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> It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX If Elon can understand

> It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. I'm not talking about in layman's terms, I'm talking about the actual science that goes into it. Same deal with car design. I'll give Elon props for having a vision and pushing it forward but let's not say ridiculous things like "lead rocket designer at spaceX". That's like thinking Tim Cook could write a line of Swift if his life depended on it or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works. I don't exactly begrudge them for that (I won't get into profit sharing, or the lack there of at most companies) but let's not pretend that Elon is himself coming up with revolutionary ideas. Putting his money behind this is laudable, at some level, but he didn't invent these things any more than Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone. We here on HN should know better than most how "worthless" an idea is on it's own. It's about execution. And Elon gets props for his execution (in this case hiring people who did the real work) but he shouldn't get all the credit for the work of the actual engineers.

theonething 4y ago
> If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. Bon appétit! > When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people. Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer > Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
- gw98 4y ago
  Stupidity is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, but also a lack of common sense. He's clearly intelligent. Some of the most intelligent people I've ever known are quite frankly the most stupid and dangerous with actions conceptually and verbally.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Fair enough, I stand corrected. I guess I expected more from someone who is actually an engineer. Like to be smart enough to see WFH isn't some evil thing (and if instead it's a move to get people to leave on their own then he is just an asshole, I mean he is a well established asshole/troll, it would just further cement that legacy). My hat is old and pretty gross though so instead I hope you'll accept a donation to the EFF: https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY
  - gw98 4y ago
    Having worked with a lot of intelligent engineers (mostly EE) I would suggest that they are no more capable of making rational business decisions than anyone else. The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own. My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
  - theonething 4y ago
    Hat's off (ha!) for your admission. When encountering the same scenario on Reddit, people there invariably just double down in the face of undeniable facts. A donation to the EFF is more than enough. I was actually going to just let you off the hook based on your honest response and strengthening my faith in HN:) As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asked their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.
nobleach 4y ago
Actually Zuck has a tremendously strong understanding of how his system works. He used to geek out explaining pieces of it. Obviously it's grown but let's not let our personal feelings (for someone we've likely never met) cloud reality.
jodrellblank 4y ago
> or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works How about in 2016 where he built an home control AI and iPhone app with voice recognition for it using Facebook tech? "I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play." "As the CEO of Facebook, I don't get much time to write code in our internal environment. I've never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive. My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework or iOS development. The open source Nuclide packages we've built to work with GitHub's Atom make development much easier. The Buck build system we've developed to build large projects quickly also saved me a lot of time. Our open source FastText AI text classification tool is also a good one to check out, and if you're interested in AI development, the whole Facebook Research GitHub repo is worth taking a look at." https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis/10154361492931634/ https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis... (You can argue that's still "surface level because he didn't build those things" but it won't be a very interesting argument)

theonething 4y ago

> If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. Bon appétit! > When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people. Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer > Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

gw98 4y ago
Stupidity is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, but also a lack of common sense. He's clearly intelligent. Some of the most intelligent people I've ever known are quite frankly the most stupid and dangerous with actions conceptually and verbally.
joshstrange 4y ago
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I guess I expected more from someone who is actually an engineer. Like to be smart enough to see WFH isn't some evil thing (and if instead it's a move to get people to leave on their own then he is just an asshole, I mean he is a well established asshole/troll, it would just further cement that legacy). My hat is old and pretty gross though so instead I hope you'll accept a donation to the EFF: https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY
- gw98 4y ago
  Having worked with a lot of intelligent engineers (mostly EE) I would suggest that they are no more capable of making rational business decisions than anyone else. The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own. My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
- theonething 4y ago
  Hat's off (ha!) for your admission. When encountering the same scenario on Reddit, people there invariably just double down in the face of undeniable facts. A donation to the EFF is more than enough. I was actually going to just let you off the hook based on your honest response and strengthening my faith in HN:) As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asked their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.

nobleach 4y ago

Actually Zuck has a tremendously strong understanding of how his system works. He used to geek out explaining pieces of it. Obviously it's grown but let's not let our personal feelings (for someone we've likely never met) cloud reality.

jodrellblank 4y ago

> or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works How about in 2016 where he built an home control AI and iPhone app with voice recognition for it using Facebook tech? "I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play." "As the CEO of Facebook, I don't get much time to write code in our internal environment. I've never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive. My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework or iOS development. The open source Nuclide packages we've built to work with GitHub's Atom make development much easier. The Buck build system we've developed to build large projects quickly also saved me a lot of time. Our open source FastText AI text classification tool is also a good one to check out, and if you're interested in AI development, the whole Facebook Research GitHub repo is worth taking a look at." https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis/10154361492931634/ https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis... (You can argue that's still "surface level because he didn't build those things" but it won't be a very interesting argument)