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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

For me at least, this perception comes from the level of hubris that Elon exhibits in public. Statements like "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth" is not something you hear from good engineers very often because it reeks of Dunning Kruger. Elon also frequently chooses to make statements with high certainty about areas far outside his expertise ("Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April") and consistency overpromises and under-delivers with some technologies (FSD).

So I don't know. Maybe he's a good engineer when he's not on camera. But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.

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I remember my perception changed when I watched an interview with musk talk about the material science challenges of panel gaps on teslas. You can't have that level of knowledge unless you worked very close to the problem.

https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1100

Worked very close to the problem != is an engineer

Not sure why people gate keep so hard around "he'S NOt An engiNEER". Even if he's not writing the code anymore, having deep technical understanding of important day to day tasks is an important quality in any leader in an engineering organization.

Yeah. It's a bit like a junior programmer saying architects are not software engineers because they don't write the code.

(Btw, software engineers are not really engineers.)

I wasn't taking a position on Musk with that specific comment, and I don't disagree with your latter point at all.

Broadly speaking, I wouldn't rush to consider anyone a doctor, an engineer, a pilot, so on and so forth simply because I watched a video of them speaking so well to a very specific problem that they just so happened to work so closely on. That's all I was getting at.

when does he get to the material science challenges in that video.

How many people know what galvanic corrosion means?

every one who has ever owned an aluminum boat, or generally worked with aluminum that's anywhere near electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode It's not an obscure thing; field specific maybe, but it's very much sub-table-stakes.

Most people who've done secondary school chemistry would know what that is. Uses technicals terms != is engineer.

Every single electrician I know is familiar with galvanic corrosion as well as how to mitigate it with insulation, dielectric grease, sacrificial anodes, etc. Steel and aluminum are the two most common metals that we use to make things. Galvanized steel has a zinc coating that acts as a sacrificial anode, almost any steel that is installed outside that isn’t stainless is galvanized.

I am an engineer, though not at all involved in materials science/engineering, and I've known what galvanic corrosion is since I was a teenager. It's not exactly an obscure phenomenon.

We covered that in high school chemistry, along with an in-class demo and a section in the book on sacrificial anodes and how they're used to prevent corrosion in things like oil pipelines. It was a US public school.

I mean, he might pay very close attention to everything at his company. That doesn't mean he's deeply involved with the engineering.

For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.

At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.

I also found this to be pretty impressive: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1560720224588120064?lang...

There's a difference between "an engineer" and "a good engineer".

So those saying he's not an engineer at all are probably wrong, but those saying he's a good engineer probably aren't correct either.

I think it's also the case where his misses are more evident. If you said "We'll get to Mars in 10 years", people will likely have forgotten you said that after 5 years, much less 2 years after your boasted time frame expires. So people credit you for big ideas while not having to deliver on anything. Every year, we've been about a year away from fully autonomous self-driving cars.

Complaining about twitter and saying how you'd fix it is easy when you don't control twitter. But actually fixing it is a different story once you have all the control.

Promises are easy to make, harder to deliver.

I don't know man. I'll often hear things to the effect of I can't believe how incompetent the developers of this app are, regardless of the complexity of the app.

>But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.

I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.

Golly, how do average Americans perceive Elon?

Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess? All I can find are his own boasting and second hand reports of folks impressed by his familiarity with jargon.

>Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess?

Yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

Second and third hand accounts are nice. Even better when they come from folks no longer financially dependent on Elon's good graces.

But I was hoping to see some of his source code for Zip2, some CAD he'd done himself, or even a video of him solving some intractable problem in one of these rooms full of stumped geniuses.

So this guy has founded multiple successful engineering-heavy companies, did not receive any actual financial support past 18 (despite inflated myths of an "emerald mine"), is attested by multiple skilled engineers, and has given videos where he talks in depth about engineering, but we're still looking for new & different kinds of evidence that he has skills?

Are we testing whether he knows anything at this point, or whether he's a literal Tony Stark? This thread started with discussion of whether he's any kind of engineer at all now we're looking for "rooms full of stumped geniuses" as if this was something every random engineer experienced.

Didn't see any links to talks by Musk. Perhaps you can share some?

Look I can go read Gates' code, so I have some direct evidence of whether his reputation as an engineer is worth the paper it's written on. The story for Musk is much less direct. Still, I'm open to studying the evidence of Musk's engineering chops.

A video that someone changed their perception was discussed here, earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35917912&p=2#35919980

The actual video it mentions is here: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1100

I would characterize him as a bad engineer. Which for a CEO is a lot better than nothing, if one does not become too arrogant and stops listening. Which, by now he seems to have done. He clearly can do the math of rocket science, but that math is not actually super hard, but its still better than your average CEO he can do. He can understand math and physics based arguments.

But he has never understood people, politics, etc. Which is what twitter is all about.

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