I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual original founder if I'm not mistaken, I could see the Tesla argument, but those people never provide any true insight into how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a new CEO). I think it's pretty obvious he is a capable individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow makes it work.
I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.
As an ex spacex employee I can definitely say that it wouldn’t have been half the company today if Musk want in charge. Not a fanboy but trying to give an honest evaluation. Space is crazy hard and doesn’t happen without brilliant people so of course the credit for the success of the company goes to the engineers and everyone that gave some of their best work to making it happen though that type of success doesn’t happen without Musk at the helm. When it comes to space, he is truly a visionary that pushes for the craziest ideas and then challenges these brilliant people to make it happen. He truly loves space and has embraced learning everything there is to know about the engineering side of things so it’s not like what he’s proposing is impossible. It’s just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the brilliant people that he’s been able to recruit are able to make it happen. It’s a BRUTAL work environment from a work life balance perspective but you don’t mind because you’re working on SPACESHIPS with some of the most brilliant people you’ve ever met and doing some of the most impactful work of your life.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.
Thanks for sharing your ex-space-x perspective. I too, am skeptical about any good coming from this.
I observe that Musk’s biggest wins is where he has used his enthusiasm and large cachet of celebrity capital to challenge the status quo. Tesla and SpaceX both embody elements of society that sci-fi has been dreaming since we were kids. Self landing rockets flying all the time! Electric robot cars that drive themselves! He challenges entrenched industries to do a thing that people wish they would do, but the bean counters say isn’t worth it. It least that’s how the fanciful narrative goes.
The problem with Twitter (or any social network/super app) is that it is not clear what that “go big, go beyond, dream big” trajectory is. For me personally, it’d be about open source, open walls, federation, and above all no fricking advertisement/surveillance economy. I don’t see how Musk’s acquisition here achieves that or any other “dream for the stars” aspiration one has for Twitter.
He has talked about open sourcing Twitter's algorithms.
And His dream for the stars aspiration for Twitter is a public square where people exchange communication and ideas freely, civilly and honestly. Some might argue that is a crazier dream than autonomous rockets, Mars and electric cars!
"It’s just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the brilliant people that he’s been able to recruit are able to make it happen"
you can read this sentence and come away with the conclusion that he doesn't do anything, or that he is responsible for everything. To me, it mostly seems like he has a bunch of money / financing so he can pay people to try lots of often very dumb ideas and some might work. His core "skill" being an accumulation of immense wealth.
you might say "you need both ideas and execution, and he is an ideas guy", which is correct, but i think the level of credit (and compensation) is wildly skewed towards the "ideas guy" in this case
You can’t have one without the other. If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things. Musk doesn’t propose ridiculous things. He’s an engineer at heart and truly understands the science of space flight to an insane degree so when he proposes something it’s within the realm of possibility but no one else is doing it because it’s never been done and the chance of failure is so high that any sane business would shut it down. He can’t achieve anything without his employees but those employees wouldn’t be doing a single moonshot idea without leadership willing to invest in those ideas.
You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that’s a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He’s a tremendous leader and you’d be foolish to underestimate him.
Again, I don’t fanboy him but I do give credit where credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked with him on a project that he cared about. He’s brilliant at some things but his god complex is off the charts. He’s an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he’s not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes leadership.
Our culture tends to deify leaders when it’s really a team effort. Don’t blindly hate the guy because others fawn over him. He’s human, and a deeply flawed one at that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the impossible.
the number of things he has proposed that were lies / scams (solar tiles, tesla self driving), or incredibly stupid (hyper loop, whatever these shitty robots are now, boring company etc) is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer. he is a salesmen as you say. to me he is more elizabeth holmes than nikola tesla
"If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?
> is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer.
These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
I've said the same about Branson and Virgin Galactic. He's been trying since 2004 to commercialize spaceflight and I don't think they've done anything worth mentioning. It seems to take more than an eccentric rich guy with big ideas to tackle space.
It's not all ideas, but an ideas guy is a necessary but insufficient condition for the ultra talented "do-ers" to do their amazing things. Elon could have bought a big chunk of Google or apple if he wanted to with all his wealth and just generated nice returns, but t we probably wouldn't have boosters that return to land and can be reused if he did.
Musk essentially was the A series, which led to him becoming the chairman and majority owner of the 7 month old company, which at that point just had a handful of guys. He ended up dismissing the original founders of the company before production began on their first product.
Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.
You can still do that. Just "electric battery car" was not a novel idea in 2003.
Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.
He has done a fantastic job at fundraising for SpaceX. Most other companies can't get past Series G as a private company. I think SpaceX is on series N, or around there. The talent pool available to SpaceX and Tesla is also very smart and motivated, and will put up with a lot of BS from the companies because they are so mission-driven.
That is his really great talent: getting smart people to put their resources behind ambitious projects. That was also Elizabeth Holmes's talent, and Adam Neumann's. So far, he has done well at pivoting that inspiring message to real results, unlike the other two.
