Tesla and SpaceX are technology/engineering problems. This is what Musk is good at and can take huge risks to go after it. Twitter is NOT engineering or technology problem. The politics and policies are not Musk's forte, at least not yet. However, the more concerning part is his continued defragmentation of attention. Tesla is now genuinly falling behind with massive new competitions rising up. New models haven't been on market for a while. Previously announced models aren't getting delievered. Pace of growth of superchargers is not keeping up. There is a lot at stack where Musk can make huge difference.

Beg to disagree, other manufacturers are catching up but Musk's playbook since Tesla's inception has been to consistently overpromise to the nth degree, so it's not anything new. Remember it took 2-3 years from the Model 3 announcement for them to ship in any meaningful number (2015 -> 2019). Same thing currently happening for the Cybertruck, Roadster, Semi, etc. Are they being too ambitious? Certainly. But it's not really anything new for Tesla. If anything having Musk's attention being frayed to various companies is probably a benefit, from my anecdotal personal interactions with top employees at SpaceX and Tesla. A lot of employees left because Elon is a great figurehead and product leader but an annoying micromanager.

SpaceX is not just a technology problem. It's a sales and marketing problem. You're not selling to the mass market, you're selling to a government. You need to convince people with power to buy your product. If they don't, your business can't get off the ground.

If you're interested in the realitiesof running a modern rocket company, I highly recommend the book "Financing the New Space Industry." It talks about marketing and other aspects.

"We're 10x cheaper" is great marketing.

It’s hard to overstate how difficult this is.

Definitely not his forte, all his projects in urban planning have been so, so bad.

> Tesla is now genuinly falling behind with massive new competitions rising up.

I think you still being too generous. Other than Teslas which starting to get large amount of competitors who were late to EVs market, and SpaceX, which won't have many competitors because we still kind of figuring out what the heck we need to fly in space for (at this price points), Musk's basket is full of terrible failures.

The most shocking to me is a Boring company. What was promised - vast network of 3D tunnels where cars will move at 150mph speeds. Eventually trip from New York to Shanghai will take less than 2 hours.

What was delivered? A short tunnel with absolutely zero safety features, no ventilation, no exit points, build with state-of-the-art technology that turned out to be 3 times slower (per mile) than 30 years old boring machine that dug La-Manche, and Teslas are driving in that tunnel at... 35mph.

And Musk as we could all predicted came out in defense of all this tweeting that "We made the whole thing much simpler" - no elevator ramps, no high speeds, simple one-lane tunnel. And his base ate it up like some sort of genius he is that he invented moving traffic in one lane underground at bicycle-ride speed.

I say the same thing will happen to twitter. Initially it will be: - open algorithms (99.9% people would not understand what they looking at, at probably 80% of engineers wouldn't either - as an ex-Googler, I can tell you these algorithms are like rings inside a tree - hundreds of layers amassed on the top of each other over the years; - allow full free speech (so no control over even nastier language) - fight with bots.

Fast forward 5 years from now, the only people who understand the algorythms will be large bot farms and they will game the system to get throw to the top before anyone elses tweets. Just like there is reason Google is hiding their algo instead of f.e. patent those, they do that because they don't want smart people to game the system. Full free speech will bring even more maneuver to the site, and at the end of the day its impossible to remove bots. In China for 5 cents you can get someone's real ID. For 10 cents they provide you photo of ID with todays date. For 15 cents they will show up on any video call to provide they are who they are. So at the end of the day small trolls and insignificant bot farms will get wiped out, but the big players who make decent buck by trolling, they will continue undisputed. In a few years Musk will abandon Twitter to focus momentarily on another shiny object. "in fight for humanity freedom", like he couldn't do that when he proposed to solve world's hunger.

On the top of that, isn't his involvement in another project just a big fuck-you to everyone still waiting for:

- Solar City - roof shingles that will revolutionized electricity and actually will make you the homeowner to sell electricity to the power plant. - Tesla trucks and semi trucks - nothing new on that? - Boring company - no new progress after years of LV "loop". - Flying to Mars (many things changed now - from fancy trip sort of Cruise Trip with fun games etc, now the word is that many people will die during the trip and it wont be fun)

Seriously if all these projects would run full speed ahead on all cylinders, I would be happy Musk is taking over another project. But they are not. Most are terrible failures and Musk is still in hot water re: Solar City buyout. I'm starting to think all these projects were just temporary scams to boost Tesla stock value (which Musk succeed with 20 x P/E), and that's about it.

