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The reusable rockets are real. The cool EVs are real, though Tesla is obviously losing its edge more than SpaceX. Pure bullshitters don’t do that. No he didn’
by api 3y ago
The reusable rockets are real. The cool EVs are real, though Tesla is obviously losing its edge more than SpaceX.
Pure bullshitters don’t do that.
No he didn’t personally build all that stuff, but there is far too much of a trail of success here for the guy to have been a fool. He was at least clearly quite good at selling a vision and knowing who to hire and promote to make it happen. That’s not as easy as it sounds.
I’ve followed him since before he was famous and I remember hearing early interviews of his. I think he was genuinely a genius.
Was.
Today he seems totally fried. I suspect drug abuse is a major factor. I also strongly suspect he’s bipolar, and that can worsen with age especially if you are not rigorous about treating it and taking care of yourself.
I think people want to recon him into a fool because the fall is actually pretty damn depressing. It’s easier to say he was always like this than to realize that drugs and social media (hard to say which was worse) took a great mind.
- rpmisms 3y agoI think he aged out of optimism, and now feels a sense of social responsibility appropriate for his age, and is applying the same tactics he used to become so successful in rocketry and automotion.
- throwup238 3y agoThere's always another other coping mechanism.
- rpmisms 3y agoI'm fine with this one. Massive amounts of money spent on the opposite of the political orthodoxy is always fun.
- felixgallo 3y agoOh, I don’t know, last time was a little unfun in Europe for a while.
- rpmisms 3y agoAnd directly resulted in the best era Europe has ever had.
- felixgallo 3y agoI mean, unless you're one of the 75 million people who died in the massacres, the concentration camps, the firebombing, the disease, the starvation. Maybe we could find a way to have a great era without that, they might suggest.
- api 3y agoBeing bombed to death, losing tens of millions in death camps and trench warfare, and then being divided in half between the USA and Russia for 70 years? Really?
- epistasis 3y agoI don't think Elon did any of that either, except to bring money to smarter people to actually build those things.
- fragmede 3y agobringing money to smarter people to actually build things is huge! even if that is all he did, why do we down play that?
- epistasis 3y agoIn Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people. And for Tesla, he wasn't even a founder, he just kind of took over. With every success there's some amount of luck, and some amount of accrued power, and some amount of grit and novel creation. It's increasingly looking like the less that Musk has his hands on things, the better "his" companies do. He may have lots of leftover power from his early luck, but others need to rein him in for any sort of success to happen. Now that his ego is too big, we get whatever has been happening for the past few years.
- fragmede 3y ago> In Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people. The site we're on is a testament to that. Even if Elon is just a successful VC investor and not an engineer, why denigrate that? I'm not saying this out of any love for Elon, but to recognize that getting the right people together in the right time and place and funding them is, in and of itself, and accomplishment. eg Al Gore and creating the Internet.
- Fricken 3y agoThere's a lot of rationalizing going on in this thread. Musk didn't invent Paypal, he didn't found Tesla, he didn't design a single rocket for SpaceX (he bought a bunch of ship designs from NASA which they then reused). He puts his name on these companies and pretends to be the only thing holding these companies together. He was always like this.
- spencerchubb 3y agoThis is a bad argument. "He didn't actually do the work". Well duh. Lots of things are done as a team. He was on the team at three monumental companies. You seem to believe he just got lucky. But if it happens 3 times, it's not an exception, it's a pattern.
- Fricken 3y agoThere is no alternate history timeline where Elon and his army of insecure, raging manchildren didn't suck up all the oxygen in the room so I guess we'll never know how much better things could have been.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gamblor956 3y agoI've "been on the team" at more than a dozen monumental companies. Doesn't mean I get to take credit for the stuff they've done... And objectively speaking, the fact that everything Musk micromanages is an abysmal failure is proof that Musk was not behind the rockets, or the EVs. SpaceX was going nowhere until Shotwell took over. Tesla was going nowhere until Musk brought in qualified executives from other carkmakers. Boring's a failure to launch. Neuralink is touting "accomplishments" that were already accomplished decades ago. X is worse now after 1.5 years of Musk ownership.
- spencerchubb 3y agoYou should be more positive. You do get to claim partial credit for the teams you were on :) If you were very early to the team, you get to claim a larger fraction of credit as well
- slimebot80 3y agoHis brain didn't do the rocket science or the EV engineering. He's an investor who knows a bit of science, and is able to inspire people - which translates to money. Inspiring people is a great skill and it could have been great for everyone to have that central push. But the many years of grifting has been exposed now, so maybe he feels like he's got nothing to loose.