A rescue diver on what it was like to save the Thai boys in the cave

People’s issue isn’t with Musk trying to help, it’s Musk trying to help as a thinly-veiled publicity stunt. If Elon Musk has reached out quietly to the Thai government and asked what he could do with his resources and connections to help, THAT would have been using his resources for good. Throwing a bunch of your money at a cool-sounding but absolutely useless project that nobody asked for while making a lot of noise on Twitter about how helpful you are is pure self-aggrandizement, and that’s what people are reacting to.

I don't think you are quite understanding why people are negative towards Musk. It's not that he tried to help. It's how he went about it. He inserted himself into the problem, he turned it into a Tweetstorm PR campaign. And eventually came up with a "solution" that wasn't feasible. The people who were asked to come and help are the domain experts. Stay out of their way and let them do what they do best.

I was very skeptical of his involvement because I have seen similar situations at work. When I was a consultant I often worked on emergency situations where you had to bring systems back online quickly. Sometimes the CEO would come in and say "You can get whatever you want" and suddenly you had all these important people who didn't know the situation ask questions and give suggestions. Now you had the problem at hand and you had to baby these people in addition. Once the problem was solved the CEO and his people took credit for the fix and went away despite in reality only causing problems.

There was simply no time for the people on location to look at Musk's stuff and testing it. It would have been a big distraction from the work at hand.

So far I would rate his involvement as pure PR stunt. However, if he kept working on this now that the crisis is over and worked with experts on something viable for the next rescue he would be really helpful. I don't know if that's happening and to be honest I have my doubts.

Sometimes, particularly in disaster situations, the most help you can give is to stay away and let the people who can do the most good work without distraction.

The original intent of the rescue, judging from the Washington Post version of this article, was to have the two rescue drivers carry the kid between them as much as possible. It was realized when they were transporting the first kid that said transit mechanism was impossible, as the space was too cramped to do that; the operation then had one diver carrying the kid, swapping divers frequently because that's a very physically taxing job.

Between the weight and the length of the sub, it's clear from descriptions of the rescue operation that it was completely unusable. Any attempt to use it would have had a very high risk of it getting wedged somewhere in the cave that would have made the cave impassable. And guess what? Pretty much everyone who had some sort of experience with caving commented that the sub idea was unworkable when it was first announced.

Just because you want to help doesn't mean you can help, and you shouldn't give someone a pass on their actions just because they're trying to help. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I think that this guy issue is that on top of being in high pressure high stakes situation that require cooperation of huge amount of people, he had to deal also with that submarine thing.

I don't know whether you had experience with clueless dominant people trying to help you, but it usually sux big time. And I mean, it sux and slows down in low pressure low stakes situations.