CEO of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company resigns
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Blue Origin is proof that just throwing money at a problem does not achieve results, and saying the Musk's only contribution to SpaceX to was "using his money to buy success" is a fallacy.
I don't how much you can look into his "engineering" prowess.. but clearly it was more than zero.
Bezos' thought that if he was a benevolent benefactor and a good money source, if he gave Blue Origin a blank check and let them loose to "do rocketry", he would get good results.
But his laissez-faire approach didn't make him a good boss, it made him a bad one. Blue Origin runs along like a headless chicken. He wouldn't have tolerated this shit in Amazon, why does he tolerate this in Blue Origin?
But Musk proves that you need to get into the weeds, you need to manage it yourself, and ask the weird questions no one else dares ask.
It's one thing to look at an invoice for a "rocket radio" for $25k or whatever and go, "I guess that's what it costs, here is the money, go buy two and a coffee for yourself".
It's another thing to go "hang on a second! why exactly does it cost that much, why can't we use a $600 one that's commercially available?"
Musk gets a lot of flak for not "listening to the experts" but him ignoring them and asking "but why?" like a toddler is what allowed SpaceX to massively cut not only cost but also time, a far valuable thing.
This meant he did a lot of stupid things... but it also allowed him to discover a lot of pitfalls where a commercially available part was just as useful for the task as something "rocket grade".
There are two anecdotes that prove this. (giving the cliff notes version, you can read his biographies to learn more about these)
In one test, he tried to fix something by cutting away the broken part and taking the fuel penalty caused by the part being shorter (but still under the fuel budget margin).
Naturally people said you shouldn't try such hacks and should just replace the part... but he tried and it worked and even NASA was impressed by it. He ended up discovering his margins and saved time, allowing them to proceed through the rest of the testing process.
In another test, he tried to fix something by trying to glue something that should have been replaced. It ended up failing, and rightly people would say he was stupid to not listen to the experts... but here is what I took from it.
For one, Bezos wouldn't be caught dead trying to glue things himself, he would never get his hands dirty like that...But then he wouldn't even what part was broken to attempt a hack anyways. He doesn't have the lay of the land like Musk does.
But secondly, it shows how two billionaires with open chequebooks approach things differently. One would just cut a cheque to replace it, but learn nothing new... another would say, sure I will cut the cheque afterwards, but while we are here, why not try something risky?
If it works, we learnt something new, if not, I had the cheque book handy anyways.
I feel this approach is why SpaceX works. YMMV
there are also youtube videos of NASA employees discussing these things as part of their report on the Commercial setup.
So we do have 3rd party evidence. Not all of it make him look nice, but it does mention him, which proves his presence (or meddling, however you want to look at it) in the thick of things.
I'm not a Musk basher, I mean I do think he has behavior problems on X and runs constant pump and dumps in crypto, but I don't think he's an idiot or incompetent or what have you. I think Tesla and SpaceX are incredible achievements. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who are like, "and it was all Musk, this proves it", which to me feels like an impossible claim to prove. Don't thousands of people work at SpaceX? Isn't it possible they're better at engineering, or had better luck?
Ceteris Paribus, given two billionaires, both with the ability to hire the thousands of excellent employees you mention, why does one succeed while the other doesn't?
The excellent employees at both organisations cancel out and we left with the two billionaire leaders and hence why we talk about them and not the employees.
There's no such thing as ceteris paribus when it comes to organizations where thousands of people work, doing insanely complex work. There's literally way too many variables.
If you have a CEO who is currently stingy about making process improvements that aren't sexy and is focused largely on office politics and that's not what the company needs at the moment, promoting someone who has been down in the trenches is a great option. Conversely if a company is bloated and needs to tighten its belt to survive, you might want someone who can look at it as dispassionately as possible. Really you can't look at it in terms of good or bad ceo, but rather appropriate or inappropriate.
Maybe you could argue this is what they should be doing, but it's clearly not what they are doing. The vast majority of CEOs simply suck some of the blood out of the company before flying off an parasitizing another one. You say the other answers are snarky; I say yours is naive.
> Would you have paid someone twice his salary if you thought they could do better?
No, I would have paid a random engineer who didn't want the job 1/10th of the CEO's salary and gotten a TREMENDOUSLY better outcome.