And also, arrogant to the point of being funny? "Interviewer: Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs?Elon: Mostly not." LOL.
And also, arrogant to the point of being funny? "Interviewer: Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs?Elon: Mostly not." LOL.
> "Politically, Musk has described himself as "half Democrat, half Republican". In his own words: "I'm somewhere in the middle, socially liberal and fiscally conservative."[116]
> Musk is a self-described American exceptionalist and nationalist, describing himself as "nauseatingly pro-American". According to Musk, the United States is "[inarguably] the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth", describing it as "the greatest force for good of any country that's ever been". Musk believes outright that there "would not be democracy in the world if not for the United States"
> Musk has directly contributed to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who has been accused of holding [skeptical] positions regarding climate change.[121]"
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."
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.
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.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539861/techs-enduring-gre...