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Comment by Grimblewald | Hacker News Reader

I have no faith in elon products for one simple reason: if you have talent you have options and if you have options, why would anything elon has tainted be anywhere near the top?

There was a time it was reasonable, early space x days for example, when elon was still managable, easily abstracted away and you were able to work with better funding and less red tape vs other options - but modern times i cannot see a reason one would work with elon unless desperate or in the cult, and lets be honest, you dont reason your way into joining cults.

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A lot of (talented people in a field) are idiots / irrational in other parts of their life. A very talented engineer with options may buy in to Elon’s public vision (which sounds good on the surface) and may be completely incapable of recognizing when someone is betraying their vision. Very smart people get caught up in nonsense all the time.

I find while this is true, those talented people aren't very good at the long game, or building things in a sustainable way.

Like most of the "brilliant" people I know that fit the profile you're describing, the usually build product in the same way they maintain relationships, chaotic.

If you consider actual intelligent people, this isn't true. Intelligence is about dealing with information and interpreting it in correct ways - what domain that information comes from, whether politics, social issues, or coding or engineering, is irrelevant.

Most people really just DGAF about politics in US. The (few) smart people working for Elon are those who are really into whatever technology and just like to play with toys while getting paid. I used to work with such a dude a few jobs back in my aerospace days, guy was multi talented across both software and hardware, and could easily be making bank at Apple Amazon Google in one of their edge programs, but was content with getting paid like 80k a year in 2010s in a fairly high CoL area with an hour commute all because he got to play with a rather big UAV.

Surprisingly, to me anyway, is that Elon has a larger negative popularity in the US than Netanyahu. Even people who aren't politically aware think he's a jerk.

Ah the “no true Scotsman” of intelligence.

There's a difference between being well read and being able to do something with what you've read. I would argue a far more useful and pragmatic definition of intelligence is one that focuses on, given the same information, a more intelligent person can achieve more with that information. In such a scenario, doing nothing if the information is bad is obviously more than what is achieved by acting on it. The idea, I guess, is that intelligence is about how you wield information, not what information you have. Being able to swim long distances unassisted is fairly called having high endurance. Doing so with all manner of aids, assistance, and pre-planned routes, is less impressive. So in a space of information, intelligence is like strength, or endurance. It allows one to defend, to change, to build, to create, especially in areas where others might be limited.

So this is in no way a `no true Scotsman` fallacy. Being able to be well read is a product of having intelligent people in your society, people who make hard things accessible, make it learnable, but it does not itself make you intelligent.

Because the world has random error and not all incredibly talented people are correctly identified and picked up by the OpenAIs and Anthropics.

OpenAI isnt exactly a top choice anymore either.

I spoke to SpaceX people at previous defcon and the answer was simple: Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team. If you are olympic class you only want to be working with those kinds of people. The mission didn't hurt either: Make life multi-planetary, electrify the world etc.

Dont know how much of that has damaged itself post Trump. Seems like Tesla is losing a lot of top talent. Remains to be seen if SpaceX is falling off the wagon.

>Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team. If you are olympic class you only want to be working with those kinds of people.

This is a common fallacy.

If you are truly an intelligent person, and you know what the right solution is, what you want to be is around people who work for you. You don't want to have to spend time convincing other people of your correctness, you want to be able to just tell everyone what to do in detail and have them do it without asking questions, preferably with ability to figure the minutia stuff on their own.

The "A" players team is basically people who see value in working 60 hour weeks. With enough ambition and motivation, stuff can definitely get gone, but its not the same as intelligence. Space X didn't win with reusable launch stage because of the smart people working on it, they won because Elon had money to throw at test over and over again, while almost scamming their supplies in not paying them until way past due. Trying something over and over doesn't take intelligence.

And now, everyone is working on the Starship. While its cool, its absolutely impractical. It would take 8 -20 launches to refuel it in orbit for an actual mission, and the engines are basically on the verge of blowing up when operating due to how precise the system has to be for that high of a pressure ratio.

Personally Im very close friends with someone that worked at Space X early enough to retire at 40 with $2mil+ after stock sale. A mechanical engineer. Yet, I have to help him fix problems with his bicycle of all things, because he can't figure out how a simple bearing interface works (he was tightening an axle that was clamping the frame instead of the bearing inner race due to a missing washer, and as a result his suspension pivot was getting stuck)

A good read on the Talent at Tesla https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...

>And now, everyone is working on the Starship. While its cool, its absolutely impractical. It would take 8 -20 launches to refuel it in orbit for an actual mission, and the engines are basically on the verge of blowing up when operating due to how precise the system has to be for that high of a pressure ratio.

When he does achieve it I imagine you will create a new post saying something like "he didn't achieved Starship because of the smart people working on it, but because he had the money to throw at test over and over again".

You don't have to be a good mechanic to be a good mechanical engineer.

All of these statements are based around very loose definition of mechanic vs mechanical engineer.

A mechanic for example can just memorize a bunch of procedures on how to service a car or a bike, and follow them. An engineer can memorize a bunch of advanced stuff like CAD and Stress analysis, and never really work with his hands.

