[narrator]

Has anyone asked Elon how to fix manufacturing in the U.S? Has he given anyone any ideas. The guy probably does as good or better job at manufacturing in the U.S than anyone else, and he has plenty of plants in foreign countries, so he can compare and contrast. Alas, the current administration hates the guy, and you can't have a guy who's clearly on the wrong team get to take credit for anything these days.

Edit: He did have something interesting to say about the "idiot index" which is the price of a component over the cost of the raw materials. If that's very high, it means there are serious problems at that manufacturing organization.

https://officechai.com/stories/elon-musk-idiot-index/

There's so much inefficiency in American manufacturing. It cost SF $1 billion a mile to extend the subway for example.

[aphyt]

Building a subway is infrastructure, not manufacturing. Elon recently said the sheet metal in the cyber truck needed to be machined to the precision of a red blood cell. This is not somebody who understands manufacturing.

[edrxty]

The Elon stans need to read up on his history. He claims to have significant engineering experience but in reality he does not, he mostly got lucky a couple times early on and hired well. There are millions of people much more capable than him but will never have their chance because they don't have the resources to make their ideas actionable.

[reducesuffering]

I'm no Elon stan, but I think telling others to "read up" is ironic.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk#%C2%A...

Feel free to point me to people actually around him that thinks he doesn't know physics or engineering.

"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does." - Garret Reisman, former SpaceX director and USC Professor

[edrxty]

That's a "rationalist" blog, an inherently unreliable source in this area, and they're literally only quoting people who have a relationship with him and stand to gain financially from his success.

Objectively, at present he's stoking a fire comprised of $44 billion dollars, committing anti trust crimes, and endangering a besieged foreign nation.

Judge him by his actions, not by what his blowhards say about him.

[SyzygistSix]

There are similar reports from people like Jim Cantrell, Robert Meuller, and Jim Keller. They aren't blowhards and don't need to kiss anyone's ass.

[bitcurious]

>Objectively, at present he's stoking a fire comprised of $44 billion dollars, committing anti trust crimes, and endangering a besieged foreign nation.

What do any of those have to do with his engineering skills? Do you think good engineers can't make bad investments, or are inherently moral people incapable of antitrust violations?

[aphyt]

Even reading up on his history is difficult given how credulous tech media is in general. With tech media basically turning the smoke machines on all around something, I can't blame people from assuming there is fire somewhere. I've often said that the most reliable way to get "rich rich" is to watch where money is flowing from point A to point B, stand in the middle and stick your hand out. Elon has certainly mastered that, but I don't have to ascribe "genius" to it.

[adwn]

> I've often said that the most reliable way to get "rich rich" is to watch where money is flowing from point A to point B, stand in the middle and stick your hand out.

Oh come on. If it were this simple, everyone would be doing it. Why aren't you "watching where the money is flowing and sticking your hand out"?

> Elon has certainly mastered that, but I don't have to ascribe "genius" to it.

Musk is vastly overhyped by some, but that's really selling him short. SpaceX and Tesla have real products providing real value, they aren't just leeching off money flows.

[aphyt]

I'm content with being rich. Most people are content with less than that. Maybe I'm reading the guy wrong, but he doesn't seem happy or content. So why would I do something I don't want to do to achieve something that I don't need.

As for the real value of SpaceX and Tesla. I think there is value there, but probably less than most and I don't buy into "great man theory", so I would probably ascribe the success to the actual engineers and designers that did a majority of the work. He is a good leader for what he is trying to accomplish with those two companies as far as I can tell.

[SyzygistSix]

Are you saying Jeff Bezos and Boeing/ULA had less resources than Elon did? They had far more resources. And SpaceX hires from the same pool of talent as they do.

[joshxyz]

we literally got reusable rockets because of him.

no one says he is a great engineer, but oh boy he sure does well in finding those great engineers and funding them to work on large scale projects.

he hires people greater than him in other fields, no doubt.

[smileysteve]

Hate seems like a strong word for a person with multiple dod contracts (and a new one recently for military starlink) and one of the most obviously already qualifying companies for the administration's most touted achievement (US made cars + whole home battery systems)

[ramraj07]

I agree that you shouldn’t discount what Elon does or says. He’s clearly one of the most important individuals of our time. Doesn’t mean whatever he says is gold though. Same standards should apply.

I agree that his naysayers are making a grave mistake of calling him universally stupid. He’s a vile selfish person, who makes a lot of bigoted stupid statements and actions, but ignoring him would be the end of us.

