Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

I like Elon Musk, but the hero-worship disturbs me. Yeah, he founded one pretty successful company, got in early at a very successful company, and has been using the money to fund cool projects ever since. I think Tesla and SpaceX are both interesting, but still experimental: he hasn't been singlehandedly Tony Starking up the future in a lab, he's just used a lot of money from making some smart/lucky decisions to hire good people.

> I thought he was like John Carmack or something, but at the end of the day he's mostly a sales guy with big dreams. The self-taught rocket engineer stuff is mostly self-promotion.

Where do you get that impression? Except maybe from not following anything about him. Unless you think that the following quote from this interview is an outright lie:

"I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design. Engineering and design, so it's developing next-generation product. That's 80% of it.

(...)

I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something, which is fine. Business is fine. But really it's like at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is Chief Operating Officer. She manages legal, finance, sales, and general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team, working on improving the Falcon 9 and our Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial architecture. At Tesla, it's working on the Model 3 and, yeah, so I'm in the design studio, take up a half a day a week, dealing with aesthetics and look-and-feel things. And then most of the rest of the week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory. Because the biggest epiphany I've had this year is that what really matters is the machine that builds the machine, the factory. And that is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the vehicle itself."

>has been using the money to fund cool projects

Musk and his companies' investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost. [1]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-2015...

If anyone deserves hero-worship, it's Elon. In our age where the Kardashians and other vapid people are being worshiped, we need people like Elon to get a bit of the limelight and encourage and motivate ordinary people.

Ask yourself what the real subtext is; what most people are going to think when they read "But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design".

Is the mental image that of Tony Stark, single-handedly designing rocket components in some kind of advanced cad/cam-ish lab, scoffing at staid business meetings he delegates, or is it of a guy talking to a bunch of engineers, and hearing presentations, picking favorites among a bunch of proposals, signing off on this or that?

You are supposed to think of the former (PR), whereas the latter is closer to the truth.

Is this meant to imply that this is somehow unusual or particular to Tesla? The government provides incentives and subsidies all over the place. Even Coca-Cola benefits from subsidies.

"he hasn't been singlehandedly Tony Starking up the future in a lab"

So this is the measure of progress now? How can this sentence sound like anything other than sour grapes?

You use the tools available to you for the betterment of your species in some way.

Yeah, I imagine the latter is closer to the truth. I doubt Elon is spending all his time in CAD software, but I'm pretty sure he talks to people who do and looks at their work, and can meaningfully comment / advise on it.

I've seen the type before. I've personally met one of the guys running Reaction Engines Limited (the Skylon company); I've been on a talk he had for physicists at Rutherfort Appleton Laboratories. He mostly talked big-picture things during the presentation; then on a Q&A session someone asked him about details about the engine, and the guy went into full physics professor mode, explaining the engineering tradeoffs they made in excruciating details.

That's how I imagine Elon too.

Like I said, I like him! I just don't understand why we should think he has special knowledge of what the future holds.

The John Carmack comparison is point-on!

Musk isn't the most reliable source of information about himself: ' Musk sells himself as a singular mover of mountains and does not like to share credit for his success. At SpaceX, in particular, the engineers “flew into a collective rage every time they caught Musk in the press claiming to have designed the Falcon rocket more or less by himself,” '

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539861/techs-enduring-gre...

Let's not forget the $80 billion or so spent on the auto bailout...

He doesn't! He's a smart guy, for sure, he has some pretty interesting ideas - but as for the interview, it was done just because he's famous. He's stating his opinions. If you treat them as anything more, then it's not exactly his fault.

I think people overestimate the value of interviews. It's just individuals talking, not a compressed textbook!

First of all, those subsidies exist exactly to be used like this, so at best you can complain the government uses money to incentivize businesses. Elon is one of the few people who uses subsidies as they should be.

Secondly, his companies have a good track record of paying governments loan back, in full, before the due time.

Funny how a success story can be twisted into a negative.

They probably use government subsidized roads to deliver their goods, too. The freeloaders.

Funnily enough, I've yet to see him do that. The logical next question is obviously "so what are these other people for?".

>he has some pretty interesting ideas...

Can you list a few? I think only Hyperloop was a truly new idea. And I don't think it is going anywhere. It now feels like something that he did to capture the attention of the geek world.