[jve]

Elon Musk must be one. Seems enough techy to me: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink - software being used for the hardware in innovative ways.

Edit: Oh, wow, mentioning this guy is surely controversial, sorry. However discussing whether he is a nerd, understands engineering on very deep level/gets his hands dirty OR he only manages people - there must be some psychological aspect related, a form of disagreement to discredit or have a hard time believing it can actually be true.

Here is a list of credible persons commenting on Musk whether he understands engineering or not. With all the sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Maybe he used to be one, who knows. But I doubt he read a book or seen a movie in the past few decades. He got roasted by Joyce Carol Oates on X recently for being an oaf and he immediately started replying to tweets about acclaimed movies. And nothing insightful that proved he had seen them, just 'this is a great movie' or some other stupid oneliner. It would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad that the richest man on earth is such a pathetic little man.

[robocat]

The list is missing my #1 quote from Jim Keller (an epic engineer type) although unfortunately quote is in middle of a long YouTube vid. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33662764

Aside: I don't understand why they even mention what journalists think - only engineers opinions matter when judging engineering ability.

[jve]

Middle of a long YT video is nothing: you can make links to auto seek to a specific place in YT video. When you share link on computer, it even allows you to check-a-box that will include timestamp within link

Or append &t=1h2m3s to the link to prevent writing long sentences on where to seek and save users from manual seeking :)

[xg15]

I think Elon Musk just wants to be Tony Stark and cultivates the appropriate image for that.

And possibly a genuine obsession with (rightwing-ish) meme/youth culture, which I think got him a lot of his initial followers on twitter/reddit/4chan/etc.

[ben_w]

A lot of people miss how much of a tit Tony Stark (at least the Robert Downey Jr. version) was.

Smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. Not good with anything interpersonal. Flair for the dramatic (and dad jokes) at the expense of those working with him.

[actionfromafar]

Is there a difference? I mean, he may be Tony Stark to himself but end up an oppressor to others.

[shawn_w]

He thinks he's Tony Stark but he's actually Justin Hammer.

[tim333]

Musk is a complicated character. He's had nerdy times programing, fascist turns including the famous salute, emperor delusions - he was named after The Elon, a fictional ruler of Mars.

[adev_]

> Elon Musk must be one

Spoiler: He is not. But he is very good at faking it.

Anytime he tries to give a serious opinion on anything related to computers: It is laughably bad and out of touch (SQL, compilers, languages, performance, etc... ).

He definitively has a scientific background but definitively not "Tech" as far as computer are concerned.

[Treegarden]

I don’t see how “tech” is limited to software. While your case might be made for software, according to many accounts Musk is a strong driver on the hardware side. For instance, I’ve read the Tesla and SpaceX books by Eric Berger, which are much more focused on technical things compared to the more mainstream books. And while Musk is not in the trenches with a screwdriver, he’s not faking it either.

To be honest, I’m actually interested in this hypothesis: is he legitimately skilled/knowledgeable, or is he indeed faking it? And for either side I would like to see evidence. This question is interesting to me because some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).

If he is really faking it, that might even be good, because the success of his companies might be replicable and could continue without him. But what if he is not?

[adev_]

> or is he indeed faking it ?

On a domain side to nerdery: video games. There is zero doubt he is faking it entirely.

The streams he publishes on game like PoE or Elden Ring, have been long commented on online boards

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1hwe0id/elo...

And honestly, I can understand it entirely.

He has a public image of "geek/need hero" that is honestly inspiring. And that benefits him a lot because it bring people to trust his decisions. He has all the interest of the world to maintain this image.

[petra]

There was a podcast with Mark Andreesen, the VC, and he said that Elon has deep understanding and involvement in the technical side in his companies.

[anthem2025]

Wow if Marc Andreesen said then it must be true.

[freilanzer]

> some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).

People he hired for these companies made contributions.

[Treegarden]

Can you elaborate how this relates to his own competency?

[delichon]

Unlike the more common pattern, Elon doesn't hesitate to make straight up engineering decisions for his businesses, including ones that look unnecessarily high risk to a lot of his own engineers. Chopsticks catching spaceships made of stainless steel and self driving cars without lidar are well known examples. The success of those choices earns him legit nerd cred.

[mikkupikku]

Self-driving cars without LIDAR was a pure cynical business decision and hasn't worked well technically.

[delichon]

Disagree. The current limitations of Tesla self driving are not around difficulties in judging distances that lidar solves. They're around inference deficiencies with accurate geometry.

[tim333]

It must be a bit embarrassing having Waymo and Baidu cracking ahead with the driverless taxis while the Tesla ones still don't work well though.

[mikkupikku]

LIDAR provides dense point clouds from which you can derive geometry that Tesla's vision methods struggle to perceive.

(Subtle things, like huge firetrucks parked straight across the road.)

