Comment by TheHappyOddish
3 years ago
SpaceX was founded by Musk, he is the CEO, CTO, chairman of the board, owns 47% of the stock and has voting control of the board.
You seriously believe he allows a team of people to act as an intermediary between him and the company, yesman and nod to him, then go and do their own thing?
Step back for a second and consider how incredibly unlikely this scenario is. Try and put another successful billionaire and the company they founded into a hypothetical, and tell me it's realistic.
Well if they exist it’s unlikely he would allow them, which makes it somewhat plausible (idk) and it’s certainly not generally unheard of.
Another scenario to think about here is how does he spend any amount of quality time focusing on SpaceX or SpaceX projects when he’s running day-to-day ops at Twitter for sure and supposedly Tesla too. Something has to give.
If he’s mostly spending his time on Twitter I don’t see how it’s all that implausible that for SpaceX he does randomly show up and toss around ideas and people tell him yes so he goes away and they can go back to their normal ops. I don’t know either way, but I wouldn’t really dismiss it so offhandedly.
It's a good question, and I suspect he doesn't spend as much time on SpaceX as he used to.
However, he did found SpaceX 20 years ago in 2002. And their first successful launch was in 2008, 14 years ago.
It's entirely likely he puts less effort and impact into the daily running of SpaceX now, however I don't believe his last 6 months running Twitter invalidate his last 20 years running SpaceX.
I don't think it invalidates it, but it's impossible to run 3 companies the size of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter so I'm sympathetic to the idea that he might drop by one day to a Tesla and they give him high-fives and tell him what he wants to hear and then once he leaves they get back to whatever they were doing.
Have to imagine investors in Tesla are not happy right now with such divisive activities from Elon Musk in the public sphere and the lack of focus on the company (yes I can say factually he is not focusing enough on Tesla).
Musk effectively does not run SpaceX, for good reason, despite his entitlements.
What is your basis that the CEO/CTO/chairman of the board does not run the company? I am curious how you come to this unusual conclusion.
I have read a fair bit of reporting that Gwynne Shotwell effectively runs SpaceX, such as https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/tech/spacex-coo-gwynne-shotwe...
Given the number of news stories I’ve read like that, from a range of news outlets, and given that Musk is also CEO of Tesla, I’ve decided that I find these stories plausible.
Please re-read my comment. The keywords are “effectively “ and “despite his entitlements”.
1 reply →
You have certainly never worked with someone like this, or you’d know that this is almost 100% how it works. You are being naive in your assumption Elon does shit all, but run his mouth.
I’m not sure why you’re so obsessed with a fantasy version of a man.
I'm unsure where I indicated any obsession? Before replying I didn't actually know all of his roles there, I looked them up.
No, I have never worked with a billionaire CEO, founder and chairman of a space company. I have however worked with many founders and CEOs, and the ones who are dead weight quickly get moved on.
Why you do believe it's likely for this one to hold all the decision making power in a successful company with effectively no input?
Surely the default assumption is the founder/CEO of a successful company plays a part in it? So what do you have to indicate this is untrue, aside from your obvious dislike of a person you don't know.