It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX, built both companies into unlikely leaders in their industry with powerful people trying to crush them all the way, while being a total idiot.
A similar but more charitable theory is that Elon is very good at leading a company to build actual hardware that has to solve hard physics problems. At twitter the primary challenge is managing people, and he is autistic and has no idea how to do this. He has no idea how normal people experience or use twitter, no idea how his tweets are felt by people, no idea how his employees feel about him etc.
all of these are things that don't matter when building a rocket or a car, while understanding people and politics is the ONLY thing that matters at twitter.
> It would be a remarkable bit of luck that Elon stumbled into both Tesla and SpaceX, took on the role of lead rocket designer at spaceX
If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. I'm not talking about in layman's terms, I'm talking about the actual science that goes into it. Same deal with car design. I'll give Elon props for having a vision and pushing it forward but let's not say ridiculous things like "lead rocket designer at spaceX". That's like thinking Tim Cook could write a line of Swift if his life depended on it or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works. I don't exactly begrudge them for that (I won't get into profit sharing, or the lack there of at most companies) but let's not pretend that Elon is himself coming up with revolutionary ideas. Putting his money behind this is laudable, at some level, but he didn't invent these things any more than Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone.
We here on HN should know better than most how "worthless" an idea is on it's own. It's about execution. And Elon gets props for his execution (in this case hiring people who did the real work) but he shouldn't get all the credit for the work of the actual engineers.
> If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat.
Bon appétit!
> 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.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I guess I expected more from someone who is actually an engineer. Like to be smart enough to see WFH isn't some evil thing (and if instead it's a move to get people to leave on their own then he is just an asshole, I mean he is a well established asshole/troll, it would just further cement that legacy).
Hat's off (ha!) for your admission. When encountering the same scenario on Reddit, people there invariably just double down in the face of undeniable facts. A donation to the EFF is more than enough. I was actually going to just let you off the hook based on your honest response and strengthening my faith in HN:)
As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asked their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.
> Apple, Google (and others) asks their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too?
I do and I've consistently voiced that opinion no matter the CEO/company. I don't think they think it is stupid, I know they have their reasons. I disagree with their reasons, I think there is more at play than only logical thinking on this point (real estate, asses in chair, etc), and I think it's shortsighted. WFH is an amazing perk and while I get not everyone wants it there are a large number of people who do and to cut off that entire group is incredibly short-sighted.
It's fine though, I'll never work for any of those companies, I have zero desire to do so, I much prefer smaller companies that understand WFH. Though I'd make 1 exception I think, for Apple, to gut and replace App Store Connect/The Developer Portal or at least have better feedback/errors/displaying the current state (which is a common complaint I have with Apple when their software needs to talk to server, the feedback is always lackluster or non-existent). Those websites look broken and/or are confusing/vague way too often. At least the Google Play dev console is so busy and incoherent that you'd not notice most issues. Though props to the Google Play devs for making apk/aab upload/release errors as confusing as possible in most cases :chefs-kiss:
I don't think he's trying to prove a point or play 3D chess.
I think it's much simpler. He's basing his decision on his beliefs about and experience with in-office vs WFH. He believes in-office is more productive.
I would postulate the belief in-office is more productive is somewhat akin to 3d chess. AFAIK the data is mixed and I've seen some data that suggests WFH is more productive (but the jury certainly still seems TBD on this debate)
Apple at least has always been bizarre about work conditions and anti-WFH, so that seems expected.
It seems optimistic to think that Musk made a careful decision based on nuanced factors that just happened to have exactly the same outcome as every other company he owns.
It's not an intelligence thing (yes, he's not a genius but that's not to say he's not very intelligent and has some deep technical knowledge in some areas) - I think the thing is that Musk has generally demonstrated poor judgement and low ethics in many areas (think Solar City acquisition, tweets leading to SEC legal action, Thai cave diver slur, some of the cryptocurrency stuff, now this whole Twitter thing, etc.).
People expect intelligence to lead to good judgement but I'm more and more convinced that (assuming a decent baseline of intelligence) they're fairly separate and unconnected things.
