Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.
The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.
The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
Any other firm, you mean like the bloated and bureaucratic NASA/JPL/defense contractor madhouse? That's not much competition.
> Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
Your "idea" (statement) is that his companies are successful due to his micromanagement. In reality, they're successful in spite of it. Like all impactful engineering institutions, there are incredibly talented people working at the "bottom" levels of these companies that hold the whole thing together.
There's a good bit of irony here in your thought that he'd fire people that didn't agree with him or disobeyed him. From what I've heard, he lacks the technical rigor to even understand how what was implemented differs from his totally awesome and cool, off the cuff, reality adjacent ideas.
The myth of the supergenius CEO has real potential to influence investors, beyond that, the hard engineering is up to the engineers. Period. SpaceX wouldn't have gotten past o-ring selection with Elon at the engineering helm.
What do you and them know that the countless extremely successful engineers who actually worked with Elon do not?
https://erik-engheim.medium.com/is-elon-musk-just-a-sales-gu...
Did you read my comment?
"I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company."
I am literally referring to extremely successful engineers who have worked directly with Elon.
I'm going to need more than a puff piece on some random Elon stan's medium page to outweigh what I've heard from my friends.
Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.
And which of those is also an American institution, with American educated employees and American cultural values, operating in an American legal and business framework?
Pretending NZ is a relevant comparison point is laughable. I bet SpaceX is also doing better than the 5th grade STEM class down the street!
Russia would've been a much better comparison given the history of the world we live in, but still not apples to apples.
Survivor bias. He's had how many failed businesses? 10? Probably more.
>Uhhhh
Thanks, I wouldn't have noticed how wrong that was otherwise ;)
It's most certainly two of them.
When you boil it down though, sometimes more than one company is built using almost the same exact mold, and the only major difference between them is the idea that the business plan is bult around.
More profitable ideas are good to have.
High-functioning or not.