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Musk was definitely instrumental to Tesla's early success, but my understanding is that's mostly due to his deep pockets, his fundraising connections, and his a

Musk was definitely instrumental to Tesla's early success, but my understanding is that's mostly due to his deep pockets, his fundraising connections, and his ability to attract and motivate real engineering talent. his direct design and engineering contributions are marginal, and he continues to inflate his role in those areas as part of his decades-long project to portray himself as an engineer or designer (which he definitely isn't). Elon says he "led the design of the original Roadster"[1]. However, Elon is often loose with the truth - and even by his own admission in 2006[2], his role at Tesla mostly involved business and product strategy. Really, the visual design of the Roadster is a highly modified Lotus shell. It was designed by a group of people, notably Barney Hatt[3]. Musk had strong opinions about how the car should look, and participated in key meetings with designers. You can think of him as the product owner for the visual styling of the Tesla's shell (but not the designer). This is impressive on its own, as he was also running a fledgling SpaceX at the same time. Building a really nice version of the Lotus Elise shell is not what makes Tesla unique, though: their all-electric drivetrain and battery systems were revolutionary at the time, and they designed by a bunch of brilliant people like JB Straubel[4] -- not Elon Musk. Ze'ev Drori also deserves credit for bringing the Roadster from prototype to production and bringing the discipline needed to solve their early manufacturing issues. Tesla's incredible marketing, though? The thing that let them hire best-in-class engineering talent and inspire those folks to work for long hours on changing the auto industry? The thing that let them raise money from Google and eBay founders? The thing that continues to inflate their share price to massive P/Es, even today? That's all Musk. He's the best marketer in the world, bar none. It irks me that Musk is not satisfied with his incredible level of accomplishment and needs to also obscure the work of the people around him who made important contributions. It's been a successful strategy for him so far though, as evinced by the wide acceptance of his version of events and the resulting positive effect on the companies he's involved with. I'll write a blog post about this with more research if people are interested. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596862790408568836 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596862790408568836 [2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... [3] https://www.tesla.com/blog/lotus-position https://www.tesla.com/blog/lotus-position [4] https://archive.ph/HK5uh https://archive.ph/HK5uh

Phlarp 4y ago
A big turning point for me with Elon was actually listening to him talk. In countless interviews he's asked some variation of the question "how do you do it all" and every single time it's the most obvious softball question begging for an answer that praises all the amazing and dedicated engineers that worked on these products and every single time his answer is is some variation of "I'm just that amazing" -- "I only sleep 4 hours a night" -- "I work really hard"
- kuhewa 4y ago
  Decoding the Gurus pod nailed it with their most recent episode on a Musk interview where he hammers this point home. He's the techno-shaman — by demonstrating how different he is to the rest of us mortals and how he has unique knowledge of beyond the cutting edge of tech, he gives people license to believe in whatever he's selling. Just like a traditional shaman does but it's work 120 hours a week sleeping on the factory floor + intimately familiar with every aspect of design, engineering and production (and routinely solve problems none of his brilliant engineers can), instead of going into trances with a direct line to a deity.

Phlarp 4y ago

A big turning point for me with Elon was actually listening to him talk. In countless interviews he's asked some variation of the question "how do you do it all" and every single time it's the most obvious softball question begging for an answer that praises all the amazing and dedicated engineers that worked on these products and every single time his answer is is some variation of "I'm just that amazing" -- "I only sleep 4 hours a night" -- "I work really hard"

kuhewa 4y ago
Decoding the Gurus pod nailed it with their most recent episode on a Musk interview where he hammers this point home. He's the techno-shaman — by demonstrating how different he is to the rest of us mortals and how he has unique knowledge of beyond the cutting edge of tech, he gives people license to believe in whatever he's selling. Just like a traditional shaman does but it's work 120 hours a week sleeping on the factory floor + intimately familiar with every aspect of design, engineering and production (and routinely solve problems none of his brilliant engineers can), instead of going into trances with a direct line to a deity.