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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, to offer an analogy:

"CelebrityDude had the amazing idea of flying around by building a set of robot arms that would reach down and pull really hard on your own shoelaces, which is something we could do today..."

It's not clear why we would care about that except as a reason to point and laugh at CelebrityDude.

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I'm not Musk's biggest fan by any means, but after decades in existance he made electric cars "a thing", and he drove the costs of getting to space down by so much that it makes the existing players look like idiots. He's clearly not the dummy your portraying him as. I'd definitely listen to his ideas, even if some of them aren't good.

I disagree with the implied-worldview behind that: Such progress is fundamentally incremental and stochastic, rather than hinging on "Great Men" (or women).

For a great many discoveries or inventions or ideas, digging a little further into the history shows the famous-people often aren't the first to say/try something, but the ones who attempted it again at a more favorable time or place, were more powerful or influential, or just plain got lucky.

We're talking about SpaceX specifically, not Tesla or any of his other companies. In the context of SpaceX, what GP said is absolutely true. The rocket industry has not been getting incrementally better over time. If anything, costs have incrementally gone up over time. Until SpaceX, nobody was able to significantly lower launch costs. Then SpaceX came along and succeeded where dozens of previous startups had failed, and the price floor drops out. In this particular case, "revolutionary" is the right descriptor to use.

I mean, my world view is that you should listen to people's ideas when they've had some good ones in the past. I'm not saying we have to believe they're always right.

I don't believe in great men, but I don't believe innovation just stochastically appears either. Behind all those little steps upwards is someone who's stumbled on some kind of insight and did something about it. Sometimes an idiot can get lucky and have it work out once, but Musk has done it several times.

The best thing you can do when you have the resources is to outsource your thinking to other people. Don’t want to figure out your own taxes? Pay someone to figure it out. Don’t want to figure out the law? Pay someone to figure it out. Don’t want to figure out your schedule? Pay someone to figure it out.

My point is, you’d probably get a lot farther by talking to the experts he pays to be close to rather than listening to him.

The problem really is a lot of people seem to think he's an engineering genius, which he isn't. What he is is a marketing genius.

I don't know about Tesla, but at SpaceX he is actually the Chief Engineer, and in more than just title. A lot of the innovative stuff SpaceX has done were the result of engineering decisions he made. According to Eric Berger's book on the beginning of SpaceX, he is a quite capable self-taught engineer respected by the people who work for him, including those who moved on to other things and had no incentive to lie.

I don't hold him on any pedestal. But saying he's just a marketing guy isn't correct either.

He also wanted to run air levitated trains in a partial vacuum and that was a nonstarter. Not every idea can be a winner.

(For the record, I wouldn't apply this to Elon specifically, but I think this is a good moment to plug a book-quote.)

> You think he's a genius?" she said, raising her eyebrows. The high-[noble] twit?

> "I don't know him quite well enough, yet. But I suspect so, a part of the time."

> "Can you be a genius part of the time?"

> "All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters."

-- Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

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