Musk's public persona is a nightmare, even if you only look at his public professional persona -- encouraging overwork, getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates, a total disregard for safety of both his customers and his workers, and developing an unhealthy cult of personality.

I own a Tesla, I love SpaceX, I think Elon Musk is insufferable.

> getting himself knowledgeable enough about a subject to fool laymen and investors but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates

This is both a strength and weakness. How many times have people wished CEOs actually knew what they were talking about? As long as Elon knows enough to build a decent team and lead it well, he doesn't need to know everything.

From the outside it looks like he sees himself as 'one of the engineers' which is something I deeply respect, even if there's major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).

Yeah, I appreciate any engineering firm that at least attempts to have some engineering leadership in charge.

> major issues as well (FSD and Hyperloop being the big ones).

That Vegas loop too... That's going to be a truly awful tunnel fire someday, and the safety systems there seem seriously lacking. (Also, the whole project feels like a grift.)

It’s in a conceptual prototyping stage, jeez. Criticism is fine but you gotta let the bud flower, come to fruition and then put regulations. That’s how literally every single world changing technology is invented. If Elon’s ideas don’t work out, fine. It was a boondoggle on his own dime, what’s anyone’s business in slamming down on the efforts?

Risk taking is amazing. I’m not sure if I want to live in a risk averse world where ideas are nipped in the bud by CEOs of GE and Honeywell.

"Tunnels" is not something that is at a "conceptual prototyping stage". We've built tunnels for hundreds of years. We know what the dangers are, we don't need a prototype to kill a bunch of people to find that out.

You could make a similar argument against electric cars.

Electric cars? Perhaps. Self-driving cars? Not so much.

I'm not sure what down-voters are disagreeing with: electric cars have been in existence for over 100 years, there are very few unknowns there. Self-driving cars are a very recent development, and not a single developer has achieved widespread Level 5 autonomy. I thought that'd be pretty uncontroversial, but this is HN, I guess.

Ah yes, the world changing technology of putting a potential fire hazard in a narrow tunnel with no escape routes. What could possibly go wrong? [1]

More information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RPMt_FS-s8

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Tunnel_disasters

Those that work for him call it "the impossible ask": Musk will basically spin through the engineering floors of SpaceX and push the team for something that's functionally impossible. Whether this strategy motivates brilliance to emerge is probably not _terribly_ in dispute: they do get results. The "at what cost" element and the burnout and other impacts... those are more tricky to weigh.

I don’t get Elon hate just the way I don’t get fanboyism and cult following. Neither side provides an objective and truthful representation of reality.

No single personality can be 100% perfect. Let’s not ignore pretty much the entire world changing revolution of EVs and reusable rocketry, while focusing on the guy’s public persona and how he behaves that’s apparent to us and project what he must be like in general. Seems deeply and profoundly unfair.

Why can’t someone have flaws which is ok to point out, but then ignore their accomplishments. Opposite also stands! Fanboys of Elon think he is some kind of a messiah to save the world from global collapse but turn a blind eye to his rather rude behavior?

It’s like populism has a reverse backside of the coin.

IMO silent majority has pretty balanced view of him and just doesn’t care to participate in a holy war praising or hating on the guy. Social media and regular media bias towards the polar opinions, as with anything else.

History respects Edison, Jobs, Tesla, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Hughes for what the accomplished while acknowledging their individual flaws. I think Musk will be remember similarly. Depending how successful his ventures are over the coming century he might even be remembered more than any of them.

It's an interesting observation. Personally, when I look back at giants and read their biographies, I find the most interesting bits usually about how they were motivated, what drove them, how they overcame challenges and hopelessness, how they forged business relations - I think the least interesting part is their personal life and what they did to piss someone off or what they tweeted/told publicly. The latter is just typical soap opera of details that provide little value to me. The latest Steve Jobs movie primarily focused on the melodrama of his personal relationships and offered literally nothing about what made Apple succesful.

Can I say, it's really refreshing to see your list of very apt comparisons to very smart and successful people. Many tech-heavy news sites (looking at you ArsTechnica) compare Musk to Newton and Einstein.

To me, Musk's flaws are much smaller than some of the others you mention. Namely: overly optimistic (some would say fraudulent but eh) timelines, a puerile sense of humor, and calling that diver a pedo.

The diver absolutely did start it, and if I was a gambling man, sexpat seems like a reasonable bet. But calling someone a pedo without evidence is a very unwarranted escalation.

It in response to a post in which the author said they wanted to revisit joining Neuralink because hopefully now their culture is more in line with Musk’s public persona. And the post ended with praise for Musk’s projects.

That doesn’t read as “haters gonna hate” to me, but rather as a narrow criticism of just the one aspect of Musk’s businesses that was brought up.

> Let’s not ignore pretty much the entire world changing revolution of EVs

Elon sure did. He decided, apparently out of pure greed, to invest big into Bitcoin, driving the price up and with it increasing the carbon emissions of it, enough to quickly wipe out basically all carbon savings Tesla has worked to achieve for its entire company lifetime.

