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Comment by badwolf | Hacker News Reader

I think a big part of SpaceX successes are due to Elon letting Gwynn Shotwell manage the company.

Apparently when they first met, she gave him a dressing down and told him a bunch of things he needed to do to be successful. He then tracked her down and hired her to do all the things.

Right, you don't build a spaceflight / rocket company in a vacuum, or from scratch as a software engineer. He poached top talent and got the job done from the bank and his twitter account. Not that I'm knocking that (it worked!), but the "Elon is a great engineer" trope is questionable.

Look: http://larsblackmore.com/

That's the kind of person who makes spacex successful.

> "Elon is a great engineer"

Even his "physics degree" is apparently BS

Unrelated but I wish the market/VC/wallstreet put more value into hardware. I know why they never will (lower margins and harder to scale) but as an engineer I would much rather work on something like space ships or automation in robotics over just another internal reporting service that is being rebuilt just to deliver a report in 1 hour instead of 1 day.

You'd be surprised how much space/robotics is just analytics and reporting. But I get the sentiment. If you want to get into robotics, coursera courses and some ML knowledge can go a long way in today's hiring market.

Yeah that makes sense, maybe the grass is always greener, but I think even if I was doing reporting pipelines at a robotics company I would enjoy it more than the reporting pipeline I currently work on in the adtech industry.

> you don't build a spaceflight / rocket company in a vacuum

Sure, you don't build it in a vacuum (I'll see myself out)

Yeah but put that MIT guy at Boeing or LM, and you get the same disposable rockets they've been building for 100 years. You need a crazy guy at the top to allow for crazy things, otherwise you'll get the same results. If you put a bunch of Google engineers under Oracle or Cisco management, you get Oracle or Cisco in the end.

> Yeah but put that MIT guy at Boeing or LM, and you get the same disposable rockets they've been building for 100 years.

I don't think he'd have gone there. But you're right, that a good vision is absolutely going to attract the right talent and make a cohesive company. It's just that's not engineering that's management.

He's got a mega case of "George Lucas Syndrome" it seems. He needs someone who can tell him "No."

You have to wonder: if he was starting SpaceX now and had the same interaction with Shotwell now, would he hire her? I doubt it.

I’ve been hearing this a lot and while GS is a huge part of SpaceX success this says nothing about Tesla and the way Elon has grown the company.

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