[robocat]

Jim Keller talks about his impression of Elon after working with him - skip to 1:20:50 and watch the next 4 minutes of this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA (the whole interview is full of effing amazing insight, IMHO).

Jim also talks about Elon’s engineering skills at the 50 minute mark for about 6 minutes in this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c

Elon seems like a complete tool to me. But here is Jim, a proven smart engineer-type, give a strongly positive opinion on Elon’s engineering ability. Many effective people have personality traits I abhor.

Unless you have worked with Elon yourself, and you are a good engineer yourself, you are just making shit up. I think it is normal to hate, but at least try to be honest.

[ModernMech]

I don't know, it's hard to trust anyone who has worked for a narcissist like Musk to tell the truth about said narcissist in public media. Powerful narcists love to surround themselves by people who are willing to use their credentials to launder the reputation of the narcissist. My favorite example comes from Dr. Deborah Birx regarding fmr. President Trump during the pandemic:

  "He's been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

This is just about what Jim Keller says about Musk in the first video. You'll notice when he talks about what he learned from Musk he's very vague, and then he pivots directly to a story about how his friend invented a more efficient electric motor that was better than anything they had. That's a story about engineering prowess, but that story is pointedly not about Musk. Why does he need to pivot to another engineer when talking about engineering prowess? Because he doesn't have anything to say about Musk's engineering prowess, and can only speak to his technical philosophies. Of course those may be sound, and perhaps helps the engineering team, but having ideas about local maxima doesn't make one an engineer.

The second link isn't any better. Jim says Musk is the "real deal" and a great engineer, but instead of examples of that, just talks about how Musk prefers to receive presentations with solutions first, and got upset when they weren't frontloaded. Which is a fine point of view I guess, and maybe is related to managing an engineering process, but all the technical work was done by others.

And finally, as a robotics engineer myself, I have a very hard time listening to anyone from the Tesla autonomous group unless they want to explain why they are testing Tesla's beta quality AP (that is in fact lethal and has caused deaths) on the general public without their awareness or consent. Or explain why after the first decapitation caused by Musk's insistence on not using LIDAR in their cars, this group failed to step up and course correct. Instead they doubled down, and their decisions resulted predictably in nothing getting fixed, leading to a second decapitation. Who exactly made the call on those decisions? That's really all I need to hear from them.