Having worked with a lot of intelligent engineers (mostly EE) I would suggest that they are no more capable of making rational business decisions than anyone else.
The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own.
My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
Rest assured, it's very confusing to see him act so stupidly with this twitter event. I have difficulties wrapping my head around the spacex-smart vs twitter-fool contrast. I guess he doesn't use the same part of his brain on these two topics.. i'm sure he was sharper because tesla/spacex were hardscience dreams of his, whereas twitter is just "i've succeeded twice, let's just handwave that thing"
> 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.
This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me. Like, I don’t know anything about rockets, but we all know a bit about CPU design here, right? If someone said that Tim Cook really knew his stuff and wanted answers about the M1 that got down the the fundamental laws of physics, we’d probably say — well, that’s pretty stupid, right?
You’d have to talk about thing like pipeline stages, decoder width, memory bandwidth, branch prediction — obviously these parts have to follow the fundamental laws of physics but that isn’t really the interesting part. Fundamental physical limits aren’t the bottleneck yet.
Maybe rockets science is just much easier but that seems surprising to me, given the expression.
"This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me."
Classic NASA. Read Gene Kranz's "Failure is not an option".
In rocketry you're usually up against physical limits. You need materials near the limits of physical strength and temperature resistance. You need fuels near the limits of energy density. And still you're launching with a payload to destination that's maybe 5% of the mass, if you're lucky. Which is why rocketry has to obsess on weight reduction.
If fuels were 2x as powerful, or gravity was 1/2 as much, this would be easy. A spacecraft would have the weight budget and safety margins of an airliner.
If earth's gravity were somewhat greater, you'd never make it to orbit with chemical fuels.
But the most interesting thing about his rockets, that they land, which enables a totally different economic proposition, is in direct defiance of this sort of physical limitations first way of looking at the problem. It would clearly be more efficient fuel-wise to not do a controlled landing, right?
Yes, and that costs some payload. That tradeoff is right up against the limits of what's physically possible. How Space-X does landings is quite different than most VTOL landings, which are slow and careful. The boosters approach fast, and then blast at 2G just before landing. Fuel is spent almost entirely to get rid of kinetic energy, not to fight gravity while hovering. That rather drastic solution makes it possible.
I'm not a huge Musk fan, but he does seem to get the physics of rocketry.
Market disruption is the key difference. We now know how CPU operate and it's almost taken as a commodity.
Before Telsa, nobody thoughts electric cars were ready for road. Before SpaceX, I don't think anyone tried reusable rocket thingy. The thing is when you come up with a radically new idea, you have to know enough about it to convince others to work on it.
Steve Jobs knew enough about computer(and general idea of programming) to sell it, and Bill Gates was once a good programmer. Intel, nVidia founder were also chip engineers.
Stupidity is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, but also a lack of common sense. He's clearly intelligent. Some of the most intelligent people I've ever known are quite frankly the most stupid and dangerous with actions conceptually and verbally.
This is the kind of response I expect on Reddit not here. To me it is indicative of being influenced more by personal bias than truth and reason.
To answer your point though, Zubrin does not and never has worked for any of Musk's companies. Watson did work at SpaceX 8 years ago, but works somewhere else now so he has nothing to lose or gain from Musk.
And here is an account of a top NASA engineering official's interactions with Musk who also has never worked for Musk.
> He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting.
Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking.
Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build.
Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had.
“I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.”
Not parent nor have I contributed to this thread in anyway beside this post, but I have to say for someone who so easily accuse others of having personal bias you seem to be really deeply invested into proving how great Elon is. Your messages in this entire subthread add essentially nothing beside quote without context about how great and smart Elon is.
In an era where online manipulation is becoming ubiquitous, when talking about someone who has a clear ego issue and the desperate need to be seen as awesome (to the point he has several cases of acting against his best interest just to protect his ego, across several companies), and in the context of that person acquiring one the platform most forward in the whole social media space that pushed those issues forward... I find that interesting.
