He makes crazy "moonshots", he has a vision and doesn't tone it down nearly as much as others do, and he's not afraid to be "wrong".
The SpaceX community has a running joke about "elon time" being set to mars time, because his predictions and goals are almost always late (and are often under delivering), but I honestly respect that. Him and his companies aren't taking the "easy way out" of making easily achievable goals and then making them again and again. They are shooting for unlikely and in some cases almost impossible goals, and getting 70-90% of the way there, and they aren't exactly ashamed of it. IIRC there was a reddit thread a while back that was "bashing" Elon and Tesla and SpaceX about only hitting something like 70% of the goals they set, but I read it differently. They set out to revolutionize 3 different industries (cars, space, and now "boring" and public transport), and even if they can only get to "70% revolutionized", it's still a massive win in my opinion!
He's not perfect, I hear lots of bad things from many employees about the work environment, but overall I really respect the man and the companies he has created, and I think he has and will continue to do a lot for humanity.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/945712432416137217
Saw this yesterday when someone threw together a quick article on all of the gushing responses from customers to this tweet.
How can you say someone nicknamed "the real world Iron Man" is bad at PR?
No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.
He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.
Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.
Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_...
> "At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester...."
But this is a very biased way of describing two people working on a technical project. To call one an "engineer" and the other a "breadboarder" as if he sat quietly contributing nothing.
Just because one person is playing second fiddle to a truly gifted technical genius doesn't magically make them non-technical.
If you want to argue Steve Jobs isn't technical, you'll have to set the bar lower than "as good as Woz" or almost none of us will make the cut!
You cannot create the company or products that Steve Jobs did without being technical. That doesn't mean you have to write the firmware on the wifi chip. It does mean you have to understand thousands of deeply technical concepts about computers.
"Move far enough up in any career, and you are essentially doing sales".
Thought that was very true.
He has been anointed as a neo-PR guy now because his style of doing things (like responding to requests on Twitter with "Done,") is breathtakingly refreshing compared to PR from actual trained PR agencies
His back of hand calculations on the viability of self-landing rockets, while coming back from a trip to Russia after a failed attempt to purchase a launch vehicle certainly wasn't moonshot.
He is a technology man in and out and knows the capabilities and limits of technology. I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
> I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
My view is that he focuses on what should be possible from first principles, ignoring whether or not our short-sighted markets find it desirable at the moment. It's a good strategy if you have a non-monetary goal in mind and resources to bankroll the efforts at forcing the markets into accepting your work.
I really wish there is stronger support for him against these sorts of people. How can he be all talk when we see his rockets going up and coming back down.
He's a CEO. All the support he needs is to deliver on his promises. From my exceptionally limited point of view, he's at about 35% there:
Space X: 100% (Reusable, self-landing rockets. Fuck yeah!)
Tesla: 40% (Prototype in decent shape, promised production capabilities of model 3 still seems a long ways off)
The Boring Company: 0%
Hyperloop: 0%
- More popular support means his visions resonate, and more people will start pursuing them too.
- More popular support means the market will be more receptive towards those visions.
Note that Musk doesn't care if it's SpaceX or Tesla that are the market leaders long-term. He cares that we go to Mars and get off fossil fuels in transportation, however that happens. Hence e.g. opening up Tesla patents.
RE your % score, I'd give a different breakdown, based on what are Elon's actual goals:
SpaceX: 40% (reusable, self-landing first stage done; Falcon Heavy yet to launch, BFR in the works)
Tesla: 80% (their latest cars might have problems, but they successfully cracked the car market and started a wave of electrification that's unlikely to stop now; Chinese companies alone will carry it forward)
WRT Tesla: The company has started a revolution, but to all intents and purposes it feels like its falling behind. The Model 3 was supposed to be in full production already, but it's not. It's also not profitable, which is a major problem for Tesla (and Musk by extension) in the long run.
Not to mention, all of the pre-orders for Model 3's that aren't fulfilled in a timely manner are going to hurt the population's opinions of Elon Musk - and rightly so.
