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Comment by rain_iwakura | Hacker News Reader

he never got into stanford. he made that up. there is no record of his admittance. and court records show that stanford dean (under oath) had to admit that they couldn't locate them. do you have source on "drove a lot of engineering" claim? even if you worked at one of these, could you prove the other?

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I think you got that backwards. There's a quote here[1] (sourced from court documents) from the director of admissions at Stanford that he was admitted:

> Dear Elon,

> As per special request from my colleagues in the School of Engineering, I have searched Stanford's admission data base and acknowledge that you applied and were admitted to the graduate program in Material Science Engineering in 1995. Since you did not enroll, Stanford is not able to issue you an official certification document.

> Sincerely, Judith Haccou, Director

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/54065/did-elon-...

What is novel about driving engineering? It’s obvious he’s a highly involved CEO, and he actually understands and explains engineering decisions all the time. I hear all the time comments like “he doesn’t know anything about making rockets”. Tom Muller regularly has to comment on this noise. https://x.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929

Eric Berger’s book Liftoff details the early years of SpaceX based on interviews with the people involved. They all speak highly of Elon’s engineering expertise and the critical design decisions he made.

I have no inside information, but a biographical book written with exclusive interviews to the person basically means it's a PR book. It maybe also has interesting and true things, but that's like justifying that he knows engineering because his mom said so.

Eric Berger is a highly respected journalist. There was no editorial control from Elon/SpaceX.

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