Elon is a great salesman, but I think SpaceX is far enough along that it would be fine without him. Maybe better than fine, given how reckless he can be.
When I said 'reckless', I was referring more to the repeated WTFs in his handling of the twitter acquisition, including but not limited to the acquisition itself.
They wouldn't get to Mars, though. Starship needs the 'recklessness' of being prepared to fail rapidly, repeatedly, dramatically, and incredibly publicly, while learning from each failure.
So far they've managed to ensure that no humans have been injured during launch/landing failures (although the delayed flight termination of the recent launch was worrying, and should probably be more of a concern than the launch site damage)
Sure, now that he's pushed them to where they are with his vision. Would we even be talking about landable rockets today without his involvement?
SpaceX plows all its profits into this goal. (Its shareholders aren't getting any returns, not for a long time. The SpaceX investors are playing an extremely long game.) And if you constantly use all your profits to improve your capability, you have a huge long-term advantage over companies that exist to make a profit for their shareholders.
Falcon is not fully reusable, there's a hard cost floor from the need to throw away a second stage for every launch, and there's no reasonable prospect to avoid doing so. The idea is that Starship will beat Falcon on launch costs long term. SpaceX itself is chomping at the bit getting Starlink to launch on Starship instead of Falcon, because it will be cheaper.
Maybe its more accurate to say that Musk is simply good at leading technical companies?
> feverish loyalty amongst his followers
You mean his employees? Most of them don't seem feverish.
And if you mean people that are not his employees how does that have anything to do with SpaceX?
I'm sure you have source for that. And I'm sure she already did that when she was Head of Sales right?
And its funny how Tom Mueller, Hans Königsmann, Garrett Reisman and every other higher up in SpaceX talks about lots and lots direct interaction with Musk.
Funny how 'Liftoff' the book about SpaceX doesn't mention anything about that. And the author of this book is currently writing about the the Falcon 9 days, and I think that book will confirm the same thing again (and the author of those books interviewed literally 100s of current and former SpaceX people).
And again, pretty much every single person in leadership positions at SpaceX would disagree with you. But its great that you know so much more.
> to recognize what a shitty CEO he is
Ok, so how do you define a good CEO if not based on the company he leads are successful. Sure if its a short term success maybe you can point to other factors. Musk has been in his position longer then pretty much every other CEO in both the space and the car industry and both companies are absurdly successful.
Look, you personally dislike him and you don't like his style. But that is just irrelevant. By any actual objective measure Musk is one of the most successful CEOs in history. The results speak for themselves and its not even really debatable.
That you have to bring up individual practices that you dislike, shows that you can't actually point to any aggregate results to make your point.
> you only need to pay attention to the disaster that has been his Twitter acquisition
If you actually think that in a 30+ year career the only thing relevant is one acquisition then you are actually delusional. Any fair assessment takes into account a whole career and not one acquisition.
And in terms of Twitter, the results should be judged after 5-10 years and not the first year.
Its simple a restructuring that was always gone happen after a while and had nothing to do with 'Gwynne' taking over management from Musk or whatever spin Musk-Haters wanted to put on it.
Yeah he was somehow able to start both Tesla, a wildly successful paradigm shifting hard tech company, and then go on to start SpaceX, an even more paradigm shifting, wildly successful hard tech company that has absolutely blown out every single competitor on earth to the point of embarrassment.
What does it take for people to just accept that he’s a genius? Is that seriously so difficult? Clearly he’s doing something and it isn’t sales.
may not have that exactly right but hte point is Elon, at least in the early days of SpaceX, was definitely more than a salesman.