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> Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. Well I do. Or at least I did. He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought

• ROTMetro 3y ago
  Did Musk originally go to Roscosmos to license their tech and it was only after the laughed him out of the door that SpaceX pursued it's current strategy? His original plan was literally to be dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
• kaba0 3y ago
  I don’t know, is it really fair to attribute any of these to him? There are thousands of engineers/scientists that did the actual work. Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table. With a big enough wallet it’s not particularly hard. Also, spacex had plenty of government funds going to it — wouldn’t those same funds going to NASA resulted in similar results from taxpayer money? Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
  • jmilloy 3y ago
    The people who did the work deserve credit. So does the person who had the vision and brought them together. Those engineers didn't get together of their own accord and nominate musk as a mascot. Regardless of how you want to summarize Musk's career in the context of his current behavior, which is getting tiresome, I think this is a false dichotomy.
    • EatingWithForks 3y ago
      Musk didn't even have the vision of spacex. He bought it from the original founders and strongarmed the founder label on himself in the legal dispute.
      • mcpackieh 3y ago
        You're confusing SpaceX and Tesla. Maybe you should review these pages and get your facts straight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
      • EricE 3y ago
        So what if he did? What were they doing before he got involved? If it was so easy to bring this kind of stuff to market then why aren't more people as wildly successful? This kind of "Musk didn't do do anything or have the vision" hate is beyond tiring.
        • EatingWithForks 3y ago
          There are plenty wildly successful people. There's a list of billionaires, and even more millionaires. Of course, these people tend to pull up ladders behind them, so they prevent other people from their opportunities. :)
  • BigJono 3y ago
    > Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table. I love to shit on Musk as much as anyone but I dunno about this lol. There's a lot of skill in hiring good technical people. IMO that "skill" basically just comes down to being a good technical person yourself so you can tell the difference. You can't hire an elite engineering team with hype, out of 100 applicants you'll get 2 good ones and 98 muppets that want to work at the trendy place and be seen to be doing so. I've worked for like 5+ companies that were doing fine before some dipshit head of engineering hired a bunch of other dipshits and they took over and turned it into a big dipshit orgy hellbent on driving a perfectly good company straight into an iceberg. The person doing the hiring has a shitton of influence in how a business goes unless your business model can live with enterprise-grade average and you can just hire everyone. I can't see that being the case at Tesla or SpaceX... I think Musk deserves some credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Doesn't stop him being a flog though.
  • dmonitor 3y ago
    No way would SpaceX happen without him
  • itslennysfault 3y ago
    NASA (or perhaps a better comparison ULA) wouldn't have taken the risk to try to make reusable rockets. I think Elon's value in Space X (aside from hiring because he clearly has some brilliant engineers working there) is that he's crazy enough to risk it all on "crazy" ideas. He was REALLY close to failing on both Tesla and SpaceX because of this, but it wound up working out and producing things that almost certainly wouldn't exist otherwise. What he's doing with Twitter is, I guess, a similar leap of faith, but I don't think it is going to pan out this time.
    • mulmen 3y ago
      The Shuttle was reusable and NASA built that in the 1970s.
      • EricE 3y ago
        The shuttle might as well have been disposable for all the inefficiencies in its design. If it was really reusable and cost effective we'd still be using it. Guess what - we aren't.
        • mulmen 3y ago
          That’s a strange conclusion. A 1978 Ford Fairmont does everything the common person needs in a car. But there was room for improvement in terms of features, reliability, and efficiency. So we continued to develop cars. Expecting any vehicle to be perfect is unrealistic. Even the Falcon 9 has evolved. SpaceX is working on another vehicle that is even more efficient. The shuttle had flaws but it was reusable.
          • mcv 3y ago
            But the Shuttle was retired well before the US had a replacement ready. For quite some time, the US was dependent on the Russian Soyuz. It was technically reusable, but at a pretty steep cost. It was not very efficient.
  • welshwelsh 3y ago
    I think you're massively underestimating how difficult it is to allocate capital and execute business plans. When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement. For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is. On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.
    • maxlin 3y ago
      While you're not completely wrong, your estimation on replaceability of engineers in general isn't just "hey monster.com please send 5x general engineers my way" after you lose a few. Especially when it comes to senior positions, or unique aerospace roles like at SpaceX. There's a reason those salaries go sky high at times. That aside, in many cases it takes an engineering-minded businessman to create the greatest enterprises. Not just in valuation, but in general value and appreciation in fields where one can do a lot of good but not get a lot of profit.
  • bonadrag 3y ago
    Having money is necessary but not sufficient to achieve the things he did. There are other millionaires and billionaires who tried to do what he did but couldn't. Regardless of your personal animus towards Elon, give the man credit where credit is due. Tesla and SpaceX are great contributions to the world and he was instrumental in implementing them, from capital to the business core ideas.
  • GlacierFox 3y ago
    You could probably say the same things about Henry Ford. I heard he didn't do any of the hard work either...