As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
Sure the might have fallen short 30-40% but given the scale of their plan, this seems like a extremly miner problem.
The buissness reality is that there are 100000s of people who want these cars and they have essentially a proven market for years to come. The waste majority of these people are not gone start hating elon because their car is a bit late.
> As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
Like building a reusable rocket or massivly improving the price and production capacity of batteries?
People need to stop listening to Elon own prediction of things and consider where things would be without him. He has already revolutionised the space and the car industry, that is just a fact.
Paypal: 75% (Much hate, still good option for many things.)
Solar City: 75% (Over expanded, not sure if that was a bad thing and was bought by Tesla. Still it installed 870 MW of solar in 2015 alone.)
Steve Jobs had close ties to fewer companies, Pixar, Apple, NeXT and did a similar purchase of NeXT by Apple. However, while dubious Apple greatly benefited from NeXt. So, I am willing to bet Solar City could be a similar net benefit.
The boring company is still to early to judge. Hyperloop is not yet a failure and considering it was simply a short paper I think 0% is overly harsh.
I could swear that the rush for solar via Solar City has dropped precipitously. It seems like those who want it have it at this point. Its business model is also heavily dependent on US grants, and has seen some major downturns in terms of litigation and has been operating at a net loss for its lifetime. Let's put it closer to 50%
The boring company is simply trying to make underground highways - a task which makes very little practical sense in a world where highways already exist, and their downsides are well known. Not to mention, no execution or proof of concept exists.
As for the Hyperloop, again with the lack of execution or proof of concept. Anybody can make a whitepaper, but Elon Musk has put his weight behind the concept, to no practical end. But sure, let's remove it because you're right, he made no promises behind it; didn't start a company around it.
We're still only around 40%.
I would call it similar to Space X before they started landing the rockets. Just making digging cheaper much like making rockets cheaper is a basis for a profitable company. A long term goal of 1/10th the price really would be game changing.
PS: Picture even a one way toll road that goes 20 miles under I-66 into DC they could easily charge 10$/ trip an get 100,000+ riders each way per day. So, the real question is how much that tunnel costs. At 20 billion $ that's 20 billion * 6% ~= 1.2 billion per year vs 2 * 10 * 100,000 * 5 * 48 = 480 million so not a win. But, at 1/10th the price or 2 billion that's ~120 million per year break-even vs 480 million and highly profitable. How many places could a 5 mile segment be able to charge say 3 dollars and have 100,000 people per workday?
Cars, unless going ungodly fast (140mph is not enough), are inefficient at throughput.
PS: I-66 really does have 3mph traffic as it will take 30+ minutes to travel 10 miles. As in I was happy if that part was under 30 minutes, and not surprised if it took 40 minutes as the average was well over 30.
Rendered moot by the fact that large numbers of people prefer the privacy and convenience of a car.
Musk's solution takes the human condition in to account.
Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on: SpaceX targets not met, Tesla still running at a massive loss, Hyperloop being doomed to failure, etc etc. I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Am I understanding this correctly, that the criticism of Elon Musk being all talk is because he didn't personally perform all the work in achievements like Falcon 9 and Model S?
Ultimately, focusing on a leader is a shorthand used in everything. We talk about famous generals, and not about their lieutenants. We talk about presidents and kings, omitting the low-level administrative staff that actually does the work and keeps everything from falling apart. Often it's a bad generalization leading to bad conclusions (e.g. most presidents have little influence on the direction of their countries), but I think it's fair in case of Elon Musk, since it's his strong vision that defines the direction of SpaceX and Tesla.
Consider this: if SpaceX went public and Elon decided to step down, the company would lose most of its fanbase for very simple reason - it would most likely turn into a regular company and stop being just the vehicle to get humanity to settle Mars.
Tesla I could still grant but you do him great injustice by simply ignoring how much of his personal resolve is responsible for SpaceX even existing.
