Do you have any actual evidence of that, or is it something you like the idea of because it's difficult to accept that Musk is a real arsehole and total idiot about some things (e.g. steering wheels, divers), yet also a very successful engineer (yes) at other things (rockets, electric car platforms).
Why would it matter whether he technically founded Tesla? He basically built it from scratch regardless.
Also What does that have to do with him (supposedly) being a talented engineer? He’s a brilliant strategist/visionary/CEO obviously but Cybertruck was a product of his engineering decisions then.. yeah.. probably he isn’t.
Right, consumers are often stupid beyond belief and will buy an objectively worse product purely for prestige and signaling to other humans. It's that social part of the brain going off.
That doesn't change the fact the Cyber Truck is an inferior truck to just about any other truck in just about any metric. It's a testament to the sheer arrogance of Man and the failure of modern American education.
Looks like it’s designed by a not particularly talented three year old?
of course not everyone is bothered by that. All the water/environment related issues (I guess you can get the “optional” coating) and the absurd repair costs seem like a bigger issue.
> Tighter turning than everyone
Doesn’t the Hummer EV have a 25% smaller turning radius? Also a removable roof.
Do you have any evidence of him ever being one? I mean he’s an extremely successful CEO and decision maker which is almost infinitely more important than just being an engineer.
I mean was Jobs ever considered an “engineer”? And I’d bet he was significantly more involved in the design of Apple’s most successful products than Musk was in SpaceX (and possibly even Tesla if Cybertruck was the result of him going of the reins).
Go and watch the videos of him touring SpaceX. He's clearly involved in the engineering.
You just don't want to believe that because it complicates your view of him as a purely worthless arsehole. You can't accept that he's an arsehole and a skilled engineer (or project manager if you want to gatekeep "engineering").
Imagine him coming up with the spaceship equivalent of the CyberTruck at SpaceX. Even Boeing would seem like being great at what they do at that point…
You read any biography of him any testimonials from people who've been with him. It's well known and obvious he gets into the weeds. THATS why his companies are successful.
> It's well known and obvious he gets into the weeds. THATS why his companies are successful.
What about the PayPal stories? Or those are all supposedly “not fair and balanced”?
> It's well known and obvious he gets into the weeds
That’s why the Cybetruck looks like it was draw by a 3 year old?
> THATS why his companies are successful.
Why? You don’t have to pretend you are an engineer to build an extremely successful company as CEO while having significant impact on the products it designs. Just look at Apple.
>What about the PayPal stories? Or those are all supposedly “not fair and balanced”?
What stories?
>That’s why the Cybetruck looks like it was draw by a 3 year old?
So? This doesn't serve to disprove my point. Elon gets into the weeds. Your opinion of it doesn't change the success of the company and the technology.
>Why? You don’t have to pretend you are an engineer to build an extremely successful company as CEO while having significant impact on the products it designs. Just look at Apple.
I never said anything about apple. I said that's why HIS companies are successful. There's plenty of reasons why other companies are successful.
It's a well known fact Elon Gets into the weeds of engineering and tech. Just watch the video.
Yeah, that's true for the incredible innovation in Neuralink and Paypal and OpenAI and Tesla, too. It's a total coincidence that Jeff Bezos and other billionaires fail.
On the other hand, if we shortly discover an asteroid on course to meet Earth within a concerning time frame or some other predictable disaster coming down the pike, they'll be a mass effort to take giant steps to ensure he and others are not wrong.
You're out of touch with reality. I'm not a fan of everything musk says but you're not clear about how ludicrous it is to catch a rocket with chopsticks. You're only going off your gut feeling from social media and popular opinion.
This is the reality. Musk made bets that have a lower chance of success then winning the lottery. If even one of the bets succeeds it means he's smarter than normal. That being said, Musk has succeeded in way more than one bet.
> You're out of touch with reality. I'm not a fan of everything musk says but you're not clear about how ludicrous it is to catch a rocket with chopsticks. You're only going off your gut feeling from social media and popular opinion.
Not sure what you're getting at here. I just praised SpaceX, but you're acting like I downplayed its success.
and then he launched a bunch of dumbass initiatives, and Peter Thiel power-played him out, and ditched "X".
his real victory was surviving long enough to make money from the merger and not get totally fleeced on the way out.
and given the number of Russians using Starlink, I suspect it's a matter of time before his clearance is revoked and the US FedGov backs away further from SpaceX. wouldn't be surprised if there are ITAR violations there, too...
Nothing that happens in the future can negate the fact that he promised autonomous driving would available in Telsas by now (actually long before now), and it isn't.
Tesla can never be the first to large-scale autonomous driving since Waymo is already delivering it. Sure, Tesla will probably deliver it eventually. Whether they can overtake Waymo's rollout is the open question.
> Nothing that happens in the future can negate the fact that he promised autonomous driving would available in Telsas by now (actually long before now), and it isn't.
Absolutely, he is well known for setting extremely optimistic stretch goal timelines, and is almost always late. In virtually every case he is still years or decades before the competition, with autonomous driving being the biggest miss to date.
He certainly does deliver though.
Given that Tesla are currently making 2 million cars per year and have 5 million on the road, I think it extremely likely they will have by far the biggest autonomous fleet.
Musk inspired and hired a lot of great engineers that made this all possible. His vision, passion and capital are crucial in this, but he dis not catch these himself, nor did he engineer any of the control systems to the detail needed to make this work, I'm sure.
I wonder how the mood is at SpaceX. I mean, those engineers see how he unsafe the production workers at Telsa have to work, they see how shit he's treating everyone at Twitter and basically sinking it, how long before someone the mood turns sour and we see an outflow to the competition?
The problem I see here is: what competition? There doesn't exactly seem to be any in the rocketry space. There's Boeing, but that place is a disaster right now. I guess ULA is still around, but they're not doing anything groundbreaking at all AFAICT, just using old rocket designs to launch some satellites. Where else can these people go?
Twitter people can go lots of places, both competing social networks, and also various other internet-related or software places. Tesla people can go to lots of different competing automakers. But I don't see anyplace nice for SpaceX people to go.
Plenty of of want-to-be competitors, but not so far with the amount of capital behind Musk. And space remains capital intensive, if not for hardware, then for people.
You say that, but at least half a dozen of these companies in the linked wikipedia list, all western, launched rockets last year. And several more are on track to launch within the next. Rocketlab is a serious competitor with multiple spaceports, a rapid launch cadence, and reusability and next-generation launcher projects in the works. Blue Origin is supplying engines to ULA and seems almost ready to test New Glen. Firefly had a successful launch. Stoke is working on a resuability concept that's even more exciting than starship, and advancing steadily through testing flight capable hardware. The list goes on.
Rocketlab and others even have products which standardize the bus part of the sattellite or probe, so you just attach your science experiment or sensor.
There's some new competitors, like Stoke, Relativity, Blue Origin, bunch more I'm forgetting.
This sort of diaspora of talent with experience is good to have, if there is capital
It's right around the corner. The evidence that Musk is actually really dumb is riiiiight around the corner. And will continue to be, for a very long time.
People at twitter seem to be very happy, major features like community notes are being shipped and having a huge impact on the platform and the company is much healthier after he removed the employees that weren’t doing anything.
His track record for being behind all these mindblowing innovations is off the record, but we don't like his face, so he doesn't deserve any credit for it!
