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Comment by nurettin | Hacker News Reader

Elon musk is pretty similar if you take a good hard look. He was an unsuccessful manager at a software company which got acquired. SpaceX is a successful company considering all it went through. It was founded on the basis of a manned carrier aircraft pushing the rocket and do a suborbital split. (they did this for years) Then they got a lot of investment and gave up on the original premise, instead going for controlled takeoff and landing. That failed spectacularly many times, but money kept pouring in. And now we have privatized satellite launches and Elon musk takes all the credit for it.

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How is an aerospace company that did 31 launches last year, including some manned ones, pretty similar to a pharmaceutical company with an entirely pre-clinical portfolio of unproven "cures" invented by and licensed from a magician embroiled in a litany of fraud and other crimes?

I do not doubt the success of spacex, but Elon Musk is not the visionary genius people take him to be. His main skillset is luck and persistence.

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.

Isn't success x% inspiration and [significantly larger than x]% perspiration? How does it matter if he achieves it through persistence. He is consistently able to build teams that deliver.

Consistence is something that is continuous and at the same level. This is not the case. But people don't care because SpaceX exists. At least some good came out of all this.

That is some pretty strong black and white thinking. I never said anything about Elon Musk being "visioniary genius". He does have some skill. He certainly has no fraudulent intentions.

Well, are you sure about that? The whole market manipulation he does with stocks and crypto is not ‘fraudulent intentions’? Sure, he might not be frauding with his products, but I would think it is fraudulent. Did he not actually pay a securities fraud fine a few years ago? And he just keeps doing it; he makes more from the rise and fall than he will ever pay in fines. It is smart but they are fraudulent intentions. We don’t really know how many corners were cut (or how deep) in other places; if they didn’t succeed we would have known about them probably, but things are easily forgotten when there is success.

The point being that there is a lot of success coming out of Elon Musk's ambitions and none so far out of the originally discussed pharmaceutical enterprise.

Sure, got your point. However, you said he has no fraudulent intentions. I think he does and that it is one of the pillars for his success; manipulate to get more money, use that money to fund ideas (and get others to co-fund which is easier if you pony up too). He just doesn't get caught too much.

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).

> [SpaceX] was founded on the basis of a manned carrier aircraft pushing the rocket and do a suborbital split (they did this for years)

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_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne

You're right, at some point SpaceShipOne boosters were provided by SpaceX, but it wasn't the same company.

Musk has, to my knowledge, never claimed that his own genius is what SpaceX or Tesla is based on. That's very different from Theranos, which was based on claims about technology developed by Holmes personally, or this company which is likewise based on a founder's supposed genius inventions.

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.

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