Musk said he was going to automate the factory and he is going to automate the factory, no matter what.
Musk is a visionary, he lives in the future. For him the future is as real as the present, and has a clear pathway for it. He is going to make mistakes and some pathways are impossible to transit, but the goal remains the same and he will find a new way to go there. No matter if it takes five years and it is not possible now, but he will do it.
Field is a different kind of person. Things are the way they are, if nobody has done something before, it is impossible. For him not being able to automate things at first is a proof that he is right and Musk is wrong and things are impossible to automate further, forever.
Obviously both personalities are going to clash, only one can prevail. It happens in every single company out there. If two co founders have different values and ideas of what the company should do, there is a clash.
Being the most shorted company in Human history, there has always been a huge economic interest in portraying Musk badly and making shares go down.
If what the article says is the most serious thing they could find, I don't see the problems.
I have worked in the industry as an engineer in Europe and we had way more serious problems every single week.
Look at SpaceX/Starbase. The dude is crazy. He accelerated development over a week or two and the time series of photos of the site show epic progress. They installed 29 (!) Raptor engines in a single night with incredibly complex plumbing. They had 23 people working inside the diameter of the rocket.
Granted, he is rushing the SuperHeavy orbital build with reckless abandon, and a bad weld or connection somewhere means a multi-kiloton bomb blowing up on the launch pad (See Russian N1 launch), but you have to admire how fast SpaceX does things compared to ULA.
I mean, how many decades were people promising satellite internet? Iridium? Bill Gates Teledesic? OneWeb? etc. Starlink has put up satellites at a record pace compared to those projects. Again, with problems no one considered 10 years ago, like fucking up ground based astronomy.
Blue Origin hasn't even made it to orbit yet, but SpaceX has landed boosters 100 times, created the Falcon Heavy, the Crew Dragon, etc How many times has Starliner failed and been delayed? It's not even as capable as the Crew Dragon either.
I'm just saying, Musk has a "move fast and break things" iteration approach, the opposite of waterfall. He develops cars and rockets almost like people slap together websites. And it seems to be working, despite being a dickhead to employees, he's created a huge EV car company, and a huge world leading aerospace company.
Left out of your comment is the true hero of SpaceX: Gwynne Shotwell, who saved SpaceX from Musk's excesses and turned it into the highly profitable company it is today with a string of successful launches.
Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims.
Every launch failure that SpaceX has had in the past few years? That's Musk, gallivanting in at the last minute and interrupting the processes Shotwell set up to ensure successful launches to satisfy some silly little last-minute whim.
All of Musk's "successes" at SpaceX are literally just him waltzing in and stealing the credit for the work she's actually doing.
I don't think you can separate the two. It's like separating Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and giving 100% of the credit to Woz or Jobs.
Certainly Shotwell has made the business and operational side of the Space Falcon business smooth and helped win commercial/government contracts. But do you really think it is shotwell who is aggressively asking people to throw away designs, delete components, and iterate quickly by getting rid of testing steps? She is more of a Tim Cook than a Steve Jobs.
Look at this 1 hour q&A at Starbase, time index 13:30, there's no way this five stages of engineering comes from Shotwell. It's not her personality, but Musk's instincts here are absolutely correct.
And it's the number one reason why SpaceX made it to orbit, and Blue Origin didn't, and why Starliner is taking forever. Musk doesn't care about blowing up 29 raptors and blowing $50 million on a test that will most likely result in a RUD. Shotwell would never have authorized that, she is much more concerned with keeping SpaceX's finances in order and the contracts flowing, and Starship simply doesn't have many launch customers who need 100t in orbit, and where launching on Falcon 9, or Electron's is good enough.
> Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims.
Really? Based on what? The reason why they could pull that off is because Elon forced a shitload of SpaceX employees to be relocated from other parts of SpaceX to meet an arbitrary and unnecessary deadline. You think Shotwell would have ordered 24/7 round the clock booster assembly?
Keep in mind that it is Musk who insists on production automation, because his #1 priority is $/kg thrust, and so Raptor engines are pointless if you can't mass manufacture them. There is currently no economic reason for SpaceX, as a business, to mass manufacture these engines which have never been to orbit, even on a prototype demonstrator. Again, this had to have been Musk pushing for this, not a seasoned CEO/businesswoman looking to keep the company on track.
The entire Starbase is like a Google X, or Xerox PARC, it's a CEO running a big profitable company smoothly, so it can fund the crazy R&D ambitions of something else. That part Shotwell is responsible for, but there's no evidence of her involvement at all @ Starbase. She's never even been recorded being there AFAIK.
