Thank you Elon!
Not sure what you mean by that. Are you suggesting that Elon/SpaceX sabotaged Boeing Starliner program? Because it seems pretty obvious that Boeing did that all on their own.
I think it's both the incompetence of the incumbents, and the impressive work of SpaceX that got us to where we are. With the vast majority of companies, especially tech companies, I think the leadership gets far too much credit. In most organizations I have been a part of, they succeed in spite of the leadership, not because of it.
In the case of SpaceX though, I am less sure. Reading the Walter Isaacson biography on Elon Musk was quite fascinating and illuminating about his leadership style. I would never work for him myself, but he does have some really fascinating philosophies.
No-one would've believed it possible, no-one even conceived of the notion that it was worth while to try.
And there's not another billionaire around who'd've been willing to bet the house on it.
I don't know how much of a roll he had in the designs (other than "make it pointy") but the fact remains that he's the man who built the team that somehow managed to achieve the hitherto impossible.
My biggest concern with him is that he's pushing a pace that in some cases will go beyond the point of diminishing returns, and even beyond that into the territory that invites burnout.
When you're building teams of the best minds on earth, you probably don't want to be burning through them like candles.
Isn’t he running Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, The Boring Company, Starlink, and the Starship R&D, including its first-of-it’s-kind Raptor engine design which just hit major version 3? And also raising the remainder of his 12 kids (~8?) that are still speaking to him?
I’m fairly certain that most of the “boring” stuff at SpaceX happens despite Musk, not because of him. Ms. Shotwell’s (the SpaceX COO) name doesn’t come up nearly as often as his does, and I suspect she does at least an order of magnitude more work there.
Indeed, several SpaceX staff wrote an open letter complaining about him and his antics being a distraction that hinders them.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/spacex-illegally...
Elon does decision making for the R&D programs, i.e. Starship, where his style works better.
For most other tech companies people done even know the Nr.2 person in the company, and that includes companies much bigger then SpaceX. So if anything Shotwell comes up more often then literally any other Nr.2 person in a major tech company. I couldn't tell you the relevant people at Nvidia, or Google, or Microsoft.
Also the letter was more about the external image, that Musk reflected on them. There was no actual argument in the later work inside SpaceX was slowed down because of it. And from the continued progress SpaceX has made before and after that, there is no evidence of that it actually did.
But of course its also self evident that the CEO isn't doing 'boring day to day stuff', but neither is Shotwell.
Joel Spoksky’s meeting with Bill Gates about Excel is famous lore in our circles as well, although I doubt Spolsky was ever even top 10 at Microsoft.
Werner Vogels comes up fairly often, too.
And there is a big difference between people generally known and being a character in on famous 'lore' story.
I challenge you to compare all threads about SpaceX and Amazon and and see who gets more mentions, Shotwell or Vogels. I have never hared about Vogels despite reading many theads on Amazon, that said, I don't read many about AWS details.