So in this case, your statement would be correct. But both of these would just be average good, not exceptional, like SpaceX hiring makes it seem.

In general, as a mechanical engineer, your expertise is putting different materials together in certain shapes, matter states, and so on to make them do things. You may not know specifically how a bearing assembly works if you have never worked with it, but you should realize that a bearing is designed to provide rotational freedom to a part, and that mechanically, the thing that is connected to the inner part that rotates should be fully separate from the part that does not.

Look im just telling you what they told me. I am not in the field of aerospace engineering but I do want to push back and state that if it was just about money and bullying suppliers, boeing would already be on Mars. You are providing an anecdote about your friend. Great, same as my anecdote when I questioned Starlink employees. It would be wonderful if there was some legit competitor to Starlink in the US so that everyone can just ignore Musk but right now many people can't.

Regarding the tesla link its crazy to see that post crop up again. I remember reading it the day it was posted. I was one of the first people on /r/realtesla. I genuinely believed that they were toast in 2018. That sub has been proven wrong time and time again and now they have devolved into whatever absurdity as long as it is negative of Musk companies. That post has not aged well at all. Looking back, I suspect a lot of corners were cut when the company was running on fumes. The model 3 rollout was so bad that not even the shorts could have anticipated the nonsense they pulled(for example: the famous tent) but they managed to survive and improve significantly since the early model 3 days.

Like I said in my initial post whether there is still enough talent remaining post-Trump remains to be seen.

>> Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team.

Funny take because I know multiple talented people who’ve worked SpaceX & Tesla who claim an extreme amount of bloat wrt earnestly negative-value employees in the engineering sectors. This was pre-2020 as well.

Seems like a filter for toxic personalities that self identify as “elite”.

SpaceX is well insulated from Musk shenanigans. Its leadership team is fantastic and their engineering org, as you stated, is Olympic class. Single handedly keeping the space coast of Florida afloat.

> is Olympic class

Is that why their rockets keep exploding?

No, it's why they outcompeted every other space company in the world, public and private, and still have the spare capacity to put in orbit a constellation of 7600 satellites, more than half of all the active satellites on Earth.

Privatization of space is not really outcompeting - nobody was racing to build reusable launch vehicles.

The cost is also not fully "turnkey" - if you overwork your employees, fail to pay your suppliers, rely on subsidies, then of course you are going to reduce your cost.

And all of that happened before Musk fully lost his mind.

Efficiency wise from pure physics, they would have been better off developing something similar to Scaled Composites. Air breathing is way more efficient to get to altitude, then you do a High Altitude Orbit insertion, and then do your vertical landing. For stuff like Starlink Satellites that are rather small, you have to do more launches but the cost of launch goes down significantly.

Ahem, another company tried that approach and couldn’t get it to work. The fastest way to space is up. The fastest to orbit is a curve through the mesosphere to the exosphere to reach a speed of 11.2km/s.

They built the best vehicle that would work, today. Not some distant future of a possible way to get to space. An actual working way to get to space. Built on the backs of NASA engineers of the space coast of FL, Houston TX, CA, and AR. You can armchair architect another way, but they successfully built one. One that is reusable. Over and over and over and over again.

EU then followed. Then China. Then India (ordering could be wrong but). So it’s definitely something that works.

EDIT

Ok, EU doesn’t have a reusable rocket yet.

The main argument here is "smart people working at SpaceX".

Im not debating the fact that they were able to put together a product. Im also not debating that it was successful. Nor am I debating that any average person can work on rockets, you do need some engineering knowledge.

Im just arguing that the reason they got there wasn't because they managed to hire the best of the best engineers that are smart in one area but fail to understand how much Musk is doing politically. My claim is that Space X hired enough average intelligence, but super driven people, which is why they managed to build Falcon 9 through act of throwing money at it, and as supporting evidence of this, Starship is currently blowing up despite their supposed "learnings".

The Falcon 9 blew up a lot too. So do all the rockets until they are perfected. I know some SpaceX’ers and I wouldn’t classify them as average intelligence. On the contrary. I think a lot of people fail to realize how SpaceX works. Nothing musk can do will stop it. Sure, his antics have cause consumers to question his products but the United States government depends on SpaceX to function. The US Military needs SpaceX to function. While their public facing people may seem “average intelligence”, the vast majority of employees at SpaceX are high high IQ people.

No one else puts up a rocket about once a week. No one. :D

They have the most reliable rocket in the world.

Spontaneous Rapid Disassembly isn't a failure. It's an event. All data is recorded, studied, modeled, and reassessed for the next experiment. Like the Falcon 9, once the correct inputs are developed, it will become as routine as "Hey Siri..."

Fully agree.

However if your stuff keeps exploding after you have had quite a large number of those test events, something is amiss.

>Like the Falcon 9, once the correct inputs are developed, it will become as routine as "Hey Siri..."

TBD. Raptor engines are the equivalent of taking 2 liter inline 4 engine and putting on massive turbos to make it generate 1000 whp. Thats pretty much how you get the high pressure ratio.

The majority of recent failures have been due to counterfeit parts… parts that were supplied to a specification but failed to meet it. Last one was a nitrogen tank.

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