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Comment by mack1001 | Hacker News Reader

How much of this success is because of Elon?

How do you measure something like that?

Without Elon, SpaceX wouldn't exist (and in all likelyhood no comparable company would exist in its place), so all of it.

Without everyone but Elon, SpaceX wouldn't exist, so none of it.

A better spin on this question is probably along the lines of:

Does SpaceX still need Elon? As a figure head, maybe. As a leader? More complicated, there's probably still some risky path-finding left but the biggest moon-shots are now out of the way and as long as it doesn't become a quarterly returns focused company anyone slightly bullish could probably do a good enough job.

Musk owns 60+% of SpaceX, and it is private so quarterly returns are irrelevant.

> but the biggest moon-shots are now out of the way

You'd think so, but if Elon is correct in his words, some bigger moon-shots are still comping. BFR program could be interesting.

Does SpaceX still need Elon - compared to what - for what?

Does SpaceX still need Elon to control ownership of the company as opposed to selling to "average" investors in order to colonize mars? Almost certainly.

Does SpaceX still need Elon as the CEO as opposed to the "average" other CEO they could hire, to profitably launch satellites into space? Almost certainly not.

At least we reach theoretically answerable questions with this sort of construction, but I don't think we have enough information to answer any but the most obvious versions such as those above.

SpaceX's biggest moonshots, if they keep succeeding and Elon keeps leading, are yet to come.

SpaceX has accomplished only a few percent of their stated mission: "SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets"

There's still so much work to do.

Success works on an inverse veto system, where everyone has to perform right for anything to happen at all. That includes Elon, who invested a lot of his own funds in the beginning, and as I have heard manages actively.

Eventually some other investor would be convinced boosters could be reused multiple times and that it'd be a huge competitive advantage and a qualitative change in the launch and space operations marketplace.

There is no way to tell accurately when that would happen.

All of it, because he founded the company. But most people agree none of it would happen without Gwynne Shotwell.

If Microsoft does well, it's because of Satya Nadella's brilliant leadership. If Space X or Tesla does well, it's definitely not because of Elon...because he tweeted a bad thing once?

You have to keep in mind "if not but for me" is not the same as "all because of me".

SpaceX is a huge collaboration of many essential individuals who's absence would have made it impossible.

A better question is, "How much of this success is because of Gwynne Shotwell?"

And the answer is: Most of it!

Tesla is lacking a leader equivalent to Gwynne, sadly (and I'm long 100 TSLA)

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