Musk has been on the verge of failure for years, and cracks are showing now more than ever before.
I'd hate for everyone to stop dreaming for tomorrow just because one guy couldn't pull off everything imaginable.
For all the good things Musk does, he also does a lot of bad things. Including but not limited to dreaming up absurd fantasies to "reinvent" industries he has literally zero experience in (aviation comes to mind, drilling tunnels, underwater rescue, etc) - and everyone fixates on that imaginary solution because he said it.
Not to mention taking credit for all the hard work the actual aerospace, mechanical and other engineers are doing under Musk. Very seldom do you hear Musk talk about how incredible the team is and how lucky he is to have them working on these problems. No, instead he has the gall to call himself Lead Designer this, or Chief Architect that. We all know he's not sitting down and crunching math to design rockets and cars and more.
Look at Hyperloop. People are still wasting money, energy and resources on it, regardless that what we have in testing today are just Maglev trains in tubes... a far cry from what Musk originally dreamt up. Nevermind how impractical or prohibitively expensive and uneconomical it would be to build trains across the US, oceans, across the world all connected.
People want to dream. Fine. But trusting all of the future to just one guy... I'm not so sure.
He constantly praise or give credit to his teams, even full credit where it is due.
No, instead he has the gall to call himself Lead Designer this, or Chief Architect that. We all know he's not sitting down and crunching math to design rockets and cars and more.
Yes? All the bucks stop with him. He makes engineering decisions, bad or good. It doesn't matter if he doesn't have the relevant degree or did the calculation on a particular project.
Part of the problem is not trusting the future to one guy, but rather that there is hardly more than one guy to trust it to. Where are the other Elon Musks? We need more people like him, not less.
I'm not sure I agree.
I like Elon Musk (a whole lot more than most people) - but every Elon Musk consumes a lot of societies resources. He's spending 10s or 100s of billions of dollars worth of resource on (literal) moonshots. A hundred of him would raise that to trillions to 10s of trillions of dollars.
I think we can afford the former as a society (and that it benefits us). I'm not sure we an afford the latter. Worse, we become less efficient at is when there are more of him because we start running out of talented and driven engineers.
Maybe 10s would be a good order of magnitude.
There is for sure a cult of personality like there was for Steve Jobs.
The other lesson could be "maybe we shouldn't rely on one person's charisma to drive us to do new and interesting things," but that's not likely to be the lesson learned.