Never Bet Against Elon
blog.oxplot.com
blog.oxplot.com
This article is an example of why cherry-picking is a logical fallacy. There are a lot of examples where a bet against Musk’s claims would have been a good idea. Examples include Tesla Solar Roof and the whole SolarCity acquisition, timely release of the Tesla Roadster gen 2, the Cybertruck (a major commercial flop), the $25k Tesla, the Boring Company, the Hyperloop, and of course a Mars colony.
By complicated I mean problems that can be decomposed into well-understood tasks with clear constraints, measurable completion criteria, relatively predictable dependencies, and short feedback loops. Think designing and building rockets, factories, data centers, going to the moon, etc. With these types of challenges, his style and strengths make a lot of sense:
- rethink from first principles
- identify the bottleneck
- challenge industry assumptions
- assign ownership
- remove the constraint
- iterate very quickly
Complex problems are a different story, and he doesn't seem particularly well suited for them. A complex problem has unknown unknowns, contains problems that cannot necessarily be decomposed because they are novel and not yet well understood, and has feedback loops that produce emergent behavior. You can't simply solve problem A, move on to B, and then C, because solving C can change the assumptions you made about A.
Examples of complex problems would be would be FSD, the Twitter ecosystem, curing some types of cancer, politics, etc.
Starship has too many high risk dependencies stacked on top of each other. For example the project is so far away from the launch cadence that makes orbital refueling possible that the project could become irrelevant before they can even try. The obvious high risk dependency is that high volume orbital refueling works at all, but it's also dependent on payload which isn't meeting spec yet, and a lot of aerospace projects never meet their payload spec, which in the case of starship could double or triple the number of refueling flights needed.