“Slapping a name on other people’s work” is something leaders do. They also typically are the ones who gather those people together and create the environment in which they can do their best work.
…that said, yes, I think Musk is an idiot.
There's a reason he was lauded before this Twitter/X debacle.
This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time.
The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
I didn't know this one and just read more about it. This is so absurd.
There’s an episode of the podcast On With Kara Swisher where she goes into detail about who he was and how he went off the rails. The date is 2022-11-14. I found it really helpful to square this circle.
I’m not as familiar with Tesla, but I’ve been following SpaceX pretty closely since around 2014. He’s not in the trenches doing CFD to optimize cooling on the latest iteration of the raptor engine, and who knows whether reusability was originally his idea, but he knows his shit. When you hear him talk about rockets, he sounds very competent, unlike when he talks about software. And I’ve never heard any actual rocket scientists say Elon doesn’t know shit about rockets.
(He does sometimes move fast and ignore established wisdom though, as with the concrete pad that got obliterated during the last launch. But sometimes that’s how you sidestep decades of cruft)
I do wish Gwynne Shotwell were more of a household name. She’s the one running SpaceX while Elon is off Eloning.
Doesn’t seem to know anything about tech though. And he’s burned his reputation to the ground this last year.