[idiotsecant]

Elon Musk is one nepobaby with poor emotional regulation. SpaceX is an enormous number of very smart, very driven, very dedicated professionals who all work ridiculous hours in not great working conditions because they believe in the outrageous idea of humanity out among the stars.

It's ok to not like the guy at the top, but still marvel at the achievements of the people he pays.

[coldpie]

I understand that perspective, but I can't agree with it. There are many important and meaningful jobs out there that those people could be doing, which don't involve giving financial & political power to one of the worst people alive today. Choosing to work for him after the many, many, many red lines Elon Musk has crossed taints all of the work those people are doing.

[foobarian]

Entire human history has been like this. How many Bachs, Mozarts, Michelangelos, etc. got to do great things just because of a sympathetic ruler who held all the pursestrings?

[riffraff]

I don't think you can rightly compare "rich people who spend money on art" and "rich people who employ people and become richer".

I agree that plenty of good has happened because of the profit motive but SpaceX is not patronizing the sciences, NASA is.

[idiotsecant]

The point is that over the course of human history all science is done at the whim of or in the service of bad people. Do you think Galileo didn't have wealthy patrons that descended from a long line of brutal warlords not afraid to crush some skulls to get ahead? This is how humans operate. You have to make progress where you can, how you can. We don't have the luxury of waiting for mister Rogers to start a rocket company.

[coldpie]

There's a whoooole lot of breathing room between Elon Musk and Mr. Rogers. More ethical employment opportunities exist now, today; SpaceX employees are choosing not to take them.

[idiotsecant]

Sure, name them. Tell me where this hypothetical rocket building brain power is better spent.

[rockemsockem]

If you want to work on manned spaceflight specifically or Mars colonization even more specifically, where exactly could you better spend your time?

[olddustytrail]

I certainly hope the people at SpaceX don't do that because it's not cool to neglect your family and friends no matter how cool your job is.

I appreciate their work however and it's a shame that Musk has tainted their efforts. He could be a decent man if he tried but he's clearly chosen a different path.

[FridayoLeary]

You don't give him enough credit. No one else was lunatic enough to back spaceX and build it into a genuinely innovative and successful company like he has. Of course he had a leg up but i see in him a genuine drive to succeed. He thinks he can do things better then anyone else, and in some ways that's true and he gets frustrated when things don't go his way.

You see the same sort of thing in F1 drivers. Even in the most casual of driving competitions they are competetive to the point of pettiness. My theory is that's part of what makes them an F1 driver - the inability to lose. it can easily be turned to destructive purposes, see all the avoidable crashes but it gets harnessed and turned to useful purposes.

On a more loaded tangent, see Trump. His lifelong ambition was to be famous and become president and i thinkthat, more then his billions gave him the drive to run for office and get reelected (you can argue that it was to satisfy his overwhelming ego but that doesn't change my point). Even if you despise them and everything they stand for i think everyone can learn something from them in how to succeed in their goals. it's not being narcisstic and elbowing everyone out of the way, but it is about having goals, wanting them enough and a healthy dose of self belief.

[idiotsecant]

Elon Musk's primary contributions to his companies are funding them and staying out of the way. When he gets involved in actually leading them bad things happen. See: Twitter.

[panick21_]

People have gone off the deep end on this. Its just factually false by every historical fact we know. He does not 'funding and staing out', that's mostly the opposite of what he does. That's just an objectively false claim.

And if you actually study SpaceX and Tesla, then you figure out that they are actually very smart with their capital investments, and therefore didn't need nearly as much funding as his competitors.

And not being able to do one thing, running twitter, doesn't mean magically that its the same at other companies. Morris Chang failed at running a consumer facing job at TI but do we therefore conclude that he is bad?