Comment by mcv
2 years ago
> His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself.
I used to think that too, but I've since come across a story that SpaceX actually has people who's informal job is to manage him, and they present their ideas in such a way that he thinks they're his, in order to keep him happy. He's mostly there to bring money and hype.
No idea if that story is true, but honestly, it would explain some things.
The impression he's been giving me recently is that his success may have broken him. Too many people worshipping him and praising literally every crazy thing he does, may have made him believe he can do literally everything including run a social media company on his own without first learning how social media companies work. He honestly seems to be running Twitter into the ground. The mass firings he started with, followed by ruining the blue checkmark feature, really didn't make it look like he knows what he's doing. His management style sounds like hell.
I did my PhD under possibly the most narcissistic, ruthless, and petty professors anyone around me had ever heard of, so I might be able to comment on this.
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.
> The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system.
Professor's diary: It's so tiring coming up with broken experiments that still have some possible merit, but the system works, and my role is clear. If only the benefits of working under constraints weren't so clear with regard to innovation, they they are what they are and this farce continues for all of us. Maybe I'll finally feel like the private sector is the way to go next yet. Probably not, but who knows.
Also, this sounds like I've heard the military described at times, expecially in war, where the upper echelons come out with wile ideas that make no sense on the ground and mid-level officers pull wild solutions out of their asses and whatever works ends up being copied.
I could see something like this possibly developing as a natural solution when all you look at is the output and not the process, and provide a rigid framework within which different behavior can be iterated until it stabilizes on something that works. That, unsurprisingly to me, has similarities in how ML works, given given these are basically institutions that act as machines.
Honestly sounds kind of like my job. Corporate executives suggesting nonsensical solutions to technical problems they created and insisting they are right. You just need to let them think they won and work around them to get things done. You learn this after a few years working corporate. No point butting heads with people in power. They won’t back down because they will look silly to everyone else in the meeting. They always have to be right to save their own face.
Achieving a PhD in dealing with narcissistic assholes is a valuable career skill, that will benefit you in any field, no matter the topic of your thesis.
The most important skill I learned getting a BS in CS was how to BS.
You’re absolutely right about that. I switched over to tech, and pretty much feel like Will Ferrell in the final season of office, “this job is a joke” and all this politics is so silly and petty and so easy to game and overcome! Life is literally in easy mode now. I highly recommend a PhD to anyone who wants to just become wiser about life in general not just to do research.
> try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing.
Maybe the university publish or perish system is the real problem, with the egojerks being symptoms?
no; the pathology is independent of social system.
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How is that related?
Why can't a PI push his team to publish a lot, even callously work them to the bone (common in chemistry) without being and egotistical psychopath?
Is it because the egotistical psychopathy is the excuse the PI hides behind when stealing credit/authorship from their team members?
I worked on the Engineering side of compliance at my last job managing Compliance and Security. As part of going public, part of my job was keeping some executives away from the Auditors. This was not because the Auditors wanted information from them that we didn’t want to share, but because the auditors actually had zero interest in what they had to say. I.e. they did not care about Joe Techbro and his Git front end and how it would allow us to avoid having an Internal Audit team (news flash: it didn’t).
All these pointless conversations would slow the process down and the auditors would bill (aggressively) for these pointless interjections.
My job for a while was listening for signs they would do this, create a meeting, take notes, email the notes to our Eng team, and then fein concern. This worked as the audit team were able to do what they needed to do and we went public. Eventually half the people I was playing interference against were asked to leave the company or were otherwise fired for unrelated reasons that I’d roughly group into being unprofessional or poorly prepared for their role.
In my subsequent job (years later and at a multinational) I’ve seen more of this. I’ve learned that at any sufficiently large company there will be at least one person paid to keep one person from messing things up with their presence.
Overall, I find the stories about keeping Elon placated completely believable.
My dad's oldest living friend worked at Koch industries for years. I forget his official title, but they way he describes his role was "I ran interference to keep the brothers from killing each other."
I read this book a few years back: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/... Here are my recollections/opinions (stripping out further qualifiers to save space)
The truth is somewhere between what the boosters want you to believe and what the detractors want you to believe. Elon's very smart and works incredibly hard, but has a serious ego problem and isn't pleasant to work for. A bit like Steve Jobs maybe.
No CEO can succeed without attracting talented people and inspiring them to excel, and Elon has been very successful at that. By working incredibly hard, thinking incredibly big, and setting high expectations, he inspires everyone else in the company. But he's also capricious in a way that demoralizes people and burns them out.
We like the story of a lone hero who does everything. But there are many people who worked at Elon's companies and played a key role, but feel underappreciated in a way that the author seemed sympathetic to.
The "people managing Elon" thing is true to a degree. It so happens that I've spoken to a couple employees (one SpaceX one Tesla) who both told me stories like this. (Specifically the two stories were something like: (1) "We adjusted the Tesla to optimize for the route Elon drives, even though that hurt autopilot performance overall" and (2) "We keep having to explain to Elon the basic probability math that explains the importance of continually testing rocket components")
At the same time, "he's mostly there to bring money and hype" seriously underplays his role. As an extreme analogy, imagine you had a toddler who told you "[Mommy/Daddy] I designed an awesome treehouse and I want you to build it". You keep saying you're busy and treehouses are impractical. But your toddler gets you to buy into their vision, and challenges you to overcome obstacles until an awesome treehouse is built. Even if you did all the work in this analogy, you have to give your toddler some credit. The power of visionary leadership and extreme determination was one of my big takeaways from the book -- again similar to Jobs with the "reality distortion field", I guess.
Social media moderation requires a humility and good judgement -- not Elon's strengths. But it's definitely not a coincidence that he's started so many successful companies.
The difference with Twitter is that, being a web site and app, his decisions have immediate visibility. Bans, unbans, blue checkmarks — those become visible to everyone in the world to see right away.
With his other companies, the lag time before anything becomes public is longer. We presumably don't see a lot of the eccentric decisions Musk makes because the companies are able to course-correct before they end up becoming real.
Of course, we still get screws-ups like the Cybertruck and whatever that robot was.
He's good at finding the right people and putting them in a room, and convincing other people to give him money...that's it.
> if you want to pretend he has 75 IQ
I don't think anyone has ever argued that. He obviously has above-average IQ. That does not automatically make his claims of working on rocket designs himself, credible. In fact, I think those claims put credence to the story that they present ideas in such a way that he thinks he's designing rockets himself.
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Username checks out there Elno, but we see through it.