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Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

> Turkish MIT graduate who played a central role in the development

I am sure being Erdoğan's son in law helped more to obtain his position than being an MIT graduate.

The causality is backwards here. He achieved his position first, became the CTO of probably the most important Turkish tech company and then met Erdoğan's daughter.

It's probably inconceivable from a Western perspective.

Samo Burja has an interesting clip where he talks about the succession problem, and briefly mentions the Japanese practice of adopting someone by getting them to marry your daughter. He also talks about how this would not work in modern day America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGPjhrV4G9c (last two minutes talks about Japan)

Yes, this truly doesn't tell anything about Turkey having very robust tech industry, and legions of very qualified engineers, many times the number of other countries their size.

Be him Erdo's in law, or not will not make any difference to Turkey having many other equally well performing heavy industry, and military hardware companies.

This is very distracting from the serious conversation when everybody keeps calling out one man's family status, having no bearing whatsoever on the wider industry as a whole, as a sole thing worth talking about Turkish industry.

That was what I was going to say.

Also, they don't actually build the thing themselves but rather buy all the parts. Not that any of it matters on the battlefield. Certainly not to their current enemies. They get blown just the same

I was under the impression that western suppliers stopped exporting to Turkey after the Artsakh "conflict" so that they now manufacture most parts themselves (reverse-engineered or not)

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