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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon.

Well I do. Or at least I did.

He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.

He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.

He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it.

Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things.

But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.

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I don’t know, is it really fair to attribute any of these to him? There are thousands of engineers/scientists that did the actual work. Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table. With a big enough wallet it’s not particularly hard. Also, spacex had plenty of government funds going to it — wouldn’t those same funds going to NASA resulted in similar results from taxpayer money?

Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).

The people who did the work deserve credit. So does the person who had the vision and brought them together. Those engineers didn't get together of their own accord and nominate musk as a mascot. Regardless of how you want to summarize Musk's career in the context of his current behavior, which is getting tiresome, I think this is a false dichotomy.

Musk didn't even have the vision of spacex. He bought it from the original founders and strongarmed the founder label on himself in the legal dispute.

You're confusing SpaceX and Tesla.

Maybe you should review these pages and get your facts straight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX

So what if he did? What were they doing before he got involved?

If it was so easy to bring this kind of stuff to market then why aren't more people as wildly successful? This kind of "Musk didn't do do anything or have the vision" hate is beyond tiring.

There are plenty wildly successful people. There's a list of billionaires, and even more millionaires. Of course, these people tend to pull up ladders behind them, so they prevent other people from their opportunities. :)

> Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table.

I love to shit on Musk as much as anyone but I dunno about this lol.

There's a lot of skill in hiring good technical people. IMO that "skill" basically just comes down to being a good technical person yourself so you can tell the difference. You can't hire an elite engineering team with hype, out of 100 applicants you'll get 2 good ones and 98 muppets that want to work at the trendy place and be seen to be doing so.

I've worked for like 5+ companies that were doing fine before some dipshit head of engineering hired a bunch of other dipshits and they took over and turned it into a big dipshit orgy hellbent on driving a perfectly good company straight into an iceberg. The person doing the hiring has a shitton of influence in how a business goes unless your business model can live with enterprise-grade average and you can just hire everyone. I can't see that being the case at Tesla or SpaceX...

I think Musk deserves some credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Doesn't stop him being a flog though.

No way would SpaceX happen without him

NASA (or perhaps a better comparison ULA) wouldn't have taken the risk to try to make reusable rockets. I think Elon's value in Space X (aside from hiring because he clearly has some brilliant engineers working there) is that he's crazy enough to risk it all on "crazy" ideas. He was REALLY close to failing on both Tesla and SpaceX because of this, but it wound up working out and producing things that almost certainly wouldn't exist otherwise.

What he's doing with Twitter is, I guess, a similar leap of faith, but I don't think it is going to pan out this time.

The Shuttle was reusable and NASA built that in the 1970s.

The shuttle might as well have been disposable for all the inefficiencies in its design. If it was really reusable and cost effective we'd still be using it. Guess what - we aren't.

That’s a strange conclusion. A 1978 Ford Fairmont does everything the common person needs in a car. But there was room for improvement in terms of features, reliability, and efficiency. So we continued to develop cars. Expecting any vehicle to be perfect is unrealistic. Even the Falcon 9 has evolved. SpaceX is working on another vehicle that is even more efficient. The shuttle had flaws but it was reusable.

But the Shuttle was retired well before the US had a replacement ready. For quite some time, the US was dependent on the Russian Soyuz. It was technically reusable, but at a pretty steep cost. It was not very efficient.

With respect to the missions the US government cares the most about, the US did have replacements for the Shuttles. Namely Atlas V and Delta IV. After ISS construction was finished, there was little point in keeping the shuttle around just to ferry people around unsafely. Launching people into space is more of a side gig to keep a steady stream of young idealistic recruits coming in. Letting that lapse for a few years was demoralizing (less demoralizing than losing a third shuttle would have been) but not a real problem for the US government otherwise.

Incidentally, Atlas V used/uses Russian engines. Pretty bad idea in retrospect but at the time a lot of people thought it seemed reasonable.

Nobody claimed the Shuttle was efficient. The claim is that Musk gave us reusable rockets. NASA did that.

It was a hell of a lot cheaper to refurbish and reuse a shuttle than to build a new one each time. That's why 135 shuttle missions were flown with 5 shuttles instead of 135 shuttles. It's true that refurbishment between use was far more expensive and time consuming than had been planned, however it was a hell of a lot cheaper than building a new shuttle each time. Refurbishing a shuttle took months but building Endeavour to replace Challenger took several years and cost several orders of magnitude more. There can be no serious question that the shuttle orbiters were mostly reusable.

