I'm in the same box (SpaceX seems amazing, Musk less so) and I keep wondering: Is SpaceX succeeding because of Musk or despite of Musk?
I believe their success comes down to how they go about these massive development projects. They start super scrappy, quick to iterate, build and throwaway hardware quickly. But then are experts of transitioning into a sustainable late stage development within the regulatory bounds of a highly controlled industry.
They did it with Falcon, Dragon, Starlink, and I suspect they will with Starship too.
They could only go about this by having a "crazy" and very rich benefactor, along with the management of COO Gwynne Shotwell.
People get confused by this when they see bits of metal get blown up and fail. The cost of that metal isn't really that high at the end of the day and the bits of metal that are recovered get melted down and reused.
Do you know what cannot be recycled and reused? Human effort when we spend tens of thousand of hours on something that doesn't pan out. In so many mega project we see design ideas carried on because of the sunk cost fallacy. The key to prevent this is being able to bail out as fast as possible when the idea isn't going to work, and being able to focus on what is going to work.
I wish something like this could happen in software, too.
I have worked in a a couple regulated industries, and in all cases the firm's decision to impose the same level of governance at all levels of the software value chain was a horrible impediment to innovation. After a certain number of iterations of having to do governance reviews of spikes and PoCs that were going to be thrown away regardless of whether the idea worked, any developer who values their own time will eventually settle into avoiding true prototype and PoC work and instead dive straight into writing production-bound code from the beginning.
I've wondered if we could get more innovation and more quality by allowing rapid iteration (without all the paperwork) during early development and prototyping of an idea, followed by a complete and in-depth review, documentation and certification of the final design and implementation as part of preparing it to ship to production.
"We are going to fly to Mars!" attract different kind of engineers than "We are going to eke out 5 per cent more growth for our shareholders!"
Most publicly traded corporations fall into the latter trap: find some cash cow and milk it endlessly so that the shareholders are happy, and screw any innovation.
Privately owned corporations such as SpaceX can afford "loftier" goals.
The way SpaceX has revolutionised the space industry is largely down to Elon's unique vision and drive. Elon has set the mission of getting to Mars and SpaceX has relentlessly pursued that goal and hasn't paused to soak up cash for shareholders (Falcon 9 Block 5 would be ludicrously profitable if SpaceX just scrapped R&D and rested on their laurels).
People who work in Space tech generally _want_ to work in Space tech and want to do the big things (like reaching Mars etc.) so SpaceX has an easier time hiring highly motivated and highly capable people because it has such ambition.
Elon managed to hire very capable senior leadership. Like Tom Mueller who led SpaceX propulsion development. And most importantly, SpaceX's President and COO Gwynne Shotwell who basically runs SpaceX in most meaningful ways. Elon as CEO is more like a very involved chairman than a traditional CEO which is why I would say SpaceX is also successful in spite of Musk, because he's actually not that involved day-to-day which is probably his most negative influence.
This combination works incredibly well. Musk regularly questions conventional wisdom and reimagines things from first principles, and then has the balls to go through with it. Channeled properly this is incredibly powerful and propels SpaceX on a trajectory far beyond their competition. Channeled improperly ... well, just look at some of his other companies.
Probably because. Just look at Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. Or look at the US, EU, Chinese space industry. It does look like Musk adds something to SpaceX that makes them achieve above the rest.
Many of them came from Boeing or Lockheed, and they talk about how getting approval for a new piece of equipment or new manufacturing tech would take 12 months, then budgeting, then whatever and you might have the thing in 2 years if you were lucky.
With Elon, you go into his office and lay out your ask. He will ask one or two directed questions, they say "yes, do it" and pull out the check book then and there, and you can spend millions and get something new in weeks.
Even when it doesn't work out down the road, Elon will ask if you learned something and if you're now on the right track, and if the answer is yes, Elon says "You did the right thing".
So it sounds like he removes a ton of barriers, and I'd love to work for someone like that.
He picked the right people to work SpaceX and Tesla, which is his greatest feat and deserves much praise. He informed himself, then involved himself more than was probably required or even good, but he had adult supervision.
