It makes me sad that a technical comment from someone in the field thats widely echoed somehow compares to funding an EV and space travel startup. No one claimed Musk couldn't do that...
But they were people loudly claiming that landing and recovering the rocket is impossible. And uneconomical. All the way past first demonstrations, and it was only until SpaceX started doing it as a matter of course that these voices finally stopped.
Musk’s current wealth is higher than the total revenue of all the companies of which he was CEO, combined. Not profits, revenue. I don’t get why people are impressed that he sent astronauts into space when he’s been funded by equity markets and subsidies to the tune of billions of dollars. His feats are impressive in the same way building a skyscraper is impressive, but the trick is to find a way to do it sustainably and honestly. Musk has failed at both.
That being said, Tesla is currently bigger than the 4 biggest auto makers in the world combined. Remains to be seen if they can justify that valuation.
> His feats are impressive in the same way building a skyscraper is impressive
Um, but isn't he chief rocket engineer at SpaceX for example? And are there not numerous stories and anecdotes of people working at SpaceX who say they are amazed at how good his brain is, how fast he calculates ridiculously complex equations in real time. And, didn't SpaceX send people to ISS and create reusable rockets and design new machines to weld steel in a way that had never been done before and, well, so much more.
Isn't that a little bit more impressive than building a Skyscraper? But anyway, building a skyscraper is pretty cool why is that the bad thing to do here?
Musk the media legend is a much different person than Musk the man. He is not a rocket scientist, he didn’t drop out of a phd at Stanford, he didn’t found Tesla, and he almost killed PayPal. Link me to one piece of technical work he has ever done, not something his employees have done that he slapped his name on.
Are we applying the same measuring tape to Musk as to other great businessmen?
How many lines of code did Steve Jobs write? How many circuits boards did he design? Show me the work that wasn't done by his employees that he slapped his name on?
How many lines of code did Bill Gates write for Windows? For Excel? For Internet Explorer? He's clearly a technically incompetent fraudster stealing credit from his employees.
How many warehouses did Jeff Bezos design and build? What's his technical contribution to Kindle? How many packages did he personally deliver? Clearly he's technically incompetent fraudster stealing credit from his employees.
Musk conceived, funded and managed all his extremely successful companies. In case of Zip2 he was even the first (and only) coder. I really don't get this desire to bring him down by denying that his achievements are extremely impressive.
This is moving the goal post. The reply that started this chain had the following to say:
> Um, but isn't he chief rocket engineer at SpaceX for example? And are there not numerous stories and anecdotes of people working at SpaceX who say they are amazed at how good his brain is, how fast he calculates ridiculously complex equations in real time.
There's a difference between being a good business person (Elon is exceptional at marketing and execution) and a genius scientist / engineer. Elon has tried to market himself as the latter, and has a following online (mostly male and interested in tech) that believes it.
There hasn't been a groundbreaking paper, a patent or some other innovation that Elon personally contributed to that I'm aware of.
While great, having worked in these environments before, we almost always put our bosses on the patent if they contributed to the discussion in any way[1]. Giving the benefit of the doubt, would those contributions be considered substantial?
I don't know. It's the demographic on social media gravitating towards Elon.
If I had to guess: it's an inspirational story if you look, think and have a similar background to Elon and that demographic idolizes and sees Elon as a role model.
> Are we applying the same measuring tape to Musk as to other great businessmen?
Why wouldn't we?
Gates was some kind of computer whiz kid in his early days, and who did write a lot of code. I noticed you picked certain later products, I guess he wasn't a involved in those? Jobs obviously wasn't the technical mind in his ventures. We can give these people credit for achievements as entrepreneurs without getting caught up in mis-attrtibuting credit for technical skill.
Steve Jobs never slapped his name on other people's work. He never claimed he was an engineer. The original Mac went to manufacturing with the names of the whole team engraved on the inside of the case [0]. For better and for worse, he viewed himself as a product visionary, and that's exactly what he was.
>> Steve Jobs never slapped his name on other people's work
I'm not sure he told Atari he couldn't program:
>Jobs convinced Wozniak to work on the game during his day job at Hewlett-Packard, when he was meant to be designing calculators. At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester.
>Allegedly, Jobs told Wozniak that he could have half of a $700 bounty if they were able to get the chip count under 50 (typical games of the day tended to require around 100 chips). After four sleepless days that gave both of them a case of mono (an artificial time limit, it turns out: Jobs had a plane to catch, Atari wasn't in that much of a rush), the brilliantly gifted Wozniak delivered a working board with just 46 chips.
>Jobs made good on his promise and gave Wozniak his promised $350. What he didn't tell him -- and what Wozniak didn't find out until several years later -- was that Jobs also pocketed a bonus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. Though it's often reported that this caused a rift in their friendship, Wozniak seems to have no hard feelings.
Jobs could and did program. He couldn't do what Woz could, though. Nobody could. And nobody could create or sell a vision like Jobs. Apple was a great division of labor.
> What he didn't tell him -- and what Wozniak didn't find out until several years later -- was that Jobs also pocketed a bonus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000.
Also unlike many other business leaders Musk has demonstrated his exceptional technical knowledge of the fields he works in as demonstrated by his Physics first principles approach.