> cost effective

That's another matter entirely. It would have been cheaper to use conventional disposable rockets. Even better than that is reusable conventional rockets; the economic sense of which has now been demonstrated by Falcon 9.

Falcon 9 and STS do not have the same capabilities. F9 can match STS on payload but only if the booster is expended. With booster recovery F9 payload to LEO is ~25% less than STS. Falcon 9 has no capability to recover payload from space like STS [1]. They're different vehicles with different missions. We didn't need the shuttle anymore so we reallocated resources. All the F9 ISS missions are only happening because we had STS to build the ISS in the first place.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A

Having money is necessary but not sufficient to achieve the things he did. There are other millionaires and billionaires who tried to do what he did but couldn't. Regardless of your personal animus towards Elon, give the man credit where credit is due. Tesla and SpaceX are great contributions to the world and he was instrumental in implementing them, from capital to the business core ideas.

I think you're massively underestimating how difficult it is to allocate capital and execute business plans.

When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement.

For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is.

On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.

While you're not completely wrong, your estimation on replaceability of engineers in general isn't just "hey monster.com please send 5x general engineers my way" after you lose a few. Especially when it comes to senior positions, or unique aerospace roles like at SpaceX. There's a reason those salaries go sky high at times.

That aside, in many cases it takes an engineering-minded businessman to create the greatest enterprises. Not just in valuation, but in general value and appreciation in fields where one can do a lot of good but not get a lot of profit.

You could probably say the same things about Henry Ford. I heard he didn't do any of the hard work either...

> He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.

True that.

> He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.

Well, NASA decided that building rockets isn't their core purpose anymore as rocket building isn't as scientific, experimental anymore and could be comodotized and financed private industry to take over.

Musk was in thebright spot ant the right time, with enough capital and hype to take over the engineers and and funds and found the right executive team.

These are achievements, but I he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.

lol - SpaceX didn't surpass Blue Origin or NASAs contractors because of hype! How can people be this sincerely deluded?

The point is the market was positioned so that any participant would have benefited. Maybe Blue Origin or another company would have taken years longer to achieve what SpaceX did. Maybe more expensively, not as good, though one doubts hardly any less unreliably. But circumstances made it so that any player who tried could have gotten NASA the rockets more or less, if they tried, because the government was actively supporting private industry efforts to do so.

> IF he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.

What is your basis for this belief? Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, by a man who was far richer than Elon Musk, hired people connected and accomplished in the space industry and with that opportunity has accomplished far far less. They've never put anything into orbit, even as a test. SpaceX's success has not precluded Blue Origin's success. Blue Origin hasn't succeeded despite hiring many of the best people in the industry because they're unfocused and undriven. Blue Origin is poorly managed by Bezos, not hindered by SpaceX's success.

Really, explain your reasoning for thinking otherwise. I would love to hear this.

> But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified

My personal take at the time when I regarded him positively was that he, although not really a genius, "got" things in general and being in a position of power, would allow those who really were geniuses to do their jobs.

If that was ever true, he switched from letting those brilliant people do their work to actually telling them to blindly follow his crazy ideas (for lulz and otherwise).

Did Musk originally go to Roscosmos to license their tech and it was only after the laughed him out of the door that SpaceX pursued it's current strategy? His original plan was literally to be dependent on Russia's Soyuz.

> and I personally hate PayPal

PayPal is really old at this point though, the original people have had nothing to do with it for a very long time. IIRC PayPal had novel and useful functionality initially, before it was run into the ground as a product.

Yes, before the founders sold out, Paypal was very novel and unique. Now they seem to be more interested in tying up people's money to use for float as their primary business model, rather than providing value as a transaction clearing house.

Eberhard and Tarpenning had the idea to make an EV sports car (rather than the traditional "green" branding that EV's tried to go for), so I think they deserve credit for the "sexy" approach. Musk deserves credit for recognizing the opportunity, commandeering it, and keeping the idea going.

The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing.

His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best.

I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.

When someone is that successful a lot of people will try and write them off. I wrote in another comment, I don't agree with everything he says or does. But he is undoubtedly in the firing line.

> But he is undoubtedly in the firing line.

Billionaires are uniquely positioned to be, because they tend to get away repeatedly with things that would be career- or life-ending for others.

One thing I vehemently disagree with is the crazy hours he makes his employees work. I think it's wrong from a people perspective in general, and as a programmer I think this could only lead to bad outcomes.

