Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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The reusable rockets are real. The cool EVs are real, though Tesla is obviously losing its edge more than SpaceX.

Pure bullshitters don’t do that.

No he didn’t personally build all that stuff, but there is far too much of a trail of success here for the guy to have been a fool. He was at least clearly quite good at selling a vision and knowing who to hire and promote to make it happen. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

I’ve followed him since before he was famous and I remember hearing early interviews of his. I think he was genuinely a genius.

Was.

Today he seems totally fried. I suspect drug abuse is a major factor. I also strongly suspect he’s bipolar, and that can worsen with age especially if you are not rigorous about treating it and taking care of yourself.

I think people want to recon him into a fool because the fall is actually pretty damn depressing. It’s easier to say he was always like this than to realize that drugs and social media (hard to say which was worse) took a great mind.

I don't think Elon did any of that either, except to bring money to smarter people to actually build those things.

bringing money to smarter people to actually build things is huge! even if that is all he did, why do we down play that?

In Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people. And for Tesla, he wasn't even a founder, he just kind of took over.

With every success there's some amount of luck, and some amount of accrued power, and some amount of grit and novel creation. It's increasingly looking like the less that Musk has his hands on things, the better "his" companies do. He may have lots of leftover power from his early luck, but others need to rein him in for any sort of success to happen. Now that his ego is too big, we get whatever has been happening for the past few years.

> In Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people.

The site we're on is a testament to that. Even if Elon is just a successful VC investor and not an engineer, why denigrate that? I'm not saying this out of any love for Elon, but to recognize that getting the right people together in the right time and place and funding them is, in and of itself, and accomplishment. eg Al Gore and creating the Internet.

I think he aged out of optimism, and now feels a sense of social responsibility appropriate for his age, and is applying the same tactics he used to become so successful in rocketry and automotion.

There's always another other coping mechanism.

I'm fine with this one. Massive amounts of money spent on the opposite of the political orthodoxy is always fun.

Oh, I don’t know, last time was a little unfun in Europe for a while.

And directly resulted in the best era Europe has ever had.

I mean, unless you're one of the 75 million people who died in the massacres, the concentration camps, the firebombing, the disease, the starvation. Maybe we could find a way to have a great era without that, they might suggest.

Being bombed to death, losing tens of millions in death camps and trench warfare, and then being divided in half between the USA and Russia for 70 years? Really?

His brain didn't do the rocket science or the EV engineering.

He's an investor who knows a bit of science, and is able to inspire people - which translates to money.

Inspiring people is a great skill and it could have been great for everyone to have that central push. But the many years of grifting has been exposed now, so maybe he feels like he's got nothing to loose.

There's a lot of rationalizing going on in this thread.

Musk didn't invent Paypal, he didn't found Tesla, he didn't design a single rocket for SpaceX (he bought a bunch of ship designs from NASA which they then reused). He puts his name on these companies and pretends to be the only thing holding these companies together. He was always like this.

This is a bad argument. "He didn't actually do the work". Well duh. Lots of things are done as a team.

He was on the team at three monumental companies. You seem to believe he just got lucky. But if it happens 3 times, it's not an exception, it's a pattern.

I've "been on the team" at more than a dozen monumental companies.

Doesn't mean I get to take credit for the stuff they've done...

And objectively speaking, the fact that everything Musk micromanages is an abysmal failure is proof that Musk was not behind the rockets, or the EVs. SpaceX was going nowhere until Shotwell took over. Tesla was going nowhere until Musk brought in qualified executives from other carkmakers. Boring's a failure to launch. Neuralink is touting "accomplishments" that were already accomplished decades ago. X is worse now after 1.5 years of Musk ownership.

You should be more positive. You do get to claim partial credit for the teams you were on :)

If you were very early to the team, you get to claim a larger fraction of credit as well

There is no alternate history timeline where Elon and his army of insecure, raging manchildren didn't suck up all the oxygen in the room so I guess we'll never know how much better things could have been.

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