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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?

• hnbad 4y 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.