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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

If you sold Carmack, you sold me. I have my opinions on Tesla as a company, but have always been impressed with SpaceX. Godspeed.

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Carmack has been sold by SpaceX right from the start.

Musk and Carmack are both rocket nuts. Carmack ran a rocket company: Armadillo Aerospace, mostly as a hobby. From engineer to engineer, Carmack has a lot of respect for Musk, and Musk tried to offer Carmack a job at SpaceX, as in "stop playing with your toys, we have serious rockets here".

Musk isn't an engineer

Neither Elon Musk nor John Carmack are engineers, certainly not rocket engineers. Musk is a businessman, Carmack is a programmer. Both are world class in their respective fields.

But they are also pretty good at roleplaying engineers. I suggest watching the latest Tim Dodd videos when he tours Starbase with Elon Musk and you'll see Musk engineer character. No nonsense here, no Mars colonies or hyperloops, just the practical considerations of rocket building.

As for John Carmack, my preferred example is that short discussion with Elon Musk on Twitter. https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/536277962803650562

I concur and I’m very vocal about the vapor ware that Tesla spews from time to time. SpaceX has delivered and I watched in complete awe when two rockets touched down near simultaneously a year or so ago.

I still think the whole passenger part of spacex might be a pipe dream but who knows.

> vapor ware that Tesla spews from time to time

Elon Musk speaks quite aspirationally and optimistically from time to time, for both Tesla and SpaceX.

> SpaceX has delivered

They sure have! Tesla has also delivered over 1.7 million cars. They're on track to deliver about 750k cars in 2021 alone.

I think people would give Tesla more credit for delivering if Musk weren't chronically making full self-driving promises that are never fulfilled.

This is very true. I wish he would tone all of that way way down.

I just look at where Tesla started, and where it is today. How they revolutionized electric cars during a time when the ICE industry was against them in order to protect the status quo. I wonder how many companies would be "all in" on electric right now had Tesla not existed and forced them to. Would the Mustang "Mach E" exist? Would Ford be changing their most profitable and popular line, the F-150 Truck, if there wasn't a Tesla? Would Porsche be making electric cars if Tesla cars 1/3 the price weren't wiping the floor with them in track races, handily embarrassing them? They accomplished this even as the car industry was able to "swing" politicians to ban "Tesla dealerships" which is a huge impediment. Do you know of any Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, GMC, or Porsche "dealerships" that don't have physical storefronts? They persevered and basically got around that by building A+ products which sold themselves on reputation and performance alone. I guess you can concentrate on "vaporware" and ignore the actual industry shake-up that they forced upon the "establishment" (existing ICE companies) and have done more concretely than any other company I can think of in terms of taking an existing problem (car pollution) and turning it around.

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