"He’s obviously a visionary. I prefer dealing with him to others because he gives you genuine answers. He will call you back. He will have a beef with you when others run away because they’re cowardly. If he disagrees, he’ll be in your face, but at least he’s in your face. I’m perfectly fine with that. In a world where everybody’s making a lot of silly stuff, he’s not. Cars, rockets, solar, these are important things. He can’t be as silly or as fascist as people make him out to be. Maybe he does act like a stupid tech bro sometimes, but maybe he’s a little more complex than that? Thomas Edison was not a nice man. Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people — Steve Jobs, for example. The times we live in are so reductive that it’s really hard to be able to get our minds around a truly complex human being. And that’s what he is."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/kara-swisher-on-elon...
Kevin Watson's take, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
Musk's not much of an inventor, though. Certainly, that's not why he's rich.
Part of the criticism of Musk is that the popular view of him is totally out of whack with what you get if you just look at what he does, and has done. He's not Tony Stark.
I think Elon falls much more into the second category, which I agree is not really like Tony Stark, but I think still provides a ton of value to society. I think there's a real argument to be made that he is the reason we have dropped cost per pound of payload to orbit by over half with reusable rockets, even if he himself didn't invent the functionality.
But he's not a super-genius, and given how flighty he can be, when he announces various Grand Visions, it's wise to take a wait-and-see approach. His big mouth probably ought to have landed him in quite a bit of legal trouble, too, except that it's so much harder for the justice system to deal with rich people than poor people.
It's not that he's uniquely awful among successful business dudes, since much of the above is true about many of them—his PR and superfans are just... grating.
That said if you're a patron of inventors then you are an inventor. If you can manage the pain of failing and failing and failing, then in my book you're creative and a co-inventor.
That still makes him a pretty big deal, of course.
It is also probably worth nothing that they all had another trait in common. They were all notorious assholes for various reasons.
So fuck your tunnels, fuck your cars, fuck your rockets, fuck your cars again
You promised you'd be Tesla, but you're just another Edison
I agree, and think of him in much the same was as I think of Edison. It's strange how polarizing a figure Musk is. It seems like a majority of people (or maybe a vocal minority) either want to attribute every single thing to his own personal genius, no help from others or good fortune. While others view everything he's accomplished as nothing more than luck born out on the backs of other people's labor. I don't know where the balance lies between those two extremes but I doubt that either one is very accurate.
My conclusion instead is that Elon Musk is Chaos Titan; like the netflix chaos monkey, but basically just going around causing chaos by hyping up twitter and then causing massive swings with individual tweets.
I don't mind Musk much either way and while I'm annoyed when he wants to let Trump back on Twitter after what I strongly believe was an attempt at a coup d'état, or him removing, say, the mobile charger in new Teslas I still like the products that his companies make and when he sits down and does an interview he says things that resonate with me.
So what makes someone a visionary? I mean I sit down and have a vision where Earth is a multi-planetary species, we build an outpost on the Moon within the next few years, and then Mars, and then mine asteroids. But is that all it takes? If so I think the word visionary is often either misapplied or is quite diluted. But if we take into account the need to execute on such visions, naturally, calling Musk a visionary makes more sense. Maybe we just don't have a great word (or one isn't immediately coming to mind) for someone who says "we should go to Mars, and I'm going to participate/lead in the creation of the entity that will do that".
Then comes SpaceX, doing engineering that NASA seems either incapable of or uninterested in (no specific blame on NASA, there is no substantial government push for progress in this area). OK, maybe you and I have not directly benefited from SpaceX yet, but do not discount the accruing benefit of cheap transport to space.
There are much, much, much easier ways to make money than to make an electric car company and a space company. Your argument is a little too cynical.
I literally drive a Tesla. I've watched SpaceX land reusable rockets and send people to the International Space Station. What you are saying here is factually incorrect and I'm really losing patience for this very obvious trolling and flame-baiting.
Congrats for being rich I guess? Your car brand is still as rare as Porsches, if you account for Europe it's still more rare on the road compared to Porsches.
Musk has been at the helm of Tesla since 2002. In FY21 Tesla accounted for 1% of vehicles sold globally. 1% in 20 years
I reapeat. 1% in 20 years. Hyper-growth for me (the stock market) , snail growth for thee (the American/global consumer)
[1]https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2021/ [2]https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/porsche-us-sales-figures/
It's absolutely not that rare.
