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Correct: he is not. All the success he has had comes from lots of bucks to start from, and lucky hires. You can tell from all his obvious duds, and the idiotic

by ncmncm 4y ago

Correct: he is not. All the success he has had comes from lots of bucks to start from, and lucky hires. You can tell from all his obvious duds, and the idiotic things he says whenever he goes off-script. Gwynne Shotwell probably deserves the credit for SpaceX, and probably all of that for her personnel actions.

baq 4y ago
Gwynne absolutely is the unsung hero. (Though in truth I think more spacex fans know about her importance than it would seem. Not sure about the outside world.)
nickserv 4y ago
As someone having hired quite a few people over the years, I can say without a doubt that there are no lucky hires. If you know how to hire well, and have tons of money, it's difficult to do badly.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Don't dislocate anything patting yourself on the back. Overwhelmingly more of success is luck than anybody involved likes to think.
pyinstallwoes 4y ago
Oh yeah totally? Just luck! Wow, what a lucky man right? Probabilistically nearly impossible but hey? Statistically it’s still possible as a fluke. Super rational thinking that’s applicable to increasingly well understood mental modes of reality. Bravo!
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Probabilistically it's not that implausible. Musk has what, one successful company he founded himself - SpaceX? The hyperloop is flop, the boring company is a flop too, so is SolarCity, and the sucessful one came with a lot of exceptionally great hires. I'd say empirically his skill at hiring competent people that are willing to work hard is higher than average, while his engineering skills don't seem to be particularly special. 1 out of 4 seems solidly probable to me.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Yeah, many people don't get how much the world is tilted in favor of the rich. Look at Jared Kushner's ability to keep failing upwards, for example. Musk is an amazing hype man; the way he talked Tesla's stock price into the stratosphere gave him incredibly cheap capital. And he was correct in thinking that electric cars were a coming thing that the major auto companies were sleeping on, so he gets points for insight. But now that the majors are in the game, over the next decade we'll see how much Tesla's built on skill vs luck.
  - randmeerkat 4y ago
    > I'd say empirically his skill at hiring competent people that are willing to work hard is higher than average… He wasn’t competent at hiring the right people, his ideas in the beginning looked amazing and drove the best minds to apply there. Now they’re leaving…
    - pyinstallwoes 4y ago
      Right right, "they're leaving", exactly who is they and how mow many is that? > Tesla revealed in its 10-K filing with the SEC that it employed 99,290 employees as of December 31, 2021. This is a substantial increase from how many people the company had employed at the end of 2020. Tesla reported an employee headcount of 70,757 people at the end of 2020. [0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/000095017022000796/tsla-20211231.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0... Also, it's often that those who leave, should leave, as there is a mismatch. To generalize and extrapolate a minority percentage of misfits that you clearly are focusing on is quite the error. Let's see Tesla's growth year over year: Tesla revenue for the quarter ending June 30, 2022 was $16.934B, a 41.61% increase year-over-year. Tesla revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022 was $67.166B, a 60.45% increase year-over-year. Tesla annual revenue for 2021 was $53.823B, a 70.67% increase from 2020. Tesla annual revenue for 2020 was $31.536B, a 28.31% increase from 2019. Tesla annual revenue for 2019 was $24.578B, a 14.52% increase from 2018. Yep, sounds like you know what you're talking about.
dotnet00 4y ago
And yet every biography and early employee of SpaceX will say otherwise about Musk's importance to the success of the company. Shotwell however does not get enough credit in the eye of the general public (she's quite popular among people who keep up with SpaceX), Musk has always emphasized how important she was/is for securing contracts for them and keeping engineering from going too wild. Like when Musk wanted to cancel Falcon Heavy because it was turning out to be much more challenging than expected, was a dead end in terms of Mars ambitions and Falcon 9 had improved enough that it basically took most of the launches FH had been intended for, but she pushed for them to work on it anyway because IIRC they had enough potential customers lined up to go forward with it.
- rlt 4y ago
  And yet there have only been 2 commercial launches of Falcon Heavy launches. There are more on the manifest but I wonder how many of those would be served by Starship, especially if the effort put into FH had been used to pull forward Starship.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    There should have been a few more by now but they keep getting delayed. Overall though, I think FH might have been made worth developing because of Europa Clipper, NSSL launches and Dragon XL despite not necessarily making back R&D yet. Falcon Heavy is easier for risk averse government agencies to choose. Remember that Lunar Starship winning HLS was not at all expected, most people assumed NASA would consider it too radical, going for the other more conservative proposals. In that environment, FH offers best in the world capability at low costs while still being pretty close to what people (especially uninformed politicians and bureaucrats) think of as a rocket.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Two quibbles: One, saying that he was important to the success of the company is not the same thing as saying he's a particularly good technical innovator on his own. Take Steve Jobs as an example: important to the success of the Mac, but as a visionary who was also enough of an asshole that he got fired. Two, what people will say about an egotistical, litigious billionaire is limited. Even more so when he controls their income and/or they still hold a lot of illiquid stock. Note, for example, that Musk fired 5 people just for internal criticism: https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-fires-employees-involved-letter-rebuking-musk-nyt-2022-06-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-fires-employees-in... I saw a lot more negative accounts about Steve Jobs starting a few years after his death than I did in the years leading up to it. I expect to see something similar with Musk.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I don’t understand the discussion people are having here. Musk is demonstrably good at identifying interesting problem spaces, finding things a new company could do better in them, convincing people who have capital to invest, building, growing and leading a team able to successfully tackle the challenge and communicating with the outside world in a way generating a tone of interest and buy in. In short, he is very good at his job which is being a CEO. Musk is not working in engineering. Someone in this discussion said he lucked out on the team at SpaceX. That’s a gross misunderstanding of why he is good. The managing team of SpaceX and especially Shotwell is Musk great achievement.

