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Musk is a very impressive booster and is therefore an important figure in modern capitalism.
He isn’t an “inventor” or “engineer” the way, say, Brunel was. No Musk stan can point to a key mechanical component of the spaceship, or model S, that he personally designed, drew the CAD model of, came up with the physics behind, actually invented in the way even a 5 year old would understand the term.
Yeah, you can point to his employees saying he’s really smart and “gets it”. So do plenty of regular people with STEM degrees. Musk isn’t a great inventor in the Victorian tradition. He’s a businessman.
No, his employees and former employees say understands rocket engineering to a very high level and is responsible for the very ambitious engineering that got done by insisting it's possible.
Even the entire insane approach: it's just a rocket, just metal, and not a precious one, so it shouldn't cost like it's made out of silver is his approach.
I bet there are plenty of MBAs at Boeing smart enough to understand rocket engineering too, who can insist that “it’s possible”. The reason for Musk’s success is that against all the odds his personal brand is extremely strong, and that pays immense dividends. “The real life Tony Stark” is what Tesla and SpaceX were built on, a meme from the first Marvel movie which of course itself begat the most successful box office franchise of all time.
Musk’s image can attract engineering talent nobody else can. There are very smart minds whose choice is essentially going into quant roles, possibly the most elite tech jobs, or working for Elon Musk. They won’t work for Ford or Boeing, no matter their pay. But they will work for Tesla or SpaceX, because of him.
But I don’t think vague comments about him being able to understand the tech means much. Transformer models are easy to explain and understand, but it still took someone to invent them. Musk wasn’t that person for his product. Making it possible isn’t the same thing.
I think that's BS. For one he clearly understands the stuff and loves it - you can see it in some of the interviews he gives where he talks about the most minute details. He's not 'just a guy who studied engineering and then decided it's not for him and got an MBA' which is imo the stereotypical manager with engineering degree.
He's a guy who earned money in internet, then staked it all on an absolutely insane idea, hired great people and succeeded despite everyone making fun out of him. (the mocking comments are all out there, archived).
People who don't work for him anymore, so not on the payroll (Cantrell, Mueller) said he's extremely smart or a genius, learns very fast.
Mueller said that Musk hates everything that detracts from the mission: office politics, bureaucracy etc. Also hates hearing "can't be done".
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You'd think so, and yet the trouble is they don't. They've only occasionally said the exact opposite, but everything they do suggests that their statements aren't a fluke. SpaceX was flying Grasshopper in 2012. As of 2022 ULA (Boeing's space consortium with Lockheed Martin) was still debating whether they'd have a better time catching falling booster engines with a helicopter or just packing an inflatable ballute+raft in them.
Boeing's vision of the economics of space was decades of cost-plus contracting. The idea that they could make more profit by bringing down costs than by incurring them was so foreign to them that they didn't even want that to be an option. In hindsight, the overruns on Starliner (despite getting 60% more money than Crew Dragon) suggest they weren't wrong about that - for themselves, anyway.
Boeing's grandest vision of the future in space is a rocket that costs $25B to develop, plus another $4B minimum per year to launch one mission per year, and the mission can put people in lunar orbit but a lander is going to take some more work and maybe four versions down the line plus a new reentry vehicle plus another lander we can talk about Mars in the 2030s unless there are some delays just like there were the last time and the time before that. They do not believe a high flight rate is possible. They do not believe reuse, much less rapid reuse, is possible - they will be using extremely expensive Shuttle-derived engines originally designed for reuse, but they will be throwing them in the ocean for each flight. They do not believe rapid innovation is possible. They choose technologies like solid rocket boosters (for which "flyback" is an impossibility, as is "an off switch") and hydrolox fuel (great if you're optimizing ISP, less great if you're optimizing cadence or dollars) that don't even allow for a latter switch in that direction.
To be sure, SpaceX's newest rocket may be a failure. I've been getting a little more optimistic with each test, but the hardest parts are yet to come, and just because they've succeeded at reuse with Falcon and reentry with Dragon doesn't mean they're guaranteed to manage reuse with Starship and reentry with Starship. But the point where they're at with it as of their last test, sailing the upper stage through space before it disappointingly breaks up on reentry ... that's basically the point where nearly every other launch vehicle declares victory! By SpaceX (and honestly any reasonable) standards, Boeing's newest rocket was designed to be a failure, even if it had been a nominal success. It was designed so that, if everything had worked even with the schedule they had originally hoped for and the prices they had originally hoped for, it would not have been an economically sustainable system for anything more worthwhile than a few national pride stunts before Congress gets bored with funding those again, and in the absence of competition its greatest effect on the space industry would have been further normalization of the falsehood that space is just so super hard that there's no reason to expect anyone to ever do it any better.
You don't get rocket engineers (who really ought to be the ones in the common idiom! I've done a little rocket science, but rocket engineering still greatly intimidates me...) to work with the kind of passion that SpaceX was getting from them by offering them the chance to Go Where Man Has Gone Before while repeating the same mistakes as last time. Part of the SpaceX formula for success was their engineering choices, part of it was their vertical integration, part was their willingness to design "hardware-rich" even though that's embarrassing ... but a lot of it was that, for the first time since before their engineers were born, they were actually being given the option to succeed.
Elon Musk could succumb to a heart attack tomorrow, and as long as Gwynne Shotwell was still at the helm (or at least someone who's picked up the same long-term vision - I doubt SpaceX upper management has many who haven't), SpaceX would still have just as easy a time (probably easier - aerospace engineers are 50% left-wing, and the right-wing half surely aren't all comfortable with Elon's edgelord shitposting style either) recruiting.
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The problem I have with these anecdotes is that they're coming from other nerds (no hate, I'm one of them), and Elon is basically king nerd, so anything bad they say against him is like blasphemy. I personally have not witnessed Elon be competent about software (my expertise) once.
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