Say what you will about Musk, but he's making an effort in this regard. He has open sourced a number of goodies with Tesla.
I believe none of the cars shipping today contain any open source electronics. Teslas are notoriously full of very expensive proprietary electronics. He has indeed released some "goodies" but is nonetheless as bad as every other shipping car manufacturer today.
It is honestly hard to say he is making an effort when he is so blatantly lying about the roadster and his other vehicles are completely proprietary. Not saying he is worse than the other companies, but I can't give him credit for something he is not doing.
I'd say there is a mountain of evidence from SpaceX and Tesla that's not actually true and that he has little to no understanding of anything related to engineering, nor the ability to manage engineering teams effectively; I think he's surrounded by people that are actually talented and do a lot to scrambling to make stuff happen and fix his messes.
The huge 'box' his demanded his team put together, to rescue people from a cave with passages so narrow diver could not wear tanks on their backs? To me that demonstrates he has no ability to analyze a problem at high level and correctly apply the engineering resources available to him.
Examples:
* Dishy, which had basic design flaws, such as a permanently attached power/data cable that if damaged meant you had to purchase an entire new unit
* Hyperloop.
* SpaceX's repeated failures, which they spin as "it's okay, we meant to fuck up, we got data!", including the disaster where his insistence on launching on 4/20 resulted in substantial vehicle damage (5-8 rockets failed), heavy damage to the facility, a 380 acre wide debris field (so severe you could see debris landing in the ocean from an aerial shot well outside the launch danger zone), a forest fire, and heavy damage to a car (parked within the "hazard area.")
* Musk's repeated production-related issues at Tesla, and his insistence on automating as much as possible even when experts in their field who work for him tell him it's not possible
* Repeated demonstrations of engineering incompetence at Telsa. The Model S drivetrain units used to be disposable and would be quietly replaced during routine service at anywhere from 10-30k miles. They still can't make a Tesla with proper body panel gaps. People have found bits of wood/wire/duct tape holding their Tesla's guts together. For years Model S's couldn't be driven in heavy rain or through large puddles without water ending up in the drive units. Windows randomly shattering while cars are parked in driveways and garages. Etc
The solution they came up with for those kids was extremely risky, involving drugging them and hoping they didn't drown in their face masks. It had never been done before in cave rescue history, and no-one really knew if it would actually work.
Cave passages can be widened. It's actually quite common for cave rescues to involve widening passages. It's also relatively common for cavers to do that in general as part of ordinary exploration - I personally have helped widen an impassibly narrow passage with explosives myself. And yes, this is done underwater too.
If the drugging solution had resulted in a kid drowning, there is a very good chance that the submarine solution would have been used.
> Dishy, which had basic design flaws, such as a permanently attached power/data cable that if damaged meant you had to purchase an entire new unit
That sounds like a typical engineering/marketing decision: rather than coming up with a tricky waterproof connector, just seal it permanently and sell the user a new one if they break it. Starlink as a whole has been very successful.
> SpaceX's repeated failures, which they spin as "it's okay, we meant to fuck up, we got data!", including the disaster where his insistence on launching on 4/20 resulted in substantial vehicle damage (5-8 rockets failed), heavy damage to the facility, a 380 acre wide debris field (so severe you could see debris landing in the ocean from an aerial shot well outside the launch danger zone), a forest fire, and heavy damage to a car (parked within the "hazard area.")
SpaceX is probably the most successful aerospace company in history., and they have some of the most reliable orbital rockets in history. Obviously their focus on meeting schedules and iterating is working for them. They just launched Starship again with even more success, and will probably do so yet again in a few more months. I really don't think SpaceX themselves care about occasionally spreading some debris around, setting some trees on fire, and damaging a car in the designated hazard area. There's lots of rocket engineers that have managed to destroy their own cars because their rockets failed and debris hit the employee parking lot.
SpaceX operates what, by reasonable measures, is probably the most reliable launcher in history. That’s the Falcon 9. They are absolutely capable of reliable space operations.
Their two test flights of the Starship stack are test flights. Perhaps a better term would be R&D flights. They’re building something way outside the envelope of what’s ever flown before. If they followed the approach taken by big government contractors and/or classic NASA, we might expect them to fly around 2042 after spending many billions of taxpayer dollars. (Exhibit A, SLS). What you see is a company taking risks to advance the state of the art.
Be thankful or be ignorant but please, please don’t be loudly and proudly wrong!
Has that changed?