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.
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.
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.
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.