Diamonds are beautiful. Blood diamonds are horrific tragedies.
Elon Musk is in charge of some projects that have amazing outcomes, yes. But does he actually know the engineering (which is kind of not a very interesting question to me), and is he horrible to work for?
A famous anecdote from the Steve Jobs official biography was where he was telling the CEO of Corning glass about the specifics of glass manufacturing. The CEO just smiled and played along, because they wanted Apple's business.
The custommer is always right; even when they bloviate well beyond their area of expertise.
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
> He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
Quotes like that give me the impression he's very much involved technically.
For me at least, this perception comes from the level of hubris that Elon exhibits in public. Statements like "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth" is not something you hear from good engineers very often because it reeks of Dunning Kruger. Elon also frequently chooses to make statements with high certainty about areas far outside his expertise ("Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April") and consistency overpromises and under-delivers with some technologies (FSD).
So I don't know. Maybe he's a good engineer when he's not on camera. But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.
I remember my perception changed when I watched an interview with musk talk about the material science challenges of panel gaps on teslas. You can't have that level of knowledge unless you worked very close to the problem.
I mean, he might pay very close attention to everything at his company. That doesn't mean he's deeply involved with the engineering.
For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.
At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.
Not sure why people gate keep so hard around "he'S NOt An engiNEER". Even if he's not writing the code anymore, having deep technical understanding of important day to day tasks is an important quality in any leader in an engineering organization.
I wasn't taking a position on Musk with that specific comment, and I don't disagree with your latter point at all.
Broadly speaking, I wouldn't rush to consider anyone a doctor, an engineer, a pilot, so on and so forth simply because I watched a video of them speaking so well to a very specific problem that they just so happened to work so closely on. That's all I was getting at.
I am an engineer, though not at all involved in materials science/engineering, and I've known what galvanic corrosion is since I was a teenager. It's not exactly an obscure phenomenon.
We covered that in high school chemistry, along with an in-class demo and a section in the book on sacrificial anodes and how they're used to prevent corrosion in things like oil pipelines. It was a US public school.
every one who has ever owned an aluminum boat, or generally worked with aluminum that's anywhere near electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode It's not an obscure thing; field specific maybe, but it's very much sub-table-stakes.
Every single electrician I know is familiar with galvanic corrosion as well as how to mitigate it with insulation, dielectric grease, sacrificial anodes, etc. Steel and aluminum are the two most common metals that we use to make things. Galvanized steel has a zinc coating that acts as a sacrificial anode, almost any steel that is installed outside that isn’t stainless is galvanized.
There's a difference between "an engineer" and "a good engineer".
So those saying he's not an engineer at all are probably wrong, but those saying he's a good engineer probably aren't correct either.
I think it's also the case where his misses are more evident. If you said "We'll get to Mars in 10 years", people will likely have forgotten you said that after 5 years, much less 2 years after your boasted time frame expires. So people credit you for big ideas while not having to deliver on anything. Every year, we've been about a year away from fully autonomous self-driving cars.
Complaining about twitter and saying how you'd fix it is easy when you don't control twitter. But actually fixing it is a different story once you have all the control.
I don't know man. I'll often hear things to the effect of I can't believe how incompetent the developers of this app are, regardless of the complexity of the app.
>But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.
I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.
Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess? All I can find are his own boasting and second hand reports of folks impressed by his familiarity with jargon.
Second and third hand accounts are nice. Even better when they come from folks no longer financially dependent on Elon's good graces.
But I was hoping to see some of his source code for Zip2, some CAD he'd done himself, or even a video of him solving some intractable problem in one of these rooms full of stumped geniuses.
So this guy has founded multiple successful engineering-heavy companies, did not receive any actual financial support past 18 (despite inflated myths of an "emerald mine"), is attested by multiple skilled engineers, and has given videos where he talks in depth about engineering, but we're still looking for new & different kinds of evidence that he has skills?
Are we testing whether he knows anything at this point, or whether he's a literal Tony Stark? This thread started with discussion of whether he's any kind of engineer at all now we're looking for "rooms full of stumped geniuses" as if this was something every random engineer experienced.
Didn't see any links to talks by Musk. Perhaps you can share some?
Look I can go read Gates' code, so I have some direct evidence of whether his reputation as an engineer is worth the paper it's written on. The story for Musk is much less direct. Still, I'm open to studying the evidence of Musk's engineering chops.
I would characterize him as a bad engineer. Which for a CEO is a lot better than nothing, if one does not become too arrogant and stops listening. Which, by now he seems to have done. He clearly can do the math of rocket science, but that math is not actually super hard, but its still better than your average CEO he can do. He can understand math and physics based arguments.
But he has never understood people, politics, etc. Which is what twitter is all about.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I'm struck by two things about that Reddit post. First, all but one of the quoted people who are engineers [1], are also Musk's subordinates. And second, there are suspiciously few (as in zero) dissenters listed.
