Fun reminder, Musk did not start Tesla and bought his way into the company. His involvement should not be understated, but it's had years of management shuffles and changes of direction.
Tesla employs almost 80k workers, and SpaceX employs almost 10k. Elon might have had the idea, but it's the employees that made it possible and a reality.
I do agree that it isn't "single-handedly," but when I hear Elon speak he definitely does shout out to the team. I haven't heard him take 100% credit for these things.
and the money to convert the idea into execution with a high probability of losing his money.
Did it really ? Tesla rode on the advances of battery tech driven by mobile devices, there were other EV efforts arround the time Tesla came up. I agree they recognised it early on and made it fasionable + they had this narrative driven market valuation which pressured other automotive execs to invest in the EV narrative. But 10 years is way too much - battery tech advancements were bound to bring us to this point even without Tesla R&D (I think they only started using their advancements recently, before that it was just stock batteries ?), and there was enough money in batteries from other markets to drive advancement without the EV push.
Not denying Tesla played a big positive role in this, but certainly not 10 years IMO.
Electric cars were a gimmick before Tesla, almost no-one was taking them seriously, after Tesla that changed.
In fact "affordable" Teslas (model S) came after competition like Leaf which was a best seling electric car up until recently.
also, if you ask me, a super expensive sports car should still count as a "gimmick". I give Tesla credit for reigniting excitement about EVs, but lets not oversell their achievement.
The what?
> the Ford Ranger EV
The what?
> honda ev plus
The what?
> Toyota RAV4 EV
The what?
If you mention Tesla to literally anyone, they know about the cars. The product, and the marketing of it, have definitely brought EV's into the mainstream. Before that, very few consumers knew anything about EVs, maybe with the exception of the GM EV1. Now electric cars are a common sight on the road.
Nisan Leaf was way more recognisable than a Tesla for a while.
And also things like Prius really prooved the point that electricity can be used to power cars.
Not knocking on Tesla, they have a great brand and helped spark interest and speed up demand for EVs. But saying they advanced the adoption of EVs by 10 years is ridiculous.
I honestly don't think we'd have seen the same level of EV adoption by now if not for Tesla. But then I don't really know how to quantify it for arguments sake.
SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of giants, if SpaceX didn't exist, the science and people wouldn't just disappear.
But, SpaceX and Tesla for sure accelerated the EVs market and reusable rockets. I don't think anyone could've created this level of buzz around their companies. Main thing being that most of the general public now knows about Tesla and SpaceX and the awareness around EVs and reusable rockets. Now, I'm not saying Musk is some godsend or something, but he definitely played big role in creating this buzz around space travel and EVs.
> their success only makes it harder for other rocket companies to stand out and succeed.
Of course it does. That's one of the main points of one's success and it is true for every single field in existence. By that logic, no one should succeed because that would make it difficult for others? I strongly disagree with that one.
SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough.
Not particularly shocking.
Rich people buy rich people things, yes, and it matter if its a gas car or an electric. And it matter if the battery industry was transformed by that. And it matters that the image of electric cars was transformed. It matters that the largest fast charging network in the world was financed by this.
SpaceX proved that they could make things the government already does massively cheaper. Literally read any report from NASA or GAO. NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.
Since SpaceX join the race military launches have come down in price by sometimes multiple 100 million $. ULA even outside of the 300M$+ launch prices, received an extra 900M every year.
Literally everything the government is buying from SpaceX could literally not be done cheaper by any other government, foreign or domestic or company foreign or domestic.
When SpaceX got started the commercial launch market was basically 0% US launchers, SpaceX alone changed that to depending on you calculate 50-90% of the commercial market now.
There is seriously not a single argument you can make about SpaceX other then simply arguing the government should be doing spaceflight at all. Everything we know about government internals suggest that both NASA and DoD are beyond happy with SpaceX.
That's odd, I didn't say a single word about whether or not I liked Elon. Did you mean to reply to my post or someone else's?
interesting, can you cite that?
For those of us who measure by outcomes, he's a genius.