Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.
What about, without Elon they'd have reusable rockets but without Shotwell they wouldn't? Do you believe this?
I get you hate Elon but at some point these takes are just so outrageous I can't believe you are making them in good faith.
Which contribution do you believe that Elon Musk had on the development of reusable rockets?
Let's put it this way: if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
He is a constant technical driving force.
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Would we have reusable rockets in the same timeline as SpaceX, absolutely not. The proof is all the other rocket companies that have failed to do so, including government entities.
So yah obviously if Musk never founded SpaceX, we would not have reusable rockets right now.
In the USA you have the SLS, which can only be described as a congressionally designed failure.
Past experiments by NASA for self landing rockets had their funding denied as well.
In the EU there was the Arianespace CEO who explicitly said that self landing rockets were a waste of time.
In Japan, space experimentation and failures are such a public nightmare we would never have bothered.
The idea of losing dozens of rockets in order to aim for reusability would have been untenable.
Starship would not exist. Because the idea of a rocket with that many engines on the booster was also believed to be impractical.
Elon is egomaniacal sure, but that's only magnified by his status as a CEO. His behavior, unfortunately pretty close to the average person.
Doesn't change the fact that SpaceX under his leadership is the only reason we have reusable rockets, or the ridiculously ambitious Starship launches.
No one could have predicted the current incredible cadence of launches by SpaceX either.
Any time prior to ~2014, absolutely.
Correct.
You don't need a hypothetical, it's not like SpaceX is the first rocket making entity in the world. Why were all the other darlings incapable? SpaceX didn't invent a new branch of rocketry after all. And they hired from the pool of engineers who could have and did work at all the other rocket companies.
How did this same pool of scientists and engineers end up with a viable reusable rocket with 300+ successful landings only when they came together at SpaceX?
I get you love Elon, but as some point you need to look in the mirror and recognize your sycophancy for what it is.
I think you are just as biased as the parent comment if you think one failure invalidates the merit of all previous successes.
What do you think the word "nothing" means?
You can’t honestly say he founded that company.
Calling SpaceX Gwynne’s baby is just straight up misinformation. Talk to actual employees from SpaceX, especially early on. They’ll tell you that Musk actually does get involved in various deep aspects of the vehicles. You might not be aware, but Gwynne Shotwell was in BD not product.
All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage".
I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.
He probably takes his rocket knowledge and under-estimates software complexity.
I think he’s probably a smart guy who’s worked hard to learn as much as possible about the fields he’s entered into, but I find it hard to believe that he’s a world-leading technical mind at either. The reason he’s struggling comparatively with Twitter is partly that he doesn’t take it seriously, and partly that he has other ambitions for it (“X the everything app”) than what it actually is.
The main attributes behind his success are his obsessive desire to achieve certain goals, and his willingness to take on a very large amount of risk over and over again (he could easily have gone bankrupt several times, but so far things have mostly gone his way).
Edit: Another reason he’s had a tough time with Twitter is that he’s acted out of spite and alienated people and organizations he should have been on good terms with, mainly advertisers (Twitter’s actual customers).
Karpathy: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1bpwo0w/andrej...
Tom Mueller: https://i.redd.it/89dqiz2lc2t81.jpg
Or even Shotwell herself for that matter and how she has expressed how she and Elon subdivide the work.
Elon Musk is not nice person, but he gets things done and he's deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of his companies. I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes.
You say that like its a good thing. Normally CEO attending random low level meetings is considered a pretty big red flag.
If you want to run an IBM or Cisco, don't hire Musk, sure.
If you talk to actual employees, especially early and senior employees, you find that Elon Musk is absolutely pivotal to the engineering direction.