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Scott Alexander’s review of a 2015 biography of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, to me, is one of the world’s most confusing people. He’s simultaneously both one of the smartest people in the world, creating billions of dollars of value in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the dumbest, in burning billions on Twitter. Scott’s review I think is a good explanation of what’s up with Musk.
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yes becase the math and engineering was already figured out. management is important, as I agree with you there, but engineering is what stands in the way of something being possible or not, even with the best managers the world. if the equations cannot be solved, then it is literally impossible to get to the moon. not impossible in an abstract sense, but literally cannot be done.
That's the difference between necessary and sufficient. Yet sufficient can be way more important than neccessary.
Copper is necessary to make phones. If you have no copper, you can have no Iphone, categorically. But it's in no way even remotely sufficient. The Trojans had copper! >5% of the work is in raw material extraction. 95%+ of the value is in stuff like refining, design, chip manufacturing, software... Iphones need copper but they're not about copper like a spear might be.
Maybe in 1750 it really was about finding an engineer, or better an engineer who knew what he was doing. But today there are loads of engineers who can do pretty straightforward mathematics, the real substance of all our problems is in management, policy, quality-control, supply chains, efficiency...
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