He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.

I actually don't agree with this because I find Tesla's so unsexy, I would never buy one. What I think he did do though, is bring a fairly reliable electric car into production, which was pretty cool, and because of the climate crisis, people wanted to contribute by ditching their petrol guzzler. It's also a bit of a "flex".

> He gave us reusable rockets.

The Space Shuttle would like a word.

The space shuttle is a reusable upper stage. The shuttle successfully massively increased the cost of the upper stage by making it reusable falling incredibly short of it's initial design goals.

It’s also a massive stretch to describe the shuttle as “reusable” when the cost to refurbish the orbiter between flights was comparable to the cost of an expendable vehicle.

It’s not a stretch at all. That’s the definition of reusable. It might not be economical but that’s a whole other metric. Dismissing a first-of-its-kind state-of-the-art vehicle from the 1970s for not meeting the standards of 50 years in the future isn’t going to lead you to any insightful conclusions.

It’s not just that it didn’t meet the standards of today; it didn’t even meet the cost-efficiency goals it was originally intended to.

It met the capability requirements though. Including reusability.

I’m not going to continue to engage because you don’t seem to be engaging in good faith here.

If you can't engage constructively then that is probably for the best. But you should reevaluate your assessment because you have come to an incorrect conclusion.

I have engaged constructively this whole time, and you've downvoted every comment of mine you could. (HN doesn't allow you to downvote direct replies to your own comments, and those are the only comments of mine that aren't downvoted, so it's easy to tell.) That indicates bad faith.

Amazing that people are so willing to dismiss economics to be technically correct. Hilariously, that kind of thinking is why we no longer use the shuttle.

Yeah, the whole point of reusability is cost efficiency. If your system is less cost efficient but technically reuses the vehicle, nobody cares (aside from maybe some checkbox-ticking federal bureaucrat).

Nobody is dismissing Economics. It's just not relevant to this conversation.

The Shuttle also reused the SRBs which are the first stage. Only the fuel tank was single-use. The Falcon 9 is a (optionally!) reusable first stage but the second stage is discarded.

The initial design goals was to build a space cargo plane understandable and acceptable to taxpayers and is capable of capturing a Soviet spy satellite with a mockup left in the orbit all in just one orbit and divert to any standard 747 runway and may be operated by both NASA and USAF.

The Shuttle did fulfill something like half of those, just those were pointless goals. But it wasn't reusability alone that made Shuttle a technical failure.

The Space Shuttle is only partially reusable, cost a $billion per launch, has long been retired, and has a poor safety record, having lost its crew twice. It was cool, but didn't really fulfill its promise.

Falcon 9 is also only partially reusable. The claim is that Musk gave us reusable rockets with no qualifier on economics or safety. By that standard the Shuttle was first.

The Shuttle in original form can fly on a "regular AF mission" and bring back a Soviet Hubble and land "diverted" straight into Area 51. That's the point. The thing is all built around that purpose.

That sort of mission is mostly speculation. Nabbing a Soviet spy satellite would probably be suicide, they could have easily had scuttling charges onboard that would destroy both the satellite and the shuttle.

What is known is that it was designed to go to a polar orbit, where many spy satellites are, deploy a satellite and return to the launch site after a single orbit. It's that "single orbit" part that particularly necessitates the large cross-range capability, since 90 minutes later the launch site will about 1500 miles to the east of where it was. If landing after a single launch weren't necessary, they could just orbit for a day and wait for the landing sight to come around again. Deploying a satellite in a single orbit would be an incredible feat, but capturing one in a single orbit is just too far-fetched.

The idea of doing this was apparently to launch a US spy satellite quickly without giving the Soviets much time to track the exact orbital parameters the satellite was being deployed into. TBQH it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, unless the spy satellites themselves are presumed to be stealthy to Soviet radars. Maybe that was the case. I can see why the Soviets thought it was a nuclear bomber. Anyway, the Shuttle never actually went to polar orbit at all, so in this sense you could say the Shuttle never fulfilled its purpose.

> He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.

What Musk did was show the oil addicted automakers that EV's are both practical to manufacture and own. Using the word sexy to describe machinery and inanimate objects in general is just weird and I consider it the peak of marketoid speak.

I think ‘sexy’ here is just implying how it has become a status symbol.

There's a good reason why they started with sports cars and luxury sedans. And showing how ridiculously fast it could accelerate was a big part of Musk's marketing.

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