As an ex spacex employee I can definitely say that it wouldn’t have been half the company today if Musk want in charge. Not a fanboy but trying to give an honest evaluation. Space is crazy hard and doesn’t happen without brilliant people so of course the credit for the success of the company goes to the engineers and everyone that gave some of their best work to making it happen though that type of success doesn’t happen without Musk at the helm. When it comes to space, he is truly a visionary that pushes for the craziest ideas and then challenges these brilliant people to make it happen. He truly loves space and has embraced learning everything there is to know about the engineering side of things so it’s not like what he’s proposing is impossible. It’s just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the brilliant people that he’s been able to recruit are able to make it happen. It’s a BRUTAL work environment from a work life balance perspective but you don’t mind because you’re working on SPACESHIPS with some of the most brilliant people you’ve ever met and doing some of the most impactful work of your life.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.
Thanks for sharing your ex-space-x perspective. I too, am skeptical about any good coming from this.
I observe that Musk’s biggest wins is where he has used his enthusiasm and large cachet of celebrity capital to challenge the status quo. Tesla and SpaceX both embody elements of society that sci-fi has been dreaming since we were kids. Self landing rockets flying all the time! Electric robot cars that drive themselves! He challenges entrenched industries to do a thing that people wish they would do, but the bean counters say isn’t worth it. It least that’s how the fanciful narrative goes.
The problem with Twitter (or any social network/super app) is that it is not clear what that “go big, go beyond, dream big” trajectory is. For me personally, it’d be about open source, open walls, federation, and above all no fricking advertisement/surveillance economy. I don’t see how Musk’s acquisition here achieves that or any other “dream for the stars” aspiration one has for Twitter.
He has talked about open sourcing Twitter's algorithms.
And His dream for the stars aspiration for Twitter is a public square where people exchange communication and ideas freely, civilly and honestly. Some might argue that is a crazier dream than autonomous rockets, Mars and electric cars!
"It’s just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the brilliant people that he’s been able to recruit are able to make it happen"
you can read this sentence and come away with the conclusion that he doesn't do anything, or that he is responsible for everything. To me, it mostly seems like he has a bunch of money / financing so he can pay people to try lots of often very dumb ideas and some might work. His core "skill" being an accumulation of immense wealth.
you might say "you need both ideas and execution, and he is an ideas guy", which is correct, but i think the level of credit (and compensation) is wildly skewed towards the "ideas guy" in this case
You can’t have one without the other. If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things. Musk doesn’t propose ridiculous things. He’s an engineer at heart and truly understands the science of space flight to an insane degree so when he proposes something it’s within the realm of possibility but no one else is doing it because it’s never been done and the chance of failure is so high that any sane business would shut it down. He can’t achieve anything without his employees but those employees wouldn’t be doing a single moonshot idea without leadership willing to invest in those ideas.
You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that’s a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He’s a tremendous leader and you’d be foolish to underestimate him.
Again, I don’t fanboy him but I do give credit where credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked with him on a project that he cared about. He’s brilliant at some things but his god complex is off the charts. He’s an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he’s not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes leadership.
Our culture tends to deify leaders when it’s really a team effort. Don’t blindly hate the guy because others fawn over him. He’s human, and a deeply flawed one at that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the impossible.
the number of things he has proposed that were lies / scams (solar tiles, tesla self driving), or incredibly stupid (hyper loop, whatever these shitty robots are now, boring company etc) is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer. he is a salesmen as you say. to me he is more elizabeth holmes than nikola tesla
"If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?
> is too high for me to think he is a particularly gifted engineer.
These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.
> 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.
I've said the same about Branson and Virgin Galactic. He's been trying since 2004 to commercialize spaceflight and I don't think they've done anything worth mentioning. It seems to take more than an eccentric rich guy with big ideas to tackle space.
It's not all ideas, but an ideas guy is a necessary but insufficient condition for the ultra talented "do-ers" to do their amazing things. Elon could have bought a big chunk of Google or apple if he wanted to with all his wealth and just generated nice returns, but t we probably wouldn't have boosters that return to land and can be reused if he did.
Musk essentially was the A series, which led to him becoming the chairman and majority owner of the 7 month old company, which at that point just had a handful of guys. He ended up dismissing the original founders of the company before production began on their first product.
Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.
You can still do that. Just "electric battery car" was not a novel idea in 2003.
Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.
He has done a fantastic job at fundraising for SpaceX. Most other companies can't get past Series G as a private company. I think SpaceX is on series N, or around there. The talent pool available to SpaceX and Tesla is also very smart and motivated, and will put up with a lot of BS from the companies because they are so mission-driven.
That is his really great talent: getting smart people to put their resources behind ambitious projects. That was also Elizabeth Holmes's talent, and Adam Neumann's. So far, he has done well at pivoting that inspiring message to real results, unlike the other two.
