[David_Axelrod]

I remember my perception changed when I watched an interview with musk talk about the material science challenges of panel gaps on teslas. You can't have that level of knowledge unless you worked very close to the problem.

https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1100

[facet1ous]

I mean, he might pay very close attention to everything at his company. That doesn't mean he's deeply involved with the engineering.

For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.

At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.

[jjulius]

Worked very close to the problem != is an engineer

[David_Axelrod]

Not sure why people gate keep so hard around "he'S NOt An engiNEER". Even if he's not writing the code anymore, having deep technical understanding of important day to day tasks is an important quality in any leader in an engineering organization.

[TheAlchemist]

Yeah. It's a bit like a junior programmer saying architects are not software engineers because they don't write the code.

(Btw, software engineers are not really engineers.)

[jjulius]

I wasn't taking a position on Musk with that specific comment, and I don't disagree with your latter point at all.

Broadly speaking, I wouldn't rush to consider anyone a doctor, an engineer, a pilot, so on and so forth simply because I watched a video of them speaking so well to a very specific problem that they just so happened to work so closely on. That's all I was getting at.

[machdiamonds]

I also found this to be pretty impressive: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1560720224588120064?lang...

[Avshalom]

when does he get to the material science challenges in that video.

[David_Axelrod]

How many people know what galvanic corrosion means?

[armadsen]

I am an engineer, though not at all involved in materials science/engineering, and I've known what galvanic corrosion is since I was a teenager. It's not exactly an obscure phenomenon.

[meepmorp]

We covered that in high school chemistry, along with an in-class demo and a section in the book on sacrificial anodes and how they're used to prevent corrosion in things like oil pipelines. It was a US public school.

[Avshalom]

every one who has ever owned an aluminum boat, or generally worked with aluminum that's anywhere near electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode It's not an obscure thing; field specific maybe, but it's very much sub-table-stakes.

[andyjohnson0]

Most people who've done secondary school chemistry would know what that is. Uses technicals terms != is engineer.

[quickthrowman]

Every single electrician I know is familiar with galvanic corrosion as well as how to mitigate it with insulation, dielectric grease, sacrificial anodes, etc. Steel and aluminum are the two most common metals that we use to make things. Galvanized steel has a zinc coating that acts as a sacrificial anode, almost any steel that is installed outside that isn’t stainless is galvanized.