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.