You may very well be right! I didn't mean to come off saying you are wrong, just that Revenue isn't a proxy. IKEA on the other hand I very highly doubt has a higher market cap. Retail typically has high Revenue and low margin, like Walmart
Not even close. It might be the most valuable one that uses venture funding (which would be normal given that they might also be the most highly funded venture-backed company, I'm not sure if anyone is beating them on that), but there are a ton of huge private companies that don't use venture funding.
Now I'm curious. Do you have some examples? I know there are some huge companies that are state owned like saudi aramco, but dont know if any other privately held companies with 100+ billion valuation
Most of them are companies whose owners either want to keep them private or who are not well-served by "tradFi" as the cryptobros say. As such, they don't have valuations over $100 billion (they don't have valuations at all, usually), but they are worth over $100 billion.
Several big law firms are likely worth over $100 billion if they ever were equity financed, but use a partnership structure for legal reasons. The same for large hedge funds, which use partnerships for tax reasons.
This list has some more traditional companies that have stayed private but have high revenue:
These lists only include companies that report their revenue for one reason or another (eg to get a loan). Many profitable private companies don't - their owners like to stay private and extract cash from the business rather than having to keep the profit in the business.
State-owned companies are another group entirely, and are often worth a ton.
SpaceX is unique because there are a whole lot of people who want to work on space exploration and very few big companies that are making serious progress in the field. Many people will put up with lower pay and extreme working conditions just for the chance to be a part of something like that. I don't think we can say the same for Twitter.
> From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision.
Maybe? But I think he and others would argue that Twitter was gradually losing popularity and had no direction. So I'm not sure "slow death" is such a great culture to hold onto.
Have you considered for a second that sending people to an irradiated hell hole planet where conditions are worse than earth even with 1000 years of climate change isnt the idea it’s cracked up to be?
The notion of "progress" is just mythologizing the past and fetishizing a particular version of the future. It only serves to portray alternatives as "anti-progress"; it is a rhetorical cudgel devoid of substance. We have problems that need solving, climate change is one of them. Musk's notion of Mars as "Planet B" is an entirely unworkable idea, and dangerous in that it invites postponing action in favor of a silver bullet that will never arrive.
Things are not worth doing simply because they are risky - that's just more fetishism. They are worth doing because they solve problems. Space travel has the potential to solve certain problems, and is already solving lots of problems today. Mars colonization is not a serious proposal to any problem, because it can't be accomplished on any time horizon we're planning for. Mars colonization will likely never happen, and if it does, it is far beyond the foreseeable future (>100 years).
So; SpaceX's rockets (and satellites) could certainly be useful, and are certainly useful today, but as GP pointed out, Musk's stated purpose is nonsense.
Why derail the conversation with rudeness and condescension? Why put words in my mouth instead of engaging with what I've said? Cui bono?
At the scale of individuals I would agree people should be free to try whatever hairbrained schemes they please, at that scale who am I to say what will work out or won't or what success even means.
What concerns me is that so many people are buying into false solutions and transparent grift about real and pressing issues that impact us all collectively. Musk isn't a crackpot who should be tolerated in the interests of liberty, he's a public figure who is actively causing harm, and I believe will cause more in the future. So I'm certainly entitled to share my views on this public figure, and I'll continue to do so. I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
>>I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
Because
I think I shouldn't do X. == ok
I think You shouldn't do X. == no
I think you should get all the rights to not start a rocket company, car company, a tunnel boring company, solar panel company. But you demanding others not start all those companies seems to be wrong to me.
Again, I give you all the rights do sit down and do nothing.
Whatever comment it is you're responding to, it doesn't seem to be mine, since I never said any of those things.
The freedom you seem to be advocating for is freedom from other people having opinions, existing, or speaking to you. As if they only mattered when they agreed with you or were willing to help you, and they became irrelevant the moment they had a criticism. I think you should reconsider. I think life is better with vigorous debate with people you disagree with, and that the things you so badly want to "get done" will be richer and deeper if you engage with people who may not like what you're doing. Otherwise, how could there be any other outcome than finding yourself surrounded by yes men?
I think understanding the difference between a poorly considered plan and real progress is very important. Elon seems to demonstrate repeatedly (even if he has a mythos otherwise) he does not think multiple detailed steps ahead as illustrated by several failures like Boring company.
To be fair, doesn't seem like he's putting any effort into digging holes.
The strongest argument is Tesla still doesn't have self-driving cars considering he's given it tons of attention for years and missed ETAs many times, but they're clearly getting there.
That said, while I do think space travel is crazy cool, the prospects of living on Mars are quite long-term and a _lot_ of work to the point you might ask if it's really worth it worrying about it right now. How are they going to solve the atmosphere? Or even more impossible, how are they going to solve the ionizing radiation from space? I guess they could just live in closed-off domes but still...
Exactly the how and why of mars haven’t been explained at all. Because he isn’t serious. Fsd, mars, etc are all grifts to get engineers to work harder and give up more value so they think they are a part of some meaning.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.