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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

To be fair though, if Tesla build say a giant electic powered jet airplane next year, it will happen because Elon Musk decides he wants an electric jet airplane, not because John Doe in the Tesla workshops is really good a welding.

Some people really do make that much of a difference. If none of the other people at SpaceX had existed in 2002 when Elon decided to build the company, so he'd had to hire all different people, there's a pretty good chance we'd still have reusable orbital booster rockets by now.

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> not because John Doe in the Tesla workshops is really good a welding.

As a counterpoint, the idea and concept of the now-successful HondaJet light jet was developed by a then-mid-level Honda engineer, Michimasa Fujino.

It took nearly two decades for the idea to take form but at least there was capacity for the organisation to evolve an idea from bottom-up.

Right, so without Fujino it wouldn't have gone anywhere.

My point isn't that welders are crap, it's that when you have a product that exists because of the singular ambition, drive and vision of a single individual pushing a company to achieve their goal, take that individual out of the picture and there's really nothing left but an undistinguished mob of people. That applies to Fujino just as much as to Musk. I say this as a lifelong card carrying member of the mob of people.

IMO Above average smart people feel better about themselves, if they keep thinking to themselves that there aren't any obscenely smart successful people that can make decisions and produces results that they could have produced only by being part of a large group. Because if they didn't, then their lack of success would have been attributed to them not being lucky or not being at a right place/time, not that they themselves simply are just not as good as they thought they are.

I think that your reasoning can be applied to a lot of people, independently from the "above average smart" condition. Still, I believe that one can both recognize Musk's abilities and give due credit to the people in the company.

As for being at the right place/time, I hope you agree with me in saying that success is a mix of hard work and luck. But again, this is not the point of my first comment.

Btw, I had a hard time understanding what you wrote so forgive me if I got the wrong meaning out of it.

So the headlines for such endeavours should be 'big group of people built a thing'. We all know Musk didn't build this thing himself with a screwdriver. Nobody is confused on that point. This is all just complaining for the sake of technically having half a point some people will join in with you to help complain about it.

The headline should be "Company X build thing Y". As for the rest, it's like, you know, your opinion. This being HN, I'll end it here.

That's orthogonal to my argument though, isn't it?

I'm just saying that he didn't build the thing himself. He decided to do it and did whatever he does at Tesla, then a lot of smart people worked like crazy to finish by the deadline.

Stretching it a bit (maybe too much): think of going to war. The President gets to decide it, but when you win you don't say "President X won the war". Yet a single soldier is likely as replaceable as a factory worker (before I get more hate, I know they are different but I hope you get my point).

The corrollary to that would be that if you have a terrible general leading an army that takes them to the wrong battlefield, issues the wrong equipment and puts the artillery on a position where it's poorly defended and the whole battle is a massacre, really when it comes down to it, it was the soldiers that lost it because they didn't fight hard enough.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen a ‘thousands of little people actualy did all the work’ post on HN and it gets really old. Yes. We know. We’re little people too. Yawn.

Yes.

The only difference being made in your story is that Elon Musk is the one holding the capital.

The beauty of capitalism. Inovation will happen only when it aligns with the whims of those sitting on piles of money.

Think about the fact that SpaceX only exists because Musk wants to go to Mars. What if he had instead decided to retire in Hawaii?

That's the opposite of being fair. Making decisions (such approving a new, ambitious project) is not doing the work.

Any good manager will make sure that credit goes to the people doing the work. Though it's difficult because the there are so many people involved. The people at the top tend to get too much attention and credit for structural reasons and it's an uphill battle to prevent this.

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