The criticisms are getting more and more comical. Michael is a friend of Elon and trusted Elon with many of his ideas and contacts. I'm sure Musk would say as much. Do you think Michael was sharing these ideas and contacts with just anyone? Why do you think he specifically chose to work with Elon?

He saw Elon was good at recruiting Silicon Valley talent and selling the whole "save humanity by going to Mars" story (but even that was Mike's idea with Orbital).

"Elon hires people he doesnt do all the work!"

Yes thats why you hire people...to not do all the work. Im pretty sure Elon is aware of this.

A decent amount of people on this site are absurd and detached from reality.

There's nothing comical about it. They went to two different Russian firms to partner with before it was even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and they lost all confidence in the project.

What was he running his mouth about? Crazy stuff like landing boosters back at the pad, or on barges in the middle of the Atlantic?

No, his plan was to build greenhouses on Mars.

Perhaps that's just because he was talking to people who think another literal moonshot was a figurative moonshot.

Er, no. That was his stated goal as a member of the Mars Society's board of directors when these talks happened. He wanted to purchase a Dnepr ICBM and retrofit it for that purpose. When the deal was rejected, he discussed building his own rockets with Michael Griffin.

That just shows confidence isn't always a predictor of success. They made a bad call, quite obviously.

No, it does not. His plan was to build greenhouses on mars.

Their rejection of his idea is what inspired the pivot to build rockets instead.

Even if we were to accept that as true as stated, which I don't, that doesn't explain Paypal and Tesla. Even if you think this Michael Griffin guy did everything - why did Elon bet on him? Why didn't anyone else? Tons of people had the money to do it at the same time. None of them did.

Nobody did everything. We all build upon the work of giants, Elon Musk and Michael Griffin included.

Musk talks about his employees and how critical they were/are constantly. This whole notion that "Musk didnt do it all" is such a clown argument because theres no other form of attack from people who simply dont like him and his politics.

Its almost like Elon hired him knowing hes smart or something...

....and Griffin gave him ~$2B of taxpayer money. (DARPA and COTS contracts before SpaceX flew a single rocket and CRS for Falcon 9). All discussed in the link above.

Why tax payer money? Where did that part come from.

There's really a recurring thread here, or elsewhere, which is that elon doesn't do shit, and deserve much credit for his success. To me he seems like a hard worker, and deserves credit

For someone who claims to work extremely hard he seems to spend a lot of time antagonising people on Twitter.

Do you think he's crafting his tweets with hours of deliberation? Honest question, how much time do you think he spends trying to antagonize people on Twitter per week?

Why do you assume the hard work to Twitter time ratio isn't the same as other people, but scaled up?

It's absolutely a part of his job, though.

One of the most valuable parts of Musk is his personal brand. He can raise money and hire talent in large part because he's a household name. Everything he does, from naming his child X Æ A-12 to producing a house track, is to proliferate the public perception that he is an eccentric genius, a modern-day polymath like the Da Vincis and Franklins of old.

It may not seem like "real" work, but if Elon Musk and I both started different companies on the same day, who do you think is going to attract funding and top talent more quickly?

If so, he's doing an absolutely fabulous job of trashing his reputation inside of a week.

Musk can be great when he does his homework and first principles analysis. It is obvious he hasn't done it here.

Having advertisers take a huge step back because they seek minimal uncertainty and you spend the entire week maximizing uncertainty is bad (& shows incompetence).

Having advertisers drop campaigns literally in the middle of the call to sell next year's baseline because you aren't even close to prepared for the questions is deeply arrogant incompetence [0].

Threatening "thermonuclear name and shame" on your advertisers [1] — your primary customers — is unnecessarily showing the entire world that you've lost it.

Same goes for starting the week with the now-infamous claim that "a bunch of activists" are chasing away the revenue (would Musk accept that kind of excuse from any exec reporting to him?)[2], then having it explained WHY they are actually pausing by one of the people in the meeting [3], then blocking the guy you just spoke with the day before...

I cannot begin to see how any of this is remotely good for Musk's brand. He's showing the world in real-time that he's in over his head, has no idea what is the business model and the key elements, and just thrashing about blaming everyone else, when literally he is entirely to blame for the chaos.

Oh, and I've yet to read the other HN Pg1 headline [5] that Musk/Twitter is already asking some of the people it fired yesterday to return!

If you can actually explain how any of this is remotely good for Musk, Twitter, or anyone, I'd be interested to hear it... Because it looks like he's trying really hard to sink Twitter faster than Digg sunk. (There's actually a good argument that his initial intent was to sink Twitter when he first made the comment and offer, to maximize uncertainty and tank their '23 sales, but then he was forced to buy it b/c he was too foolish to even have a proper excape clause in the contract, and here we are)

[0] https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696157794242560

[1] https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1588718759098851328

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880

[3] https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921

[4] https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588622182066057216

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808

I agree that his approach is odd, to say the least. But Elon is clearly marketing himself as part of a counter-culture movement that's opposed to the current dominant neoliberal/corporate zeitgeist (but isn't quite alt-right). It's extremely deliberate. Whether or not it's a good idea remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term it hasn't been.

Yes he needs to curry favors with Republicans to get the big DoD contracts for:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

Yes, I see that he wants to market to that not-quite-alt-right-but-not-neoliberal customer.

I just do not see how any of his actions actually help enhance that even with even an idealized version of such a customer, and does not alienate even that customer.

How does it establish any credibility with anyone to 1) be so unprepared for a critical advertiser's (your customers) presentation that customers literally cut their spend during the meeting; 2) publicly make excuses trying to blame for your failures on some "activist groups" who actually had no influence on advertisers' (your customers) decision to cut spending; 3) destroying verification and turning it into a anyone-can-pay-$8-to-say-they-are-anyone-and-get-greater-reach; 4) come into a $44B deal making a lot of noise and failing to articulate a plan, any plan that gets anyone on board?; etc., etc., etc.

I wish Elon all the success in the world, but he is seriously flailing here, and creating confidence in no one. I expect that he has a good chance of sorting it out once he understands the issues, but he's clearly done no homework up front, so is figuring it out in real time.

I do not see how this helps him, even with his ideal customer. Of course, as usual his comments have plenty of fanbois claiming whatever he does must be 4-D Chess, but seriously, how does this much public flailing, thrashing, and excuses give anyone confidence?

Can you point to any specific action that would actually give such a customer more confidence? From what I've read, the RW people are also really pissed at him because they expected to be able to rush right in and raise hell, and that's not yet happening either...

There’s good and bad. I for one am happy he decided to smoke that joint on joe rogan

To me he sounds like a pedophile who can't dive but to each their own I guess.

Why there has to be "one mastermind guy"?

It seems safe to say that you need to dovetail at least dozens of people to have successful rocket launching, well, startup?

Tom Mueller (recruited by Mike Griffin) also deserves credit. SpaceX hasn't built a reliable rocket engine since Tom left.

But Mike probably was #1 reason for SpaceX success.

It's hard to argue that SpaceX wouldn't happen without Elon's mom.

Why was Elon selected to become the richest person in the world and not one of the any thousands of other billionaires out there?