And which is "Full Self Driving"? One man's very early stage "tangible product" is another's "vapourware".
What amazes me the most is that he is able to get project management in place that works. Somehow most (or all) of his companies get shit done, and it is indeed some amazingly complex shit. That may be his super power, beyond having been lucky with his first investments giving him the billions for the next endeavors.
A grifter promises things, none of which have ever happened.
Hyperloop, Cybertruck, inter-city rocket flights, Mars colony - these are ideas that haven't or won't succeed because they're ridiculously impractical and/or pointless, and seem to be more about projecting a futuristic image than anything else. (The alternative explanation is that he's a lot dumber than he seems.)
But, he throws ideas at the wall and some of them work out. It's a similar thing venture capital companies do with their startup portfolios, but mixed in with a lot more futuristic PR fluff ideas.
If you look at how he uses Twitter and other public ways to pump up stock prices, it seems likely that he figured out early on that there's lots of money in convincing people that the future is just around the corner and that you should buy shares in his companies to get in on the action.
He's the wealthiest-on-paper person in the world not because of the value produced by his companies, but because of the future value he's convinced people that his companies have.
In light of his recent difficulties with Python (and in combination with a few other bizarre comments and actions) this is starting to seem increasingly likely.
I can't believe you're serious if you don't think any one of these would be considered career-capping achievements for most people.
My previous comment wasn't saying Musk hasn't achieved anything. I was making a couple of points:
1. He tends to throw more ideas, more publicly, at the wall than most tech entrepreneurs.
2. Some of those ideas seem to be obviously impractical, to the point that he (hopefully!) must realize that, and the're probably intended more to boost the image of his companies in order to pump up stock value. And if you accept this line of argument, it's been a staggering success, making him the richest on-paper person in the world based on a car company and an aerospace company which, without his clever grift, would be worth a tiny fraction of their current valuation.
I can only marvel at the stuff and complexity SpaceX and Tesla seem to be able to pull off, both in terms of software and hardware engineering and other organizing and logistics.
- he is publicly brash and careless, but privately very efficient and savvy
- or his companies get shit done without his involvement, or despite his attempts at getting involved rather than because of them.
He might be brash but he’s clearly been an effective leader.
Same with neuralink, it's not just words.
The only thing he started himself that has worked out so far is SpaceX. Yet the whole Martian colony line is 100% grift. Starlink might yet flop, as it needs more subscribers than it probably can support. SpaceX has been very good at eliciting government handouts.
Starship will absolutely not be able to turn around in less than 30 days until after they figure out a tile scheme different enough from NASA's, if ever.
It is very far from certain the chopsticks catching scheme will work.
Each time a Superheavy detonates on the launchpad (which will happen) will set them back months, because it will wipe out the whole "stage 0" and tank farm.
> Musk bought into both of those
Very early on. And grew, at least Tesla, many orders of magnitude from early prototype to mass production.
> SpaceX has been very good at eliciting government handouts
Contracts, not handouts. Which they have delivered on in spades.
Starship and Starlink are still early, yes. But Falcon 9 has brought launch costs down considerably, is putting more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, and is currently the only way the United States can get astronauts into orbit.
You correctly do not assert that Martian colonization or suborbital passenger or freight service are better than grift even with a 100% Starship success.
You correctly do not assert that any other Musk initiative, including hyperloop, domestic robots, self-driving cars, electric trucks, are anything other than grift.
And “government subsidy” is a complete red herring. Inventing and building things takes money, I don’t care if that comes from the government or private investors. I’d say he has plenty to show for the investment the government made in his companies.
The only reason he has as much as he does is via grift, puffing the value of his properties. He has delivered a bunch of legendarily unreliable expensive cars and a bunch of rocket launches, and been handed pots of money of far greater value than anything he has delivered. Grift.
And he gets free puffery from internet volunteers.
I'm sure you've heard of the boring company which would revolutionize traffic except it did not and never will. He says "I have this idea make it work". This is the limit of his capability. In that way he's pretty similar to Elizabeth Holmes, except he isn't playing with the health of individuals for monetary gain.
I agree he is not just a 'luck' guy; he work(ed)(s) hard, is very persistent & pushes boundaries; he also knows how to manipulate the world successfully to pursue his goals, like Jobs & Gates & others before him. However, as far as we know, they weren't walking such a fine line close to fraud (although Gates was of course somewhat close to the illegal line with his anti-competitive actions in the EEE times).
Musk is at worst comparable to people like Steve Jobs or Donald Trump: people with a near pathological need to prove that they deserve their wealth by taking stupid risks. Risks that sometimes pay off. For every Trump or Musk, there are probably ten rich sons who took stupid risks and failed so bad they didn't get to take such risks anymore.
Is this actually true? The only air-launched SpaceX project I could find was the cancelled Falcon 9 Air [1], which I don't think actually flew, and was years after the Falcon 1.
Was there some undocumented air-launched SpaceX project going on between 2002 and 2006?
The hyped private project I remember from around that time was SpaceShipOne[2], which won the "X Prize", but that was done by Scaled Composites, not SpaceX.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_launch_vehicles#Falcon_...
It wasn't this way 10 years ago, but the list of things his companies are purported to do is now quite a bit longer than what they actually do.
And 10 years ago, the list of things they were merely purported to do includes many of the things that today they actually do. E.g. manufacturing EVs at scale, reusing rockets, etc.