> By all accounts from those who have worked for him, he is heavily involved and pretty hands on in terms of engineering and design. I've heard that too, but I

> By all accounts from those who have worked for him, he is heavily involved and pretty hands on in terms of engineering and design. I've heard that too, but I've also heard that he kind of goes in, drops a bomb on his engineers, like "This needs to be 25% more efficient by next year," and then leaves it to them to figure it out -- even if it isn't technically possible. Sometimes the breakthroughs are very hard but actually possible (like reusable launch systems at SpaceX) and sometimes they're just not possible (like reaching L4/5 SDCs in a few years without even having LIDAR). So the question I'd ask is, can anyone achieve a few breakthroughs if they constantly repeat this formula? 1. Make huge promises about advancements in technology. 2. Hire excited engineers. 3. Give them lots of money and unreasonably optimistic deadlines. 4. Repeat. Musk himself hasn't succeeded seemingly even 50% of the time with this formula, but he is one of the few people with enough money to keep trying it over and over again. Google is the same: they have so many moonshots, one of them was guaranteed to be a breakthrough like Waymo while a lot of the others were going to be more like Loon[1] or Calico[2]. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55761172 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55761172 2. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/27/15409672/google-calico-secretive-aging-mortality-research https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/27/15409672/go...