[sergiosgc]

> Why anyone would feel the need to "white knight" a billionaire is beyond me.

Being a billionaire shouldn't be a negative trait. Yet, it is, because so many of the 1% show lack of empathy and disregard for the common man and a single focus on generating wealth for wealth's sake. Musk does not seem to be in it for the cash, and thus looks different.

Musk is, very transparently, an engineer at heart. He tinkers and creates and takes absolute joy in the creation process and in the result. It just so happens he's also a billionaire. Combine the hacker mentality with lots of cash and you get crazy creations like SpaceX, Tesla or The Boring Company.

Musk's tweets about the sub, if viewed from the perspective of a hacker bragging about a hack, are perfectly natural. As is throwing a car up into orbit.

That the Internet at large jumps to reading these fun, creative actions as "marketing" or "self-promotion" or "billionaire arrogance" is a sign that we, as a collective, lost our innocence long ago, and are unable to take pleasure in creating stuff.

It is a shame.

[smcl]

I got a kick out of him sending a car into space, I'm impressed by SpaceX, Tesla and I'm at least curious about the Boring Company.

But what people are annoyed about here is that a very influential person is directing the internet hate machine at someone who he didn't like. Calling someone a paedophile is not a fun creative action in my book. Any defence of this as some kind of engineer-specific personality quirk we can all identify with isn't something I'm going to agree with

[sergiosgc]

For the record: I strongly criticize the pedophile slur. It's infantile, inconsiderate and entirely non-productive. In my comment, I was trying to explain why people admire Musk, but he is full of flaws.

The world, in general, isn't black and white. One must exercise critical judgment.

[luord]

> It's infantile, inconsiderate and entirely non-productive.

A false accusation of that caliber can destroy an innocent person's life and it cheapens the value of real accusations (specially when said by someone with the kind of cult following that Musk has). It's far, far worse than "infantile", "inconsiderate" or "entirely non-productive."

[ofrzeta]

It's also interesting that people perceive Elon Musk as an engineer because as far as I can see he is primarily a businessman. He got a bachelor in physics but then moved on to earn a bachelor of economics.

[ballooney]

Parent was downvoted but shouldn't be. A lot of people really seem to need to believe that Elon Musk designed the falcon rockets or the teslas. This is simply not the case.

What made SpaceX work is that he found most of the good people stuck in bad organisations already in the space sector, put them under one roof (which almost never happens in aerospace with it's goverment-funded pork-barrel contracts), and provided both the money and the will. Having both, rather than one-of, those last two things (the money and the will) are almost unheard of in aerospace anyway, and are a super-power. They gave the Tom Muellers of this world they space they need to do their work, and they had them co-located with the manufacturing, and they cared about manufacturing techniques, and they made a product. It probably was, and maybe still is, the nearest a company has come to taking Skunkwork's crown as an example of how aerospace engineering can be done right.

He likes to geek out, and he has vision, but he's a pusher of engineers rather than an engineer, and he sails very close to the wind with over-pushing his people. To the extent that any historical or fictional comparison is apt, he's more a Henry Ford than a Tony Stark.

[sergiosgc]

You should hear some of his more informal interviews. He did a couple for Y Combinator, available on the podcast. The technical knowledge he shows is lower level than CEO activities provide. He's probably never in the trenches, but surely talks a lot with people who do.