As a side note, I would suggest reviewing HN's community guidelines regarding discussion of controversial issues and use of throwaway accounts. Respecting these guidelines would help your comments remain visible, rather than getting downvoted grey.[0]
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but *please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.*
WRT the last point, maybe you just found HN this week and this is your brand-new community identity, but your account name and posting activity doesn't give that impression.
He's already delivered, one hundred times over. Continuously moving the goal posts of what you're criticizing doesn't suddenly make it a lack of delivery.
So, I tried to walk the line without using judgmental language. My own opinion is that he's a complicated figure. I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him, how much of it is an act, and if it's truly him whether or not it's a representative small slice of him or not. I have a firm judgement on his his public persona, which I think makes him look like an asshole (the pedo guy stuff alone clinches that) but even if that's an accurate picture of him as a whole I still admire what he has accomplished.
Someone is sexist against 50% of the people the interact with? They are sexist.
Someone is sexist against 20% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.
That someone is sexist against 5% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.
The person does not stop being sexist/shitty/$negative_trait just because they most of the time are not acting on it. They become nice when they stop altogether, or at least make clear effort to stop.
So, back to Elon, considering his recent praise of work/life balance and slave-like conditions in China, I see no reason to believe his nice side should be considered equally or more worthy of praise than his negative side be considered for criticism.
Putting Musk aside, I'd have to know a little more about what you mean by $negative_trait to agree or not. Everyone has negative traits, everyone is occasionally shitty. Frequency certainly matters, but assuming it's not very regular than maybe it comes down to what you said about "clear effort to stop". You have to be self aware enough to recognize it when it happens and work on doing better.
I mean look at all the other “big names” in tech… Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. These are highly flawed individuals.
Hell look at the entertainment industry… so many of the most famous successful people turn out to be hugely flawed. Take Jonny Depp for example—that dude has some major issues. Or to a much greater extent Bill Cosby. Cosby transformed TV in so many different incredibly positive ways and look how it ended…
Fame and wealth does some weird stuff to people.
This is the crucial point. Power corrupts, a painful fact long established. Therefore, when the power and wealth of an individual grows, they deserve more scrutiny and criticism. You don't "give them a break because they're human". The self-preservation of society and freedom itself demands that we closely scrutinize the powerful. If you don't want to be scrutinized like that, then it's easy to avoid becoming a leader. It's a cliche, but with great power comes great responsibility, and Musk is still acting like a child half the time, egged on by a legion of equally childish fans.
I say all we can judge someone is what they do. It's perfectly fine to judge Musk on his public persona. Unless you want to try to divine secret reasons for his public actions, but even that is judging him based on his public persona.
I'm not saying you need to naively believe what he says are his motivations. But his public persona is at least somewhat predictable.
> if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.
Most elite celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople simply put a lot of effort into pretending to be perfect, mostly out of vanity. They lie, hide, avoid all controversy, and employ teams of PR people to craft their public image using publicity stunts, bribery, philanthropy and all kinds of tricks that have been proven to work for thousands of years.
If Elon Musk followed the elite PR playbook, a lot more people would like him, probably a lot of the haters in this thread. Which says more about them than him.
Elon Musk offers a glimpse of what very powerful/successful, and basically good, people are often really like.
I'd argue that:
1. Anyone who completely denigrates and dismisses Elon Musk is a blind hater.
2. Anyone who claims he's without flaws is a fanboy with rose colored glasses on.
3. And only people who agree with his own assessment of himself, that he's a "mixed bag", are assessing him clearly and with intellectual honesty.
Do they have a responsibility to set a positive example? Absolutely. Is that always achievable? Turns out probably not.
I think society needs to learn to forgive. We got really good at canceling people, but we haven’t got very good at forgiveness. In the internet age where your entire life can be saved on the internet, it is important to realize people change, everybody makes mistakes (sometimes even very stupid ones) and people aren’t perfect.
I don’t know… I guess they say you should never meet your heroes. I think now that we can peek behind the curtain and often see the “actual person” we have to come to terms with the fact that under all the fancy dress and act, even the “highest” in society are ultimately the same flawed, imperfect humans as the rest of us.
None of us really know what the fuck we are doing… we are all making it up as we go along. Even the most successful amongst us.
The “pedo guy” accusation was beyond the pale and, so far as I remember, Musk doubled down on it vs making any sincere attempt at an apology.
And yeah… the pedo guy thing was completely uncalled for.