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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes the fantasy that an IC can just magic this all away.

This would likely result in a CEO with no pull and a CFO that had all the hard power to call the shots.

The reality seems to be, for some reason, building profitable and safe planes in America is becoming increasingly difficult.

A company most be able to do both: build a quality and safe product and make a margin. It can’t exist without revenue.

I’m guessing the real problem is somewhere between low quality or overworked and poorly trained line workers, complex systems, and a revenue strategy that obscures what the company is selling.

It takes more than a random ic manager to fix that — but I agree they should come from that past maybe.

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No matter how profitable building good planes is, building slightly worse planes that are bought in equal numbers is more profitable. The profit maximizing move is to lower quality until sales suffer more than profitability is increased. And if you have a strong reputation, and feedback cycles on product quality are long, lower quality might take a long time to actually be noticeable in sales.

Boeing profits and sales had been on a steady upwards trajectory for 20 years until 2019:

https://www.helgilibrary.com/charts/boeing-profits-sales-qua...

The trick is building worse planes may result in future costs to fix the problems. It's much less costly to bolt the door plug in before it falls out.

They got so lucky with that one.

At least they get to blame it on COVID. The real benchmark is relative to Airbus.

>The reality seems to be, for some reason, building profitable and safe planes in America is becoming increasingly difficult.

Is there another data point or are you just basing this off Boeing's issues?

The other datapoints have been merged into Boeing or they went away, Lockheed hasn't made a passenger plane for decades.

Gulfstream doesn't really count I think, because it isn't in competition with either Boeing or Airbus.

Building airplanes it a bit like running a restaurant... it's a business no sane person would willingly go in to.

> Building airplanes it a bit like running a restaurant... it's a business no sane person would willingly go in to.

Other people with a similar perspective about rockets tried to convince Musk that as well. Thankfully he didn’t listen. You’re never going to realize gains that surpass the return on the S&P if you don’t take risks in business.

Musk is an interesting standards bearer for sanity.

> Musk is an interesting standards bearer for sanity.

Think what you will about Musk, but SpaceX has completely revolutionized space travel and will be in the history books a hundred years from now.

And dozens of his projects have utterly failed. Remember The Boring Company? Hyperloop? The-site-formerlly-and-forever-known-as-Twitter-until-Musk-ruined-it?

Throw an unlimited supply of darts and you're going to get a few bulleyes. Doesn't make you the worlds greatest dart's player.

> And dozens of his projects have utterly failed. Remember The Boring Company? Hyperloop? The-site-formerlly-and-forever-known-as-Twitter-until-Musk-ruined-it?

You say dozens and name two, one of which (X) is still up and running with active user engagement. Many people have thrown darts, none have developed self-landing reusable rockets and outcompeted ULA or developed a satellite based global internet provider. Not even Google at its peak was able to come up with anything better than Project Loon. I’ll concede there’s a little luck in every venture, but what Musk and SpaceX have accomplished is well beyond luck and quite remarkable.

I mean, I dispute your implication that he's not destroying twitter (I mean, ever since he took it private we don't have hard numbers. But that itself doesn't suggest _good_ things).

But aside from that, and the two examples above, 1. x.com (the original) 2. tesla has been killing way more people since he retroactively became a founder (there was a delay while existing products moved through the pipeline) 3. solarcity 4. optimus 5. neuralink (well, ok, it hasn't failed yet. But _I'm_ not betting on it...) 6. the Tham Luang cave rescue 7. crypto 8. his relationships with his kids / exes

TBF, spacex appears to be his baby, and it has done _much_ better than I ever thought it would. There are rumors about the existence of a whole team there preventing him from breaking things, and personally, I believe them. But I have nothing _remotely_ like proof. And even if those rumors are true, spacex appears to have been his idea, he hired the first batch of people, etc. He can definitely take loads of credit for it, even if I don't think he deserves as much of said credit as he clearly thinks he deserves.

The Boring Company is still very much alive.

Two of those three are operating and possibly even growing. The other was thrown out for others to pursue rather than Musk companies.

Surely there are better examples of failures than these? Personally, I would have focused on "FSD". That one has been a huge debacle with a lot of potential to get worse.

I'm no fan of Musk, but it's hard to argue that SpaceX hasn't been revolutionary, to the point where I question if there's anyone else who could have pulled that off. Moving focus to The Boring Company or Hyperloop feels a little like whataboutism. No one succeeds at everything they do. Musk is in the unique (and lucky, for him) position that he can throw a lot of darts and lose a lot of money, but keep on going even if many of his bets don't work out.

And I don't think the usual "throw shit at the wall until something sticks" thing applies to Musk. Certainly he's had some things that slid to the floor, but he hardly has an "unlimited" supply of darts. And even if his finances were infinite, he still only has 24 hours in a day, and can only focus on a certain number of things. By and large, the things with a lot of his focus do seem to be doing pretty well.

Twitter is clearly a huge blind spot for Musk; while I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand, it does seem like an outlier. Regardless, it's still running, somehow, when I expected it to have been shut down by the middle of last year. While I know people who have stopped using it, I know more people who still use it and get value out of it, regardless of the negatives since Musk bought it.

You forgot, treating Tesla like piggy bank. That company has a rusty frame. Still looks shiney.

Boeing will be as well for the 737 Max, in the history books that is. And so far, Space X only got more junk up to places we already did junk up to before. SpaceX ahs yet to get us some place we haven't been in space, or at the very least one we have not been to in a long time. By themselves, if they deliver portions of the mission equipment they are a supplier like everyone else.

SpaceX achieved impressive things, the over glorification so rubs me the wrong way. And equalizing SpaceX successes with Musk a person does way more than just rub me the wrong way.

> SpaceX ahs yet to get us some place we haven't been in space, or at the very least one we have not been to in a long time.

It got us to a place where the cost of a rocket launch is 10 times less than it was before, and soon it will get us to 100 times less. It's just a matter of time that this is leveraged to bring us to new physical places.

> And equalizing SpaceX successes with Musk a person does way more than just rub me the wrong way.

He is the person that single-handedly made the decision to start a rocket company, decided on the initial architecture, hired the key people and finance the whole operation.

> SpaceX [...] will be in the history books a hundred years from now

As will Theranos. That's not really a great indicator of how good or useful something is.

Inane comparison, SpaceX will be in the history books because their rockets demonstrably work. They've already beaten every other rocket organization on the planet, including the state-run ones.

Maybe the secret sauce is to not build a rocket company at all. You build a Mars Exploration company that gives people a purpose and objective beyond just money. A company where quality/efficiency/price have a direct benefit to a broader mission.

It's a rocket company that tells people it's a Mars exploration company.

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