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Comment by jdiez17 | Hacker News Reader

I'm no Elon fan but as an aerospace engineer, I can at least vouch that he knows what he is talking about when it comes to rockets (wasn't the case when SpaceX started) and has steered his army of engineers in useful directions that weren't obvious to other people at the time (reusable rockets, Starlink, etc.)

If you have watched Everyday Astronaut's tours of Starbase with Elon[0], where he explains in significant detail pretty much everything that is going on with the various prototypes, you'll know what I mean.

He's not a guy with an MBA that has somehow lucked out by throwing gobs of cash at various Hard Engineering Problems (although there's that, too.) Of course the bulk of the work is done by "rank and file" engineers.

[0] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

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>he knows what he is talking about when it comes to rockets

At a surface level. If you ever drill down on his shallow tech understanding, he sputters, kicks you out or flees.

No, at the level of knowing off hand the design considerations down to thermodynamics for practically every design decision that Tim asks about. In many cases to a much greater depth than I, an average engineer, know about these things.

He can regurg briefings, look again at what he says in anything you’re an expert in. E.g. software: he’s a total fraud.

The stochastic parrot argument. It seems there’s no evidence that will change your opinion.

Also, have a look at recent unedited videos of Tesla’s self driving. It’s not everything that was promised and it’s much later than promised, but it sure is impressive. However I agree it is being oversold and that’s extremely scummy.

You're replying to an aerospace engineer talking about aerospace engineering.

The amount of effort people take to try to convince themselves Elon is just a relatively average (or even moronic!) intellect who got successful via non virtuous means is absolutely impressive.

To attempt to be civil, I will also state I find the hero worshiping of Elon to be similarly deranged.

In my noob eyes, I think he just doesn't care much about software. He kinda have the same radical motto (delete, reduce, combine, forget the past, forget the mainstream.. basically what he says around min 20 in the video above. which is not far from move fast and break things) and he got a lot of success before with that so he just barged in twitter applying this brainlessly.

With rockets, he is deeply involved in the area and his proficiency have been confirmed by top engineers, a few quotes from them here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

I'm not sure about Elon's proficiency with software, but based on his comments on twitter I'd lean on him being out of touch there. He does seem to be knowledgeable on the AI/DL side though, see Andrej Karpathy's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617

Would you please stop posting like this? It's tedious, not what this site is for, and you've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. I don't care whether it's boo or yay, we just don't want shallow flamewars on this site.

>mudslinging (or mud wrestling for that matter).

Dan, this line of yours cracked me up! Big Time!

Gave me a good laugh. (which I don't get to do much these days)

This comment is ridiculous. The guy understands every single facet of every process at his companies. If he "sputters," it's because that's how he normally speaks.

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