A Tamil saying I like translates (by ChatGPT) in English as, “Regardless of the speaker’s guise, Seek the truth that in the statement lies.”

[Qwertious]

>ignoring him would be the end of us.

How so? That's an extraordinary claim that you haven't remotely justified.

While it's possible for anyone to say something smart, Elon Musk is no more likely to have clever insight than the average janitor.

He makes a bunch of insightful-sounding claims that only make sense if you don't have a clue on the subject he's talking about - like when he stack-ranked by lines of code, at Twitter.

[ramraj07]

He hasn’t made a single smart decision in Twitter, agreed. But in every other venture that’s not true.

[Qwertious]

Neuralink, Boring, Solarcity? These are basically worthless when you take a closer look:

Neuralink is at best replicating decades-old research, all while horrifically violating scientific codes of ethics,

Boring is just a tunnel digging company (tunnel-boring is a very often unavoidable construction technique and thus is a very mature technology, he's not going to magically find an order-of-magnitude technical breakthrough) whose basic premise is that you can increase throughput per dollar by digging lots of slightly-smaller tunnels for cars instead of a single subway-sized car; a premise that is objectively false.

Solarcity might have been an interesting idea but was handled poorly and went bankrupt, at which point Musk forced Tesla to buy it so he personally could avoid the bad PR of "Musk's company goes bankrupt!", which is quite illegal and an abuse of his power as CEO of Tesla.

Starlink flat-out makes a loss per satellite launched, and scaling its userbase up won't fix that; it's dead once it runs out of investor money.

There's this weird situation were Musk has N different ventures, and each venture looks alright on the surface but is rotten when you take a closer look - but everyone thinks "well sure, but the other (N-1) ventures are doing fine, so maybe I'm missing something about this one?", not realizing that all the other ventures are just the same.

Please, please do the following exercise: ignore all the PR you've heard about Musk, and pick one of his companies that's not Tesla and look closely at it. Evaluate if that company makes sense on its own merits, without Musk.

[callalex]

The idiomatic translation to English would be: “A broken clock is right twice a day.”

[ramraj07]

This is again implying that he’s nothing but an idiot. I don’t know why people are incapable of acknowledging he’s an insightful but crazy and evil person.

[callalex]

The negative implications from the message deliverer come from you, not me. You are probably correct about him being an idiot, but the phrase being translated specifies that the message delivered is not relevant to the message, in the same way that I would not call a clock an idiot for being low on battery power.

[neither_color]

Well said. I just sped through his new bio and while the author seemed overly-apologetic about his assholish tendencies(like in the Thai cave diving incident), his ability to inspire his engineers and get things built is undeniable.

[ramraj07]

Marc Andressen mentioned in the Lex podcast that Larry Page mentioned his plan for “funding humanity’s future” would just be to give all his money to Elon and let him do whatever.

I wonder if he will still say that, after learning Brin divorced his wife for likely cheating with Musk.

This seems like a perfect encapsulation of this person (and the snobbery of everyone involved of course).

[Qwertious]

>his ability to inspire his engineers and get things built is undeniable.

I deny this. He provides money and hype, and hires the best engineers in the industry who then get results. In some cases things gets things built, but that doesn't mean Elon Musk was personally useful to any given project besides providing hype and money.

[ramraj07]

“All he does is organize everything and choose what he focuses on” sounds like you say this is easy and simple. I really don’t want to be a Musk defender so I’m gonna stop here.

[mortureb]

In this case it’s more like the clock was always right until it was broken.

[narrator]

I think this thread encapsulates the politicization of society, basically determining all credibility and worth based on who is on what political team. This reality has been causing a lot of problems with getting productive work done in the U.S as everything becomes about power and giving out favors vs. a meritocraticly organized society. We need to become more of a society where people don't change their opinions on someone's ability to do rocket engineering based on whether they think their tweets are mean or not.

[SyzygistSix]

For the most part Musk (and his businesses) and the administration, as well as US auto manufacturers, are playing nice now and realize they need to work together. The sniping between them has decreased a lot and is mostly coming from elsewhere while their collaboration has increased. Mostly because the economics of EVs have shown resistance is futile and SpaceX' capabilities are so useful.

[mortureb]

Honestly we need more strong figures like Musk if we have any chance of pulling this off (preferably the pre insane Musk because that Musk seemed way more capable and productive). Bureaucratic, ladder climbers are not going to be able to pull something hard like this off.

[bugglebeetle]

This is a truly hilarious comment when you consider the manufacturing capacity of China vs. the US.