Feel free to list the number of times a group of engineers have spontaneously teamed up to form a rocket company.
Your assume that A) big things can only ever get done by companies. B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
I'll give credit to him for creating and acquiring funding for the organization. I'll give him credit for publicizing his vision. Each and every rocket/car however, was massively subsidized by taxpayer dollars, and made feasible by hundreds of people WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOAL.
The practice of abstracting away hundreds to thousands of people's hard work and financial support, involuntary or not, is disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst.
Abstraction is evil. Abstraction is what turns "people" into "human resources".
And before the inevitable "That's not practical!" or "That's unreasonable!": It really isn't. Most people have just gotten so used to credit for their own work being sacrificed to someone else that nobody points out how incredibly screwed up the practice is.
> B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
Never made the claim nor does it seem relevant here. No one is talking of actual ownership. When it comes to ownership and accounting of a company, there are already well-established metrics and practices to figure that stuff out.
Yes, the rocket is designed by engineers and put together by technicians and mechanics and thousands of souls have come together to achieve this task, and no one is denying their contributions.
But none of that would have existed without Elon. And he is being praised for that vision and steely resolve while others work on their PhDs from Armchair University.
This leadership is not trivial and it is central to something like SpaceX even existing.
I do not think that Musk should get a free pass. His companies have taken on some pretty impressive projects. One day someone will make a better electronic car but much like the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, Musk did lead the way.
Maybe Musk really is as skilled as all that. Or maybe he was lucky enough to make a lot of money once (with x.com) and hire good people. It's hard to tell since so few people ever get to try having that much money to play with.
Whatever are his contributions to the rocket design these days (it's obviously a SpaceX secret), one can't deny that his ideas for future of humanity are the raison d'être and the driving force behind the company. He obviously hires engineers smarter than himself to do the work; his own engineering skills only add to the credibility of the company and its goals.
Elon is still in control of SpaceX, so the Falcon 9 and FH rockets are his by any reasonable definition.
> Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on:
What matters is overall progress and not progress relative to elons timelines. Also, most of those were not promises but rather announcments.
> SpaceX targets not met
Yeah, he only took like 15 years to launch more rockets then China or Russia. Build the largests commercial launch buissness.
But of course what we should focus on is that he is such a failure because he said 5 years ago that the FH would fly a bit sooner.
You really need learn to evaluate things on its own terms.
> Tesla still running at a massive loss
Poor Elon, 500000 reservations that any other company would kill for. Revenue stream for 1-2 years even without new reservations. What a failure.
> Hyperloop being doomed to failure,
Whitepaper without company behind it not successful. More big news at 8pm.
> I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Yeah, the guy who revolutionised space launch, landed fucking rockets and created reusable rockets is 'mostly talk, with some success'. Honstly people can't see the trees because of the forest. This is so fucking bizar.
I mean sentiments like that. It's just right in the feels ya know? It's a reason to go even read the news in the morning.
Musk arguably does significantly more talking than doing, but his goals are lofty enough that even failing to make it halfway still means significant advancement.
There used to be a time where American people were different in that regard. Celebrating success, entrepreneurs, daring mavericks, etc.
Now all I see is jealousy, smirk, poo-pooing. Have you guys turned French?
This is not a fringe philosophical concept bound to popular novel's either. Look to the background of villains in mainstream super hero movies, to our politics (many call Trump the first Postmodern president), and the drive to be "authentic" in every aspect of the self for reasons of self promotion in some kind recursive cynical loop which other view as a perfect specimen of our contemporary irony, nearly perfected!
I'm not an expert on French culture or any culture per-se, but perhaps Americans (of which I'm one) do have a more superficial embrace of sentimentalism and a less critical approach to hero worship and "getting rich" and maybe it isn't driven by cynicism as much as naiveté but that's only one aspect of the culture as a whole. Even still, I'd argue most people are driven by the Postmodern philosophy wether they know it or not; are more cynical then they even know and skeptical of our institutions (universities, churches, etc) on one side or another.
