[provost]

> Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” ...

This kind of comment is a disservice to all the engineers who actually figured it out. Elon Musk is certainly a visionary and a financier, but is not a 1000x engineer/mathematician who did all the work himself

[nickik]

The reality is that Elon is and was the Chief Engineer for the Falcon rocket family. He had the vision, the finance and he lead the engineering effort extremely directly and successfully. He overruled his top guys on multiple decisions and usually he turned out to be right.

Go listen to Tom Mueller on the design choices made for the Merlin example.

But of course nobody does everything himself, but for some reason I read this sort of comment made about Musk in every single thread but not with most other people.

[dingaling]

Mr Musk has strategic vision, but not necessarily engineering vision. Which is fine, engineering is a huge field.

Bear in mind that the first time one of his staff proposed verticals landing rocket stages, he laughed.

[throwaway84742]

He does have a degree in physics though. So he probably has a pretty good grasp on the concepts involved, as well as a finely tuned bullshit detector.

[examancer]

While it is a good idea to spread to credit for SpaceX's acheivements around, Musk himself has done more engineering of products at SpaceX and Tesla than any of his peers. His title as CEO of both companies is somewhat misleading as he has very little involvement in business operations of either company and spends most of his time engineering.

[TheArcane]

Source?

[nickik]

He is Chief Engineer at SpaceX, because they couldn't get anybody.

Go listen to Tom Mueller for example. Musk himself says at SpaceX 80% of the time he is working on engineering not traditional 'CEO' things..