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Comment by bombolo | Hacker News Reader

> His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself.

You mean hiring engineers to work on cars and rockets?

Organizing the efforts of large teams of smart people is one of the most high value activities you can do in our society.

Edit: not saying that's happening at Twitter, but it has demonstrably occurred at Tesla and SpaceX.

You can also hire people for that

It’s crazy how people can look at Elon’s twitter saga and come away with the impression that he is a good people manager.

You mean he hired product managers?

In my experience, product managers do not spontaneously organize to create successful, billion dollar companies, either.

I'm curious why do you think SpaceX and Tesla are market leaders in their niches? Is Elon the only person who hires product managers?

Testla is market leader in "tesla cars"… which is an odd way to define a market leader.

Spacex, I honestly don't know enough to comment about.

Tesla is the market leader in electric vehicles. Tesla sells more EVs in the US than all the other manufacturers combined.

https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-...

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/13/fully-electric-vehicles...

Tesla's aren't even good cars they are great batteries attached to mediocre cars sold at an unprofitable price rendered profitable only by government handouts.

However, it seemed that Elon's mind was more with manipulating Bitcoin rates, and then buying and changing Twitter the last few years. Tesla and SpaceX must be run by other people, which investors and Elon conveniently keep out of the picture.

Elon is certainly laser-focused on self-promotion, no doubt. I suspect most of the value he will deliver at those companies is in the past, but that doesn't detract from it.

Perhaps founders are not all that different from the companies they run. In time, bloat and complacency will twist them into unrecognizable shapes, until they too are disrupted by upstarts.

Why should Musk be any different?

> Elon is certainly laser-focused on self-promotion, no doubt.

Strongly doubt. But we will have to wait until he's no longer relevant before we get a good view of this man's inner workings.

This wasn't an achievement for SpaceX. Lots of very talented people wanted to work on space based on passion alone. It just came down to providing funding at a time space privatization was an uncertain venture.

Compare to Neuralink mostly being a failure.

No one wanted to work at SpaceX initially. It took Musk's persistence and ability to sell a vision to hire first employees. And yes, also money. But just money gives you Blue Origin, not SpaceX.

It took SpaceX many years and a few rockets blowing up before they had first successful lunch so what you expect Neuralink to have achieved by now?

They're making progress. Let's revisit the "Neuarlink is a failure" 10 years from now.

The role of Mike Griffin in helping Musk set up SpaceX and source the right people, and then steering NASA support his way can’t be ignored though. Without that it’s almost certain it wouldn’t exist now.

There is still something special about spacex. There are many other space companies that get the same passionate people but they get very little done by comparison.

Be careful not to assume the something special is Musk rather than it succeeding in spite of him.

Don't care that much for Tesla - the EV ship has sailed - but I hope he doesn't destroy the work being done by SpaceX's team.

Jeff Bezos is hiring engineers to work on rockets. Blue Origin is older than SpaceX and still hasn't reached orbit. So, I don't think it's that simple.

At this point it's fair to ask how much was Musk and how much was Gwynne Shotwell.

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