This. I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one to notice that villains in popular movies/TV shows increasingly present reasonable positions (even if crooked methods), while it's the protagonists who seem to live by simplistic, populistic, feelings-based morality.
Sounds like HN: "Check out my cool new web app/hardware gizmo!" Army of critics arrive to poop on it
How is Tesla's supposed claim they solved electrical driving misleading?
The Model S targeted a new market entirely. Nobody had tried to do a luxury sedan EV and kodus to Tesla for spotting that niche, but that was not the goal that everyone else was chasing. It was something else entirely.
From an economics and from a technology point of view, building an $80k EV with decent range is insanely easier than building a $15k EV. Even if it has to be a luxury car and look good. It still gives you that $20k leeway to equip you car with a massive battery.
The misleading part was trying to claim that they had solved the problem that everyone else was working on, when in fact they had not. And they still have not today as evidenced by the $35k price tag of the Model 3.
Not so much: The actual Cannonball record is a bit over half the EV one -- 28 hours and 50 minutes -- and Roy himself drove it in 31 hours and 4 minutes. I'll be curious how much of their journey was charging time, a figure someone will probably extract from their GPS track soon.
Sounds like Google, Microsoft, and pretty much every tech startup between Palo Alto and Vancouver.
The difference is that Musk actually does something. Creates something. 90% of the other "tech" companies are just shoving around bits of other people's information and calling it innovation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885128
Nothing has changed.
To quote 'natural219 from what I just linked, the words I 100% support:
"Godspeed, Musk. (...) I'm behind you 100%. I just hope you can finish your work before our shitty, myopic, destructive society tears you down. Here's to faith."
I am sure situation is same for SpaceX too.
And then the whole SolarCity acquisition which didn't go down well.
That said, yes you have to hand it to Musk. Even if these companies go belly up, they have brought in lot of new technology.
The situation for SpaceX is different. SpaceX got 18 successful launches last year, several of them with reused rockets and most of them recovered afterward (no unsuccessful landing attempts, though a few were intentionally expended for performance reasons).
Their only real domestic competitor ULA which launches Atlas and Delta, long held as the giants in American space launch, only had a total of 8 launches, all expended of course.
Not only does SpaceX have a huge technological moat in the form of operational space launch reuse, but operationally their Falcon 9 (which had complete success in 2017) is out-launching everything else, including both the Chinese DF-5 (which had a failure) and the Russian R7/Soyuz (which also had a failure).
And their future products build tremendously on this already sizable lead:
1) Falcon Heavy, completed pad fit checks by the end of the year and now getting ready for a static fire and launch in a couple weeks, is even MORE reusable (3 cores recovered, counting for 27 out of 28 of the engines) and MORE powerful than any other rocket launching today. Dragon Crew also nearing completion and will be the first (of 3 total vehicles nearing completion) to return Americans to orbit on a domestic vehicle, likely this year.
2) A satellite constellation which is readying satellite prototype launch in the next month or two, has the potential of making SpaceX a telecomm giant. The scale of this constellation would not be feasible without the reusability tech they've developed.
3) And BFR, which will further cement their space launch tech moat, make launching the full version of the potentially-extremely-profitable satellite constellation WAY cheaper, and potentially open several new markets.
SpaceX is like Tesla after a full ramp-up of the Model 3 selling as many cars as Toyota does but in a world where no one else has an electric car for sale. So understandably (for Musk), he's leveraging this position to make things like BFR a reality.
Both companies are in extremely good positions compared to 2008 when both companies nearly went under. SpaceX in particular. And given the fact that Elon was able to save both, it means a market down-turn is something he has seen before and he has some powerful strings to pull in case the market has some major problems.
The negativity is so bad, his car company is worth more than Ford, with a minuscule fraction of the sales.
Elon will be just fine.
And it might sound callous but plenty of companies have similar practices (and are not creating anything of earth-shattering value), so judging Tesla more than the others is a bit unfair.