I've no doubt Musk can talk convincingly about engines or whatever, and maybe even about physics, but I don't think he could function as a professional engineer. I'm just not getting the impression that he has much depth.
[1] discounting Carmack who is brilliant but is a different kind of engineer
Carmack is widely considered one of the greatest software engineers ever, and knows Musk well. Either he's outright lying to make his friend look good, or I'll take his opinion over basically anyone. He certainly isn't Musk's "subordinate" in any meaningful sense.
Even when Carmack was Zuckerberg's "subordinate" he was independently wealthy and could do whatever the fuck he wanted, and has been for a long time. You didn't see him going around, even then, talking up Zuckerberg's engineering chops. Despite the fact that we know Zuck did in fact write a lot of the early code for FB.
Carmack is also not a "different kind of engineer". Guy is primarily famous for his software, but he had a rocket company of his own, ran Meta's VR labs which involved quite a bit of hardware, etc.
All due respect to John, but what the hell qualifies him to classify Elon as an engineer of rockets?
I trust John Carmack in his wheelhouse, but without knowing him better I wouldn’t trust him to fix my car or recommend a beer, just because he’s prolifically qualified at building and shipping software.
I would even argue his recent work on VR for Facebook makes me question if he’s still “got it”, considering how wildly that seems to have flopped.
I’m excited to see what he does with his new AI startup, but let’s not canonize the man.
Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace landed rockets vertically, years before SpaceX did (albeit much smaller ones). He built the company as a hobbyist labor of love and it won NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge in 2008.
Carmack is absolutely qualified to talk about aerospace engineering. He also knows quite a bit about cars, FWIW.
I think the point is: There is a long list of legendary engineers in various domains who've worked with Elon and attest to his engineering talent and technical contributions to the companies he's founded.
Where is the list of legendary engineers who've worked with him who say the opposite? Seriously, even one example would be interesting to me. I'm not aware of any.
A) it's not a long list and B) it can be career limiting to speak poorly of anyone, so I don't think "no engineer has said bad things about him" is a fair assessment.
I dunno how many rooms with people like Elon you've been in, but people heap praise on people like that; it's free for them to do, and makes the Elon-type feel good about themselves, which materially impacts how much money those praisers have access to.
Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I trust the celebrity engineers less than I trust the nameless engineers, at least when it comes to matters of PR.
Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
> A) it's not a long list and B) it can be career limiting to speak poorly of anyone, so I don't think "no engineer has said bad things about him" is a fair assessment.
That's a fair statement, it could even be true. But the fact remains, what is confidently asserted by many lacks evidence to substantiate it.
> Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I think it is useful here to refer to exactly what it is that you mean. I am aware of a few such instances, but the instances I am aware of are Musk being mostly right and the engineers in question being mostly wrong. Perhaps you are aware of different incidents.
> Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
Woz hasn't actually worked with Elon. Anyway in a cursory search, I can't find the quotes you seem to be referring to. I'm not disputing their existence, but a link would be helpful to make this concrete.
As other commenters have pointed out, Carmack founded a rocket company before Elon did. So he has plenty right to speak to Elon's credibility on the question of rockets. But let's not forget that Tom Mueller at JPL was also on the list that praised Elon's engineering abilities, and I'm not sure how much more rocket credibility you can get. And more to the point, I didn't say Carmack was some kind of absolute arbiter of truth here. The baseline isn't God.
The baseline is the median HN commenter. And Carmack's opinion carries infinitely more weight than that. I would argue it carries substantially more weight than the 99th percentile HN commenter.
The point is: All of the people who have worked directly with him and are also famous for their engineering talent in various domains respect him. I'm literally not aware of a single example in the opposite category. And I'll take the opinion of widely respected engineers who've worked with the guy over the commentariat on an internet forum any day.
In the Isaacson biography, Steve Jobs viewed himself as an "engineer." It comes up in some of the quotes when they were working at Atari and early in Apple's existence. I don't have a copy of the book anymore, but it's hinted at here:
But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him." A Diet Of Air And Water Jobs was hired as Atari employee #40, as a technician fixing up and tweaking circuit board designs. One of his first roles was finishing the technical design of Touch Me, a simple arcade memory game similar to Ralph Baer's later Simon toy.
The idea that HN commenters who have never met the guy have opinions that contradict the statements of John Carmack, Jim Keller, Tom Mueller, Andrej Karpathy, etc.
These people are not sycophants. These people do not need Musk. They have plenty of their own money. They are not speaking highly of him because they want a promotion, or they want to be in his good graces, or they're afraid of being fired.
You can still hate him for the way he behaves. You can still think he's a bad guy. But if you think your opinion of his talent or engineering depth is better than these people's who've worked with him, you should seriously reconsider your epistemic blind spots.