by ncmncm 4y ago

baq 4y ago

Gwynne absolutely is the unsung hero. (Though in truth I think more spacex fans know about her importance than it would seem. Not sure about the outside world.)

nickserv 4y ago

As someone having hired quite a few people over the years, I can say without a doubt that there are no lucky hires. If you know how to hire well, and have tons of money, it's difficult to do badly.

ncmncm 4y ago
Don't dislocate anything patting yourself on the back. Overwhelmingly more of success is luck than anybody involved likes to think.

pyinstallwoes 4y ago

Oh yeah totally? Just luck! Wow, what a lucky man right? Probabilistically nearly impossible but hey? Statistically it’s still possible as a fluke. Super rational thinking that’s applicable to increasingly well understood mental modes of reality. Bravo!

sudosysgen 4y ago
Probabilistically it's not that implausible. Musk has what, one successful company he founded himself - SpaceX? The hyperloop is flop, the boring company is a flop too, so is SolarCity, and the sucessful one came with a lot of exceptionally great hires. I'd say empirically his skill at hiring competent people that are willing to work hard is higher than average, while his engineering skills don't seem to be particularly special. 1 out of 4 seems solidly probable to me.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Yeah, many people don't get how much the world is tilted in favor of the rich. Look at Jared Kushner's ability to keep failing upwards, for example. Musk is an amazing hype man; the way he talked Tesla's stock price into the stratosphere gave him incredibly cheap capital. And he was correct in thinking that electric cars were a coming thing that the major auto companies were sleeping on, so he gets points for insight. But now that the majors are in the game, over the next decade we'll see how much Tesla's built on skill vs luck.
- randmeerkat 4y ago
  > I'd say empirically his skill at hiring competent people that are willing to work hard is higher than average… He wasn’t competent at hiring the right people, his ideas in the beginning looked amazing and drove the best minds to apply there. Now they’re leaving…
  - pyinstallwoes 4y ago
    Right right, "they're leaving", exactly who is they and how mow many is that? > Tesla revealed in its 10-K filing with the SEC that it employed 99,290 employees as of December 31, 2021. This is a substantial increase from how many people the company had employed at the end of 2020. Tesla reported an employee headcount of 70,757 people at the end of 2020. [0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/000095017022000796/tsla-20211231.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0... Also, it's often that those who leave, should leave, as there is a mismatch. To generalize and extrapolate a minority percentage of misfits that you clearly are focusing on is quite the error. Let's see Tesla's growth year over year: Tesla revenue for the quarter ending June 30, 2022 was $16.934B, a 41.61% increase year-over-year. Tesla revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022 was $67.166B, a 60.45% increase year-over-year. Tesla annual revenue for 2021 was $53.823B, a 70.67% increase from 2020. Tesla annual revenue for 2020 was $31.536B, a 28.31% increase from 2019. Tesla annual revenue for 2019 was $24.578B, a 14.52% increase from 2018. Yep, sounds like you know what you're talking about.

dotnet00 4y ago

And yet every biography and early employee of SpaceX will say otherwise about Musk's importance to the success of the company. Shotwell however does not get enough credit in the eye of the general public (she's quite popular among people who keep up with SpaceX), Musk has always emphasized how important she was/is for securing contracts for them and keeping engineering from going too wild. Like when Musk wanted to cancel Falcon Heavy because it was turning out to be much more challenging than expected, was a dead end in terms of Mars ambitions and Falcon 9 had improved enough that it basically took most of the launches FH had been intended for, but she pushed for them to work on it anyway because IIRC they had enough potential customers lined up to go forward with it.

rlt 4y ago
And yet there have only been 2 commercial launches of Falcon Heavy launches. There are more on the manifest but I wonder how many of those would be served by Starship, especially if the effort put into FH had been used to pull forward Starship.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  There should have been a few more by now but they keep getting delayed. Overall though, I think FH might have been made worth developing because of Europa Clipper, NSSL launches and Dragon XL despite not necessarily making back R&D yet. Falcon Heavy is easier for risk averse government agencies to choose. Remember that Lunar Starship winning HLS was not at all expected, most people assumed NASA would consider it too radical, going for the other more conservative proposals. In that environment, FH offers best in the world capability at low costs while still being pretty close to what people (especially uninformed politicians and bureaucrats) think of as a rocket.
wpietri 4y ago
Two quibbles: One, saying that he was important to the success of the company is not the same thing as saying he's a particularly good technical innovator on his own. Take Steve Jobs as an example: important to the success of the Mac, but as a visionary who was also enough of an asshole that he got fired. Two, what people will say about an egotistical, litigious billionaire is limited. Even more so when he controls their income and/or they still hold a lot of illiquid stock. Note, for example, that Musk fired 5 people just for internal criticism: https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-fires-employees-involved-letter-rebuking-musk-nyt-2022-06-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-fires-employees-in... I saw a lot more negative accounts about Steve Jobs starting a few years after his death than I did in the years leading up to it. I expect to see something similar with Musk.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

I don’t understand the discussion people are having here. Musk is demonstrably good at identifying interesting problem spaces, finding things a new company could do better in them, convincing people who have capital to invest, building, growing and leading a team able to successfully tackle the challenge and communicating with the outside world in a way generating a tone of interest and buy in. In short, he is very good at his job which is being a CEO. Musk is not working in engineering. Someone in this discussion said he lucked out on the team at SpaceX. That’s a gross misunderstanding of why he is good. The managing team of SpaceX and especially Shotwell is Musk great achievement.