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Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

I am worried that the good people at SpaceX might decide to abandon ship because of the Musk association. The money might be good, the work fantastic and exciting, but at some point saying "I work at SpaceX/Tesla/whatever" will become dangerous to one's health?

Musk put good people in charge of some of these companies, Gwynne Shotwell is a great example, but his sphere if influence is big enough that the collateral damage could be significant.

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> I am worried that the good people at SpaceX might decide to abandon ship

For whom? There isn't another ship. (Literally. Ariane has nothing, ULA is on its deathbed, Blue Origin might do something in the 2030s and nobody is moving from Hawthorne to Xi'an.)

SpaceX remains a jewel of American industry and technological achievement. If you're an ambitious aerospace engineer, SpaceX is the only place where you'll see your cutting-edge work launched.

There's Stoke, Relativity, Rocketlab, Firefly, Ursa Major and a whole bunch more companies (many of which I forgot to mention, sorry) that are trying to come after SpaceX. Now that SpaceX has shown reuse is possible, it's easier to convince anyone that reuse is viable.

Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers to get on this too.

The issue is that space launch is a lot smaller market than EVs with a lot higher unit costs. I think the majority of the companies you mention are going to fail, because the market isn’t big enough for them all. Rocket Lab is most likely to survive because they’ve already got a decent sized business even though it is primarily at the low end, but moving up the market is arguably easier than starting from scratch. The others are competing not just against SpaceX, but also Blue Origin (which despite being rather slow is still way ahead of most of the companies you mention), as well as against Rocket Lab and each other

> There's Stoke, Relativity, Rocketlab, Firefly, Ursa Major and a whole bunch more companies (many of which I forgot to mention, sorry) that are trying to come after SpaceX

These are all smallsat launchers. I have worked with a few of their teams and have mad respect for their work. But between launch cadence, fundraising and mission profile, they’re not comparable to SpaceX.

> Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers

SpaceX has a global commanding position and domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed. It’s fair to say it has a monopoly in commercial launch outside niche operations, e.g. dedicated smallsat.

> they’re not comparable to SpaceX. Not yet indeed. If SpaceX were to fail for whatever reason, eg. Musk falling out of grace with his orange buddy or whatever else, there is sort of backup now I guess.

> domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed

Agreed, but I think SpaceX showed that reuse could be done before Musk got any political influence (and went off the rails...).

SpaceX is the stoic incumbant by now. They have the launchpads and enough money to fight any challenging patents. If I was an up and coming rocket engineer, they would be my goto stable career choice. If I had ideas, i would shop around.

What about Rocket Lab? (Well, unless people start to get Musk vibes from Peter Beck…)

> I am worried that the good people at SpaceX might decide to abandon ship because of the Musk association. The money might be good, the work fantastic and exciting, but at some point saying "I work at SpaceX/Tesla/whatever" will become dangerous to one's health?

Meanwhile, plenty of people still work in industries such as oil+gas, tobacco, gambling, military tech, etc. No hate, no threats, business as usual.

SpaceX has a clear mission; Tesla not so much. What is the use of building electric cars "to save the planet" while your boss is enabling a ton more environmental damage using the money from Tesla sales and charger network (and his giant compensation package)?

I’d argue Tesla has succeeded in its original mission of bringing electric cars to the masses.

Profitability, vehicle autonomy, market share etc weren’t really the reasons why the company was founded.

> Tesla has succeeded in its original mission of bringing electric cars to the masses

Sort of. China has done more for this mission than Tesla, certainly Musk, at this point.

Yeah, but now?

I think we need like a wiki for people to read all the stories that people have posted about working for Musk companies to understand why so many people stay. I have recently seen so much misinformation about Musk being pushed. Its completely fair to criticize a person that deserves intense criticism, it just does a disservice to other readers if the entire context is not explained because it then propagates false assumptions about Musk which he then uses to 'surprise' his critics because they were operating under incorrect beliefs.

At this point, no not going to happen. The money sucks given how much you work, no work/life balance. These people already sacrificed their personal lives to get the company to this point. No other company is getting to Mars first. If you are an Olympic class engineer, would you really just walk away from getting to be a part of history? I guess unless you are at the top of your field you are not going to feel the same as these guys.

Regarding engineers burning out, given that Tesla and SpaceX are some of the most desired companies for new Engineering grads Musk will have a continual supply of engineers to grind down to dust as the old ones become useless to him.

There'll always be young people excited to work on the cutting edge of something they're passionate about, even if it means being horribly overworked and underpaid. See also the games industry, movie VFX, etc.

Thats a good point. I'm thinking how is Musk able to attract so many of them? His payroll obligations are enormous(think about how many he employs across all is factories).

We need competitors to Musk, preferably nicer, that can attract the best of the best. I guess in order to fight a psychopath you need tendencies of being a psychopath yourself?

A wiki is exactly what you don't want if the problem is "misinformation".

A Supreme Court ruling that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements violate the first amendment, however, that might help.

If they do, what is the net harm? The technology that SpaceX was losing money to for decades is now known. Their moat isn't as deep or wide as it used to be. See Space Pioneer, CAS Space, Galactic Energy, LandSpace, ...

How many of the companies you mentioned have even one reusable flight to show for, much less a proven track record?

Catching up to SpaceX is something even us Europeans haven't accomplished.

> How many of the companies you mentioned have even one reusable flight to show for

All of them?

there are a lot of extremely intelligent people that would want to work for musk. why ? beats me, but reality is reality.

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