Bon appétit!
> 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...
My hat is old and pretty gross though so instead I hope you'll accept a donation to the EFF: https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY
As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asks their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.
I do and I've consistently voiced that opinion no matter the CEO/company. I don't think they think it is stupid, I know they have their reasons. I disagree with their reasons, I think there is more at play than only logical thinking on this point (real estate, asses in chair, etc), and I think it's shortsighted. WFH is an amazing perk and while I get not everyone wants it there are a large number of people who do and to cut off that entire group is incredibly short-sighted.
It's fine though, I'll never work for any of those companies, I have zero desire to do so, I much prefer smaller companies that understand WFH. Though I'd make 1 exception I think, for Apple, to gut and replace App Store Connect/The Developer Portal or at least have better feedback/errors/displaying the current state (which is a common complaint I have with Apple when their software needs to talk to server, the feedback is always lackluster or non-existent). Those websites look broken and/or are confusing/vague way too often. At least the Google Play dev console is so busy and incoherent that you'd not notice most issues. Though props to the Google Play devs for making apk/aab upload/release errors as confusing as possible in most cases :chefs-kiss:
It seems optimistic to think that Musk made a careful decision based on nuanced factors that just happened to have exactly the same outcome as every other company he owns.
The man loves proving a point, and "covid is stupid" is one of them
So, very ambiguous whether this is a reasoned move or or something more emotional and ego driven
The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own.
My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
People expect intelligence to lead to good judgement but I'm more and more convinced that (assuming a decent baseline of intelligence) they're fairly separate and unconnected things.
To answer your point though, Zubrin does not and never has worked for any of Musk's companies. Watson did work at SpaceX 8 years ago, but works somewhere else now so he has nothing to lose or gain from Musk.
And here is an account of a top NASA engineering official's interactions with Musk who also has never worked for Musk.
> He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting.
Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking.
Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build.
Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had.
“I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
In an era where online manipulation is becoming ubiquitous, when talking about someone who has a clear ego issue and the desperate need to be seen as awesome (to the point he has several cases of acting against his best interest just to protect his ego, across several companies), and in the context of that person acquiring one the platform most forward in the whole social media space that pushed those issues forward... I find that interesting.
I am not accusing you of anything, I'm merely saying your messages have the opposite result on me than the one you intend.
Elon as a person certainty has lots of flaws, but he is also quite clearly really good at a lot of things people who try to downplay that and claim its all 'luck' or 'failing upwards' usually just don't like his personality.
That's not true. I invite you to read my messages again and not that I've made 5 comments, all of them timestamped before yours, and only in 2 of them have I referenced quotes.
> add essentially nothing beside quote without context
A commenter claimed that Musk did not understand rocketry. I supplied quotes from industry experts declaring the opposite. What more context is needed?
I'm not a fanboy and have anything invested in proving how great he is. Personally, I think he can be a big jerk at times and at others brilliant. The issue I'm trying to address that I see over and over again are the false claims that Musk has no idea what he is doing technically and steals credit from the engineers he hires.
When I see a ubiquitous false claim that is easy disproven in 3 minutes with a Google search and copy and paste, then why not? I believe HN is a place where truth and reason are valued and misinformation corrected, so I think my comments and references have been valuable in that respect and apparently so do the 30+ people that have upvoted my first comment with the quotes even though they are "without context."
I don't believe he is solving any substantial technical problems at SpaceX or "designing rockets" himself.
Do you think this describes Zubrin, Watson, Sarsfield or the other experts in the reddit post I referenced?
> I don't believe he is solving any substantial technical problems at SpaceX or "designing rockets" himself.
Thanks for sharing your belief. What would be interesting and add more to the discussion is if you shared the basis for your belief. Perhaps you'll teach me something I didn't know and I can recalibrate my knowledge about Musk's expertise or lack thereof.
They claimed the people I referenced were Musk's employees and therefore said those things to kiss his ass get to get on his good side and avoid being fired.
This so blatantly false and easy to disapprove. Most of them weren't ever employees and none of them are current employees of Musk. When someone grasps at falsehoods like this in an attempt to discredit others, it naturally raises suspicions as to their motives.
This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me. Like, I don’t know anything about rockets, but we all know a bit about CPU design here, right? If someone said that Tim Cook really knew his stuff and wanted answers about the M1 that got down the the fundamental laws of physics, we’d probably say — well, that’s pretty stupid, right?
You’d have to talk about thing like pipeline stages, decoder width, memory bandwidth, branch prediction — obviously these parts have to follow the fundamental laws of physics but that isn’t really the interesting part. Fundamental physical limits aren’t the bottleneck yet.
Maybe rockets science is just much easier but that seems surprising to me, given the expression.
Classic NASA. Read Gene Kranz's "Failure is not an option".
In rocketry you're usually up against physical limits. You need materials near the limits of physical strength and temperature resistance. You need fuels near the limits of energy density. And still you're launching with a payload to destination that's maybe 5% of the mass, if you're lucky. Which is why rocketry has to obsess on weight reduction.
If fuels were 2x as powerful, or gravity was 1/2 as much, this would be easy. A spacecraft would have the weight budget and safety margins of an airliner.
If earth's gravity were somewhat greater, you'd never make it to orbit with chemical fuels.
This is the tyranny of the rocket equation.
I'm not a huge Musk fan, but he does seem to get the physics of rocketry.
Before Telsa, nobody thoughts electric cars were ready for road. Before SpaceX, I don't think anyone tried reusable rocket thingy. The thing is when you come up with a radically new idea, you have to know enough about it to convince others to work on it.
Steve Jobs knew enough about computer(and general idea of programming) to sell it, and Bill Gates was once a good programmer. Intel, nVidia founder were also chip engineers.
As you state, that is not the case for CPU design.
How about in 2016 where he built an home control AI and iPhone app with voice recognition for it using Facebook tech?
"I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play."
"As the CEO of Facebook, I don't get much time to write code in our internal environment. I've never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive. My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework or iOS development. The open source Nuclide packages we've built to work with GitHub's Atom make development much easier. The Buck build system we've developed to build large projects quickly also saved me a lot of time. Our open source FastText AI text classification tool is also a good one to check out, and if you're interested in AI development, the whole Facebook Research GitHub repo is worth taking a look at."
https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis...
(You can argue that's still "surface level because he didn't build those things" but it won't be a very interesting argument)
If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. I'm not talking about in layman's terms, I'm talking about the actual science that goes into it. Same deal with car design. I'll give Elon props for having a vision and pushing it forward but let's not say ridiculous things like "lead rocket designer at spaceX". That's like thinking Tim Cook could write a line of Swift if his life depended on it or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works. I don't exactly begrudge them for that (I won't get into profit sharing, or the lack there of at most companies) but let's not pretend that Elon is himself coming up with revolutionary ideas. Putting his money behind this is laudable, at some level, but he didn't invent these things any more than Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone.
We here on HN should know better than most how "worthless" an idea is on it's own. It's about execution. And Elon gets props for his execution (in this case hiring people who did the real work) but he shouldn't get all the credit for the work of the actual engineers.