[pm90]

Come on, he can be a salesman and a genius. At least he is a very extreme determined and hard working person, if not an actual "genius" (whose brains are wired differently). People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company.

[InitialLastName]

> People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company

... except for the other successful entrepreneurs who made mid-career changes to fund private rocket launch companies:

- Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin)

- Robert Bigelow (Bigelow Aerospace)

- Jim Benson (SpaceDev)

- Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic)

I'll grant that Musk appears to be a successful businessman, and an effective leader, but his real strength appears to be selling his ideas so hard that even his most Boring (tm) projects get covered in giant piles of hype.

[jacquesm]

You forgot Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace

[ubernostrum]

Musk's standard operating procedure is to

1. Find a market where most or all of the fundamental R&D has already been done and paid for by someone else, and is publicly available to use

2. Enter that market, evolve/iterate the state of the art a bit

3. Promise immense economies of scale, and slather everything with glittery marketing and PR stunts

This is what SpaceX is doing. This is what Tesla is doing. It is not a sign of "genius", and in both cases the promises Musk is making are... ambitious.

There have been multiple attempts to bring down the cost of launching stuff into space, and with the smartest people in the world working on the problem we've seen only modest gains. Musk barged into the market and promised at least an order-of-magnitude reduction. So far that has not, to my knowledge, materialized, and I know of nothing in the pipeline which would magically cause it to do so (and economies of scale with things as expensive as space launches are uncharted waters).

And with Tesla, Musk seems to have overpromised on production. But, amusingly, building a factory that cranks out cars -- even slightly-exotic cars! -- is kind of a well-understood problem. I strongly suspect the thing holding Tesla back is Musk's Silicon Valley "not invented here" mindset leading him to disdain the accumulated knowledge of the existing industry. Which is not a "genius" move, by the way.