I own a Tesla, I love SpaceX, I think Elon Musk is insufferable.
This is both a strength and weakness. How many times have people wished CEOs actually knew what they were talking about? As long as Elon knows enough to build a decent team and lead it well, he doesn't need to know everything.
From the outside it looks like he sees himself as 'one of the engineers' which is something I deeply respect, even if there's major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).
> major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).
That Vegas loop too... That's going to be a truly awful tunnel fire someday, and the safety systems there seem seriously lacking. (Also, the whole project feels like a grift.)
Risk taking is amazing. I’m not sure if I want to live in a risk averse world where ideas are nipped in the bud by CEOs of GE and Honeywell.
More information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RPMt_FS-s8
Reasonable estimates like what ? If your company works on something that has never been done before there is not much data at hand to make good estimates is it ?
My point isn't that these companies don't get there, it's that they take much, much, much longer than estimated.
Note that they have done zero work on building a anything other than the rocket body to get there. Making the interior volume habitable for 2 years of interplanetary travel is going to be non-trivial.
I also have colleagues who promise small concrete incremental deliverables in predictable timelines. They rarely talk concretely about the big end goal pie in the sky’s timeline, but generally deliver the big thing sooner anyways.
The answer isn’t making reasonable estimates of an inestimable thing, it’s providing reasonable estimates for the reasonably estimable pieces. Instead of “we’ll have ultra mega science in three to five years!” it’s, “we’ll have this specific piece of the stack built by 2022 and we hope it’ll enable these other slightly less concrete things towards ultra mega science.”
There is a reason why legally Autopilot/FSD is a driver-assist system, but for marketing purposes robotaxis are just around the corner.
There is a fine line between 'overly optimistic' and misleading, and more often than not, Elon crosses the line.
See https://elonmusk.today/ for an overview (if a bit biased).
No single personality can be 100% perfect. Let’s not ignore pretty much the entire world changing revolution of EVs and reusable rocketry, while focusing on the guy’s public persona and how he behaves that’s apparent to us and project what he must be like in general. Seems deeply and profoundly unfair.
Why can’t someone have flaws which is ok to point out, but then ignore their accomplishments. Opposite also stands! Fanboys of Elon think he is some kind of a messiah to save the world from global collapse but turn a blind eye to his rather rude behavior?
It’s like populism has a reverse backside of the coin.
That doesn’t read as “haters gonna hate” to me, but rather as a narrow criticism of just the one aspect of Musk’s businesses that was brought up.
History respects Edison, Jobs, Tesla, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Hughes for what the accomplished while acknowledging their individual flaws. I think Musk will be remember similarly. Depending how successful his ventures are over the coming century he might even be remembered more than any of them.
Elon sure did. He decided, apparently out of pure greed, to invest big into Bitcoin, driving the price up and with it increasing the carbon emissions of it, enough to quickly wipe out basically all carbon savings Tesla has worked to achieve for its entire company lifetime.
Our current financial system cannot.
The environmental cost of Bitcoin is not that of the energy it uses, it is the cost of the dirtiest energy it forces others to use.
There is always pollution. Some forms of energy have more and some have less. It is never good to just waste energy, that will always cause excess pollution, no matter the type of energy used.
It doesn't matter how energy is produced, bitcoin will always be harmful.
At least in the case of SpaceX, they do not seem to be as reckless as you paint them. After 20 years in space industry, they have 0 fatalities on record, which is uncommon for a corporation of this size and history.
And they scrub launches whenever they are concerned about weather or anything off-nominal that their sensors indicate. Which led to an excellent safety record for Falcon 9s once the technology matured.
She hasn’t gotten a ton of press but it’s clear she is a key reason for the successes you described above.
Which Musk can take some credit for—-hiring well and not getting in her way.
There are enough senior software engineers in this world that will have a crazy hard time making a good estimate. There was this HN comment once that mentioned that learning how to estimate work is it's entire own discipline.
It can be done and trained, according to that comment, but the comment also seemed to imply that it seems very unusual to do so.
I can't find the comment unfortunately, I read it years ago here.