He makes crazy "moonshots", he has a vision and doesn't tone it down nearly as much as others do, and he's not afraid to be "wrong".
The SpaceX community has a running joke about "elon time" being set to mars time, because his predictions and goals are almost always late (and are often under delivering), but I honestly respect that. Him and his companies aren't taking the "easy way out" of making easily achievable goals and then making them again and again. They are shooting for unlikely and in some cases almost impossible goals, and getting 70-90% of the way there, and they aren't exactly ashamed of it. IIRC there was a reddit thread a while back that was "bashing" Elon and Tesla and SpaceX about only hitting something like 70% of the goals they set, but I read it differently. They set out to revolutionize 3 different industries (cars, space, and now "boring" and public transport), and even if they can only get to "70% revolutionized", it's still a massive win in my opinion!
He's not perfect, I hear lots of bad things from many employees about the work environment, but overall I really respect the man and the companies he has created, and I think he has and will continue to do a lot for humanity.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/945712432416137217
Saw this yesterday when someone threw together a quick article on all of the gushing responses from customers to this tweet.
How can you say someone nicknamed "the real world Iron Man" is bad at PR?
No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.
He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.
Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.
Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_...
> "At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester...."
But this is a very biased way of describing two people working on a technical project. To call one an "engineer" and the other a "breadboarder" as if he sat quietly contributing nothing.
Just because one person is playing second fiddle to a truly gifted technical genius doesn't magically make them non-technical.
If you want to argue Steve Jobs isn't technical, you'll have to set the bar lower than "as good as Woz" or almost none of us will make the cut!
You cannot create the company or products that Steve Jobs did without being technical. That doesn't mean you have to write the firmware on the wifi chip. It does mean you have to understand thousands of deeply technical concepts about computers.
"Move far enough up in any career, and you are essentially doing sales".
Thought that was very true.
He has been anointed as a neo-PR guy now because his style of doing things (like responding to requests on Twitter with "Done,") is breathtakingly refreshing compared to PR from actual trained PR agencies
His back of hand calculations on the viability of self-landing rockets, while coming back from a trip to Russia after a failed attempt to purchase a launch vehicle certainly wasn't moonshot.
He is a technology man in and out and knows the capabilities and limits of technology. I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
> I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
My view is that he focuses on what should be possible from first principles, ignoring whether or not our short-sighted markets find it desirable at the moment. It's a good strategy if you have a non-monetary goal in mind and resources to bankroll the efforts at forcing the markets into accepting your work.
I really wish there is stronger support for him against these sorts of people. How can he be all talk when we see his rockets going up and coming back down.
He's a CEO. All the support he needs is to deliver on his promises. From my exceptionally limited point of view, he's at about 35% there:
Space X: 100% (Reusable, self-landing rockets. Fuck yeah!)
Tesla: 40% (Prototype in decent shape, promised production capabilities of model 3 still seems a long ways off)
The Boring Company: 0%
Hyperloop: 0%
- More popular support means his visions resonate, and more people will start pursuing them too.
- More popular support means the market will be more receptive towards those visions.
Note that Musk doesn't care if it's SpaceX or Tesla that are the market leaders long-term. He cares that we go to Mars and get off fossil fuels in transportation, however that happens. Hence e.g. opening up Tesla patents.
RE your % score, I'd give a different breakdown, based on what are Elon's actual goals:
SpaceX: 40% (reusable, self-landing first stage done; Falcon Heavy yet to launch, BFR in the works)
Tesla: 80% (their latest cars might have problems, but they successfully cracked the car market and started a wave of electrification that's unlikely to stop now; Chinese companies alone will carry it forward)
WRT Tesla: The company has started a revolution, but to all intents and purposes it feels like its falling behind. The Model 3 was supposed to be in full production already, but it's not. It's also not profitable, which is a major problem for Tesla (and Musk by extension) in the long run.
Not to mention, all of the pre-orders for Model 3's that aren't fulfilled in a timely manner are going to hurt the population's opinions of Elon Musk - and rightly so.
As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
Sure the might have fallen short 30-40% but given the scale of their plan, this seems like a extremly miner problem.
The buissness reality is that there are 100000s of people who want these cars and they have essentially a proven market for years to come. The waste majority of these people are not gone start hating elon because their car is a bit late.
> As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
Like building a reusable rocket or massivly improving the price and production capacity of batteries?
People need to stop listening to Elon own prediction of things and consider where things would be without him. He has already revolutionised the space and the car industry, that is just a fact.
Paypal: 75% (Much hate, still good option for many things.)
Solar City: 75% (Over expanded, not sure if that was a bad thing and was bought by Tesla. Still it installed 870 MW of solar in 2015 alone.)
Steve Jobs had close ties to fewer companies, Pixar, Apple, NeXT and did a similar purchase of NeXT by Apple. However, while dubious Apple greatly benefited from NeXt. So, I am willing to bet Solar City could be a similar net benefit.
The boring company is still to early to judge. Hyperloop is not yet a failure and considering it was simply a short paper I think 0% is overly harsh.
I could swear that the rush for solar via Solar City has dropped precipitously. It seems like those who want it have it at this point. Its business model is also heavily dependent on US grants, and has seen some major downturns in terms of litigation and has been operating at a net loss for its lifetime. Let's put it closer to 50%
The boring company is simply trying to make underground highways - a task which makes very little practical sense in a world where highways already exist, and their downsides are well known. Not to mention, no execution or proof of concept exists.
