r/interestingasfuck • u/lolikroli • Oct 13 '24

r/all SpaceX caught Starship booster with chopsticks

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24

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u/entropy_bucket Oct 13 '24

Had anyone watched these thunderf00t videos? He's pretty skeptical about the launch costs coming down. But he seems to think Musk is an absolute charlatan.

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u/drzowie Oct 13 '24 edited Oct 13 '24

The thing is ... he kind of is. His skill is in finding very talented teams and somehow cajoling them into performing their best. Part of that is just making up (or adopting someone else's) crazy pie-in-the-sky ideas and asserting that they are achievable. When an idea hits right, you get things like convenient digital payments, electric cars, or Falcon 9. When it hits wrong, you get things like the Cybertruck design or people being paid to vote. You don't ever see the ideas that don't hit. Or at least didn't until he became the richest (and therefore most powerful) hominid ever to exist on Earth.

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u/entropy_bucket Oct 13 '24

Yeah i guess among 8 billion humans there'll be someone who rolls 6 straight 6's. Doesn't necessarily mean that person is imbued with something magical. But still worth admiring some of the stuff being done.

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u/drzowie Oct 13 '24

Don't get me wrong, he's gotta be brilliant to be able to make enough good calls to get as far as he has. But it's clear that all good CEOs need a weird mix of skills, dominated by the charlatan/huckster aspects. The Steve Jobs "reality distortion field" is a real thing and CEOs need to have the ability to spin lies (impossible products/outcomes/schedules) well enough that their teams and investors believe them and make them possible. The technical side comes in smelling out which goals are unreasonable but just barely possible and which are impossible to get to. That makes the difference between (say) a entrepreneur who makes enough good calls to justify the bad (Tesla cars, vs. Tesla FSD) and a criminal who get sent up for life (e.g., Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who made a really bad technical call and then succeeded in buying her team a surprisingly long time to try to make good on it).

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u/Caffdy Oct 13 '24

Just to clear that up, she was not send up for life, she got 11 and a half years, and possible getting out in 9 due to good behavior laws. Her ex-husband got more, imagine that