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla. I actually don't agree with this because I find Tesla's so unsexy, I would never buy one. What I think he did do though, is bring a fairly reliable electric car into production, which was pretty cool, and because of the climate crisis, people wanted to contribute by ditching their petrol guzzler. It's also a bit of a "flex".
• gtirloni 3y ago
  > But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified My personal take at the time when I regarded him positively was that he, although not really a genius, "got" things in general and being in a position of power, would allow those who really were geniuses to do their jobs. If that was ever true, he switched from letting those brilliant people do their work to actually telling them to blindly follow his crazy ideas (for lulz and otherwise).
• MisterTea 3y ago
  > He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla. What Musk did was show the oil addicted automakers that EV's are both practical to manufacture and own. Using the word sexy to describe machinery and inanimate objects in general is just weird and I consider it the peak of marketoid speak.
  • whynaut 3y ago
    I think ‘sexy’ here is just implying how it has become a status symbol.
    • mcv 3y ago
      There's a good reason why they started with sports cars and luxury sedans. And showing how ridiculously fast it could accelerate was a big part of Musk's marketing.
• mulmen 3y ago
  > He gave us reusable rockets. The Space Shuttle would like a word.
  • parineum 3y ago
    The space shuttle is a reusable upper stage. The shuttle successfully massively increased the cost of the upper stage by making it reusable falling incredibly short of it's initial design goals.
    • philwelch 3y ago
      It’s also a massive stretch to describe the shuttle as “reusable” when the cost to refurbish the orbiter between flights was comparable to the cost of an expendable vehicle.
      • mulmen 3y ago
        It’s not a stretch at all. That’s the definition of reusable. It might not be economical but that’s a whole other metric. Dismissing a first-of-its-kind state-of-the-art vehicle from the 1970s for not meeting the standards of 50 years in the future isn’t going to lead you to any insightful conclusions.
        • philwelch 3y ago
          It’s not just that it didn’t meet the standards of today; it didn’t even meet the cost-efficiency goals it was originally intended to.
          • mulmen 3y ago
            It met the capability requirements though. Including reusability.
            • philwelch 3y ago
              I’m not going to continue to engage because you don’t seem to be engaging in good faith here.
• johannes1234321 3y ago
  > He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla. True that. > He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz. Well, NASA decided that building rockets isn't their core purpose anymore as rocket building isn't as scientific, experimental anymore and could be comodotized and financed private industry to take over. Musk was in thebright spot ant the right time, with enough capital and hype to take over the engineers and and funds and found the right executive team. These are achievements, but I he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.
  • EricE 3y ago
    lol - SpaceX didn't surpass Blue Origin or NASAs contractors because of hype! How can people be this sincerely deluded?
    • Apocryphon 3y ago
      The point is the market was positioned so that any participant would have benefited. Maybe Blue Origin or another company would have taken years longer to achieve what SpaceX did. Maybe more expensively, not as good, though one doubts hardly any less unreliably. But circumstances made it so that any player who tried could have gotten NASA the rockets more or less, if they tried, because the government was actively supporting private industry efforts to do so.
  • mcpackieh 3y ago
    > IF he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot. What is your basis for this belief? Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, by a man who was far richer than Elon Musk, hired people connected and accomplished in the space industry and with that opportunity has accomplished far far less. They've never put anything into orbit, even as a test. SpaceX's success has not precluded Blue Origin's success. Blue Origin hasn't succeeded despite hiring many of the best people in the industry because they're unfocused and undriven. Blue Origin is poorly managed by Bezos, not hindered by SpaceX's success. Really, explain your reasoning for thinking otherwise. I would love to hear this.
• pfannkuchen 3y ago
  > and I personally hate PayPal PayPal is really old at this point though, the original people have had nothing to do with it for a very long time. IIRC PayPal had novel and useful functionality initially, before it was run into the ground as a product.
  • EricE 3y ago
    Yes, before the founders sold out, Paypal was very novel and unique. Now they seem to be more interested in tying up people's money to use for float as their primary business model, rather than providing value as a transaction clearing house.
• jasfi 3y ago
  When someone is that successful a lot of people will try and write them off. I wrote in another comment, I don't agree with everything he says or does. But he is undoubtedly in the firing line.
  • MildlySerious 3y ago
    > But he is undoubtedly in the firing line. Billionaires are uniquely positioned to be, because they tend to get away repeatedly with things that would be career- or life-ending for others.
    • jasfi 3y ago
      One thing I vehemently disagree with is the crazy hours he makes his employees work. I think it's wrong from a people perspective in general, and as a programmer I think this could only lead to bad outcomes.
• failbuffer 3y ago
  Eberhard and Tarpenning had the idea to make an EV sports car (rather than the traditional "green" branding that EV's tried to go for), so I think they deserve credit for the "sexy" approach. Musk deserves credit for recognizing the opportunity, commandeering it, and keeping the idea going. The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing. His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best. I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.