As for the Hyperloop, again with the lack of execution or proof of concept. Anybody can make a whitepaper, but Elon Musk has put his weight behind the concept, to no practical end. But sure, let's remove it because you're right, he made no promises behind it; didn't start a company around it.
We're still only around 40%.
I would call it similar to Space X before they started landing the rockets. Just making digging cheaper much like making rockets cheaper is a basis for a profitable company. A long term goal of 1/10th the price really would be game changing.
PS: Picture even a one way toll road that goes 20 miles under I-66 into DC they could easily charge 10$/ trip an get 100,000+ riders each way per day. So, the real question is how much that tunnel costs. At 20 billion $ that's 20 billion * 6% ~= 1.2 billion per year vs 2 * 10 * 100,000 * 5 * 48 = 480 million so not a win. But, at 1/10th the price or 2 billion that's ~120 million per year break-even vs 480 million and highly profitable. How many places could a 5 mile segment be able to charge say 3 dollars and have 100,000 people per workday?
Cars, unless going ungodly fast (140mph is not enough), are inefficient at throughput.
PS: I-66 really does have 3mph traffic as it will take 30+ minutes to travel 10 miles. As in I was happy if that part was under 30 minutes, and not surprised if it took 40 minutes as the average was well over 30.
Rendered moot by the fact that large numbers of people prefer the privacy and convenience of a car.
Musk's solution takes the human condition in to account.
Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on: SpaceX targets not met, Tesla still running at a massive loss, Hyperloop being doomed to failure, etc etc. I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Am I understanding this correctly, that the criticism of Elon Musk being all talk is because he didn't personally perform all the work in achievements like Falcon 9 and Model S?
Ultimately, focusing on a leader is a shorthand used in everything. We talk about famous generals, and not about their lieutenants. We talk about presidents and kings, omitting the low-level administrative staff that actually does the work and keeps everything from falling apart. Often it's a bad generalization leading to bad conclusions (e.g. most presidents have little influence on the direction of their countries), but I think it's fair in case of Elon Musk, since it's his strong vision that defines the direction of SpaceX and Tesla.
Consider this: if SpaceX went public and Elon decided to step down, the company would lose most of its fanbase for very simple reason - it would most likely turn into a regular company and stop being just the vehicle to get humanity to settle Mars.
Tesla I could still grant but you do him great injustice by simply ignoring how much of his personal resolve is responsible for SpaceX even existing.
Feel free to list the number of times a group of engineers have spontaneously teamed up to form a rocket company.
Your assume that A) big things can only ever get done by companies. B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
I'll give credit to him for creating and acquiring funding for the organization. I'll give him credit for publicizing his vision. Each and every rocket/car however, was massively subsidized by taxpayer dollars, and made feasible by hundreds of people WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOAL.
The practice of abstracting away hundreds to thousands of people's hard work and financial support, involuntary or not, is disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst.
Abstraction is evil. Abstraction is what turns "people" into "human resources".
And before the inevitable "That's not practical!" or "That's unreasonable!": It really isn't. Most people have just gotten so used to credit for their own work being sacrificed to someone else that nobody points out how incredibly screwed up the practice is.
> B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
Never made the claim nor does it seem relevant here. No one is talking of actual ownership. When it comes to ownership and accounting of a company, there are already well-established metrics and practices to figure that stuff out.
Yes, the rocket is designed by engineers and put together by technicians and mechanics and thousands of souls have come together to achieve this task, and no one is denying their contributions.
But none of that would have existed without Elon. And he is being praised for that vision and steely resolve while others work on their PhDs from Armchair University.
This leadership is not trivial and it is central to something like SpaceX even existing.
I do not think that Musk should get a free pass. His companies have taken on some pretty impressive projects. One day someone will make a better electronic car but much like the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, Musk did lead the way.
Maybe Musk really is as skilled as all that. Or maybe he was lucky enough to make a lot of money once (with x.com) and hire good people. It's hard to tell since so few people ever get to try having that much money to play with.
Whatever are his contributions to the rocket design these days (it's obviously a SpaceX secret), one can't deny that his ideas for future of humanity are the raison d'être and the driving force behind the company. He obviously hires engineers smarter than himself to do the work; his own engineering skills only add to the credibility of the company and its goals.
Elon is still in control of SpaceX, so the Falcon 9 and FH rockets are his by any reasonable definition.
> Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on:
What matters is overall progress and not progress relative to elons timelines. Also, most of those were not promises but rather announcments.
> SpaceX targets not met
Yeah, he only took like 15 years to launch more rockets then China or Russia. Build the largests commercial launch buissness.
But of course what we should focus on is that he is such a failure because he said 5 years ago that the FH would fly a bit sooner.
You really need learn to evaluate things on its own terms.
> Tesla still running at a massive loss
Poor Elon, 500000 reservations that any other company would kill for. Revenue stream for 1-2 years even without new reservations. What a failure.
> Hyperloop being doomed to failure,
Whitepaper without company behind it not successful. More big news at 8pm.
> I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Yeah, the guy who revolutionised space launch, landed fucking rockets and created reusable rockets is 'mostly talk, with some success'. Honstly people can't see the trees because of the forest. This is so fucking bizar.
I mean sentiments like that. It's just right in the feels ya know? It's a reason to go even read the news in the morning.
Musk arguably does significantly more talking than doing, but his goals are lofty enough that even failing to make it halfway still means significant advancement.