You may very well be right! I didn't mean to come off saying you are wrong, just that Revenue isn't a proxy. IKEA on the other hand I very highly doubt has a higher market cap. Retail typically has high Revenue and low margin, like Walmart
Not even close. It might be the most valuable one that uses venture funding (which would be normal given that they might also be the most highly funded venture-backed company, I'm not sure if anyone is beating them on that), but there are a ton of huge private companies that don't use venture funding.
Now I'm curious. Do you have some examples? I know there are some huge companies that are state owned like saudi aramco, but dont know if any other privately held companies with 100+ billion valuation
Most of them are companies whose owners either want to keep them private or who are not well-served by "tradFi" as the cryptobros say. As such, they don't have valuations over $100 billion (they don't have valuations at all, usually), but they are worth over $100 billion.
Several big law firms are likely worth over $100 billion if they ever were equity financed, but use a partnership structure for legal reasons. The same for large hedge funds, which use partnerships for tax reasons.
This list has some more traditional companies that have stayed private but have high revenue:
These lists only include companies that report their revenue for one reason or another (eg to get a loan). Many profitable private companies don't - their owners like to stay private and extract cash from the business rather than having to keep the profit in the business.
State-owned companies are another group entirely, and are often worth a ton.
SpaceX is unique because there are a whole lot of people who want to work on space exploration and very few big companies that are making serious progress in the field. Many people will put up with lower pay and extreme working conditions just for the chance to be a part of something like that. I don't think we can say the same for Twitter.
> From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision.
Maybe? But I think he and others would argue that Twitter was gradually losing popularity and had no direction. So I'm not sure "slow death" is such a great culture to hold onto.
Have you considered for a second that sending people to an irradiated hell hole planet where conditions are worse than earth even with 1000 years of climate change isnt the idea it’s cracked up to be?
The notion of "progress" is just mythologizing the past and fetishizing a particular version of the future. It only serves to portray alternatives as "anti-progress"; it is a rhetorical cudgel devoid of substance. We have problems that need solving, climate change is one of them. Musk's notion of Mars as "Planet B" is an entirely unworkable idea, and dangerous in that it invites postponing action in favor of a silver bullet that will never arrive.
Things are not worth doing simply because they are risky - that's just more fetishism. They are worth doing because they solve problems. Space travel has the potential to solve certain problems, and is already solving lots of problems today. Mars colonization is not a serious proposal to any problem, because it can't be accomplished on any time horizon we're planning for. Mars colonization will likely never happen, and if it does, it is far beyond the foreseeable future (>100 years).
So; SpaceX's rockets (and satellites) could certainly be useful, and are certainly useful today, but as GP pointed out, Musk's stated purpose is nonsense.
Why derail the conversation with rudeness and condescension? Why put words in my mouth instead of engaging with what I've said? Cui bono?
At the scale of individuals I would agree people should be free to try whatever hairbrained schemes they please, at that scale who am I to say what will work out or won't or what success even means.
What concerns me is that so many people are buying into false solutions and transparent grift about real and pressing issues that impact us all collectively. Musk isn't a crackpot who should be tolerated in the interests of liberty, he's a public figure who is actively causing harm, and I believe will cause more in the future. So I'm certainly entitled to share my views on this public figure, and I'll continue to do so. I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
>>I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
Because
I think I shouldn't do X. == ok
I think You shouldn't do X. == no
I think you should get all the rights to not start a rocket company, car company, a tunnel boring company, solar panel company. But you demanding others not start all those companies seems to be wrong to me.
Again, I give you all the rights do sit down and do nothing.
Whatever comment it is you're responding to, it doesn't seem to be mine, since I never said any of those things.
The freedom you seem to be advocating for is freedom from other people having opinions, existing, or speaking to you. As if they only mattered when they agreed with you or were willing to help you, and they became irrelevant the moment they had a criticism. I think you should reconsider. I think life is better with vigorous debate with people you disagree with, and that the things you so badly want to "get done" will be richer and deeper if you engage with people who may not like what you're doing. Otherwise, how could there be any other outcome than finding yourself surrounded by yes men?
I think understanding the difference between a poorly considered plan and real progress is very important. Elon seems to demonstrate repeatedly (even if he has a mythos otherwise) he does not think multiple detailed steps ahead as illustrated by several failures like Boring company.
To be fair, doesn't seem like he's putting any effort into digging holes.
The strongest argument is Tesla still doesn't have self-driving cars considering he's given it tons of attention for years and missed ETAs many times, but they're clearly getting there.
That said, while I do think space travel is crazy cool, the prospects of living on Mars are quite long-term and a _lot_ of work to the point you might ask if it's really worth it worrying about it right now. How are they going to solve the atmosphere? Or even more impossible, how are they going to solve the ionizing radiation from space? I guess they could just live in closed-off domes but still...
Exactly the how and why of mars haven’t been explained at all. Because he isn’t serious. Fsd, mars, etc are all grifts to get engineers to work harder and give up more value so they think they are a part of some meaning.
Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.
That's not the problem. I can't speak for the USA however this perspective is from the UK.
At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...
Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.
Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.
