You forgot roadster 2.0 and the mannequin robot

Boring Company is right up with Tesla and SpaceX on the success trajectory by lots of measures. This is a company that just started from nothing a few years ago, and it’s already building a massive transit project, and is in final bidding in several other major projects.

They’re already building their own tunnel boring equipment.

The company raised $675 million at a $5.65 billion valuation, putting it ahead of several S&P 500 stocks in market cap, closest to Alaska Airlines.

To say this is unusual is an understatement.

At this point in SpaceX history, the company had yet to launch Falcon 1.

I think a whole lot of people are going to be mightily shocked at how successful this company will turn out. In ten years, when it’s clear how successful it is, everyone will pretend the idea was stunningly obvious and was only successful through public financing, or something like that.

All excellent examples of how much hot air Musk spews.

And the cybertruck and the electric semi that was announced 5 freaking years ago.

What about Sun King? Dig It? Don't Bother Me? Boys? Flying? (all terrible Beatles songs)

When you have successes like Tesla and SpaceX and PayPal it doesn't really matter how many failures you have. This isn't like being an airline pilot where you're judged by your worst outing.

> but judging what he will accomplish based on what he says is almost always a losing bet.

He is literally the richest man in the world. Do you think he isn’t a successful gambler because of a few $1 bets that haven’t paid off (yet on many) vs the several $1000 bets that have?

Rome wasn't built in a day and were all standing on the shoulders of giants. However you need trailblazers to cut through and push the threshold. Elon is a hacker and disruptor and entrenched interests would like to just keep things they way they were, thereby pumping money into PR firms to talk down disruption and innovation. You're either a paid talk downer or a victim of that.

All that is true and yet nobody else got EVs on the road and reusable rockets in the sky at scale.

You do realize that everyone had those benefits? In particular dinosaur rocket companies.

Yet Elon's the only person/company who put those privileges to good use

I keep seeing people say that Musk had little to do with SpaceX's technical side, and I wonder where this meme (in the original Dawkins sense of the word) is coming from.

If you watch the EverydayAstronaut interviews with Musk it shows that he has a deep understanding of the engineering tradeoffs and design reasons for many components of the rocket, and in fact is being quite careful with what he can share due to not wanting to leak company secrets. In fact, some of the questions that were asked in the earlier interview were re-referenced in a later interview as having been considered and leading to design changes.

I think Musk is a smart engineering type who sees finance, PR, politics etc as just another engineering problem, with all the pros and cons that creates. He's had a ton of success in hard-tech fields just by not being an idiotic pointy-haired-boss in a world where finance and political people are repeatedly being put in charge of projects and companies whose tech they don't understand. This doesn't mean he is likeable, or someone you'd want to have a beer with, or moral, or anything else. But it does mean he is capable of managing a tech company better than most, if we use the success of the company as our capable-of-managing-a-company metric.

No, his main skill is believing that big things are possible, and then being willing to commit resources and to be patient to let those possibilities come to reality when many others are will not.

Well I have seen the world, and I am not biased or frankly even a Musk fan, despite finding myself defending him as of late here on HN. I don’t own a Tesla (find them ugly vehicles), don’t use or care about Twitter, but I’ll admit that I think the SpaceX stuff is pretty exciting mainly because I can see it.

I said this on another thread but I will say it here too. Musk’s genius and value is not his engineering skill but his willingness to think about big possibilities and then be fearless and patient enough to make what many others think are risky (and stupid) bets on those possibilities.

We need folks like that. They move the needle far more than the random HN engineers who feel that the Musks and Edison’s of the world aren’t relevant because they “didn’t design or engineer” the technologies they made viable to the masses.

Musk and Edison’s roles—were not as the engineers of technology, but as the facilitators of the engineers.