4 ms·

Do you have some insider information how SpaceX is managed?

danpalmer 1y ago
A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk. She's the reason the Falcon program works so well. However things changed with Starlink, as it was an org controlled by a Musk loyalist and apparently got a lot of control very quickly internally. They prioritised loyalty over experience and capability and forced out some long term SpaceX folks who had made Falcon a success. Starlink was mostly ex Tesla and Boring people at the beginning I think. I think Starship is somewhere in the middle. It started as a Musk hobby project but has now got contracts and is the future of the company so Shotwell is involved.
- stinkbeetle 1y ago
  > A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk. > She's the reason the Falcon program works so well. A bunch of rumors and hearsay is an unreasonable basis for making these kinds of claims with such confidence. The reality is the public does not know much about how Musk's companies and projects are run, and most people are emotionally ill equipped to have a rational discussion about it no matter how much we know of it.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    This opinion is always so funny to me. Sometimes HN is afraid to judge someone on-grounds, other times they're afraid to draw conclusions that might make them look bad. Apple: "Nobody knows exactly how it's ran, but it's preeminently clear that Steve Jobs was a true MBA and had an almost perfect track record." Tesla: "Nobody knows exactly how it's ran, but we can say for sure it's probably not the social media edgelord/ketamine addict doing a bang-up job."
    - stinkbeetle 1y ago
      That's great. The situation may become less bewildering if you consider that "HN" could be more than one other person.
- panick21_ 1y ago
  First, Shotwell can't 'insulate' people from Musk as he is pretty involved when he wants to be, but mostly he doesn't care and want to focus on new development stuff. I guess you can say Shotwell 'insluates' the Falcon 9 manufacturing line or the sales team, but that's stuff that Musk would only get involved in if there were problems and he did so in the past. So a more accurate a normal way to say this without trying to take shots at Musk would be she runs day to day operations. Almost as if that was her job and Musk specifically put her there because she was good at that. Sounds much less dramatic that way. Second the whole 'Musk sucks and Shotwell is the greatest leader of all time' campaign is literally just people who hate Musk, they just said 'ok sure I can't actually argue that SpaceX is a failure as I initially did for the first 15 years, so I'm just going to blame all issues on Musk, and all success on Shotwell'. Shotwell is great and well liked but claiming she is the reason the Falcon project works so well is kind of silly. Turns out, if you have a product that is much cheaper and fundamentally better then everybody elses, its easier to sell. And turns out, if you only need to manufacture upper stage for 10million $ while your competitor need to build rockets that cost 70 million $ to build, yeah you have an easier jot to build and sell rockets. Now Shotwell is an awesome, and does a great job, everybody knows that. But she exists within SpaceX ecosystem that is clearly lead by Musk and sells a product that wouldn't exist without Musk, a product that SpaceX has spend 10+ years optimizing. And Musk was very, very involved for that whole period. There are other people at SpaceX then those two, and some that have been there a long time and manage important things. So the whole line of argument really just doesn't work. Musk isn't responsible for all bad things, and Shotwell isn't responsible for all the good things. Third. Actually if you read up on Starlink, you will see that the leadership of Starlink wa conservative and didn't want to move very fast. Musk then fired them. I assume that where you got the 'controlled by Musk loyalist' thing. There is no evidence that this was about loyalty, it was well reported that it was about a technical difference in opinion. Musk wanted the next development step to be an actual productive sat and launching that as soon as possible in large numbers. While the experienced people wanted to develop another series of prototypes. But the thing is, Musk was completely right, and Starlink after that, moved much faster and was incredibly successful, even more successful then anybody could have hoped. Some of those people that got fired moved over to Amazon and are now bringing their 'experience' to the much more successful faster moving Kupiter project, apparently. That Starlink leadership is all Tesla and Boring (itself a slit of from SpaceX) would be new to me. As far as I know, when he fired leadership internally, he promoted people from inside SpaceX. But that is a while ago, and people do leave companies or switch companies. I find it hard to believe that the only 'loyal' people would be from Tesla. Also, given how successful Starlink is, I don't see the issue if they are loyal, clearly the knew what they need to know. The last sentence is again some half truth that was reported and then immediately jumped on by Musk haters as a 'got you'. It was a bit of a non-story. Basically it was reported that the South Texas operation would be integrated as a normal part of the company. Claiming that it was just a 'Musk hobby' before that is idiotic, it was a large SpaceX project with people working on it in LA, Florida, multiple locations in Texas and other places. It was always at some point going to be run like everything else, because it just grew beyond the reasonably size of a Skunkworks Project. See if you are anti-Musk you call it a hobby, if the company wasn't lead by Musk, everybody would just call it 'a Skunkworks project' and literally everybody in the industry knows what that means. A Skunkworks project that get put under the main company when it goes into mass manufacture is hardly a new concept. But in instead of just talking about this in normal terms, like we would do for every other project of that nature, people have to frame it as some sort of Anti-Musk point, 'Musk was to incompetent to manage it, so Shotwell had to take over'. Its just a dumb take people people who latch on to any bit of news that can be interpreted as Anti-Musk. And I'm not saying Musk didn't make mistakes or anything like that. He clearly did, but generally the easy articles people latch onto the Anti-Musk fix, are usually not great examples of that.

