Busting the Launch Pad: Elon Musk and the Myth of the Secret Genius
bylinesupplement.com
bylinesupplement.com
Which is probably just as well, because not only is it highly unlikely that Elon had anything to do with its design, but SpaceX was well aware of its flaws/risks and was already working on a better version. But it wasn't ready in time, and this particular Starship would be destroyed in the test regardless, so they launched anyway.
People of "normal" cleverness, i.e. smart but with many equals, don't find it difficult to estimate the smartness of people less smart than they are. We can understand their thinking, and sometimes even predict their mistakes. And we can think faster than they can.
When we look at people smarter than ourselves, that doesn't work; they can solve problems faster than us, they can solve problems we can't solve at all, and we can't grok their mental processes. They appear to us to have magical powers. They don't have to be a lot smarter than us for us to place them in a different category. We see them as qualitatively different.
Also, we can't distinguish between people who are just a bit smarter than us, and those who are a lot smarter than us. We lack the measurement tools.
"Genius" is like "demon" - it's a magical classification that we use for things and people we don't understand. That is, when we call someone a genius, we're talking about what we are, not what they are.
I don't think that's true at all. I can easily distinguish between, say, my classmate who got (slightly) better test scores than I did in calculus class, and Isaac Newton, who invented calculus from scratch.
I think if I met Newton, I'd have judged him a self-promoting bullshitter. He was ultra-paranoid, and wouldn't share his work. Even when he published, it was written like a modern patent - more to conceal than to reveal.
He was a thoroughly unpleasant man. However, even people who hated his guts (e.g., the Bernoullis) recognized him as a genius quite early on.
His initial plan for hyperloop is a ~200yo design[1], only he enhanced it by putting "a air-hockey table" (his words) inside an evacuated tube. How stupid can one be?
He assembled an audience on a film studio set with mansions to show off non-existent solar shingles. He's well known to have been promising fully self-driving cars as well as flying rockets to the Moon and Mars year after year after year, always adding he was "confident" to accomplish that by "this_year + n" where n < 6 for "1/x th of the current market price" where x is typically 10 or 100.
[1](https://spectrum.ieee.org/hyperloop-is-hyper-old): ""Lord how this world improves as we grow older," reads the caption for a panel in the "March of Intellect," part of a series of colored etchings published between 1825 and 1829. The artist, William Heath (1794–1840), shows many futuristic contraptions, including a four-wheeled steam-powered horse called Velocity, a suspension bridge from Cape Town to Bengal, a gun-carrying platform lifted by four balloons, and a giant winged flying fish conveying convicts from England to New South Wales, in Australia. But the main object is a massive, seamless metallic tube taking travelers from East London's Greenwich Hill to Bengal, courtesy of the Grand Vacuum Tube Company."
"Other alleged Secret Geniuses[…] Elizabeth holmes, SBF, Adam Neumann". Major eyeroll, here. Two of those three are criminal fraudsters who never even had a product.
And while not a outright fraud, even Adam Neumann can't claim success. He spent what, $20B of other people's money in order to create a $300M company? Not exactly hard to become a millionaire if you start off a billionaire.
You don't have to like Elon, but Paypal actually is a real service. Tesla became a major car manufacturer under Elon's watch. SpaceX has succeeded fantastically.
One of these four people is not like the other.
You don't have to like him. But reality is there even when you ignore it.
Which one of the two criminals sold cars that were, by the end of the year, going to make you money as a robotaxi?
But Tesla is an actual business. People are actually driving around in actual cars.
Not so for Theranos (no product at all). Not so for FTX (ponzi scheme / pure theft).
But fair enough. In a way the difference to WeWork is just that Tesla hasn't (yet) collapsed under the weight of overinflated promises.
Edit: SpaceX is actually the largest launcher of satellites. Paypal is an actual service used by… billions?
He's not delivered everything. Not even close. We were supposed to be on Mars by now. But the rockets ARE launching actual payload.
Starlink has actual customers.
I'm not deifying Elon, not at all. But the comparison to SBF and Holmes is ridiculous.
There is a saying about the difference between a wise and a smart man. Something to the effect the smart man works for the wise man. Elon is both to varying degrees with varying degrees of success but mostly success.