Comment by stetrain

That forces a redesign of all the car electronics. While it might well be a good idea anyway from an R&D point of view it's undeniably expensive.

(I have a very slight visibility on 48V car audio R&D, for example. Most digital electronics could be adapted with a different DC-DC converter but the audio power amp stage takes direct supply voltage)

Did they?

No, no rocketry expert ever said that reusable rockets were impossible. They would have told you that the cost to develop them would not recoup itself based on the then-existing demand for orbital payloads, and that banking on such demand materializing would be a massive gamble (which is why Starlink exists).

Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.

The highest number though is like 30 uses and Starship still hasn't profen itself.

Also the boring company, Doge, Solar City, the cybertruck etc.

So what do we get out of this? Musk is for sure not just an idiot, he for sure sees sometimes good opportunities, but also he had the money to invest in these and he got lucky a few times too.

Btw. the cybertruck he announced, never came.

Arguably the longest lived successful British vehicle, the Transit. https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/eur/en/articles/2025/transi...

An engineers isn’t going to say “EVs will never work” or “reusable rockets are impossible”. They’d say things like “we’re really going to need to minimize weight and try to build better batteries to hit that range goal” or “it’s going to require a lot of money to do the R&D for reusable boosters, you need to land a NASA contract so we can afford dozens of tests”. Engineers express tradeoffs far more than absolutes.

Musk has enthusiasm, yes, but he’s let his luck at PayPal and successfully buying Tesla from the original founders go to his head. Nobody is right all of the time, and no serious project goes perfectly according to the original vision without adjustments. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an electric truck — companies with better engineering culture are making great ones — but the Cybertruck failed exactly the way everyone who isn’t a superfan expected: it’s designed in a way which guarantees high costs and it just doesn’t deliver corresponding benefits for most people. Diving into the culture wars against a large chunk of potential Tesla buyers was a bad idea but even if he hadn’t, there just aren’t that many people who have that kind of money to spend and the ones who do usually won’t accept so many limitations and flaws.

I can deny that his enthusiasm and single-mindedness are the reasons for his success.

His initial success, PayPal, was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Online payments are an obvious thing and a natural monopoly. He guessed right that PayPal would be the one that succeeded.

That gave him the opportunity to place more big bets that paid off. Neither electric cars nor reusable spacecraft were obvious wins the way online payments were, but it's also no sign of genius to have happened to place bets on companies that succeeded.

The evidence for that is that his luck ran out. He keeps backing audacious projects, and they keep failing. Anybody else would have been bankrupted a dozen times over. He keeps going because he got lucky the first time, with so much money that it's almost impossible for him to lose it all.

That is to say, I think it's more survivorship bias than the merits of his "enthusiasm and single-mindedness". A decade ago he had such a string of successes that I would consider the case that he was actually smarter than average, but he's had such a string of conspicuous and obvious catastrophes that the net result simply seems average at best.

I can deny it because he overpromises on everything just like Elizabeth Holmes. Only difference in space isn’t something new the us government did it in 1960’s and didn’t destroy nearly as many rockets. Elon isn’t smart enough to try an interfere with production rockets. His distance from decision making is what made it a success.

You invented a fictional group of people, got mad at them, then declared what you imagined they did was wrong.

I want you to know that.

Musk came into Tesla as funding. People were trying to make the cars.

With regards to SpaceX, he was looking for people to build rockets to go to Mars. But no one wanted to sell to him. So he hired rocket scientists to build the rockets.

And yes, while there will always be some asshole who says "That won't work", there were plenty of ""real experts"" who were working at those companies.

Found Elizabeth Holmes's alt.

(I don't necessarily disagree with you, but there's a difference between thinking outside the box and trying new ideas, and literally ignoring factual reality and repeated clear feedback from people who actually know what they're talking about.)

> "real experts" are not always correct

That's why you should always hire someone unqualified.

not always, but usually!