Hacker News Reader

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

I have long suspected that if he knows one thing, elon knows to keep his nose out of spaceX and just throw cash at it.

Elon spends nearly as much time at SpaceX as he does Tesla. There's no question that Elon mucks in at the lowest levels of engineering at SpaceX.

If you want evidence from a reasonably neutral observer, take Sandy Munro (himself an engineer who has worked on everything from cars to aeroplanes). He recently interviewed Elon, ostensibly about Tesla but the interview was in a meeting room at SpaceX. After the interview he was invited to a two hour design review meeting and was "blown away" at Elon's depth of involvement.

https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=370 (6:10 to 8:45)

Yes, I saw that interview and the follow up. He can talk very in-depth about the engineering of the cars as well but he is _Chief Engineer_ at SpaceX. I don’t think people quite understand this when they call him a businessman, promoter or marketing guru.

He is also _Techno-king_ at Tesla...

I have no ideas about the depth of his technical knowledge at both companies, but the titles themselves don't hold much value when he gave them himself.

It does hold a lot of value when it comes to the legal liability if/when things go wrong.

Tesla's own engineers say Musk is disconnected from reality when it comes to the engineering side:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...

I have no doubt that Elon brings zero expertise to the table with regards to machine learning and automation. That's certainly not his domain of expertise—which is more in the realm of science and physics.

In this respect I'd imagine he's more akin to an overly excited tech geek who loves to obsess over the progress made by Andrej Karpathy and his team, but is otherwise leaving them alone to do their thing.

This is demonstrably not true

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

A friend of mine working down at Boca Chica on the starship says elon is there multiple times a week, and heavily involved. It’s well documented that he has been heavily involved at the engineering level in the past so I don’t see why he’d step back now.

That people still make this asinine argument shows that it has nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with people not liking the person and not wanting to give him credit because they don't like him.

That... Sounds more like Bezos and Blue Origin to me, from what I've heard.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos-idUSKBN1772ZQ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com