He's deliberately ignoring adult supervision in Twitter and making a hash of it. The fact that both Tesla and SpaceX continue in his absence suggest that whatever direct benefit he once provided does not seem to require more.
While the road to achieving those benefits directly was a long road, the immediate indirect benefits of having a clear path to a major competitive (and customer) advantage were the quality of people he was able to inspire to work on the problem.
And as SpaceX began delivering reusability, their profit margins, and industry respect, have risen to a level that gives them overwhelming advantages for now and seemingly for some time to come.
A clear vision counts for a lot.
In percentage of rocket stages consumed / launch, their costs are significantly lower than any other entity in the industry.
Also launch frequencies are higher, and their turnaround time on launches is significantly lower, reducing the fixed costs of having a launch system per launch significantly over the competition again.
Now his turn is actually a strategic manoeuvre to make the right like him and buy his products. He is solving for global warming after all. And like a lot of immigrants, he is very sensitive to free speech becoming less free due to the whole social justice warrior movement which was getting out of hand. So he did all the memes and said a bunch of things that one can say when they are at a certain level in their lives without society being able to cancel them.
Bottomline is, we are enormously blessed to have talented immigrants like Einstein and Musk coming to our shores and we wouldn't be half the country without them.
Which isn't supposed to be an endorsement of any of this. Ethically it's very questionable, but it is a logical outcome in our flavor of capitalism.
For those secondary offerings, you put downward pressure on your stock price, and markets start to eventually pick up expectations that you will make enough money to support a given valuation if you want to keep it. SpaceX's valuation is too high for just the Falcon 9 launch business to be worth continual secondary offerings. So they need something amazing - which is supposed to be Starlink today, but could have been "mars" or "asteroid mining" or whatever else. Without this rocket, Starlink doesn't look like it has massively positive unit economics either.
Hence you get a company that is eternally raising money from private and venture markets on future promise and hype, paired with the perfect CEO to do those raises.
FTFY: Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money into significant achievements ...
Musk might not hit his target time tables. He might not deliver everything he plans to. But he still delivers things other entities have yet to match, or took a serious amount to time to match.
Investors, and people who care about his projects, don't care about him keeping every promise. They care about results. If a CEO and his team get motivated by impossible time tables, then let them motivate themselves with impossible time tables.
(Counter example? FWIW, any benefits of his foray into Twitter are not yet clear to me.)
According to people I know who worked at SpaceX, there is a whole layer of management that exists to handle Musk the way you would handle a boy king. They basically insulate him from making any decisions that can really hurt the company. I have heard of one instance where they spent 3 weeks quietly convincing him out of a wrong decision before announcing that he made the other choice (once he changed his mind and agreed to it).
It doesn't sound like a company that needs such a management layer is getting their ability to accomplish things from the boy king, just the name and the money.
AFAICT this management scheme is shotwell's doing, and you should probably credit her for the accomplishments.
Also, we're seeing this dynamic play out in electric cars. Once they became economical to make (and no, Tesla wasn't really responsible for that), other carmakers are now out-competing them.
I have no idea what you would think would be hard.
What SpaceX has done with their investors money hasn't been matched by anyone in the rocket industry. Many attempts have ended in complete failure.
The closest competitors in recent years, in terms of a consistent string of steady solid advancements, have been the Chinese. And they are still far behind.
Whether Musk is a challenging person to work for, doesn't add or subtract from that.
If you want to see companies with comparable levels of spending to Musk companies, you have to look outside rockets.
By the way, I'm not knocking the man: getting that much money to spend on rockets is an incredible achievement. Someone who did something comparable literally won a Nobel prize (the administrator responsible for making sure LIGO got enough money). Actually spending it on rocket technology once you have it isn't hard.
Edit: Hard projects in the space sector would be things like landing and operating a massive rover or a human colony on mars (or the moon for that matter), or building very new instruments like the JWST - doing things that are fundamentally new.
