this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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You mean the NASA who landed people on the moon?
So let's assume you aren't a moon landing denier and use that as a baseline, NASA is clearly capable of things given the right circumstances and budget.
SpaceX benefited from his reputation and money, because they sure as shit didn't benefit from his technical acumen.
Business wise he is successful because he's rich and influential and that works to mitigate how shitty he is at actually running an organisation, that doesn't mean he has skills as a business person that means he has money and influence, in his case originally from the mine, then from buying and bullying his was in to businesses that were technologically sound and boosting them with his money.
You could make an argument he's a relatively good investor, but he's an actively bad CEO.
Absolutely agree with this but there is no denying the innovation levels at spacex are higher (I'm not saying this is down to musk specifically. The man is a horror story of a human).
We were all in total awe when seeing booster stages land themselves successfully for the first time. It was such a giant leap forward and to the best of my knowledge no government funded space agency was even considering it before spacex.
Perhaps look into the DC-X program, fully 20 years before SpaceX Falcon: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
SpaceX has an internal team that works to make sure Musk can’t interfere with anything, because he’s so bad at managing businesses. Gwynne Shotwell is the one in charge of SpaceX.
I am not surprised in the slightest. I mean if you have a bunch of smart, highly motivated people it sounds like keeping the crazy man at arms length is the kind of thing they'd organise very effectively.
Undeniably, they've been doing amazing work (at least from my rocketry technology peasant point of view).
They landed people on the moon and then did fuck all for decades.
When Musk started SpaceX he was not well known yet, SpaceX came before Tesla.
He was able to get into the businesses he has because he was rich yes, but you can find many accounts of engineers that worked under him speak of how good he was at finding ways to cut unnecessary costs.
He’s not a technical genius that’s for sure. But he has been a good CEO for SpaceX. Terrible one for Tesla though, mostly because he bought into his own myth and became a drug addict. But I refuse to simply wave away his achievements simply because I don’t like him. I can not like someone and still acknowledge they have done something good.
Indeed, all i was saying is that they were capable given budget and circumstances.
That budget and direction comes from the government.
I will admit, i thought spacex was just another company he bought his way in to, like tesla, seems i was mistaken about that.
And you can equally find many accounts of having to distract him from the day to day operations because he's unreliable , unpredictable and chaotic (none of those meant in a good way).
He's also known for buying good press and using litigation to silence people.
I doubt this, but that could just be bias, i don't have any actual evidence of the long term impact of him as CEO.
Recently though, he's provably been significantly more of a liability than a benefit, even if just from a PR and public sentiment point of view.
Indeed, i push back on the myth that he's some self made tony stark genius, but it isn't like he's not achieved anything.
I would personally attribute most of that to neptoism, wealth, luck and opportunity, but that doesn't remove the achievement itself.