But given a conflict between the opinions of a random person on HN and prominent engineers who've worked directly with Musk, I'll place more emphasis on the words of the prominent engineers. It's not that they can't be wrong, it's that they're less likely to be wrong than people whose only interaction with Musk is reading his Twitter.

> conflict between the opinions of a random person on HN and prominent engineers

On HN, i don't think you entirely know who among commentators is a prominent engineer.

> prominent engineers who've worked directly with Musk

The full phrase was important. If someone has worked directly with Musk and is basing their opinion on that, I expect them to say so.

I just read the comments in the reddit thread. It seems like the sort of vague platitudes people say when they've worked with a person, regardless of their actual competence. Especially in a higher level position, people say this stuff all the time out of BS. I wouldn't take it for much.

Yeah what do these people have to gain by saying anything but platitudes? Why make an enemy out of the richest guy on earth who also happens to have a very passionate fanbase? Of course anyone who has other stuff to do besides looking for a fight is going to praise him when asked.

Yeah but those people went in many directions. Some have their own independent business and fanbase. Some went into education and turned into tenured professors. Some created their own new companies after SpaceX/Tesla and turned into quasi competitors. And yet all of them said all these things only to stay in the good graces of Musk, not likely. Musk might care what Bezos, Gates and co say about him, but some former head of engineer that went into academia, I don't think so.

And of course it also disregards what they actually said, its not just 'platitudes'. Some explained in great detail what he does and why they are so impressed with him.

Some of them like Tom Mueller went out of their way, years after leaving the company, to tell people not to assign all credit to them. Why would they do that, if they wanted that they could have just remained silent.

If a 'chief engineers' job is to coordinate multiple teams of engineers and make high level decisions to lead to a larger strategic goal, then that is what Musk clearly does and does pretty well and that is hard to question.

If he himself can design a rocket engine or an electric motor from scratch is questionable but I don't think that's what being an engineer is.

> Those people can also be wrong about stuff. This is just an appeal to the reputation of those names. It doesn't give weight pro se.

Err. Sure. It is, in principle, possible for all of these people to be wrong. But where are the well known engineers who've actually worked with him who say he's not? There should be quite a few by now, right?

> I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.

I've seen a lot of people make this claim. But every time I've seen this claim made in a field I know well, it was the person making the claim that was wrong, not Musk. Maybe in your case you're right. But my experience is that every time i've seen him dunked on for something technical, he was mostly right and they were mostly wrong.

I guess the examples I'm thinking about are trashing on stuff that isn't technical, but there's little doubt to me that they bleed into technical things, because you can't have these personality traits and not have it affect technical decisions.

For example, he was writing about the Bob Lee stabbing as if it was a random violent attack. I wasn't 100% certain but at the time I was extremely suspicious of this claim, based on knowing the block where it happened, it was basically guaranteed that Lee and the assailant were the only two people on the block and it was dubious a homeless person could have camped there. He started trolling the district attorney, who is more conservative about these topics than the last guy, but even she told him to STFU.

There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.

Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.

> For example, he was writing about the Bob Lee stabbing as if it was a random violent attack. I wasn't 100% certain but at the time I was extremely suspicious of this claim, based on knowing the block where it happened, it was basically guaranteed that Lee and the assailant were the only two people on the block and it was dubious a homeless person could have camped there. He started trolling the district attorney, who is more conservative about these topics than the last guy, but even she told him to STFU.

I think you can still be a pretty good engineer and believe that a stabbing in SF is probably perpetrated by a random homeless person absent other information. It may have been wrong for him to jump to this conclusion, but I don't think it has any bearing on his technical skills.

> There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.

Again you may be perfectly right, but this has nothing to do with engineering talent. Lots of great engineers are famously assholes (in various ways): see, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, etc.

> Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.

This is just not the case as any kind of rule. Like, sure, a perfectly rational Bayesian optimizer may not do these things. But real engineering at the highest level isn't about that - it's about intuition from experience about which system design choices will be good and which won't, and acting quickly and efficiently on that information.

The very small intersection of incredible engineers who are also very good people have the humility to quickly pivot when they've been proven wrong, admit it, and move on. Elon is obviously not in this category.

But I think you have to admit that it's telling that when pressed for examples of his technical failures in public, all you could come up with were completely non-technical examples.

See, you're wrong on every count. Talented engineers don't jump to conclusions with this high frequency. It is totally predictave of engineering ability. You don't build a bridge by making public, arrogant statements that it will stand, when you are actually full of shit. This clearly permeates all of Elon's thinking. He has financial success which blinds him to this problem at this point.

You still haven't come up with a single example of his technical failure in public, and I think that is more telling than any discussion of how social ineptitude relates to engineering talent.

> Also, it sounds a lot to me like you neglect the relationship between sociability and engineering work. It is a huge thing. It absolutely cannot be ignored to be a successful engineer. Linus, despite criticisms, is quite sociable and socially aware, and it's a big part of his success.

Agree completely. But it is an objective fact that Elon Musk has inspired lots of engineers to work for him, and to do so at an incredibly high level of productivity.