[allears]

The difference is corporate culture. Blue Origin (not "Ocean") behaves like Old Space, companies like Boeing, who spend a huge amount of time designing and debating before they even bend a piece of metal. SpaceX on the other hand likes to move fast and fail forward. They'd rather build a lot of prototypes and blow up a few, and learn a whole lot in the process. Also, Musk is a fanatic and workaholic, and drives his employees hard, whereas Blue Origin is more laid back and "normal" in their work ethic.

[romanhn]

I'm reading the just-released Musk biography by Walter Isaacson and I think this is a pretty good summary. He has basically taken "move fast and break things" to the extreme and with hardware.

Musk himself is quoted as believing that SpaceX's success is in large part owed to him getting involved with the technical minutiae, whereas Bezos has other people making decisions.

[userinanother]

Blue is run by accountants, spacex is run by engineers with a megalomaniac nominally in charge but well contained

[joshxyz]

musk fan here, highly accurate.

even the internal tech emails of him saying "what did you get done this week?" brings chills to my spine.

[anon1199022]

Is it possible to "lead" a lot people with being really nice and kind tho? Those things are really important and not for great leaders IMO. In reality people don't follow kindness or nice people. They follow leaders and money.

[PaulHoule]

Somebody nice with a realistic business plan (skip the suborbital "rocket to nowhere") would have accomplished more than Branson and Bezos ever did. I don't know about Branson, but nobody ever accused Bezos of being a nice guy.

[mensetmanusman]

Nice is only required when you are leading with no institutional power. If you have power, nice is a waste of time.

[PurpleRamen]

Isn't this also a difference in safety-ethic? SpaceX seems to have a rather high number of failures, crashes and even killed people, but also a higher activity. And Musk in general seems to prefer a style of "move fast, crash hard, grow quick".

[spikels]

Is this a joke? SpaceX has the most reliable launch service in human history.