The thing Elon does well I feel, is he takes real experts with know-how and talent, and puts them on the cool project they want to work on and just lets them cook.
It sounds like a no-brainer management strategy, but it's surprisingly rare in practice. People will lend on random teams and projects, projects won't try to push any envelope but just be the next thing marketing or product came up with to boost some metrics or acquire some new customer, etc.
Now I might be entirely wrong as I never worked at one of his companies, but it's the impression I get and most of his success, Tesla and SpaceX, I think he really managed to snatch the experts away from where they worked because of that.
At least I think this holds for bootstrapping. And then that top talent left, and now since the major innovations have already landed, probably you can just churn out grunt out-of-schoolers to iterate and keep the lights on.
This isn't really the case. For Falcon 1 he hired a bunch experts but a pretty small handful. Then he hired a lot of really young hungry engineers.
And its also hard to say that 'top talent left'. Because arguable some of the achievements after some of those people left is bigger then before. Tom Mueller for example build the Merlin engine, but claims to be more proud of the team he build that then went on to build Raptor. So clearly even while some talented people left, many others joined.
SpaceX is not 'iterating and keeping the lights on' they are always going for something harder in the next iteration.
Well, I don't mean it's not talented people that join, I'd assume it's all top grade students. But the initial best-in-class experts in the field I mean.
I agree with a small handful, I think that's also necessary. A select few best in class experts is ideal, because too many and they don't have room to lead and start stepping on each other and entering debates and so on.
You take best in class experts in the field, give them a team of top tier workers under them that can follow and deliver. In turn they learn from the best.
I think for Starship and Starlink he followed the same playbook though. He brought in best in class specialists to bootstrap them.
That and the other thing I think he does that's just as important is go get things unstuck. When there is bureaucracy and managers getting in the way he gets it through. Very under appreciated IMO.
What I think he does well, perhaps his true genius—-is that he is willing to put the capital into transformative ideas that have an exceptionally long payback and has the patience to wait for those returns.
the people that hate musk are going to find something wrong with it "The Ship blew up on landing" and the musk lovers will do the opposite when things actually go wrong.
Counterpoint: I dislike Musk because he's narcissist (subtypes: strongly communal, somewhat grandiose) but I don't wanna see spaceX fail. I just don't want abusive individuals in positions of power to have so much influence and to be given credit for the technical achievements of others.
He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. Books documenting SpaceX's early days make it pretty clear that Musk had a pretty significant role in putting in place the kind of thinking that has allowed SpaceX to blow open the commercial space market.
Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.
By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and likely at least flight 16 before anything orbital, likely into the upper 20s before reliable refueling and non-Starlink payloads. Most other rich people haven't done much besides minimally funding small startups or dead end joyrides.
Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).
Yeah, I agree with what you said about Elon's tolerance for risk and continuously betting the company on ever larger projects. I just dislike the common characterization of "billionaire space race", when one of the billionaires is a billionaire because of that "race", while for the other it's just a small side project (relatively to his wealth). But I root for Blue Origin too. Thanks to Bezos' commitment and the real work they have done, they will be flying frequently at some point, and that's good. Everything that keeps up the space boom that SpaceX started is good, from my space nerd perspective. And it wouldn't be good if SpaceX became a monopoly (if we don't consider it a monopoly already).
> he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire
There's a survivorship bias occurring too.
You see the same selection going on with huge commercial real estate winners: they keep doubling down and the majority eventually fail out. You see only the winner, not the failures. “Keep rolling till you crit-fail.”
I don't know much about Tesla's history, but with SpaceX, that definitely plays a role. While their success can be attributed to their engineering practices, their existence can be attributed to managing to get Falcon 1 to orbit on the last launch that the company could afford at the time, while many other companies, both before and after, have failed due to missing that "keyhole".
At that point Tesla was 3 guys with an idea and no money. They got $7.5M of investment, of which $6.5M was Musk's money (and he became chairman). I count that as "starting Tesla", as without his money nothing would happen (first big money from other investors came 2 years later).
They surely had some cash, but I think it was a small contribution compared to Musk's. Given that Musk was $6.5M out of $7.5M series A, and something like $9-10M out of $13M series B, I think it's not possible they contributed more than Musk, unless they put big money into it right at the start (unlikely). I count find any concrete information about how much money the two actual founders contributed (which I consider as evidence that it wasn't much). Do you have some sources on how much they invested?
This is a super tired, wrong talking point. Tesla was basically nothing when Elon bought it. He effectively just bought the name. It's also a tired talking point because even if there was some meaningfully well-developed product he was buying at the time, he still grew the company from basically non-existent to one of the best car manufacturers in the world, which is 99.9% of what matters.
If we're going to criticize people I wish we'd stick to real things to criticize, because there are plenty with Elon. Making stuff up like this just makes anti-Elon people look ridiculous.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
> Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
>considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Sometimes I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space.
The person above you is not wrong. Objectively people who fawn over Musks wealth and achievements without commenting on his nefarious qualities and blatant illegal behaviour recently need a reality check.
Not every mention of Musk needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer of not supporting his idiotic self-defeating politics. This isn't reddit.
