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Musk has had some trouble recently, but I thought it was pretty well known that Shotwell pretty much runs the show at SpaceX & has for some time. I may be compl
by s5300 4y ago
Musk has had some trouble recently, but I thought it was pretty well known that Shotwell pretty much runs the show at SpaceX & has for some time. I may be completely incorrect, but I think Musk is mostly just a mascot/figurehead/hype-man for SpaceX & has been for a bit. Regarding most of the day-day stuff that is, he probably still has some input on very long term matters.
But I think if Musk were to die in a mysterious Tesla fire tomorrow, not much would change for the worse at the company for quite some time.
- mhoad 4y agoI’m specifically referring to the 80% voting rights he has at SpaceX.
- dotnet00 4y agoIt is well known that Shotwell runs the business side and Musk runs the engineering/R&D side. Eg. Falcon Heavy was almost cancelled because the engineering side turned out to make it more expensive to develop than expected (with the original plan for fuel crossfeed) and F9 had improved so much that it ate up most of FH's potential market. So Musk's preference was to cancel it. But because it was favorable for the business side (I think they might've even already bid on some launches with it by then), Shotwell pushed for them to keep it, which is how we got the current variation of FH which just has F9s with a reinforced center-core.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoIt wasn't important to the business side -- they'd only sold a couple launches or so. But Shotwell convinced Elon that it was important to their reputation. Musk has since cratered his, but Shotwell's is intact.
- dotnet00 4y agoI feel like that's nitpicking, when the company's reputation is obviously a business issue.