It's not all ideas, but an ideas guy is a necessary but insufficient condition for the ultra talented "do-ers" to do their amazing things. Elon could have bought a big chunk of Google or apple if he wanted to with all his wealth and just generated nice returns, but t we probably wouldn't have boosters that return to land and can be reused if he did.

Funny, how a Series A investor in someone else' pre-existing company got people to think that he was the "ideas guy". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003%E2%...

You can still do that. Just "electric battery car" was not a novel idea in 2003.

Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.

Musk essentially was the A series, which led to him becoming the chairman and majority owner of the 7 month old company, which at that point just had a handful of guys. He ended up dismissing the original founders of the company before production began on their first product.

Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.

If all it took was money and trying a bunch of dumb ideas then Bezos' Blue Origin wouldn't be so staggeringly behind SpaceX

I've said the same about Branson and Virgin Galactic. He's been trying since 2004 to commercialize spaceflight and I don't think they've done anything worth mentioning. It seems to take more than an eccentric rich guy with big ideas to tackle space.

Nothing good worth mentioning. They got some Scaled Composites employees killed though. :(

You can’t have one without the other. If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things. Musk doesn’t propose ridiculous things. He’s an engineer at heart and truly understands the science of space flight to an insane degree so when he proposes something it’s within the realm of possibility but no one else is doing it because it’s never been done and the chance of failure is so high that any sane business would shut it down. He can’t achieve anything without his employees but those employees wouldn’t be doing a single moonshot idea without leadership willing to invest in those ideas.

You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that’s a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He’s a tremendous leader and you’d be foolish to underestimate him.

Again, I don’t fanboy him but I do give credit where credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked with him on a project that he cared about. He’s brilliant at some things but his god complex is off the charts. He’s an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he’s not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes leadership.

Our culture tends to deify leaders when it’s really a team effort. Don’t blindly hate the guy because others fawn over him. He’s human, and a deeply flawed one at that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the impossible.

the number of things he has proposed that were lies / scams (solar tiles, tesla self driving), or incredibly stupid (hyper loop, whatever these shitty robots are now, boring company etc) is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer. he is a salesmen as you say. to me he is more elizabeth holmes than nikola tesla

"If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?

> is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer.

These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.

> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.

Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer

> 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.

Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...