"At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity"
Hospitals in the UK go near or exceed their capacity in any flu season, it happened many times before 2020 and is due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care where supply/demand aren't joined up. This doesn't mean anything was wrong with Elon's position.
> due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care.
i’m not so sure this is because of socialized medicine considering how often american hospitals run into capacity issues and the general state of wreckage that is US health care—which by the way is a significant amount the most expensive per citizen in the world.
The UK has a backlog of something like 6 million+ people waiting for operations/medical attention. Whatever issues the US has, it's not on the same scale.
Primarily due to badly managed privately held, for-profit care where supply and demand aren't joined up. (because it's a hospital and avoiding death is inelastic).
How many of those patients actually needed to be at the hospital, never mind in a bed once there? How many actually needed to be transported to hospital by ambulance?
How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold?
We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases.
It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making.
Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all.
The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.
Hospitals were not taking people in willy nilly (because they were running out of beds). I wasn't in the UK, but in my area they were telling people only to come to the hospital if they were having trouble breathing. Have you ever had a cold that made it difficult for you to breathe and put you in danger of suffocating? Is that the sort of thing you just shrug off in your mind? When I was a child I had what I would consider a severe cold every year (due to a deviated septum); I coughed out some impressive phlegm gobs, but never had any shortness of breath.
You're accusing other people of being paranoid, while wildly downplaying the severity of COVID. Every reaction must seem like a paranoid overreaction from the perspective that it's "just a cold," but the cold does not have a 1% mortality rate (as we were seeing at the time).
I remain baffled by how some people will look at someone fighting for their life on a respirator and say, "wow, what a weak, entitled person, coming to the hospital for life saving care when they could recover from sheer force of will in the privacy of their own home."
You may want to reevaluate your claims, such as the mortality rate one, now that we have more information available to us.
Let's look at the situation in the Toronto area, for example. Remember, greater Toronto is Canada's most populous region, and the seventh-most populous metropolitan area in North America.
We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
> We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:
> "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
They also advise that the actual number of deaths from covid-19 is higher than reported.
Regardless, deaths were curtailed due to the measures in place. without these measures, once hospitals reach critical capacity, deaths would sky rocket, not just from covid but all sources.
> Later on, we saw news reports like this one:
> "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
This report is about two care homes in Ontario, it is not representative of the millions who died.
> We also saw news reports like this:
> "Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"
Tents setup on playgrounds were never the first line of defence, they were a contingency for other measures which worked. without the measures you're arguing against, those tents would have been very much used.
> Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.
In other news like in the ones from Saxony at some point there were so many deaths that the crematoriums ran too hot as they had to burn dead people non-stop.
Article just like these were the norm for some months in 2020.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/dunkle-...
That one field hospital didn't see a single COVID-19 patient could have a lot of reasons for example, patients went to another one.
From my experience, people around me who got COVID suffered and/or died. Others had mild symptoms. You are either lucky or your were not. :(
None of this moves the needle on your assertion that COVID was "just a cold" or that it was a sort of collective psychosis. You've identified measuring errors and some badly done logistics - hazards we have when considering a large scale under any circumstances - and from there you leap shear light-years to your conclusion.
No matter how the deaths were counted in the moment, excess death counts after the fact saw an increase of 12.8% during Covid in Ontario. So, unless there was another mysterious cause of death taking out around 75,000 people a year there, the mortality rate estimates pre-vaccine were pretty spot on.
I'm not going to accept that assertion without evidence, but even if we grant it, it's not an okay thing to do to put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it wouldn't be an acceptable thing to do.
I'm not really interested in the distinction of whether it was a hunch based on gut or a hunch based on a cursory inspection of the data. I'm fully willing to believe he was as glued to the data as I was during those early months of the pandemic, or more so. He's not an epidemiologist or a public health official, and even if he were those things, decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision.
Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it doesn't impact the moral dimension.
"decisions about other people's lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision."
That's exactly the kind of people who were making the decisions all along (public health officials and laptop-class academics).
This being why I'm criticizing the actions of Tesla, illegally violating the orders of public health officials, while not being accountable to the public at large or even it's factory workers.
The point I'm making is that public health officials were making "decisions about other people's lives" despite being "a small group of people (or one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the decision, with a massive interest in the decision". Those people are not morally or intellectually superior to Musk, far from it. There was simply no moral culpability for defying public health during COVID - it was and still is a tyrannical and expertise-free group of people that should not have any power or really, exist at all.
Musk was correct that COVID was wildly overblown and similar to flu. Fauci himself said it was flu-like back in March 2020 iirc, because it was. Musk is meanwhile highly accountable; people can just not buy stuff from him. You can't get public health officials out of your life that easily.
How could you possibly know that? Sure maybe none of the people who worked at Tesla died from COVID, but what about their families? What about every single person in public they interacted with? There is no way to know how many people, if any, they spread the virus to, who then died, and whether they got the virus at work.
But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns saved lives.
No, hospitals are still catching up on the years of “elective” procedures they and to postpone to make room for Covid cases. (Like cancer treatment and the like..)
I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.