[hnbad]

The thing is that the bad things are usually failures of management, the good things are feats of engineering. Elon Musk is despite the title he bestowed upon himself, not a rocket scientist. He's an ideas guy at worst and an activist executive at best.

That the first three Tesla models spell out "S3X" is entirely on him. That they're fairly decent electrical cars is not. That there are superchargers everywhere is on him. That they work isn't. Based on his own statements, his public actions and credible allegations against him, workplace safety is not something he has any interest in and is willing to sacrifice when it inconveniences him, even aesthetically. He wants to move fast and break things, including manufacturing workers.

If you really think that someone who spent more time in his career networking, giving interviews, schmoozing and being CEO and representitive figurehead of multiple companies at the same time is also personally responsible for the engineering achievements of even one of those companies, you're delusional. It is however fairly easy in that kind of position to get in the way of good or important things.

This is where the industry in-jokes about clueless managers and "pointy-haired bosses" came from as well as the design advise to always include one glaring mistake because managers (or clients) want to feel like they contributed something and giving them an easy error to catch is safer than risking "actual input" from them. I don't know if it's the lies we tell ourselves because we want to be entrepreneurs without sacrificing our craftsmanship or the mythological narratives that drive the ever-increasing tech bubble, but somewhere along the way some of us have started getting high on our own supply and started to believe that people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs are actual geniuses (I think it started with Steve Jobs) rather than just very successful sales people with some broad baseline technical understanding that is enough to judge some technical decisions but not enough to make them alone.

[jaimex2]

Gotta cut down them tall poppies

[fernandotakai]

>Elon Musk is despite the title he bestowed upon himself, not a rocket scientist. He's an ideas guy at worst and an activist executive at best.

while i agree, we also have jim cantrell (an actual rocket scientist) comments on musk[0]:

>"He is the smartest guy I've ever met, period," Cantrell tells us. "I know that sounds overblown. But I've met plenty of smart people, and I don't say that lightly. He's absolutely, frickin' amazing. I don't even think he sleeps."

now, am i a musk fanboi? nope. he has some horrible ideas (twitter is x? wtf?). but is he just an "ideas" guy? absolutely not.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-learned-rocket...

[hnbad]

Your quote suggests Cantrell thinks he's smart, not that he's technically competent, let alone competent enough to actually understand the nuances of the technology.

Getting the powers-that-be to understand technical intricacies is as much about having someone able to explain concepts well to someone who is not a domain expert as it is about having someone who is not a domain expert able to reason about problems with an incomplete understanding. That you can explain technology to Musk and get him to ask relevant questions or that he can pick up enough jargon and specific concepts to hold his own in a casual technical conversation doesn't mean he's an omni-genius let alone that he understands the technology.

Yes, "ideas guy" is an extremely uncharitable way to put it, but that's why I said "at worst" that's what he is. The Tesla cybertruck and the Hyperloop are certainly ideas guy products (the latter literally because what he envisioned is so nonsensical none of the so-called implementations actually have anything to do with it and those that try obviously underperform even moderate expectations). Clearly many things he's heading have worked out better than that. But if you look at the actual things he's done himself and his actual biography (rather than the hagiography he has created for himself) he is a lot more underwhelming and his success much more a product of being in the right place at the right time and hanging onto the right coat tails (e.g. Peter Thiel, who is equally despicable as a human being but clearly more technologically competent).