A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk. She's the reason the Falcon program works so well. However things changed with Starlink, as it was an org controlled by a Musk loyalist and apparently got a lot of control very quickly internally. They prioritised loyalty over experience and capability and forced out some long term SpaceX folks who had made Falcon a success. Starlink was mostly ex Tesla and Boring people at the beginning I think. I think Starship is somewhere in the middle. It started as a Musk hobby project but has now got contracts and is the future of the company so Shotwell is involved.

stinkbeetle 1y ago
> A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk. > She's the reason the Falcon program works so well. A bunch of rumors and hearsay is an unreasonable basis for making these kinds of claims with such confidence. The reality is the public does not know much about how Musk's companies and projects are run, and most people are emotionally ill equipped to have a rational discussion about it no matter how much we know of it.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  This opinion is always so funny to me. Sometimes HN is afraid to judge someone on-grounds, other times they're afraid to draw conclusions that might make them look bad. Apple: "Nobody knows exactly how it's ran, but it's preeminently clear that Steve Jobs was a true MBA and had an almost perfect track record." Tesla: "Nobody knows exactly how it's ran, but we can say for sure it's probably not the social media edgelord/ketamine addict doing a bang-up job."
  - stinkbeetle 1y ago
    That's great. The situation may become less bewildering if you consider that "HN" could be more than one other person.
panick21_ 1y ago
First, Shotwell can't 'insulate' people from Musk as he is pretty involved when he wants to be, but mostly he doesn't care and want to focus on new development stuff. I guess you can say Shotwell 'insluates' the Falcon 9 manufacturing line or the sales team, but that's stuff that Musk would only get involved in if there were problems and he did so in the past. So a more accurate a normal way to say this without trying to take shots at Musk would be she runs day to day operations. Almost as if that was her job and Musk specifically put her there because she was good at that. Sounds much less dramatic that way. Second the whole 'Musk sucks and Shotwell is the greatest leader of all time' campaign is literally just people who hate Musk, they just said 'ok sure I can't actually argue that SpaceX is a failure as I initially did for the first 15 years, so I'm just going to blame all issues on Musk, and all success on Shotwell'. Shotwell is great and well liked but claiming she is the reason the Falcon project works so well is kind of silly. Turns out, if you have a product that is much cheaper and fundamentally better then everybody elses, its easier to sell. And turns out, if you only need to manufacture upper stage for 10million $ while your competitor need to build rockets that cost 70 million $ to build, yeah you have an easier jot to build and sell rockets. Now Shotwell is an awesome, and does a great job, everybody knows that. But she exists within SpaceX ecosystem that is clearly lead by Musk and sells a product that wouldn't exist without Musk, a product that SpaceX has spend 10+ years optimizing. And Musk was very, very involved for that whole period. There are other people at SpaceX then those two, and some that have been there a long time and manage important things. So the whole line of argument really just doesn't work. Musk isn't responsible for all bad things, and Shotwell isn't responsible for all the good things. Third. Actually if you read up on Starlink, you will see that the leadership of Starlink wa conservative and didn't want to move very fast. Musk then fired them. I assume that where you got the 'controlled by Musk loyalist' thing. There is no evidence that this was about loyalty, it was well reported that it was about a technical difference in opinion. Musk wanted the next development step to be an actual productive sat and launching that as soon as possible in large numbers. While the experienced people wanted to develop another series of prototypes. But the thing is, Musk was completely right, and Starlink after that, moved much faster and was incredibly successful, even more successful then anybody could have hoped. Some of those people that got fired moved over to Amazon and are now bringing their 'experience' to the much more successful faster moving Kupiter project, apparently. That Starlink leadership is all Tesla and Boring (itself a slit of from SpaceX) would be new to me. As far as I know, when he fired leadership internally, he promoted people from inside SpaceX. But that is a while ago, and people do leave companies or switch companies. I find it hard to believe that the only 'loyal' people would be from Tesla. Also, given how successful Starlink is, I don't see the issue if they are loyal, clearly the knew what they need to know. The last sentence is again some half truth that was reported and then immediately jumped on by Musk haters as a 'got you'. It was a bit of a non-story. Basically it was reported that the South Texas operation would be integrated as a normal part of the company. Claiming that it was just a 'Musk hobby' before that is idiotic, it was a large SpaceX project with people working on it in LA, Florida, multiple locations in Texas and other places. It was always at some point going to be run like everything else, because it just grew beyond the reasonably size of a Skunkworks Project. See if you are anti-Musk you call it a hobby, if the company wasn't lead by Musk, everybody would just call it 'a Skunkworks project' and literally everybody in the industry knows what that means. A Skunkworks project that get put under the main company when it goes into mass manufacture is hardly a new concept. But in instead of just talking about this in normal terms, like we would do for every other project of that nature, people have to frame it as some sort of Anti-Musk point, 'Musk was to incompetent to manage it, so Shotwell had to take over'. Its just a dumb take people people who latch on to any bit of news that can be interpreted as Anti-Musk. And I'm not saying Musk didn't make mistakes or anything like that. He clearly did, but generally the easy articles people latch onto the Anti-Musk fix, are usually not great examples of that.