[darawk]

As other commenters have pointed out, Carmack founded a rocket company before Elon did. So he has plenty right to speak to Elon's credibility on the question of rockets. But let's not forget that Tom Mueller at JPL was also on the list that praised Elon's engineering abilities, and I'm not sure how much more rocket credibility you can get. And more to the point, I didn't say Carmack was some kind of absolute arbiter of truth here. The baseline isn't God.

The baseline is the median HN commenter. And Carmack's opinion carries infinitely more weight than that. I would argue it carries substantially more weight than the 99th percentile HN commenter.

The point is: All of the people who have worked directly with him and are also famous for their engineering talent in various domains respect him. I'm literally not aware of a single example in the opposite category. And I'll take the opinion of widely respected engineers who've worked with the guy over the commentariat on an internet forum any day.