It's ok for him to be a good engineer and a bad person. Von Braun designed rockets for the Nazis and later the US space program. Nobody doubts his engineering brilliance.
As much as I don't like Musk behaviour lately, or how he try to picture himself as the founder of Tesla, it's really ridiculous to deny his achievements. And the money argument - "oh he just paid good engineers to create the companies" - is pretty dumb too - he wasn't that rich until 2 years ago, so why other billionaires didn't do the same thing ? Or all those other more talented engineers.
Tesla as we know it wouldn't exist without him. IE, the company that almost single handedly (yes, with governments subsides etc etc - they were available to everybody) changed the car industry.
But, the way Musk tells the story or tries to push the narrative is very fishy. I remember reading Ashlee Vance biography of Musk, without knowing too much of him at the time, and while I was in awe about the achievements and boldness, it was also pretty obvious that the guy is childish and a dick.
The reality is Musk wanted to create an EV company. And somebody told him, there are some guys who started doing that, and instead of cutting them out he said, ok, let me and my guy join and ill finance the company.
Tesla was dead in the water before Musk, they couldn't raise money, they had so far only invested a minimal amount from founders themselves and were going nowhere.
Musk brought the money and the chief engineer that actually made Tesla car initially go. The founder CEO then over the next 6 years drove the company straight into the ground.
Musk then took over invested more money and 10 years later its the dominate car company in the EV transition.
I don't give a shit if he is the founder by some definition 'founder' where 'founder' means the guy who created the initial business plan (a business plan that kind of sucked btw). He is what made Tesla actually a real company rather then a joke for Detroit to laugh at.
> The idea that HN commenters who have never met the guy have opinions that contradict the statements of John Carmack, Jim Keller, Tom Mueller, Andrej Karpathy, etc.
Those people can also be wrong about stuff. This is just an appeal to the reputation of those names. It doesn't give weight pro se.
I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.
> Those people can also be wrong about stuff. This is just an appeal to the reputation of those names. It doesn't give weight pro se.
Err. Sure. It is, in principle, possible for all of these people to be wrong. But where are the well known engineers who've actually worked with him who say he's not? There should be quite a few by now, right?
> I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.
I've seen a lot of people make this claim. But every time I've seen this claim made in a field I know well, it was the person making the claim that was wrong, not Musk. Maybe in your case you're right. But my experience is that every time i've seen him dunked on for something technical, he was mostly right and they were mostly wrong.
I guess some of the examples I'm thinking about are trashing on stuff that isn't technical, but there's little doubt to me that they bleed into technical things, because you can't have these personality traits and not have it affect technical decisions.
For example, he was writing about the Bob Lee stabbing as if it was a random violent attack. I wasn't 100% certain but at the time I was extremely suspicious of this claim, based on knowing the block where it happened, it was basically guaranteed that Lee and the assailant were the only two people on the block and it was dubious a homeless person could have camped there. He started trolling the district attorney, who is more conservative about these topics than the last guy, but even she told him to STFU.
There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.
Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.
> For example, he was writing about the Bob Lee stabbing as if it was a random violent attack. I wasn't 100% certain but at the time I was extremely suspicious of this claim, based on knowing the block where it happened, it was basically guaranteed that Lee and the assailant were the only two people on the block and it was dubious a homeless person could have camped there. He started trolling the district attorney, who is more conservative about these topics than the last guy, but even she told him to STFU.
I think you can still be a pretty good engineer and believe that a stabbing in SF is probably perpetrated by a random homeless person absent other information. It may have been wrong for him to jump to this conclusion, but I don't think it has any bearing on his technical skills.
> There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.
Again you may be perfectly right, but this has nothing to do with engineering talent. Lots of great engineers are famously assholes (in various ways): see, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, etc.
> Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.
This is just not the case as any kind of rule. Like, sure, a perfectly rational Bayesian optimizer may not do these things. But real engineering at the highest level isn't about that - it's about intuition from experience about which system design choices will be good and which won't, and acting quickly and efficiently on that information.
The very small intersection of incredible engineers who are also very good people have the humility to quickly pivot when they've been proven wrong, admit it, and move on. Elon is obviously not in this category.
But I think you have to admit that it's telling that when pressed for examples of his technical failures in public, all you could come up with were completely non-technical examples.
See, you're wrong on every count. Talented engineers don't jump to conclusions with this high frequency. It is totally predictave of engineering ability. You don't build a bridge by making public, arrogant statements that it will stand, when you are actually full of shit and haven't looked into any details. This clearly permeates all of Elon's thinking. He has financial success which blinds him to this problem at this point.
