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>He's an engineer at heart. He has not built anything.

andruby 5y ago
He did code on Zip2 and sold that startup successfully. Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
- hnbad 5y ago
  > He did code on Zip2 and sold that startup successfully. Selling a startup is not an engineering achievment but a business achievment. > Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" Owning a company means you can give yourself whatever titles you want. So your entire argument seems to boil down to "he wrote code for Zip2", which happened a quarter of a century ago.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Oh, I know some of those self-appoined chief engineers (cool title, I get it, one should earn it so). They almost drove the comoany into the ground. And they never shipped anything in their whole lives neither. EDIT: And they think they are Musk as well. Without the same ability to raise money that's incredible dangerous so.
  - andruby 5y ago
    I'm not really trying to make a strong case. I'm just a little disappointed when people say "He has not built anything". Isn't that a little mean, and elitist? No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong. If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the most engineering-minded.
    - hnbad 5y ago
      I'm not sure "elitist" is the right word for criticizing the wealthiest man on Earth's habit of portraying himself as a genius rocket surgeon. I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies. When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all. Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  Being a software developer doesn't make you an engineer, despite what half of SV would like you to believe.

He did code on Zip2 and sold that startup successfully. Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

hnbad 5y ago
> He did code on Zip2 and sold that startup successfully. Selling a startup is not an engineering achievment but a business achievment. > Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" Owning a company means you can give yourself whatever titles you want. So your entire argument seems to boil down to "he wrote code for Zip2", which happened a quarter of a century ago.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Oh, I know some of those self-appoined chief engineers (cool title, I get it, one should earn it so). They almost drove the comoany into the ground. And they never shipped anything in their whole lives neither. EDIT: And they think they are Musk as well. Without the same ability to raise money that's incredible dangerous so.
- andruby 5y ago
  I'm not really trying to make a strong case. I'm just a little disappointed when people say "He has not built anything". Isn't that a little mean, and elitist? No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong. If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the most engineering-minded.
  - hnbad 5y ago
    I'm not sure "elitist" is the right word for criticizing the wealthiest man on Earth's habit of portraying himself as a genius rocket surgeon. I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies. When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all. Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
Being a software developer doesn't make you an engineer, despite what half of SV would like you to believe.