"He’s obviously a visionary. I prefer dealing with him to others because he gives you genuine answers. He will call you back. He will have a beef with you when others run away because they’re cowardly. If he disagrees, he’ll be in your face, but at least he’s in your face. I’m perfectly fine with that. In a world where everybody’s making a lot of silly stuff, he’s not. Cars, rockets, solar, these are important things. He can’t be as silly or as fascist as people make him out to be. Maybe he does act like a stupid tech bro sometimes, but maybe he’s a little more complex than that? Thomas Edison was not a nice man. Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people — Steve Jobs, for example. The times we live in are so reductive that it’s really hard to be able to get our minds around a truly complex human being. And that’s what he is."
John Carmack's take: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
Kevin Watson's take, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:
"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."
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
> Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people
Musk's not much of an inventor, though. Certainly, that's not why he's rich.
Part of the criticism of Musk is that the popular view of him is totally out of whack with what you get if you just look at what he does, and has done. He's not Tony Stark.
I think we need to distinguish between inventor (literally building new things themselves) vs executor (making stuff happen that would not have happened otherwise, or least not as quickly).
I think Elon falls much more into the second category, which I agree is not really like Tony Stark, but I think still provides a ton of value to society. I think there's a real argument to be made that he is the reason we have dropped cost per pound of payload to orbit by over half with reusable rockets, even if he himself didn't invent the functionality.
Oh, he deserves plenty of credit. He seems to be quite good at, at least, certain aspects of running a business, and happens to be interested in some fun and/or useful things, which is nice.
But he's not a super-genius, and given how flighty he can be, when he announces various Grand Visions, it's wise to take a wait-and-see approach. His big mouth probably ought to have landed him in quite a bit of legal trouble, too, except that it's so much harder for the justice system to deal with rich people than poor people.
It's not that he's uniquely awful among successful business dudes, since much of the above is true about many of them—his PR and superfans are just... grating.
Third category: Owner. Inventors invent things. Executors help them do so. Owners, the Edisons of the world, are the people with the property interest in the invention. They are the ones who get to deploy and use inventions within their business.
That said if you're a patron of inventors then you are an inventor. If you can manage the pain of failing and failing and failing, then in my book you're creative and a co-inventor.
Henry Ford seems an apt comparison. "Industrialist and business magnate", from Wikipedia's Henry Ford article, seems to pretty much cover it. Though with less of a focus on making products affordable for the normal person (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a difference in priorities).
That still makes him a pretty big deal, of course.
Yeah, Musk, Ford, Jobs, and Edison are all a big deal regardless of their role in actually inventing technology. I think Jobs is the most appropriate analog because he also has a public perception as being the person who created the tech which isn't really accurate. I'm not sure Ford had that reputation and Edison was more hands on.
It is also probably worth nothing that they all had another trait in common. They were all notorious assholes for various reasons.
Yeah, sorry, should have included that in my other post, but I do agree that Jobs is a decent analog, too. Similar public profile, sort-of similar reputation, though Jobs wasn't as prone to strident, public bullshitting.
Comparing him to Edison is appropriate I think, in both the good and bad ways that represents. I've also heard him compared with William C. Durant (Of GM circa 1910) which I think is also an appropriate comparison in both good and bad ways.
I agree, and think of him in much the same was as I think of Edison. It's strange how polarizing a figure Musk is. It seems like a majority of people (or maybe a vocal minority) either want to attribute every single thing to his own personal genius, no help from others or good fortune. While others view everything he's accomplished as nothing more than luck born out on the backs of other people's labor. I don't know where the balance lies between those two extremes but I doubt that either one is very accurate.
Is he really a visionary? Because from what I can tell, he has roughly the same background reading science fiction and making extrapolations from current science to the future, and has made similar conclusions about the risks of not multi-homing humanity, and the challenge of building intelligent non-humans. That doesn't make him a visionary.
My conclusion instead is that Elon Musk is Chaos Titan; like the netflix chaos monkey, but basically just going around causing chaos by hyping up twitter and then causing massive swings with individual tweets.
I don't mind Musk much either way and while I'm annoyed when he wants to let Trump back on Twitter after what I strongly believe was an attempt at a coup d'état, or him removing, say, the mobile charger in new Teslas I still like the products that his companies make and when he sits down and does an interview he says things that resonate with me.