This is different from Torvalds or Stallman. Torvalds is still writing commits for Linux, and they work. His public opinions are sometimes delivered sharply, but I have usually found them to be well based in fact. He's not going off on Twitter with a bunch of baseless personal attacks. Good engineers do not.
Also, it sounds a lot to me like you neglect the relationship between sociability and engineering work. It is a huge thing. It absolutely cannot be ignored to be a successful engineer. Linus, despite criticisms, is quite sociable and socially aware, and it's a big part of his success.
You still haven't come up with a single example of his technical failure in public, and I think that is more telling than any discussion of how social ineptitude relates to engineering talent.
> Also, it sounds a lot to me like you neglect the relationship between sociability and engineering work. It is a huge thing. It absolutely cannot be ignored to be a successful engineer. Linus, despite criticisms, is quite sociable and socially aware, and it's a big part of his success.
Agree completely. But it is an objective fact that Elon Musk has inspired lots of engineers to work for him, and to do so at an incredibly high level of productivity.
But given a conflict between the opinions of a random person on HN and prominent engineers who've worked directly with Musk, I'll place more emphasis on the words of the prominent engineers. It's not that they can't be wrong, it's that they're less likely to be wrong than people whose only interaction with Musk is reading his Twitter.
I just read the comments in the reddit thread. It seems like the sort of vague platitudes people say when they've worked with a person, regardless of their actual competence. Especially in a higher level position, people say this stuff all the time out of BS. I wouldn't take it for much.
Yeah what do these people have to gain by saying anything but platitudes? Why make an enemy out of the richest guy on earth who also happens to have a very passionate fanbase? Of course anyone who has other stuff to do besides looking for a fight is going to praise him when asked.
Yeah but those people went in many directions. Some have their own independent business and fanbase. Some went into education and turned into tenured professors. Some created their own new companies after SpaceX/Tesla and turned into quasi competitors. And yet all of them said all these things only to stay in the good graces of Musk, not likely. Musk might care what Bezos, Gates and co say about him, but some former head of engineer that went into academia, I don't think so.
And of course it also disregards what they actually said, its not just 'platitudes'. Some explained in great detail what he does and why they are so impressed with him.
Some of them like Tom Mueller went out of their way, years after leaving the company, to tell people not to assign all credit to them. Why would they do that, if they wanted that they could have just remained silent.
If a 'chief engineers' job is to coordinate multiple teams of engineers and make high level decisions to lead to a larger strategic goal, then that is what Musk clearly does and does pretty well and that is hard to question.
If he himself can design a rocket engine or an electric motor from scratch is questionable but I don't think that's what being an engineer is.
I can believe he's very smart, but he's also wildly irrational. He's also been caught out since taking over Twitter of broadcasting very inaccurate things about the state of Twitters software stack. Hyperfocus on the software is also definitely the wrong thing to be worrying about when it comes to running a content company and he's only made the product worse in his time there and has shown close to zero understanding what makes the site valuable.
> I can believe he's very smart, but he's also wildly irrational.
Yes, this is more or less what I believe. Or to be more precise, I think over the past 5-7 years his fame, attention, and power have corrupted him.
> He's also been caught out since taking over Twitter of broadcasting very inaccurate things about the state of Twitters software stack.
I don't remember ever seeing a valid example of this. I do remember people dunking on things he said at various times, but those people were wrong, and he was right. Nearly all the Musk haters predicted Twitter would collapse after he fired half the staff, that it would fall apart. Former engineers wrote op eds about how it would happen. None of it did.
The particular instance to which I think you're referring was some front-end enginee attempting to falsify Musks's claims about how content was loaded, but the frontend engineer clearly didn't understand that Musk was talking about the micro-services that stitch together the feeds loaded by the front end code. Now, Musk may have been wrong - I don't know what Twitter's architecture looks like inside, but the guy who was criticizing him didn't either.
> Hyperfocus on the software is also definitely the wrong thing to be worrying about when it comes to running a content company and he's only made the product worse in his time there and has shown close to zero understanding what makes the site valuable.
I'm not sure I agree. I did think that at first, but I think he actually does understand what makes the site valuable - the users, and diversified revenue streams. He hasn't fully achieved that, but he has time. A social media site where you actually buy the product instead of being the product is what people have claimed to want here for quite a while.
He could certainly be lying. He no longer has the kind of obligations not to that a public company does. But the idea that Twitter is dying or dead is just not the case. He certainly overpaid for it, and I don't think every move he's made has been good, but he's iterated rapidly, and been willing to revert unpopular changes quickly.
I don't know if he's a good engineer or not, but people that don't like him want it to be true and will propagate it regardless. All negative news or rumors about him--twitter is failing, his companies succeed despite him, SpaceX launchpad exploded, Tesla kills pedestrian, stock is tanking, etc..." grants a huge dopamine boost to these people. Unfortunately I understand this well as I have my own areas where this is true.