[ben_w]

If the AI was good enough, vision-only self-driving would be at least as good as the best human.

The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from.

It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.

[delichon]

It's safer than human drivers now. That's good enough. It will take more than that to convince world, and it should. I applaud the well earned skepticism. But I'm an old guy who has no problem qualifying for a driver's license, and if you replaced me with FSD 14.2, especially under not ideal conditions like at night or in a storm, everyone would be safer.

I predict a cusp to be reached in the next few years when safety advocates flip from trying to slow down self driving to trying to mandate it.

[Starman_Jones]

No reason we can't rely on other sensory modalities after the AI "gets good enough," either. Humans don't have LIDAR, but that doesn't mean that LIDAR is a "cheat" for self-driving cars, or something we should try to move past.

[trinsic2]

Im sorry that is just not true. You can never achive the kind of data with vison-only tech. its easy to confuse, you need lidar. anybody that thinks they can achieve self driving safety without that tech is lost.

[adev_]

As far as physics is concerned (his initial background), he definitively is knowledgeable for a CEO yes.

[n4r9]

Good example if anyone wants it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZslebJEZbE

[sam-cop-vimes]

It doesn't matter. He knows enough to be able to harness it for realising his worldview - and that is the problem.

[mikkupikku]

> Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[11][28] At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[29] At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500 (equivalent to $1,579 in 2024).[30][31]

I think it's fair to say he at least was a nerd. He was a dweeb getting beaten up in school, burying himself in books and computers at home. His skills are doubtlessly outdated now, but does that really mean much? Woz's skills (which to be perfectly clear, outclassed Musk's by miles) are doubtlessly out of date now too, but nobody would say Woz isn't a nerd.

I think the part where he grew into an unstable dirtbag might be influencing the way people see him now. Saying that is is, or at least was, a genuine nerd shouldn't be seen as any sort of excuse for his scamming, lying, etc.

[sidibe]

He definitely has talked about a lot of nerdy books. Don't know about his attention span and not sure how to square what he likes with his values. He brings up the Culture all the time but I have my doubts that he's actually read them

[mikkupikku]

I don't know either, I haven't read the Culture books (yet) either so I can't really evaluate that.

I do believe he read a lot of sci-fi in his youth, if only because that would fit the pattern of a young boy who doesn't get along well with their peers and turns towards solitary pursuits like computer programming. He seems exactly the sort to have read lots of Heinlein.

[ben_w]

Almost everything about The Culture will be immediately apparent from stuff Musk talks about, but only about half of it would look like he's understood it.

The only real crimes are reading/writing someone's brain without permission (at which point others may call you names and stop inviting you to social events) or destroying a consciousness without backups (where you'll get permanent supervision to make sure you don't do it again). Most biological citizens have a full-brain computer interface for backups and general fun, called a "neural lace".

The AI Minds in charge of everything give themselves fanciful names, which Musk has used for his SpaceX drone ships.

For the reverse:

Almost every biological citizen is gender-fluid, can change physical gender by willing it, and there's a certain expectation that you try things both ways around so you know how to be a good lover. They dislike explosive population growth regardless of if it's organic or machine reproduction, and as everyone can get pregnant if they want to (because everyone can be a woman if they want to and it all works), it's considered quite scandalous to have more than one child.

It's sufficiently post-scarcity that money is considered a sign of poverty. They mostly avoid colonising planets, instead living on ships, or on habitats so large that if one was located at any Earth-Sun Lagrange point (including the one on the far side of the sun), we could see it.

[tim333]

He wrote and sold his first software aged 12. He may not be very good with computers but does have some nerd origin.

[imtringued]

Elon Musk is probably one of the most cutthroat businessmen on the planet. His skills don't lie in technological implementation whatsoever.

Martin Eberhard was the technical co-founder of Tesla and Elon Musk is trying his best to erase his contributions to Tesla.

[irthomasthomas]

Eberhard and Tarpenning where the co-founders. Musk was an early investor, became the third CEO, and then sued to claim co-founder status.

[tim333]

Yeah there's an interesting interview with Eberhard https://youtu.be/88KHfX_kPIY?t=88

Eberhard wasn't that technical and was the CEO in the early years.

[adev_]

Yes. As far as business is concerned, facts speaks for themselves.

But that has nothing to do with the valley chips and computer nerdery

[happymellon]

Except that he didn't invent any of it.

Just a savvy investor, and as far as I understand, hasn't really worked on any of it. His contributions were rants until he just took ketamine.

His work was making a yelp clone.

[tim333]

He invented the very successful hyperloop.

[happymellon]

He also successfully managed to invent a company that takes government contracts and fails to deliver to block momentum for public facilities.

(Boring company...)

[youngtaff]

I know it’s sarcasm but he didn’t event invent it… just promoted it to undermine high speed rails

[beAbU]

Did you forget your /s ?

[tim333]

I guessed people would figure that.