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He had help from the government, specifically Mike Griffin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Gr

He had help from the government, specifically Mike Griffin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff. He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla. He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under the guise of purpose ("going to Mars") but he took a lot of shady money along the way. And then there is the Saudis.. Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive.

emadabdulrahim 4y ago
> Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive. Sources?
- pnt12 4y ago
  People who don't like him really downplay his past achievements. I currently don't like him, but he's been involved in PayPal, Tesla and Space X, all companies which had/have a big impact in our world. Some will say he bought some of these, or the engineers did the real work, or he got government and family funding. But so what? Lots of companies with funding and good engineers don't get anywhere. So I don't know what, but he's been doing somethings right for a very long time. More recently? Only crap shots, in my opinion. The boring tunnel sucks. Self driving will likely never become a reality. The Twitter deal feels off. I miss the visionary Mars seeking Musk, what we have now is the libertarian boomer Musk and he's disappointing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
gamegoblin 4y ago
If it were just a matter of money, any of the other billionaires who tried to build rocket companies would have succeeded. SpaceX got payload to orbit with ~$100M. The only other company that has come close to this is Rocket Lab with a bit over $200M invested. By comparison, Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade without making it to orbit, and probably won't until 2024 at the earliest.
- Veedrac 4y ago
  > Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade Not to claim a false SpaceX-Blue equivalence here, but this is misleading. Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue. It is true that Blue has taken much longer to get to orbit, but they're starting with effectively a Saturn V class vehicle (a bit smaller, but partially reusable), whereas SpaceX started their orbital ambitions with the vastly smaller Falcon 1. The gap in technical competence and effectiveness is still huge, but it's not as stark as the money-to-orbit metric would have it seem. New Sheppard could have reached orbit long ago, if it was designed to be orbital; it's just there's no money (in a Bezos sense) in small launch, and that wasn't the tech it was designed to prove out, so it wasn't.
  - crakenzak 4y ago
    > Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue. Seriously doubt this, please provide sources for these claims.
    - Veedrac 4y ago
      Here's an older sheet with revenue numbers not made by me: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O7nXhhKqfy5aVOn-FsysTdmZ3xGkN1KEjTVbhYn44qk/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O7nXhhKqfy5aVOn-Fsys... My preferred way to estimate this is with employee counts instead, and the difference there is also stark, and then in the early days it's also possible to prove on first principles since Bezos wasn't rich enough at the time to compete with SpaceX's early NASA contracts. Blue has ramped up a lot recently, as in the last couple of years, but you can also check SpaceX's recent investment rounds and they are burning money like crazy (a lot of this will be Starship and Starlink, since the former is a cost sink and the latter is still a ways off breaking even). There is an argument to be made that the nature of this money was different, but SpaceX has always done the Amazon thing of reinvesting every penny they make, and certainly in the early days their costs were especially R&D dominated.
- 4y ago

emadabdulrahim 4y ago

> Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive. Sources?

pnt12 4y ago
People who don't like him really downplay his past achievements. I currently don't like him, but he's been involved in PayPal, Tesla and Space X, all companies which had/have a big impact in our world. Some will say he bought some of these, or the engineers did the real work, or he got government and family funding. But so what? Lots of companies with funding and good engineers don't get anywhere. So I don't know what, but he's been doing somethings right for a very long time. More recently? Only crap shots, in my opinion. The boring tunnel sucks. Self driving will likely never become a reality. The Twitter deal feels off. I miss the visionary Mars seeking Musk, what we have now is the libertarian boomer Musk and he's disappointing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

gamegoblin 4y ago

If it were just a matter of money, any of the other billionaires who tried to build rocket companies would have succeeded. SpaceX got payload to orbit with ~$100M. The only other company that has come close to this is Rocket Lab with a bit over $200M invested. By comparison, Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade without making it to orbit, and probably won't until 2024 at the earliest.

Veedrac 4y ago
> Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade Not to claim a false SpaceX-Blue equivalence here, but this is misleading. Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue. It is true that Blue has taken much longer to get to orbit, but they're starting with effectively a Saturn V class vehicle (a bit smaller, but partially reusable), whereas SpaceX started their orbital ambitions with the vastly smaller Falcon 1. The gap in technical competence and effectiveness is still huge, but it's not as stark as the money-to-orbit metric would have it seem. New Sheppard could have reached orbit long ago, if it was designed to be orbital; it's just there's no money (in a Bezos sense) in small launch, and that wasn't the tech it was designed to prove out, so it wasn't.
- crakenzak 4y ago
  > Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue. Seriously doubt this, please provide sources for these claims.
  - Veedrac 4y ago
    Here's an older sheet with revenue numbers not made by me: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O7nXhhKqfy5aVOn-FsysTdmZ3xGkN1KEjTVbhYn44qk/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O7nXhhKqfy5aVOn-Fsys... My preferred way to estimate this is with employee counts instead, and the difference there is also stark, and then in the early days it's also possible to prove on first principles since Bezos wasn't rich enough at the time to compete with SpaceX's early NASA contracts. Blue has ramped up a lot recently, as in the last couple of years, but you can also check SpaceX's recent investment rounds and they are burning money like crazy (a lot of this will be Starship and Starlink, since the former is a cost sink and the latter is still a ways off breaking even). There is an argument to be made that the nature of this money was different, but SpaceX has always done the Amazon thing of reinvesting every penny they make, and certainly in the early days their costs were especially R&D dominated.
4y ago