I am not accusing you of anything, I'm merely saying your messages have the opposite result on me than the one you intend.
Many people who are in fact awesome have egos. Anybody who follows sports knows this.
Elon as a person certainty has lots of flaws, but he is also quite clearly really good at a lot of things people who try to downplay that and claim its all 'luck' or 'failing upwards' usually just don't like his personality.
Also, the reason I suspect personal bias in the comment I replied to us because of how low effort and fallacious it was.
They claimed the people I referenced were Musk's employees and therefore said those things to kiss his ass get to get on his good side and avoid being fired.
This so blatantly false and easy to disapprove. Most of them weren't ever employees and none of them are current employees of Musk. When someone grasps at falsehoods like this in an attempt to discredit others, it naturally raises suspicions about their motives.
> Your messages in this entire subthread add essentially nothing beside quote without context
That's not true. I invite you to read my messages again and note that I've made 5 comments, all of them timestamped before yours, and only in 2 of them have I referenced quotes.
> about how great and smart Elon is
That's not exactly accurate and seems tinged with your interpretation of my intentions.
I've supplied quotes to show that Elon is well versed in rocket science.
> add essentially nothing beside quote without context
A commenter claimed that Musk did not understand rocketry. I replied with quotes from industry experts declaring the exact opposite. What more context do you need?
I'm not a fanboy and have anything invested in proving how great he is. Personally, I think he can be a big jerk at times and at others brilliant. The issue I'm trying to address that I see over and over again are the false claims that Musk has no idea what he is doing technically and steals credit from the engineers he hires.
When I see a ubiquitous false claim that is easy disproven in 3 minutes with a Google search and copy and paste, then why not? I believe HN is a place where truth and reason are valued and misinformation corrected, so I think my comments and references have been valuable in that respect and apparently so do the 30+ people that have upvoted my first comment with the quotes even though they are "without context."
> your messages have the opposite result on me than the one you intend
My intention has been to present information to counter misinformation about Musk's technical skills. If you still believe he doesn't have technical skills, that's your prerogative of course. I'm just supplying information that looks authentic to me and leave it up to the reader to decide.
I believe is Musk is as technically skilled and capable as the average or above average engineer, and certainly as the above average billionaire. I believe he can read up on things and carry on intelligent conversations.
I believe he can impress people who aren't used to strangers even trying to understand technical issues.
I don't believe he is solving any substantial technical problems at SpaceX or "designing rockets" himself.
> people who aren't used to strangers even trying to understand technical issues.
Do you think this describes Zubrin, Watson, Sarsfield or the other experts in the reddit post I referenced?
Do you think he fooled Jim Cantrell?
> He is by far the single smartest person that I have ever worked with ... period.
> I found out later that he was talking to a bunch of other people about rocket designs and collaborating on some spreadsheet level systems designs for launchers. Once our dealings with the Russians fell apart, he decided to build his own rocket and this was the genesis of SpaceX.
> or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works
How about in 2016 where he built an home control AI and iPhone app with voice recognition for it using Facebook tech?
"I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play."
"As the CEO of Facebook, I don't get much time to write code in our internal environment. I've never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive.
My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework or iOS development. The open source Nuclide packages we've built to work with GitHub's Atom make development much easier. The Buck build system we've developed to build large projects quickly also saved me a lot of time. Our open source FastText AI text classification tool is also a good one to check out, and if you're interested in AI development, the whole Facebook Research GitHub repo is worth taking a look at."
Actually Zuck has a tremendously strong understanding of how his system works. He used to geek out explaining pieces of it. Obviously it's grown but let's not let our personal feelings (for someone we've likely never met) cloud reality.
A similar but more charitable theory is that Elon is very good at leading a company to build actual hardware that has to solve hard physics problems. At twitter the primary challenge is managing people, and he is autistic and has no idea how to do this. He has no idea how normal people experience or use twitter, no idea how his tweets are felt by people, no idea how his employees feel about him etc.
all of these are things that don't matter when building a rocket or a car, while understanding people and politics is the ONLY thing that matters at twitter.