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John Carmack's take: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Kevin Watson's take, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:

"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."

Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:

"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."

> Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people

Musk's not much of an inventor, though. Certainly, that's not why he's rich.

Part of the criticism of Musk is that the popular view of him is totally out of whack with what you get if you just look at what he does, and has done. He's not Tony Stark.

I think we need to distinguish between inventor (literally building new things themselves) vs executor (making stuff happen that would not have happened otherwise, or least not as quickly).

I think Elon falls much more into the second category, which I agree is not really like Tony Stark, but I think still provides a ton of value to society. I think there's a real argument to be made that he is the reason we have dropped cost per pound of payload to orbit by over half with reusable rockets, even if he himself didn't invent the functionality.

Oh, he deserves plenty of credit. He seems to be quite good at, at least, certain aspects of running a business, and happens to be interested in some fun and/or useful things, which is nice.

But he's not a super-genius, and given how flighty he can be, when he announces various Grand Visions, it's wise to take a wait-and-see approach. His big mouth probably ought to have landed him in quite a bit of legal trouble, too, except that it's so much harder for the justice system to deal with rich people than poor people.

It's not that he's uniquely awful among successful business dudes, since much of the above is true about many of them—his PR and superfans are just... grating.

Third category: Owner. Inventors invent things. Executors help them do so. Owners, the Edisons of the world, are the people with the property interest in the invention. They are the ones who get to deploy and use inventions within their business.

Which is why the Steve Jobs analogy might work better than Edison.

Henry Ford seems an apt comparison. "Industrialist and business magnate", from Wikipedia's Henry Ford article, seems to pretty much cover it. Though with less of a focus on making products affordable for the normal person (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a difference in priorities).

That still makes him a pretty big deal, of course.

Yeah, Musk, Ford, Jobs, and Edison are all a big deal regardless of their role in actually inventing technology. I think Jobs is the most appropriate analog because he also has a public perception as being the person who created the tech which isn't really accurate. I'm not sure Ford had that reputation and Edison was more hands on.

It is also probably worth nothing that they all had another trait in common. They were all notorious assholes for various reasons.

Yeah, sorry, should have included that in my other post, but I do agree that Jobs is a decent analog, too. Similar public profile, sort-of similar reputation, though Jobs wasn't as prone to strident, public bullshitting.

Edison wasn't necessarily an inventor either.

That said if you're a patron of inventors then you are an inventor. If you can manage the pain of failing and failing and failing, then in my book you're creative and a co-inventor.

Comparing him to Edison is appropriate I think, in both the good and bad ways that represents. I've also heard him compared with William C. Durant (Of GM circa 1910) which I think is also an appropriate comparison in both good and bad ways.

>Edison

I agree, and think of him in much the same was as I think of Edison. It's strange how polarizing a figure Musk is. It seems like a majority of people (or maybe a vocal minority) either want to attribute every single thing to his own personal genius, no help from others or good fortune. While others view everything he's accomplished as nothing more than luck born out on the backs of other people's labor. I don't know where the balance lies between those two extremes but I doubt that either one is very accurate.

Penelope Scott's "Rät" [1] touches on this in a way I adore -

    So fuck your tunnels, fuck your cars, fuck your rockets, fuck your cars again
    You promised you'd be Tesla, but you're just another Edison

Been listening to this song on repeat as my FAANG exit date approaches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI

He's obviously a finance guy.

Is he really a visionary? Because from what I can tell, he has roughly the same background reading science fiction and making extrapolations from current science to the future, and has made similar conclusions about the risks of not multi-homing humanity, and the challenge of building intelligent non-humans. That doesn't make him a visionary.

My conclusion instead is that Elon Musk is Chaos Titan; like the netflix chaos monkey, but basically just going around causing chaos by hyping up twitter and then causing massive swings with individual tweets.

I think that's a good question.

I don't mind Musk much either way and while I'm annoyed when he wants to let Trump back on Twitter after what I strongly believe was an attempt at a coup d'état, or him removing, say, the mobile charger in new Teslas I still like the products that his companies make and when he sits down and does an interview he says things that resonate with me.

So what makes someone a visionary? I mean I sit down and have a vision where Earth is a multi-planetary species, we build an outpost on the Moon within the next few years, and then Mars, and then mine asteroids. But is that all it takes? If so I think the word visionary is often either misapplied or is quite diluted. But if we take into account the need to execute on such visions, naturally, calling Musk a visionary makes more sense. Maybe we just don't have a great word (or one isn't immediately coming to mind) for someone who says "we should go to Mars, and I'm going to participate/lead in the creation of the entity that will do that".