I and the few people who managed to actually graduate with our sanity intact (out of like 50) learned to play this game you suggested where we have to play to their egos, and try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing. Every week they will suggest experiments that are nonsensical, and we will huddle and discuss how to do some preliminary work and present it in a way such that they will think it’s their idea to change it in a more productive direction.
When smart people are forced to work with egotistical pricks like this, I think it’s inevitable such a system comes in place.
The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system. For Better or worse this shitty lab actually put out a drug that helps patients (I constantly think about how and why that happened). Could this lab have been more productive? Absolutely. Would this lab have existed without these people though? Probably not though.
The question here is whether Elon is aware this is why spacex and Tesla succeeded or he’s too deranged now to remember it. Looks like it’s the latter and that just sucks. My professors too have gotten unhinged (they’ve been literally pushed out of two universities and an entire country, though they always find another sucker, which at this point is the wellcome institute lol). When you’ve been doing this shitty shtick for too long I suppose it gets to you.