[khazhoux]

People belittle his technical ability because it hurts our ego to admit someone could exceed us at all the things we specifically value in our corner of the world: successful products, massive innovation, big brain smarts, money...

Nietzsche: "The vanity of others offends most, when it offends our own vanity."

No one here is threatened when Dave Grohl pumps out his 30th hit album, or when Steph and Lebron wipe the court with all the other players. But the idea that this Elon guy is not only richer, but also smarter and more ambitious and more innovative than any of us? That's unfair, it can't be so!!

[croes]

>but also smarter

Smarter?

Have you seen his Twitter timeline? He falls for nearly every fake news and conspiracy theory.

We aren't threatened by Dave Grohl because he doesn't use his social media outreach to promote right wing conspiracy BS.

[khazhoux]

Yeah he’s an idiot on twitter. But he’s still smarter than both of us. Or I guess I shouldn’t include you in that, in case your day job happens to involve conducting high-level business and engineering reviews of manned spacecraft like Elon does.

[krapp]

Do you remember the "code review" debacle after Elon took over Twitter? Of course HN thought it was genius[0] but outside of the Elon hugbox the premise of being told to print out the last 30 days of code you wrote to justify your job is absurd and clueless. It's the sort of thing someone who's trying too hard to appear clever would do.

Do you really think Elon is like that with Twitter - not just an idiot on it but according to all evidence also while running it - yet somehow doing in depth high-level technical reviews of his own spacecraft like he's Geordi LaForge? Looking at the blueprints while sipping coffee and telling the engineers that if they only invert the polarity of the neutron flow, the engines could get another 10% efficiency by harnessing negative energy from the Casimir Effect or some nonsense?

He's smart but it should be obvious he's not nearly the world class polymath billionaire playboy inventor he's been hyped up to be. His companies work because he surrounds himself with people smarter than he is, and because those people create cultures that route around his tendencies (which culture doesn't appear to exist at Twitter.) The man brought a fucking sink to Twitter for the sake of a pun like it was the funniest thing ever.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33379578

[throwaway51081]

Don't forget the story said an assistant wrote the memo. It's very possible Musk said "print" in the programmer sense - like "print to console" - and the assistant misunderstood.

[krapp]

That doesn't seem likely given his ego and personality and apparent tendency to micromanage.

The problem is the premise that one can effectively decide the value of an employee's work by counting LOC or reading their output in that manner at all. It's dumb whether it's done with a REPL or a stack of paper.

[khazhoux]

You can find the lowest performers in an org pretty easily through a combination of reviewing what they’ve gotten done the last year (via self reviews, manager reviews, a recap writeup etc) and looking at their commit history and docs or other artifacts created.

High performers challenge this notion because they say “I have very difficult bug fixes that required little code.” But high performing engineers just don’t realize how little (shockingly little) output actually comes out of low performers. Like, a slow trickle of trivial code, and tasks that stretch for weeks for no good reason besides their inability to overcome obstacles

[brokenmachine]

What's that stupid vacuum train idea he was shilling? It was obviously dumb.

[throwaway51081]

Many famous scientists, engineers or industrialists who moved the world forward in the past were racist or total Nazis. Today, many otherwise extremely smart people exhibit the same behavior as Musk, you just see it publicly in his case. I see it a lot in high level academia circles. The antivax and other conspiracies during Covid got a lot of help from very intelligent people, in my state the leader of the highest rated university got involved in that, for example.

You shouldn't mistake his Twitter feed for straight and full approval... He often trolls or merely thinks there might be some basis of truth in something, and sometimes he blurts out in anger. Again, in his case you just see it publicly.

Not defending him, it's weird and terrible and took a sharp decline after his breakup. But it's not so unusual.