My personal take at the time when I regarded him positively was that he, although not really a genius, "got" things in general and being in a position of power, would allow those who really were geniuses to do their jobs.
If that was ever true, he switched from letting those brilliant people do their work to actually telling them to blindly follow his crazy ideas (for lulz and otherwise).
Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
Maybe you should review these pages and get your facts straight:
If it was so easy to bring this kind of stuff to market then why aren't more people as wildly successful? This kind of "Musk didn't do do anything or have the vision" hate is beyond tiring.
I love to shit on Musk as much as anyone but I dunno about this lol.
There's a lot of skill in hiring good technical people. IMO that "skill" basically just comes down to being a good technical person yourself so you can tell the difference. You can't hire an elite engineering team with hype, out of 100 applicants you'll get 2 good ones and 98 muppets that want to work at the trendy place and be seen to be doing so.
I've worked for like 5+ companies that were doing fine before some dipshit head of engineering hired a bunch of other dipshits and they took over and turned it into a big dipshit orgy hellbent on driving a perfectly good company straight into an iceberg. The person doing the hiring has a shitton of influence in how a business goes unless your business model can live with enterprise-grade average and you can just hire everyone. I can't see that being the case at Tesla or SpaceX...
I think Musk deserves some credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Doesn't stop him being a flog though.
What he's doing with Twitter is, I guess, a similar leap of faith, but I don't think it is going to pan out this time.
Incidentally, Atlas V used/uses Russian engines. Pretty bad idea in retrospect but at the time a lot of people thought it seemed reasonable.
> cost effective
That's another matter entirely. It would have been cheaper to use conventional disposable rockets. Even better than that is reusable conventional rockets; the economic sense of which has now been demonstrated by Falcon 9.
When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement.
For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is.
On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.
That aside, in many cases it takes an engineering-minded businessman to create the greatest enterprises. Not just in valuation, but in general value and appreciation in fields where one can do a lot of good but not get a lot of profit.
I actually don't agree with this because I find Tesla's so unsexy, I would never buy one. What I think he did do though, is bring a fairly reliable electric car into production, which was pretty cool, and because of the climate crisis, people wanted to contribute by ditching their petrol guzzler. It's also a bit of a "flex".
What Musk did was show the oil addicted automakers that EV's are both practical to manufacture and own. Using the word sexy to describe machinery and inanimate objects in general is just weird and I consider it the peak of marketoid speak.
The Space Shuttle would like a word.
The Shuttle did fulfill something like half of those, just those were pointless goals. But it wasn't reusability alone that made Shuttle a technical failure.
What is known is that it was designed to go to a polar orbit, where many spy satellites are, deploy a satellite and return to the launch site after a single orbit. It's that "single orbit" part that particularly necessitates the large cross-range capability, since 90 minutes later the launch site will about 1500 miles to the east of where it was. If landing after a single launch weren't necessary, they could just orbit for a day and wait for the landing sight to come around again. Deploying a satellite in a single orbit would be an incredible feat, but capturing one in a single orbit is just too far-fetched.
The idea of doing this was apparently to launch a US spy satellite quickly without giving the Soviets much time to track the exact orbital parameters the satellite was being deployed into. TBQH it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, unless the spy satellites themselves are presumed to be stealthy to Soviet radars. Maybe that was the case. I can see why the Soviets thought it was a nuclear bomber. Anyway, the Shuttle never actually went to polar orbit at all, so in this sense you could say the Shuttle never fulfilled its purpose.
True that.
> He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
Well, NASA decided that building rockets isn't their core purpose anymore as rocket building isn't as scientific, experimental anymore and could be comodotized and financed private industry to take over.
Musk was in thebright spot ant the right time, with enough capital and hype to take over the engineers and and funds and found the right executive team.
These are achievements, but I he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.
What is your basis for this belief? Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, by a man who was far richer than Elon Musk, hired people connected and accomplished in the space industry and with that opportunity has accomplished far far less. They've never put anything into orbit, even as a test. SpaceX's success has not precluded Blue Origin's success. Blue Origin hasn't succeeded despite hiring many of the best people in the industry because they're unfocused and undriven. Blue Origin is poorly managed by Bezos, not hindered by SpaceX's success.
Really, explain your reasoning for thinking otherwise. I would love to hear this.
PayPal is really old at this point though, the original people have had nothing to do with it for a very long time. IIRC PayPal had novel and useful functionality initially, before it was run into the ground as a product.
Billionaires are uniquely positioned to be, because they tend to get away repeatedly with things that would be career- or life-ending for others.
The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing.
His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best.
I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.
Well I do. Or at least I did.
He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it.
Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things.
But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.