Starlink with cubesats would have been pretty revolutionary (instead of car-sized, 1-ton monsters), and absolutely crushed the economics. The current version of starlink is basically LeoSat (one of a fee companies Musk probably heard about before starting the Starlink project) with enough initial capital to not go broke.
If they can get starship launches up and running with the economics they promise, that would be hard.
The first vertically-landing rocket did it in the 1960's. Commercializing from that point was just a matter of investment. SpaceX has contributed meaningfully to rocket engine technology, but I doubt Musk knew anything about that.
So has Russia. So has NASA. Same with Europe.
Not to mention Boeing, ULA, or other long time rocket technology suppliers.
So there are examples of large extended spending budgets (on rocketry programs, specifically) with nowhere near as much progress as SpaceX has done with far fewer people, less time, and less money.
The difference really begs the question of how he did it. And I think the answer is he did many things differently.
He didn't just have a clear vision of reusability, but also the time, cost and complexity savings of vertical integration, the faster progress that comes of tolerating intermediate failures as a source of fast feedback, and casting his overworked employees as crusaders in a meaningful mission to best the best, and turn sci-fi into reality, all with contagious enthusiasm.
He also seems to have a secret superpower for plowing through government red tape and bureaucracy. I have no idea how he does that, but both with Tesla and SpaceX it has made a significant difference. Easy not to notice that, but a lot of ambitions have been ground down with resource attrition on that mountain.
at least in the US, a lot of the budget is really glorified government pork, unfortunately. Boeing and even NASA have to spend their money sub optimally in order to secure future funding from government bodies.
> So has Russia. So has NASA. Same with Europe.
> Not to mention Boeing, ULA, or other long time rocket technology suppliers.
Do you have sources for these claims with respect to rocket technology? SpaceX has raised $10 billion to spend pretty much only on rockets - again, the easiest part of space technology by far. The rest of the money is going to comm satellites, which are also know to be a pretty easy technology. The budgets for these space agencies are bigger, but they are also spending on much more complicated things like science mission payloads. Not to mention all the pork.
> He also seems to have a secret superpower for plowing through government red tape and bureaucracy. I have no idea how he does that, but both with Tesla and SpaceX it has made a significant difference. Easy not to notice that, but a lot of ambitions have been ground down with resource attrition on that mountain.
That superpower is lying. When you claim that you have capabilities you don't, they pay you to develop them until they figure out you were BS-ing in the first place. This is what happened with the rural broadband subsidies.
Their investment dollars up to now have also covered development of their next rocket, with planned capabilities of refueling in space and round trips, including site landings, to anywhere in the solar system, and have a greater lift capacity than the SLS, beyond their current achievements in rocketry.
They also had to, from scratch, develop an organization, build out design, manufacturing and flight control capacities, their own launch facilities including unique water landing platforms.
NASA already had extensive facilities and capabilities, prior to their latest rocket project.
Of course, both NASA and SpaceX were able to leverage NASA's previous experience with rocketry. (I am a fan, not a critic of NASA.)
> NASA reports the official cost of the SLS as $11.8 billion [1]
> NASA estimates will cost $13.8 billion to develop through its first crewed launch in 2024. [1]
That doesn't cover the costs of additional rockets. Which get discarded after every launch.
> each SLS/Orion launch will have a price tag of about $4.1 billion. [2]
When you consider the cost of NASA launches vs. SpaceX launches, there are now between an order or two of magnitudes between them. Which is reflected in SpaceX launch prices. Starship will eliminate the second stage losses, resulting in even cheaper per launch costs.
I cannot think of another time in history where a company has managed to so decisively leave all competition, including major strategic nation-state initiatives, behind.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion....
[2] https://www.space.com/artemis-1-space-launch-system-rocket-c....
-- EDIT --
Not sure how I missed the opening paragraph of [1]:
> From its inception in 2011 through the year of its first flight, the Space Launch System rocket program has cost $23.8 billion. The Orion deep space capsule has cost $20.4 billion since the program began in 2006. Related ground infrastructure upgrades cost an additional $5.7 billion since 2012. In total, NASA spent $49.9 billion on these programs between 2006 and their first test launch in 2022.
$49.9 Billion!