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Comment by LargeWu | Hacker News Reader

Ambition, backed by a lot of money. He's certainly not the first person to say "What if we could reuse the rocket?".

Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". Contrast w/ the founding of Microsoft or Apple, in which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.

Musk is certainly a big-idea person, but I think he is a prime example of somebody who was in the right place to get lucky at the top of the dotcom boom, which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. His foray into Twitter, "how to solve the Ukraine-Russia war", and the Thai cave rescue suggest he's not quite the genius his fans make him out to be.

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> He's certainly not the first person to say "What if we could reuse the rocket?"

Of course. But he was the first person to make it work, which was very non-trivial. NASA failed at it for 60 years.

From sratch? I don't think so. DOS was bought from Tim Patterson. Microsoft BASIC ran on a computer created by others. Microsoft didn't invent BASIC. Neither did Apple. Apple didn't invent the 6502. The Apple 1 was built from off-the-shelf parts available to anyone.

Being a genius does not require being a success at everything. In fact, most successful people fail quite a lot. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones is the successful ones:

1. are not dissuaded by failure

2. learn from their mistakes and failures

3. try again and again

The unsuccessful ones "learn" from their failure by not trying again. Or they quit before they start.

> Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people".

He almost went bankrupt getting their first small rocket to space. He wasn't exactly poor at the time thanks to paypal, but he didn't have anything close to unlimited funds. He is a billionaire now because he succeeded, not the other way around.

> [..] which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.

If your claim is that Elon was not involved in creating the products, this is misinformed. https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... is the link I have handy.

> which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977, "I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt."

> Thai cave rescue

The "pedo"-thing was stupid and deserve criticism, but he was actually asked to continue working on the submarine: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785

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