or Electron's is good enough. > Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims. Really? Based on what? The reason why they could pull that off is because Elon forced a shitload of SpaceX employees to be relocated from other parts of SpaceX to meet an arbitrary and unnecessary deadline. You think Shotwell would have ordered 24/7 round the clock booster assembly? Keep in mind that it is Musk who insists on production automation, because his #1 priority is $/kg thrust, and so Raptor engines are pointless if you can't mass manufacture them. There is currently no economic reason for SpaceX, as a business, to mass manufacture these engines which have never been to orbit, even on a prototype demonstrator. Again, this had to have been Musk pushing for this, not a seasoned CEO/businesswoman looking to keep the company on track. The entire Starbase is like a Google X, or Xerox PARC, it's a CEO running a big profitable company smoothly, so it can fund the crazy R&D ambitions of something else. That part Shotwell is responsible for, but there's no evidence of her involvement at all @ Starbase. She's never even been recorded being there AFAIK.