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I once had a lot of respect for the dude, now I wonder who the actual competent players are at tesla and spacex who have actually got things done, because it's become pretty apparent the emperor has no clothes.
I had a rough sense that this was the case, but those quotes (and sources) make it undeniably clear.
[Insert standard caveat about his wide array of harmful and toxic behavior]
Good visionary leadership: 1. creates a big picture, 2. hires competent people to execute, and 3. then gets out of the way.
Musk largely succeeds on the first two, but waffles on the third. However, he creates enough fires to distract himself from interfering with all his companies all the time, so his failure on the third point is somewhat self-limiting.
He is well known to have 3-4h long discussions with engineering teams going into extreme detail (and doing so until into the night) and making choices and taking responsibility when they fail.
If anything is true about Musk then its that he is the opposite of 'getting out of the way'.
> so his failure on the third point is somewhat self-limiting.
Or what most people who study the subject actually believe, that him 'not getting out of the way' is actually why the companies are successful.
Bezos took the get out of the way approach and BO has spend like 10+ billion with no revenue and will never be profitable, while SpaceX is a highly successful company.
For SpaceX, do not wonder, this is known:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
https://gizmodo.com/spacex-nasa-elon-musk-gwynne-shotwell-tw...
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/gwynne-shotwell-aiming...
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-gwynne-shotwell-to-oversee-...
No matter that Shotwell or anybody else in the leadership of SpaceX would agree with this take.
And Shotwell overseeing the Starship program is just a dumb headline. What happened is that operation in Brownsville was simply integrated into the normal SpaceX structures rather then being a somewhat parallel operation. Shotwell was very involved before and after this administrative change. Neither means that much has changed in terms of how the program is lead technically.
People are speculating that the decision may have had something to do with Musk's behavior, without evidence (aside from the behavior they've seen from Musk- which may not have been taken into account).
People are speculating that the decision to choose Blue Origin may not have been based on Blue Origin's actual launch capabilities, without evidence (aside from the lack of launches so far- though they could have capabilities NASA knows about but the public does not).
SpaceX is a here today gone tomorrow kind of company, because it does whatever Elon Musk wants it to do. You don't want space exploration for an entire country (and to some extent—at least currently—the entire world) to rest on the whims of one man.
The government often awards contracts to "backups". So NASA decided to sign a contract with a second eccentric billionaire. Lol. This is America.
The problem I am point out here is that NASA defines a narrow set of specification and don't value anything beyond those specifications.
NASA is not optimizing for the most useful money spend for the next 20 years. They define narrow specification for short term operations and only value that.
So now we have something that is incredibly revolutionary and could carry humanity all over the solar system getting less money then a hacked together solution from 3 contractors who have proven to perform extremely badly on such contracts getting more money.
He points this out and stands up for free speech, which the marginalized need the most! It's the powerless who needs free speech and freedom broadly. Not the powerful.
Someone that uses his wealth to accelerate sustainable energy and reusable rockets and satellite internet for Ukraine and working almost every day instead of retiring and buying mansions for himself. He could do that and would get none of this hate. Unfucking believable. He has 0 mansions and 0 yachts and removing 0 freedoms and doesn't even hoard patents with Tesla and SpaceX. He praises other competing companies for moving to electric vehicles. But oh no, he's independent (who voted for Biden, fwiw) and challenges the official narrative and occasionally says and does dumb things. Spaceman bad.
As though the rest of us are all perfect and have made greater contributions to humanity and would have dedicated most of our time and resources into such projects after winning the Paypal stock lottery.
You're really going along with the corporate media and other powerful interests that he's the villain and not themselves who get us into devastating wars, are actively removing our freedoms and privacy, and managing our way into debt and collapse? Get real.
If you're going to cherrypick (and distort) some of the worst things people on one side have said, why not cherrypick his signal amplification of insane anti-reasoning and alt-right and fascist-adjacent bullshit?
Do you think that amplification is 'doing great things for the world'? Are these guys in desperate need of a platform? Why defend them?
The Daily Stormer founder's back on Twitter, and you're telling me that we can't call a spade a spade.
[1] Not that you seem to have any problems with telling black from white, given that you're happy to pooh-pooh particular political/cultural viewpoints as harmful, while splitting hairs and 'Is it really fascism?'-ing on this one.
Pilate in front of the crowd: “What’s worse, some guy who said ‘Love each other’ or Barabas who actually killed people?”
The crowd: “The guy who said ‘Love each other’”.
You’ll have to stand your ground in face of lions in arenas for a few more centuries to show humans who’s right, before they ditch their priests. If the priests say we should hate one or two guys because they are fascists and more dangerous than murderers, the crowd will.
Oh, Elon is just telling us the truth that "the man" doesn't want us to know? Truths like: Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer by his gay lover? That the government is running a false flag on the latest mass shooter and his white supremacist viewpoints? That the guy leading the cave rescues in Thailand was a pedophile? And on. And on. And on.
The false claim about one of most powerful and privileged people (Pelosi) in the world was another mistake and something he quickly deleted. Oh no. Be sure to fall on your fainting couch. Elon gets false accusations like that sent his way every single day. But one sent briefly in the other direction is an unacceptable slight and worth endless hand wringing?
And please explain to us how any of those are remotely as consequential as examples like Weapons of Mass Destruction or Russiagate or stoking a race war for clicks.
Funnily enough, too, there are people who think that hey, maybe it's a better goal for humanity to y'know, fix the place we live, rather than vacuuming government billions to "colonize Mars". According to Musk he was intending to send a manned mission there next year and have established the first settlement by the end of the decade. Maybe that's what people mean when they talk about him being far more show than substance. (Also, to pre-empt the inevitable: this isn't to say "he hasn't achieved anything". Of course he has.)
There has to be an optimum somewhere between the extremes as descried in "Atlas Shrugged" but this... this is not it.