- You can buy a solar roof from Tesla right now, and they are by far the sexiest way you can introduce solar to your home.

- The Tesla Cybertruck and Semi are going to be manufactured in the Austin, TX factory, which literally just opened after only 2 years of construction (mid-pandemic) – seems like progress to be.

- Who said the initial crewed missions to Mars would be a fancy sort of cruise trip?

I won't argue about sexiest way but sure the most expensive. Some assessment broke down you need some 30 years of continues use to break even, that is excluding cost of battery and other accessories, so assuming nothing ever breaks in 30 years.

Good luck with that, because at this rate you can literally sell snakesoil and claim it works. Take any group of say 10,000 people, have them use it for the rest of their lives, I guarantee you find few people who miraculously got some sort of disease cured.

- Who said the initial crewed missions to Mars would be a fancy sort of cruise trip?

Musk said that during the first presentation regarding the trip.

Why would I want my roof to be sexy?

"Why would I want my clothes to be sexy?"

"Why would I want my kitchen to be sexy?"

"Why would I want my car to be sexy?"

Oh right because tech people just assume that sexy is an adjective that makes everything better. I remember hearing this associated with Ruby on Rails at one point and realizing I might not fit in with this whole scene.

It's commonly taken to mean "visually appealing". I never use it in that sense, but I don't find it difficult to translate from those who do.

I appreciate that you aren’t propagating this usage.

> open algorithms (99.9% people would not understand what they looking at, at probably 80% of engineers wouldn't either

100% of engineers won't either. These algorithms are all going to be neural net based, which means they need the data (which will be private) to even know what outputs will be for a given input. And why the output is such for a given input? No way to know - basically a black box.

So why was this down voted exactly ?

Wasn’t he the founder of X.com the precursor entity to PayPal?

> Twitter is NOT engineering or technology problem.

It absolutely is an engineering and technology problem.

Parts of it are, but not the free speech parts.

Musk also does not run a rocket company. Musk owns a rocket company. Gwynne Shotwell runs it.

He's certainly involved enough in the development process to be able to talk about technical details at length with even some of his previous top employees confirming that he's been heavily involved in development: https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929 (Tom Mueller is one of the leading experts in the world on rocket engines due to his work on SpaceX's engines), which is a lot more than most of the other big competitors (the only exception is ULA's Tory Bruno since he too has a strong engineering background).

Shotwell is an excellent president and pretty much directly responsible for many of SpaceX's prominent contracts (as well as their survival in the early days), but she handles the 'business' side of things (although, since she has a mechanical engineering background I assume she also keeps up with the technical side), while Elon mainly deals with the technical side.

I have an MechE background from a bay area school and honestly you don't learn a thing about anything that could really help you with this. You either have an incredible passion for learning on your own or you are more clueless about engineering than a guy welding rollcages into a racecar with his highschool diploma.

She does have experience doing actual technical work and anyway, at her level I expect her knowledge to be more high level.

To take your example, she doesn't need to be able to weld rollcages into racecars, but she may be able to understand that a rollcage can only be expected to be useful in X cases or that a good rollcage should have Y features.

Similar to how Elon most likely isn't telling people to change X flange into a weld by adjusting the pipe by Y mm, but rather asking his engineers what they would adjust to achieve Z and the technical tradeoffs, then stating what he thinks is acceptable and what isn't.

I agree, hence the mechanic engineering degree is basically worthless IMO. Even in your example, any person with a functioning brain would understand your X and Y examples. So what exactly to mechanical engineers learn? As someone that went through it, I can assure you it's almost nothing. It's just a 4 year grinder so they can put a stamp on who can do medium level math and put up with the grind. The learning is up to you after.

Yeah, that's a good point. When I was talking about her background I was mainly trying to emphasize how she differs to the business leaders of other big space companies. Since I think that a big reason for the utter stagnation of the previous rocketry giants has been the systemic dominance of non-technical penny pinchers over engineers with a business lean. But yes, it does come down to the desire to learn rather than what degree they hold.

Shotwell doesn't "run" it. She is president and COO, sure. The vision, strategy and engineering is all Musk. Read the book Liftoff. Musk doesn't get much credit for his engineering work and often gets written off as just "investor" type.

The "engineering" is not all Musk. Vision and strategy, yes.

Musk is not a rocket scientist.

It's engineering, at this point.

I'm quite sure that Musk understands the engineering totally and makes important contributions. Plus, his instincts in providing direction as a CEO are excellent. Very few CEOs understand tech like Musk does.

