Building a subway is infrastructure, not manufacturing. Elon recently said the sheet metal in the cyber truck needed to be machined to the precision of a red blood cell. This is not somebody who understands manufacturing.
Oh come on. If it were this simple, everyone would be doing it. Why aren't you "watching where the money is flowing and sticking your hand out"?
> Elon has certainly mastered that, but I don't have to ascribe "genius" to it.
Musk is vastly overhyped by some, but that's really selling him short. SpaceX and Tesla have real products providing real value, they aren't just leeching off money flows.
As for the real value of SpaceX and Tesla. I think there is value there, but probably less than most and I don't buy into "great man theory", so I would probably ascribe the success to the actual engineers and designers that did a majority of the work. He is a good leader for what he is trying to accomplish with those two companies as far as I can tell.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk#%C2%A...
Feel free to point me to people actually around him that thinks he doesn't know physics or engineering.
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does." - Garret Reisman, former SpaceX director and USC Professor
Objectively, at present he's stoking a fire comprised of $44 billion dollars, committing anti trust crimes, and endangering a besieged foreign nation.
Judge him by his actions, not by what his blowhards say about him.
What do any of those have to do with his engineering skills? Do you think good engineers can't make bad investments, or are inherently moral people incapable of antitrust violations?
no one says he is a great engineer, but oh boy he sure does well in finding those great engineers and funding them to work on large scale projects.
he hires people greater than him in other fields, no doubt.