this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
1085 points (91.3% liked)
Technology
71633 readers
3820 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You mean the NASA who landed people on the moon?
So let's assume you aren't a moon landing denier and use that as a baseline, NASA is clearly capable of things given the right circumstances and budget.
SpaceX benefited from his reputation and money, because they sure as shit didn't benefit from his technical acumen.
Business wise he is successful because he's rich and influential and that works to mitigate how shitty he is at actually running an organisation, that doesn't mean he has skills as a business person that means he has money and influence, in his case originally from the mine, then from buying and bullying his was in to businesses that were technologically sound and boosting them with his money.
You could make an argument he's a relatively good investor, but he's an actively bad CEO.
They landed people on the moon and then did fuck all for decades.
When Musk started SpaceX he was not well known yet, SpaceX came before Tesla.
He was able to get into the businesses he has because he was rich yes, but you can find many accounts of engineers that worked under him speak of how good he was at finding ways to cut unnecessary costs.
He’s not a technical genius that’s for sure. But he has been a good CEO for SpaceX. Terrible one for Tesla though, mostly because he bought into his own myth and became a drug addict. But I refuse to simply wave away his achievements simply because I don’t like him. I can not like someone and still acknowledge they have done something good.
Indeed, all i was saying is that they were capable given budget and circumstances.
That budget and direction comes from the government.
I will admit, i thought spacex was just another company he bought his way in to, like tesla, seems i was mistaken about that.
And you can equally find many accounts of having to distract him from the day to day operations because he's unreliable , unpredictable and chaotic (none of those meant in a good way).
He's also known for buying good press and using litigation to silence people.
I doubt this, but that could just be bias, i don't have any actual evidence of the long term impact of him as CEO.
Recently though, he's provably been significantly more of a liability than a benefit, even if just from a PR and public sentiment point of view.
Indeed, i push back on the myth that he's some self made tony stark genius, but it isn't like he's not achieved anything.
I would personally attribute most of that to neptoism, wealth, luck and opportunity, but that doesn't remove the achievement itself.