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Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

This continues Musk’s politically incorrect response to COVID19. He’s already claimed it would be no worse than the flu, that children are basically immune, and he violated the original shutdown order until basically forced to stop production. Tesla employees were called back on site on Friday and asked to resume manufacturing. Alameda County put out a statement that the shutdown was still in place, prompting Musk’s response.

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He's like an embodiment of the know-it-all engineer meme, who thinks that domain expertise in one field makes him a genius everywhere else.

It's dangerous how prone he is to fashioning himself to be an authority on things he knows nothing about.

With one caveat that he's not an engineer. At best he has some experience as a web developer but is largely a money guy having gotten his start from his family's emerald mine in apartheid South Africa.

He claims otherwise. His rockets seem to work quite well. https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=175

That's a pretty absurd slur.

If you're going to claim Musk isn't an engineer then you're defining the term so narrowly it stops being interesting. Biographies of him are quite clear that when he decided to make SpaceX he spent a very long period of time indeed doing nothing but reading rocket science textbooks; it was the knowledge of rocketry he gained by doing that which allowed him to realise which problems needed to be solved, that they could be solved, who could do the work to solve them and most importantly to gain the confidence of other rocket engine designers and convince them to join him. He pretty routinely engages in technical discussion about rockets, what happened, what went wrong etc.

That's on top of his experience as a software developer.

So if you're going to claim Musk isn't an engineer then really neither was Bill Gates, Larry Page, or other people who did some initial work and had some expertise in what their company did but rapidly became a professional executive.

The criticism that Elon Musk is "not an engineer" is an example of loserthink if ever there was one.

Wikipedia has

>Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/ˈiːlɒn/; born June 28, 1971) is an engineer, industrial designer, technology entrepreneur, scientist and philanthropist

Still haters gonna hate.

The fact that his Wikipedia byline is the strongest evidence of any engineering expertise is telling.

Well, the easiest to cut and paste more than the strongest.

> who thinks that domain expertise in one field makes him a genius everywhere else.

To be fair and pedantic, he's proven expertise in broad areas. Regardless, I agree with your last point.

Where?

As far as I know it's mostly VC and some product design leadership.

He's fairly involved in the day-to-day engineering at SpaceX historically:

https://www.quora.com/Does-Elon-Musk-do-some-very-technical-...

There's more examples from interviews with people at SpaceX on YouTube I can't find right now. Web development and rocket science are two very different domains.

I'm not an American but by the look of it the restrictions in California are insane when you look at their case numbers. I'm comparing it with European countries where I live but California can't close their borders either to control the flow of infected from other places.

Precisely - case numbers are good because of the restrictions.

This statement sounds like Aristotle spontaneous generation.

But as I said your state borders are opened, so what's the end game? The whole Europe didn't just stop manufacturing (as a comparison), they just implemented distancing and sanitation rules etc.

I hear this regurgitated very often but I've never seen any evidence of this. Basic reasoning follows that there would be some drop in cases as a result of the forced closure of all non-essential businesses, but due to the universal nature of the closures I'm not aware of any way to quantify how much it's helping. It could very well be that widespread social distancing and voluntary measures could produce a similar outcome. Is there any study that confirms or debunks this?

I'm not familiar with one, and would think it would be very hard to create the controlled circumstances to so so without so many other variables between the study areas confounding the data too much.

You can generally infer it from restrictions in places that had high case counts and then enforced stay at home measures. Looking at the per-day growth rates in NYC, Italy, LA, etc. before and after the instantiation of stay at home measures is pretty convincing.

We'll probably have some more data as places start to reopen.

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