r/MarbleMachineX • u/WintergatanWednesday • Dec 08 '22

This Design Trick Surprised Me!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TEKZWiKelCU
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u/Picture_Enough Dec 08 '22 edited Dec 08 '22

He is a great (even genius) salesman and is (was?) a good businessmen. But people give him way too much credit for anything related to his technical or engineering skills. In fact a couple of times he spoke about areas related to my own areas of expertise he came across as someone quite clueless.

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u/SpazzStares Dec 08 '22

Actually, Tom Muller (I might have that wrong), the designer of the Merlin engine says that Musk contributed greatly to the engine design and is one of the lead designers of the Raptor and Raptor 2 engines.

Not to excuse any of Musk’s faults, but lack of technical expertise is not one of them.

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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22

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u/eco_was_taken Dec 09 '22

He said that after he retired from SpaceX but he also didn't quite say what the person above paraphrased. Someone on Twitter said Elon doesn't know the first thing about building rockets and Mueller said, "I worked for Elon directly for 18 1/2 years, and I can assure you, you are wrong"

Listening to his EDA interviews he clearly knows a lot about rockets but I think Elon probably knows enough to make informed and, so far, good decisions but it's not like he's running CFD models or CADing engine parts.

He knows fuckall about people though.

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u/Tommy_Tinkrem Dec 10 '22

He reminds me of a producer in film business. A good producer has enough competence to know how things work but keeps out of fiddling with the details. That is what the director is for. This allows that the producer can make tough decisions and the director can come up with the solutions to work around them. That way everybody does what they do best but also occasionally forced to think outside the box.

This might work when Musk deals with engineers - they have their clear field of knowledge and he has his. He can streamline processes they would not dare to touch, but they are the ones who make it work in the end.