Speaking of politics though, it was a bit jarring to see the "USA! USA!" chanting. I get the intent (disliking the government doesn't mean disliking America), but it's kind of awkward to see a large crowd of immigrants doing it as the admin their boss supports is pretty blatantly harassing immigrants regardless of citizenship.
that goes way back to the early days of spacex. its a jab at ULA that was getting their engines from Russia. and at Russia itself because Musk felt screwed when he tried to buy a couple ICBMS for his original mars idea.
I don't think it's unfair to make a comment about the guy building rockets also having an unhealthy interest in funding far-right fascist groups. Additionally the dude infiltrated the government and shut down all the agencies that were investigating his companies.
I feel this is definitely important to comment on when also fawning over the guys achievements. Is an achievement made in good faith if it was being investigated for criminal wrongdoing and then managed to make it magically go away.... I think not.
I have no idea what criminal wrongdoing you're referring to, and as for the other point, it's just so overdone at this point. Every time SpaceX is mentioned, you guys feel the need to shit up the discussion with your cynicism and repeating of things everyone has heard a million times as if it's novel insight.
We all know Musk is at best an absolute idiot when it comes to politics who's being manipulated by sycophants, and at worst, he's an evil fascist that is completely fine with wrecking everything that lets his companies actually be successful. But a lot of you guys think that's an excuse to pretend that he doesn't deserve any credit for anything. Even just acknowledging that he has done useful things in the past is apparently fawning over him.
Musk is easy to hate, especially here on HN but mate is the greatest salesman in the history of mankind and there is no one even close 50th. that I think is his greatest achievement even though he’s done a bunch of amazing things
I had considered adding how HN's darling's CEO, Tim, was also doing his part to support the American gestapo but figured that'd just be whataboutism (I think Zuckerberg gets hated on relatively similarly to Musk).
I just don't think every thread about SpaceX needs to be shitted up. It's unpleasant, like someone barging into a thread about some new exciting development/project in India or other developing country to rain on everyone's parade by saying that they should spend that money on getting everyone a toilet.
Does it need to be a competition in your eyes? Is allowing root-level access to the nations critical government infrastructure for his cronies and removing funding for organisations investigating his companies for wrongdoing the necessary broken eggs to land a flying skyscraper?
I don't understand why 'the ends justify the means' is a good answer.
Yes, you need to break some eggs to make an omelette, but you do not need to spend more than a quarter-Billion dollars to help elect an administration working to end democracy in order to build a new spacecraft. In fact the spacecraft development would likely go better without any political intervention at all; it is widely seen as a distraction, and rightly so.
The point was that it is and was completely unnecessary for the particular omlette of making new self-landing spacecraft to break the particular eggs of spending all that time and money on politics. They are two entirely different pursuits, negating the GP comment.
As for Harris, you are comparing an exaggerated number for total campaign spend to Musk's $250-$400 million spending as a single donor to a campaign in which he was not running. Comparing apples-to-apples, the Trump and Harris campaigns spent comparable amounts [0], and that is officially, not counting the massive media coverage Trump obtains for free.
It should be noted also, that to normal people, the answer is yes - any politician wasting taxpayer money is a huge problem. It is absurd when people bring up the whataboutism as if everyone is as politically biased as they themselves are.
Elon said the reason he spent that money was because he thought a Harris presidency would be a disaster for the country, worse than a 2nd Trump presidency. You may not agree with it, but that doesn't make it "nefarious" and "blatantly illegal."
I actually don't particularly like Elon and I don't like Trump or Harris and didn't vote for either. I also have no issues pointing out his accomplishments. I was pointing out that every time SpaceX or Tesla do something cool, people like you show up and have to make it political, which is super annoying and possibly a violation of the HN guidelines.
The whole nazi thing is just gross to me. Everything surrounding his is repulsive and disappointing to me now. Whether you consider that "hating", I can't be sure.
He's not a nazi though. It's literally only those on the opposite political spectrum saying that. He waved and literally described the motion in words as he was doing it.
That's a completely unfair thing to say. It's a meme at this point even that if you elevate your arm upwards at any angle between 90 and 180 you're automatically treated as having made a nazi salute.
What matters is the context around it, as has always been the case. And the context is not that of a nazi salute.
The people who insist on it being a nazi salute are just disingenuous people pushing an angle for their own virtue signalling. It's tiresome.
You're literally just wrong. It's not a meme "at this point". It's _always_ been a thing people recognize as a nazi salute.
Plus the context surrounding Elon is certainly not supporting your argument. Actual truth" conspiracy theory, George Soros comments, "DEI must die", transgender comments, amplification of racism and harassment.
The things you mention as context were not in fact context. None of the things you mentioned were in the speech. He was extremely happy and was in the midst of thanking the crowd, a nazi salute is a complete non sequitur in that context.
As one of the aforementioned, yes I don't mind seeing his projects blow up.
I'm sure Starship will make it to orbit, but I'm betting that the claim of 100 tons to orbit is where it will miss the mark. And that is the crux of the issue IMO -- because getting the new rocket engines to be reliable enough can always be accomplished by dialing back on its efficiency and overall thrust capabilities. I'm waiting to see if they will be able to deliver on its claims.