Bitcoin can be entirely powered by (renewably sourced) electricity.

Our current financial system cannot.

It can, and when it does, it destroys that energy, and forces other users to use polluting energy.

The environmental cost of Bitcoin is not that of the energy it uses, it is the cost of the dirtiest energy it forces others to use.

We should all be using nuclear anyway.

Even if we did, that is not non-polluting energy. Wasting it in massive amounts would still harm everyone.

Nuclear is definitely non-polluting energy.

Building the plant and mining the uranium, doing upkeep on the plant, and decommissioning it and processing the fuel are not non-polluting.

There is always pollution. Some forms of energy have more and some have less. It is never good to just waste energy, that will always cause excess pollution, no matter the type of energy used.

Ok, sure, but by that standard nuclear is by far the least polluting per watt.

Sure. But it still pollutes, and wasting the energy it produces is still harmful.

It doesn't matter how energy is produced, bitcoin will always be harmful.

" a total disregard for safety of both his customers and his workers"

At least in the case of SpaceX, they do not seem to be as reckless as you paint them. After 20 years in space industry, they have 0 fatalities on record, which is uncommon for a corporation of this size and history.

And they scrub launches whenever they are concerned about weather or anything off-nominal that their sensors indicate. Which led to an excellent safety record for Falcon 9s once the technology matured.

Gwynne Shotwell runs the day to day at SpaceX.

She hasn’t gotten a ton of press but it’s clear she is a key reason for the successes you described above.

Which Musk can take some credit for—-hiring well and not getting in her way.

> not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates,

Reasonable estimates like what ? If your company works on something that has never been done before there is not much data at hand to make good estimates is it ?

I have so many colleagues with that sentiment who give terrible plans because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it’s research. They mostly talk about timelines for the big end goal pie in the sky, and they’re generally wrong. That was me when I was more junior.

I also have colleagues who promise small concrete incremental deliverables in predictable timelines. They rarely talk concretely about the big end goal pie in the sky’s timeline, but generally deliver the big thing sooner anyways.

The answer isn’t making reasonable estimates of an inestimable thing, it’s providing reasonable estimates for the reasonably estimable pieces. Instead of “we’ll have ultra mega science in three to five years!” it’s, “we’ll have this specific piece of the stack built by 2022 and we hope it’ll enable these other slightly less concrete things towards ultra mega science.”

Sadly, this is great for the actual working condition and environment, but nothing that attracts funding.

Fundraising isn’t some magical situation where bad behavior is suddenly acceptable because it works, but I understand your point.

The point is Elon knows exactly whether estimates are achievable or not, but does it anyways.

There is a reason why legally Autopilot/FSD is a driver-assist system, but for marketing purposes robotaxis are just around the corner.

There is a fine line between 'overly optimistic' and misleading, and more often than not, Elon crosses the line.

See https://elonmusk.today/ for an overview (if a bit biased).

Everything from self driving, to shipping cars, to moon and Mars missions. It's one thing to be an optimist. It's another to promise something you have no path to deliver.

SoaceX just got a sole-source contract with NASA to send humans to the moon in 3 years.

Musk said he'd be launching a mission to Mars every possible window starting 2024. Including manned missions. I believe he was going to send an experimental mission to Mars before that.

My point isn't that these companies don't get there, it's that they take much, much, much longer than estimated.

The first one won’t be crewed, and there’s no way that’s going to be ready by 2022. So 2024 will be unmanned. Maybe 2026 will be the first crewed test mission, but 2028 is more likely. But we’re still talking aspirational Elon-time. If I were betting money, I’d say the 2030’s is more realistic.

Note that they have done zero work on building a anything other than the rocket body to get there. Making the interior volume habitable for 2 years of interplanetary travel is going to be non-trivial.

FSD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zTZjCCoxo&list=PLbNT8bE4Cg...

Shipping cars: https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...

Moon: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/as-artemis-moves-forward-...

Mars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor

I agree with self driving... But Tesla IS shipping a heck of a lot of cars, now. And sending people to the Moon and Mars seem increasingly likely.

Yes, now they are. Tesla circa 2014 was very different.

Fair points, but one trait that I do admire is his lack of elitism. That was sorely missing at Neuralink when I visited.

Yeah he really fooled all those Tesla and spacex investors into those massive returns. They must be so pissed.

They might not be but the TSLAQ people are still chomping at the bit.

> but not deeply understanding it enough to provide reasonable estimates

There are enough senior software engineers in this world that will have a crazy hard time making a good estimate. There was this HN comment once that mentioned that learning how to estimate work is it's entire own discipline.

It can be done and trained, according to that comment, but the comment also seemed to imply that it seems very unusual to do so.

I can't find the comment unfortunately, I read it years ago here.

Elons estimates aren't about being accurate.

Musk’s public persona is: the guy without whom nobody would know the names Tesla and SpaceX. As noxious as his personality seems to be, he does deliver.