So what makes someone a visionary? I mean I sit down and have a vision where Earth is a multi-planetary species, we build an outpost on the Moon within the next few years, and then Mars, and then mine asteroids. But is that all it takes? If so I think the word visionary is often either misapplied or is quite diluted. But if we take into account the need to execute on such visions, naturally, calling Musk a visionary makes more sense. Maybe we just don't have a great word (or one isn't immediately coming to mind) for someone who says "we should go to Mars, and I'm going to participate/lead in the creation of the entity that will do that".
Are you sure of this? Paypal truely was grand. Many people love their Teslas, and there is a (very strong, IMO) argument to be made that Tesla is the reason that the auto industry is transitioning, at least in part, to electric cars. Both of these seem like they are increasing the quality of life of the population.
Then comes SpaceX, doing engineering that NASA seems either incapable of or uninterested in (no specific blame on NASA, there is no substantial government push for progress in this area). OK, maybe you and I have not directly benefited from SpaceX yet, but do not discount the accruing benefit of cheap transport to space.
There are much, much, much easier ways to make money than to make an electric car company and a space company. Your argument is a little too cynical.
SpaceX built on existing engineering, and by some accounts isn't that much cheaper than Ariane 5 launches. It is bloody impressive so because it is a new company. Selling SpaceX as the saviours of space exploration and rocketry is a bit much so. It hirts to have Musks business, and other, attics overshadow that success.
> All he created was a financial bubble that he inflated to enrich himself for . work that he'll never actually deliver.
I literally drive a Tesla. I've watched SpaceX land reusable rockets and send people to the International Space Station. What you are saying here is factually incorrect and I'm really losing patience for this very obvious trolling and flame-baiting.
The entire history of this user's 3 day old green account is made up of this behavior. It's one thing for people to do this on HN, but to skirt the community conduct expectations by using a throwaway account is frankly frustrating to witness.
Congrats for being rich I guess? Your car brand is still as rare as Porsches, if you account for Europe it's still more rare on the road compared to Porsches.
Musk has been at the helm of Tesla since 2002. In FY21 Tesla accounted for 1% of vehicles sold globally. 1% in 20 years
I reapeat. 1% in 20 years. Hyper-growth for me (the stock market) , snail growth for thee (the American/global consumer)
For comparison in the US tesla had about a 2% market share in 2021, with Mazda at 2.3% and BMW group at 2.4%, and Toyota, the largest, at 15.5%, and Porsche at 0.46%.[2]
How many car startups in the last 50 years have made half as many cars as Tesla? Cars are an extremely competitive space. In my life in the last few years, Musk has gone from just a name on the internet to maker of a car I see on the streets at least once per day. That kind of progress is frankly undeniable. The same can be said of SpaceX - love Elon or hate him, there's no other company on earth doing what SpaceX does in the volume it does. I roll my eyes a lot at Musk on i.e. his Twitter takes, but I find the current zeitgeist of blind hate against him to be really reductive and boring. I feel like it's possible to be worried about his power, disagree with his politics, but also be impressed at the same time.
In addition to what other users have mentioned, I think the impact of the Starlink system in Ukraine is an example of where a Musk project has delivered significant value, and delivered that to people who are not in the upper stratas of western wealth. Starlink provided a swap-in alternative to Ukraine's disabled SATCOM infrastructure, realtime communications are a critical tool in this war.
As a side note, I would suggest reviewing HN's community guidelines regarding discussion of controversial issues and use of throwaway accounts. Respecting these guidelines would help your comments remain visible, rather than getting downvoted grey.[0]
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but *please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.*
WRT the last point, maybe you just found HN this week and this is your brand-new community identity, but your account name and posting activity doesn't give that impression.
> All he created was a financial bubble that he inflated to enrich himself for . work that he'll never actually deliver.
He's already delivered, one hundred times over. Continuously moving the goal posts of what you're criticizing doesn't suddenly make it a lack of delivery.
"He’s obviously a visionary. I prefer dealing with him to others because he gives you genuine answers. He will call you back. He will have a beef with you when others run away because they’re cowardly. If he disagrees, he’ll be in your face, but at least he’s in your face. I’m perfectly fine with that. In a world where everybody’s making a lot of silly stuff, he’s not. Cars, rockets, solar, these are important things. He can’t be as silly or as fascist as people make him out to be. Maybe he does act like a stupid tech bro sometimes, but maybe he’s a little more complex than that? Thomas Edison was not a nice man. Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people — Steve Jobs, for example. The times we live in are so reductive that it’s really hard to be able to get our minds around a truly complex human being. And that’s what he is."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/kara-swisher-on-elon...