It's fascinating how nobody was making this claim of a non-technical Musk up until the moment he stopped being loyal to one particular wing of US politics. Now we see a concerted effort to diminish his achievements. Do you people really think this will work? There is endless testimony from people - independent of Musk and in the space industry - saying that the dude is an honest to god rocket scientist who single-handedly made SpaceX happen through sheer force of will, engineering ability and personal investment. He routinely displays a fluent understanding of orbital mechanics well beyond what any normal CEO would be expected to display. Anyone can read his bio or the testimony of people who work in the space industry and understand that Musk was (and still is) intimately involved in every aspect of SpaceX, down to detailed engineering decisions.

Shotwell meanwhile is regularly described as managing the business development side. She negotiates with customers and oversees day to day operations. This is critical work that she clearly does very well, and she has an engineering background. But I can't find examples of people claiming that she drives product development or overall strategy for SpaceX.

Says you, random HN poster. Here's the assessment of a NASA astronaut who spent time on the ISS and who has a PhD in mechanical engineering and a degree in applied mechanics:

"[Musk is] able to have conversations with our top engineers about software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy"

But sure, him and the software engineers at NASA are all dumbasses who are fooled by an actor. Happens all the time.

Again - do you guys really think this will work? You are saying what you want to be true, not what actually is true. It's really not necessary. You can loathe the guy for political reasons and still accept that he is in fact an engineer, and does in fact know how to write software. These things are not mutually exclusive.

As for "he lies, he gets caught up". Really. Nobody making this claim is in in any position to attack someone else for getting caught up in a lie, given how brazen this claim is, how many people with direct experience have lined up to say the exact opposite, and how obvious it is that it can't be true given his achievements.

Please, stop claiming Musk isn't technical or that Gwynne Shotwell is the real leader of SpaceX. It doesn't work and makes all criticism of Musk look like ideologically motivated reasoning. There are plenty of genuine ways to criticize Musk! Attack him for being way too over-optimistic about FSD in Tesla cars if you want. Attack him for requiring logins to Twitter. But don't spread obvious lies about him - it lowers the credibility of all criticism.

Or this: > I personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages & white pages on the Internet in the summer of 1995 in C with a little C++. Didn't use a "web server" to save CPU cycles (just read port 8080 directly). Couldn't afford a Cisco T1 router, so wrote an emulator based on a white paper.

Or maybe this: > I mean, man, you’re in charge of the servers and the programming and whatever,” Brown continued. “What is the stack, Elon? Take me from top to bottom. What does the stack look like right now? What’s so crazy about it? What is so abnormal about this stack versus every other large-scale system on the planet, buddy? C’mon!

To which he answered: > Jackass

Or this: > They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.

Again I’m not speaking for rocket science, but as for software engineering and ML it seems he only has surface knowledge but does enough name dropping to maintain the illusion.

The quotes you chose contain direct references to him coding, to code that he wrote himself. Where is the name dropping? Are you being confused by the reference to web servers in the first quote maybe? In 1995 the term web server meant something like Apache with CGI. Writing a custom implementation of HTTP in C was a fairly standard technique to improve performance back then. The first version of Amazon was written in C, Google's web servers were still frequently written in C++ when I joined.

I mean, you say he has only "surface knowledge" and is "acting" to "maintain the illusion", but how many programmers could knock out their own implementation of HTTP in C on their own, let alone implement BGP and all the other low level stuff you need to bring a T1 online? How many would even understand what Musk was talking about?

The "...buddy? C'mon!" framing is simply obnoxious. Who would engage with such a person in the first place?

> Anyone who cares can build a replacement.

Technologically, sure; nothing special about it. But in terms of adoption and reach, no, Twitter is unique and extremely difficult to replace.

- there's a huge difference between a set of executives who are accountable to a board and shareholders, and a single person who is not, and doubly so when that person is among the wealthiest in the world, likes to shoot their mouth off, has a huge ego, and likes to exercise a great deal of control

Being fed the tour guide's summary and high-level overview of an event is not the same thing as knowing how they work.

Elon Musk's virtues start and stop at the way projects were funded. He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. It's well established that his takes are merely performative and with a substance of a pre-pubrescent edgy rant.

If there was any value in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the hot mess that his tenure has been, is to put the spotlight on how incidental the success of companies like SpaceX is regarding Elon Musk's influence. You're talking about the guy behind stunts like the "pedo guy" incident and yanking live servers out of their sockets as a cost-cutting measure.

Apart from Zip2 which he started from scratch and wrote the early code for, SpaceX which he stated from scratch, Neuralink likewise, OpenAI which he co founded and was the biggest early funder for and probably some others.

Could you please elaborate what you mean by that?

For better or worse Mark was/is able to see some deep minimal structure that allows what used to be a web page and is now a mobile app to elicit responses that bear an uncanny resemblance to the way human beings behave and interact in a setting unmediated by either a priest or a protocol. On the properties he runs people act a hell of a lot like they do in a bar or any other place where sapiens mix and match.

I’m not sure that turbocharging spinal-reflex humanity via computer networks is going all that well, which is one of the main reasons I parted ways with the endeavor once the true scope for mechanical advantage became clear, but he clearly sees things about what motivates people that Freud was throwing darts at.

I might have been one of the few true assassins he sent after people like Vic Gunderotta or Evan Spiegel and certainly he knows how to delegate the mechanics of leaving would-be adversaries on the scrap heap of history, but he knew who to send the hitters after and when.

Besides… Blue origin? Boeing? These are not state owned or “invisible” yet are failing.