At least during initial days, Musk spent 90% of time on engineering at SpaceX. He self-thought in rocket engineering and can easily match knowledge of many experts in the field. Many of big engineering decisions were done by Musk, at least until Falcon 9.

Seems as much a rocket scientist as anyone.

Perhaps he's good at getting the right people to run the stuff he owns?

To me this is the fascinating thing about Musk that really sets him apart: He has succeeded at building several companies that make real stuff and tackle hard engineering challenges. And it's not just having money to throw at the problem, we know that because Bezos also wanted a Rocket company and threw tons of Cash at it.

Hard to say from the outside what it is exactly that allows him to do that. It makes sense that its hard to say what it is, because if it was easy to describe, chances are it wouldn't be what sets him apart (the other option being that it's hard to emulate).

There's a short list of people who can start a rocket company and want to: Bezos, Branson and Musk. I think it is fair to say that starting a rocket company is hard. The small sample size of people trying doesn't really let us learn anything from the success or failures.

Must wasn't a billionaire when he started his rocket company. He had in the ballpark of 100 million. There are thousands and thousands of people that could start a rocket company. And he did it when no private entity had ever even reached orbit with a liquid fuel rocket.

The fact that there are so few examples doesn’t tell me its hard, it just tells me its unprofitable. Look at these examples, primarily bankrolled by the megalomaniac billionaire themselves vs the value investors who dollar cost average into lockheed martin et al.

That's a definitive 'yes'. He is extremely good at finding great and very qualified people, placing them in the right positions and getting 110% out of them.

Tesla doesn't seem that well run?

By what metric? Love it or hate it, Tesla is a huge success story.

there are tons of known problems with their hardware and engineering. plus lawsuits from employees, etc. stock price covers a lot of things up, but "well run" can still be evaluated

Tesla is the first U.S. auto company to go public since Ford did so in 1956. Is that not good enough?

Seems well run enough to pull that off.

Tesla was started less than 20 years ago and sold nearly 1 million cars last year.

What's your definition of run? It certainly seems like he's calling at least some shots? Are you saying he's a holding company?

Musk is the lead designer for the rocket. That's not something Bezos does, for example.

He's also the Techno-King of Tesla. If you think he's actually doing any of the real science behind rocket design, I have a bridge I'd love to sell you.

As influential as Musk is, he's not a real world Tony Stark.

If you watch any of the starbase videos (part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw)

It's clear he knows a thing or two about rockets. Obv no single person is designing the thing, but it's clear he's highly involved.

I was going to link these videos too. Its evident he's closely involved with technical discussions and decisions.

I think he's more likely to be involved in relatively high-level (but still critically important) engineering decisions rather than "science". That distinction aside, I really wonder what makes people so sure he isn't involved, when every indication (interviews, etc.) is that he actually has a pretty good understanding of the principles SpaceX's rockets are built on, and the reasons they're designed the way they are.

Can you enlighten me? Why is this such a common refrain?

While he obviously isn't a real world Tony Stark, other people who were very definitely involved in the nitty gritty have said that he's involved in the design. While he likely isn't doing the simulations or directly working on the hardware, it's pretty obvious that he participates in the design at a high level at minimum https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929

Like at any company, the people at the top aren't the ones who do the work. They need to have a broad understanding of the problem space, business opportunities, challenges and risk. They need to be able to understand what work is being done and understand the message that comes up to them. With that they can make high level decisions. From what I have seen, Musk deeply understands the problem space and can suggest engineers do low level stuff. I bet he suggests lots of stuff that the engineers go "erm no that is not possible". Those suggestions will never be seen by us. We will see the suggestions that happen like a rocket ship nose being changed by Musk.

If you don't think he's doing hardcore fundamental rocket design work at spacex, you've just been reading clickbait articles.

Remember when Blackberry said Alicia Keys was their creative director?

Ironically Kanye west has the perfect take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA8cUb9uyh4

I'm not sure if he meant that literally. I've heard him say everyone working there should consider themselves the lead designer (or something to that effect).

I'm sorry but this is utter nonsense.

I like Elon, too, but "no qualifications to run a rocket company" is simply delusional. He majored in physics at Penn and econ at Wharton and went to grad school at Stanford studying material science (for two days, just enough to get to signal being smart). I have a harder time imagining what kind of background would be better being CEO of a rocket company.

If he runs Twitter like 4chan, it will surely fail, but I think he has more to his plan than he is willing to share publicly at this time.