Comment by lbriner
1 day ago
> Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts
"real experts" are not always correct. A bet a lot of people told him that the original Teslas were a bad idea or SpaceX would never...wait for it...take off.
But sometimes people win when they push the boundary of what might work, push the problems to the surface and then solve them.
I don't like the guy but you can't really deny his ethusiasm and single-mindedness.
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.
That’s a little bit revisionist. I don’t like Musk much either but to be fair:
- no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible. Sure, there may have been individuals, but it didn’t make it into corporate strategy or product delivery. The Model S plus the Supercharger network changed the face of the car industry.
- none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality. They had an infinite head start vs. SpaceX and failed to innovate. Even now, having their lunch money regularly stolen by SpaceX, where is the reusable competition?
> no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible
No executive in the established "expert" car companies had any reason to rock the boat. Establishing EVs as a credible alternative to ICEs required a build-out of charging infrastructure that none of them were willing to commit to. But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existed.
> none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality
All of them would have told you that there's nothing impossible about a reusable rocket, only that their customers were happily served by their current offerings. Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
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The clever brains at JPL worked on self landing rockets before they went to spacex. Your tax dollars at work.
https://www.alphaxiv.org/@lars-blackmore
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Blackmore
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xZvK9z0AAAAJ&hl=en
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It's not just high costs, its high costs that are only there to appease one man. The stainless steel sheets don't provide features that the average consumer even considers and has more than a few drawbacks
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.
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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.
And the "real experts" left us dependent on Russia for launching a couple capsules a year to the space station.
They could have done what Musk did with Falcon 9 in the 90's. Instead they chose to mess around more with solid fueled heavy lift vehicles, all the while proclaiming that they were the experts/science.
The fallacy you are committing here is making all the non-spacex experts a homogeneous straw people.
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!