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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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

No way would SpaceX happen without him

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