No, you're literally just giving Musk credit for things he didn't do but which Shotwell did. If Shotwell were a man, nobody would put up with Musk stealing the credit for her work.
The reason that they did install 29 Raptor engines overnight was because Musk was a whiny little s$$$ and forced the employees to do it on threat of termination. But the reason they could do it was because Shotwell had the company running smoothly enough (and the labor force happy enough with her leadership) to make it possible.
And it's borderline fraud to give Musk engineering credit for the "5 stages of engineering," since Musk had literally nothing to do with any of that except take credit for the work of his engineering staff. Musk came up with "first principles" but first principles count for literally nothing in engineering. The hard part is the execution, not the base idea. See, e.g., Boring Co, HyperLoop, DC vs Marvel, etc.)
Musk didn't care about blowing up 29 raptors on a test because it's not his money that he's playing with; it's the taxpayer that's funding his whims of fancy. But Blue Origin is heavily funded by Bezos out of pocket, and since it's his own money he's more cautious about how it's used. That being said: once again this 29 raptor installation owes everything to Shotwell making it possible: having 29 raptors/parts thereof available, having an installation site available, having staff available to sacrifice their night for no good reason, and most importantly, having an inkling ahead of time that her idiot boss would demand something stupid like this and having everything ready to go when King Musk waltzed in with his latest silly demand.
Unlike you, I know a number of people at SpaceX and those involved with Starbase. Shotwell is heavily involved, but unlike Musk, she's an actual leader and trusts her employees. She doesn't micromanage so she doesn't need to be onsite constantly breathing down her employees' necks.
Would Starbase or Starship even exist as a concept or program of SpaceX, if it hadn't been for Musk? Would Shotwell have created the Starship program at SpaceX? Would Shotwell even have pushed for the reusable booster program at SpaceX or would she have went with expendable first stages? No one is taking anything away from Shotwell, but fact is, it is Musk who is making reusability, full reusability, on-orbit refueling, and super-heavy lift a priority of R&D at SpaceX.
And this has nothing to do with gender. Steve Jobs got all of the accolades for everything amazing that Apple did. He stole credit from Steve Wozniak, and from all of the other brilliant designers and engineers at Apple, but people mostly gave him a pass. But to deny Steve as the driving force for many of decisions, even if Steve had nothing to do with Apple's amazing supply chain management, or semiconductor team, is also distorting history. No Steve Jobs, no iPhone, no Mac. No Musk, no Starship. It's just that simple, Musk isn't an executive to set out to make a rocket company to make money launching satellites, he set out to make humans multiplanetary, and everything flows from that vision. His obsession with that dream is the core driver behind everything else.
Musk creates the 'urgency' at SpaceX. Blue Origin isn't doing jack because they are careful with money, Blue Origin is wasting money. They've spent $1 billion a year! They're not doing anything because they're running a traditional waterfall model of development and they have no urgency, becausefor Bezos this is a hobby. They're OldSpace dressed up in NewSpace clothing.
What you're doing is trying to remove the person who controls the purse springs, who is pushing his company to engage in risky, unsafe, but potentially revolutionary vision, from the story. Put a traditional CEO in Musk's chair and you'll get a guy managing a 5% YoY improvement in their existing Falcon 9 business lines every year. They'll rest on their butt milking the Falcon 9 with tweaks, and they'll be stuck in the innovators dilemma for fear of killing the golden goose, or risking the company.
And it's for that reason, since the 1960s, the basic formula for aerospace companies hasn't changed.
Also to be clear, I'm a big fan of Shotwell. But you can be a fan of both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, of the visionary risk taker with the obsessive personality, and the person responsible for executing it. With the ADHD and the OCD founders. You need both kinds of people.
Musk is a visionary, he lives in the future. For him the future is as real as the present, and has a clear pathway for it. He is going to make mistakes and some pathways are impossible to transit, but the goal remains the same and he will find a new way to go there. No matter if it takes five years and it is not possible now, but he will do it.
Field is a different kind of person. Things are the way they are, if nobody has done something before, it is impossible. For him not being able to automate things at first is a proof that he is right and Musk is wrong and things are impossible to automate further, forever.
Obviously both personalities are going to clash, only one can prevail. It happens in every single company out there. If two co founders have different values and ideas of what the company should do, there is a clash.
Being the most shorted company in Human history, there has always been a huge economic interest in portraying Musk badly and making shares go down.
If what the article says is the most serious thing they could find, I don't see the problems.
I have worked in the industry as an engineer in Europe and we had way more serious problems every single week.