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Comment by tomjakubowski | Hacker News Reader

What "heavy-duty" software did Musk write for a 20 year period? I can't square it with the career section in his Wikipedia bio.

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I can assure you Mr. Musk was not involved in writing code at x.com. Though he was a very decent product-manager-type guy and generally more technical than most PMs. I believe he can understand many issues with code-bases, but he absolutely did not understand why we did things the way we did in the crypto(graphy) code at x.com.

Sounds like you might have some anecdotes to share :-)

He forced PayPal to switch to windows. Opinions differ as to the wisdom of that move.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12513223

There is none. The only thing anyone has referenced is some pre-PayPal code that got scrapped and rewritten in the merger and some games when he was a kid.

Look for his interviews. He mentions a software his organization wrote and sold, but the buyer didn't know how to fully take advantage of it. Kind of like flying an F22 as a cardboard box down the side of a grassy hill.

Can you elaborate? It's a big leap to go from vaguely describing something you read he said to then describing this hypothetical as a metaphorical F22.

He made x.com, which was a financial service company that got bought by paypal. THen I think he worked at paypal for a while. Then he did spacex. Then he did tesla. All of those are very engineering heavy and he has been known to get into nitty gritty on all of them.

> he has been known to get into nitty gritty

Is he writing any software at SpaceX or Tesla? I've heard stories here and there of him sitting in an engineering meeting.

Zip2 was founded in 1995 -- there are credible claims (from a biography) he wrote software there, and that's all I've found.

highly doubt this guy wrote a single line of code at any of those companies

Is there any actual evidence of him "getting into the nitty gritty" at SpaceX or Tesla? Confirmation from people who would have been there to see it? Or just his own claims? I don't think his time doing early web stuff at x.com or PayPal counts as "heavy duty" and it certainly wasn't 20 years.

If you ever see him at any talk thats not a pure PR event he tends to go into engineering details. Good series I would recommend from Everyday Astronaut where they get into lots of nitty gritty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w

What do you think "PR" is if not doing videos like that? And how do scripted comments about a technical domain that's not programming have anything to do with his actual claim (see OP) to have done "20 years of heavy duty programming"? There's no doubt that he has some kind of smarts, but he claimed something very specific and AFAIK that claim has no basis in fact.

I don’t have rocket engineering expertise, but I do have AI.

When I see him talk about AI (which he claims to be an expert in), it’s like hearing college freshman, after first 5 classes of ML 101, who read a lot of pop-science blogs about it.

He worked in the video game industry at one point and wrote some low level code there.

Rocket flight control? I'm not sure that was 20 years in a row or how much he really does of it, but that's my guess.

He's the CEO. You think he's writing the flight control software?

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