Man, say whatever you want about Elon. The guy comes up with crazy ideas that break with some convention, and is willing to stick with them until they either fail or miraculously work out. Cybertruck is having some birthing pains but I will timidly predict that it has achieved a decent level of acceptance and we'll see imitators soon. AND he's good at picking the right people to implement these ideas.
Like there's still probably some irreducible risk from this approach, but to pluck it out of the space of possible solutions when it wasn't even on anybody else's radar? Damn.
"Willing to stick with it" does not sound as impressive when you're just funding the work, not personally putting your nose to the grinder 12 hours a day. And maybe Musk does put his nose to the grinder, but I don't see him doing that. I see him posting midwit takes on twitter.
He needs a PR team to tell him what to do to look more like the modern Tony Stark and less like, well, Trump.
A modern day Tony Stark is 'impossible' because no one person can achieve the total amount of expertise and do the actual intellectual and physical labor needed to build anything really cool and effective, esp. at scale. You can't really build a magical reactor and suit of powered armor in a cave, with scraps.
If you're only willing to give a guy credit if he personally designs, builds, tests, and produces the end product without delegation, then literally nobody gets credit for cool stuff happening.
Maybe when Elon is fully Neuralinked up and has a squadron of those Optimus robots responding to his very thoughts he could go it 'alone.'
But the dude who can identify, acquire, and direct the necessary experts and keep them motivated and funded long enough to build some cool shit is like 1/3 of the way to being Tony Stark.
My point about Elon has long been that YES, he constantly overpromises and underdelivers. But he still delivers more than his closest competitor so he wins anyway. Overhyping a product matters much less if you're the only one who can deliver anything close to the hype.
At least part of that has to do with him putting in absurd hours and, as we see above, actually adding his technical input to the process rather than just sitting back and funding other workers. Indeed, the Principal-Agent problem would suggest that if you just sit back and fund people, they will optimize for getting paid rather than delivering results, so I think he throws himself in there mainly to make sure everyone else is, too.
There is a reason SpaceX has developed and deployed this capability, and none of the national space organizations and none of the private space organizations succeeded or even tried.
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Notes -
Man, say whatever you want about Elon. The guy comes up with crazy ideas that break with some convention, and is willing to stick with them until they either fail or miraculously work out. Cybertruck is having some birthing pains but I will timidly predict that it has achieved a decent level of acceptance and we'll see imitators soon. AND he's good at picking the right people to implement these ideas.
Like there's still probably some irreducible risk from this approach, but to pluck it out of the space of possible solutions when it wasn't even on anybody else's radar? Damn.
"Willing to stick with it" does not sound as impressive when you're just funding the work, not personally putting your nose to the grinder 12 hours a day. And maybe Musk does put his nose to the grinder, but I don't see him doing that. I see him posting midwit takes on twitter.
He needs a PR team to tell him what to do to look more like the modern Tony Stark and less like, well, Trump.
A modern day Tony Stark is 'impossible' because no one person can achieve the total amount of expertise and do the actual intellectual and physical labor needed to build anything really cool and effective, esp. at scale. You can't really build a magical reactor and suit of powered armor in a cave, with scraps.
If you're only willing to give a guy credit if he personally designs, builds, tests, and produces the end product without delegation, then literally nobody gets credit for cool stuff happening.
Maybe when Elon is fully Neuralinked up and has a squadron of those Optimus robots responding to his very thoughts he could go it 'alone.'
But the dude who can identify, acquire, and direct the necessary experts and keep them motivated and funded long enough to build some cool shit is like 1/3 of the way to being Tony Stark.
My point about Elon has long been that YES, he constantly overpromises and underdelivers. But he still delivers more than his closest competitor so he wins anyway. Overhyping a product matters much less if you're the only one who can deliver anything close to the hype.
At least part of that has to do with him putting in absurd hours and, as we see above, actually adding his technical input to the process rather than just sitting back and funding other workers. Indeed, the Principal-Agent problem would suggest that if you just sit back and fund people, they will optimize for getting paid rather than delivering results, so I think he throws himself in there mainly to make sure everyone else is, too.
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Organization and management is also labor.
There is a reason SpaceX has developed and deployed this capability, and none of the national space organizations and none of the private space organizations succeeded or even tried.
Boeing having to get rescued from their latest boondoggle, despite that company having more funding than GOD, should be an illustrative point.
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