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Comment by asddubs | Hacker News Reader

wait, do you think the reason is that elon musk personally helped invent stuff?

No, but if it's not a difference of "Musk(programmer) vs Bezos(businessman)" I would like to know why other companies or leaders with a lot of money didn't have such success. Is it only a size of bank account? To me it looks like a ceo or a leader of company has more correlation with success than "just a lot of money".

My take - a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".

Yea, there are hundreds or even thousands of billionaires. Only one of them has developed a successful orbital launch company. That’s not exactly a high base rate.

And how many have tried? Not more than 5 would be my guess. We do not have enough data to make a conclusion.

The ones who didn’t try knew that they couldn’t do it. We do have enough data to conclude that money alone is not enough.

> a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".

You do know Bezos has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton unlike Musk, right?

I have a computer science degree too, but looks like it doesn't make me more successful. So I'm still asking what is the difference that made SpaceX more successful than BlueOrigin.

Well to start with you should know Musk has never been a "Programmer"

https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creator-says-elon-m...

The evidence is:

> He asked, 'How do I run this Python script?'" Palmer said, per Crikey.

That is exactly what a programmer would ask, python scripts are not self contained they have a lot of dependencies, also typically you need to invoke them with a lot of parameters.

In addition not all programmers are python programmers, getting some commands you need in order to get started is just run of the mill when you get code from someone.

He does not have a clue: https://youtu.be/cZslebJEZbE

This is the same argument people used against the Wright brothers that you're now throwing at Elon Musk (in a thread maligning the Wright brothers claim to fame)...Langley was a classically trained mathematician with associations to Harvard and the Naval Academy. He was one of the most sought after and decorated engineer's and astrologers (invented his own time system) and was given exclusive funding by the Smithsonian to solve flight. He lost to the Bicycle repair shop guys that hand rolled their own equipment on sandbars in North Carolina (who didn't have advanced degree's in engineering).

You can do a lot with 38 Billion dollars of US Government money. It's a very Socialist thing to do: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...

Both Musk and Bezos are businessmen. There is still competition among businessmen to do business the best way - directing the right people to work on the right things. But don't confuse this with actually making the products themselves. One can be a good businessman or a bad businessman, but this has nothing to do with engineering.

(Arguably, the best thing Musk did for SpaceX as a businessman was to delegate all the business to someone else. He tends to ruin companies where he does not.)

Musk is likely a worse engineer than Bezos and less technical. So that is probably not the reason. What Musk instead is is an excellent salesman. But maybe he was just lucky. Whatever it was it was not engeeeing which is a big weakness of Musk.

Musk happened to hire better engineers and programmers I guess

Bezos made some pretty technologically prescient decisions too, the obvious example being the API mandate, which set the ball rolling for AWS. I think leadership can be a factor, but to me what you're doing is a massive simplification. In any case, I don't think being a programmer would make me more qualified than anybody else to make good decisions for a rocket building company.

He seems to be the champion of using stainless steel for the rocket, which was a game changer.

Not a novel idea. The Atlas Family of ICMBs, the Thor/Delta Rockets, The Space Shuttle External tank, The R7 Russian rockets and the N1 Moon Rocket. They all did.

Musk's actually successful rocket is not made from steel. It has yet to be demonstrated that Starship is rapidly reusable, let alone that steel is significantly superior than other materials for this purpose.

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