But it pales in comparison to the watershed moment SpaceX and the entire spaceflight community will have. There is a real possibility for 28 launches, including two Falcon Heavy's. NASA TESS on track to discover an explosion in habitable zone exoplanets. Vector, Electron, TechShot and other private space data leading a push for commercial apps in space, including pharma, stem cells and materials foundries. And there is decent chance of someone landing on the moon for the first time in 45 years ;)
Will we Go Back to the Moon in 2018?
https://audioboom.com/posts/6573043-dec-29-2017-will-we-go-b...
69TH International Astronautical Congress Bremen 1-5 OCT 2018
Not a factor. Until we can travel many multiples faster than light, it doesn't matter how many things we can see far, far away.
You and I will both be centuries dead before that happens.
Why does it "not matter" since we can't land on them in our lifetimes? It's still interesting.
We must live on different planets, because I can't go a single day without hearing about some product they may or may not build at some point in the future. This is one of the most hyped up companies I've ever seen (mostly deservedly).
>Here is a guy who is scarily close to being a real-life Iron Man
Really? Scary close? I'd say not remotely close.
>I really feel sorry for Musk.
Really?
>Looking back, the true value addition by SV will be companies like Tesla, Solar City & SpaceX
SpaceX for sure. Tesla, maybe. SolarCity? What did they do except destroy a bunch of investor's money?
Edit: Downvoted before I could even fix a typo. This place is embarrassing to read sometimes..."Real life Iron Man", "feel sorry for Elon Musk".
I do feel that his critics often lose perspective. for instance he gets a lot of heat for not ramping up M3 production as fast as promised but in the grand scheme of things I fail to see what impact that has whether EVs ramp up to a million cars a year a few quarters earlier or later. only thing that matters is tesla/spacex/etc lives to fight another day.
That said I would never invest my money in tesla stock. Its simply because I dont think its His ultimate goal to make money & that will always reflect in the decisions he make.
The man wants his car designs to evoke an image of being sexy and you consider him a creep? That's a way over-dramatic interpretation.
Incidentally I was responding the comment that mentioned there is a lot of hate for Tesla. What I mostly don't like about Tesla, aside from that stupid naming convention, is that they missed all of their manufacturing targets and are about to hit a brick wall with investors, regardless of how "sexy" one thinks the car design is.
>informal exciting; appealing. "I've climbed most of the really sexy west coast mountains" synonyms: exciting, stimulating, interesting, appealing, intriguing, slick, red-hot "a sexy sales promotion"
(Also, is there a model Y in the works?)
The vehicles are sexy... to me at least.
It only gives ammunition to the chauvinists claiming that sex will be outlawed, or the idiots calling for politicians to resign for having sex out of wedlock.
"We hoped for flying cars, but what we got was 140 characters"
(or something similar, I don't remember it verbatim)
Every time I think about Tesla, I am reminded of the thousands of brilliant engineers toiling away in Silicon Valley trying to optimize online advertising. Maybe we could be a bit more closer to Fusion energy, maybe we could be a bit more closer to lesser carbon footprints. That small bit really is crucial, especially when we are fighting a losing battle with mother earth. Perhaps the world has too much information. When information flow is cheap, the cost of propaganda is low enough to create legitimate confusion. Imagine a world without Google, FB or Twitter, perhaps there would be concerted efforts by governments towards educating the masses about global warming. Perhaps such efforts could not be subverted by foreign governments or fringe groups. Looking back, the true value addition by SV will be companies like Tesla, Solar City & SpaceX.
Here is a guy who is scarily close to being a real-life Iron Man, doing something that has shown verifiable results and actually progresses humanity far more than FB/Twitter and to some extent Google.
But all I feel is constant negativity. I really feel sorry for Musk. I sincerely admire him for what he is struggling for and I really wish he'd get more support.
Note : I do understand his background and that the seed money for SpaceX was from paypal and all, but even then, paypal was a different business than just online ads.