I don't believe in hero worship.

I also don't believe in tearing down people who have achieved great things in some effort to attribute their success to mostly luck.

Your other post is rife with the fallacy of special pleading by critically examining fortunate occurrences in his endeavors while making no mention of obstacles he overcame like surviving the internet bubble collapse, being fired, having to compete with Fiskar, and countless other things you nor I know anything about.

You could just as well say that I arrived at my office this morning through pure luck. After all, I didn't slip in the shower like many people do, I didn't get in a car accident as is statistically common, etc.

Also, I was at Apple before and after the return of Steve Jobs. The internal differences in the company when he returned were palpable and quantifiable. He certainly didn't do it alone, but it definitely wouldn't have happened without him.

critical aid provided by the much maligned and mocked US government

Well, when you're spending a quarter of the GDP of the largest economy in the world, some good stuff has to happen somewhere. Those of us maligning and mocking just aren't happy with the cost to the economy and our liberties for the meager gains.

Yes, the collective efforts of engineers should be praised.

Elon himself would agree, since he once said in an interview: "“No, I’ve never aspired to be an astronaut–I have aspired to invent things,” “In fact, I think an error was made in the Apollo program in that there was too much lionizing of the astronauts. Not that they don’t deserve to be lionized, but the real difficulty was the creation of the rocket–it was the engineering and the invention of rocketry.”

Kids should aspire not to be astronauts but to be engineers."

Elon doesn't explicitly state on most interviews how awesome his engineers are, but he did express it when the space station docking mission was successful during the post-interview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s

Also, he recently delivered a speech at Caltech. He told the grads to go out there and change the world with engineering. His speech was really focused on the Arthur C Clarke quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And who wouldn't want to be a magician?"

Yeah, Musk is not, AFAICT, guilty of encouraging the cult personality following. But all that really means is that any cults that develop around his personality are really not his fault.

And when you're talking to grads, it's an accepted norm to tell them to go and be individually superstar awesomesauce. It's not necessarily a bad thing to do so, and it's not a poor reflection that he did.

In the Jobs interview that Mossberg just released, Jobs said something along the lines of, "People need a symbol to latch onto, which is me."

We may not like that people behave this way, but I take it as a mark of intelligence when someone can accept an unpleasant yet immutable fact rather than fighting it or sweeping it under the rug.

Whether the population of HN is such that our collective behavior is immutable could be the subject of endless debate, of course.

I can't find the quote, but Steve Jobs said something about all great human accomplishments being the result of teams.

I think most of realize there are large teams of people working behind all these great visions. However, it's not like tens of thousands of people spontaneously get together without the visionary and solved these problems on their own. It does happen occasionally (e.g. Linux), but, in general, the visionary is very critical.

Exactly. The visionary is the catalyst that brings everyone together and makes the accomplishment possible in the first place. This is why personality cults (in this context) are appropriate, in my opinion. Without Jobs, we would not have Apple today. Without Musk, we would not have Paypal, Tesla, or SpaceX.

The thing with visionaries that sets them apart from other people is that they are one of a kind. Whereas the vast majority of their team consists of people that, for the most part, are expendable. You can always find more engineers or product people or salesmen. You cannot find more Jobs or Musks.

I think this hero worship is a side effect of having a celebrity CEO. Many leaders choose to shun the spotlight, which goes a long way to ensuring that the whole company gets credit for the work(eg. Spotify). Some leaders feel it's important that they be seen as the face of the company, selling the dream.

I rather agree with this. I love that there exists one person with a lot of cash, and technical chops, and the right attitude. That's rare and powerful. But as someone fairly familiar with the space industry I do see a lot of gushing nonsense on HN whenever SpaceX comes up, about how [rocket feature xyz] 'could never' be invented by a government agency when infact in several such cases of drunk-on-koolaid the [rocket feature xyz] isn't new and specifically was invented by NASA or the russians in the 60s. Or similar. Once or twice I've tried to correct these comments [1] but I usually don't as it just feels like pissing into the wind. SpaceX more or less got what was left of the FASTRAC engine[2] work given to them by Nasa as a starting point. Infact, the turbopumps in SpaceX's merlin engines, which most rocket engineers will tell you is the hardest bit to design in a rocket engine, are built by someone else (Barber Nichols), who also made the one for FASTRAC [3].

But this isn't a criticism - it's precisely what they should be doing and what I would do in the same situation! It would be madness not to start from a known working configuration (designing a rocket engine is a massive game of high dimensional parameter whack-a-mole, it's very difficult to get a passable configuration without a lot of iteration and forwards-backwards passes). They're trying to massively lower the cost of space access, and you don't do that by trying to redevelop everything from first principles. It's bloody clever to learn everything you can from people in Nasa who are willing to help you and are pissed off that their own beaurocracy won't let them do it themselves. But it's a far cry from the narrative that people on this site sometimes try and suggest, which is that Musk came out of the woods one day with technically revolutionary launcher-industry-disrupting rockets, catching Nasa by surprise. It is simply not true. He has some technical chops of course but his real strength was getting good people already doing interesting things (eg Tom Mueller, SpaceX head of propulsion) and get them all under one roof with his money and focus, and talking to as many people as possible to keep the string taught and avoid going down dead-end allies. This can't be done in a vacuum.

So the reason for this comment is to illustrate that people seem to be discarding their critical faculties when it comes to Musk, and getting carried away with excitement to the point of being irrational. That simply shouldn't be allowed to happen in a community like this, whose signal to noise ratio is, in other respects, among the highest on the web.

I don't know why it is, maybe it's because people think he's a good example of someone winning the game that they're playing (web widgets for a huge payout so they can work on something they think is more meaningful) but I'm sure he's the exception that proves the rule about web start-ups. I've certainly seen comments on SpaceX threads where people get defensive about their social thingamie because one day the payoff will let them work on real problems too. But this seems silly to me if that's the actual reason, as improbable as a hobby tennis player making a career plan that requires him to win Wimbledon. If you actually want to work in some field that holds you passion, and that's not what you're doing now, consider carefully if your long term plan is as unrealistic as my caricature above. Especially if it's space, stuff is really damn exciting right now. Take a look at something like Reaction Engines [4] in the UK, who just this week announced successful testing of their precooler. Have a look at the video on their website - this really really is revolutionary stuff, not taking existing tech and doing it faster+better+cheaper, but inventing really game-changing, throw-out-the-rule-book technology (I'm gushing now, irony). If I wanted to do something exciting in space, I think I'd be far more likely to be able to make a dent in the universe by going to work for someone like these guys or SpaceX than by some dream about billion dollar buyouts.

Whatever, I've digressed from my point which is that I think a lot of people are wearing the kool-aid version of beer-goggles, which are distorting their vision. Elon has done same fabulously praise-worthy stuff, his accomplishments stand up on their own merits without us (seemingly sometimes wilfully) losing perspective or distorting the context in which they were achieved.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723065 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastrac_(engine) [3] http://www.barber-nichols.com/products/rocket-engine-turbopu... [4] http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/

I take your point about cult-of-personality, and agree that it's something to be on guard against.

Musk is not Buckaroo Banzai. He's not the rocket scientist that's inventing a revolutionary technology before he brushes his teeth in the morning. It's true that he's got the opportunity to stand on other people's shoulders, both technically and logistically (e.g., the use of NASA's tracking stations).

But I think that in your caution, you're taking away too much credit. The reason that SpaceX has been so successful is because they are able to take those ideas that were already out there, and bring them to fruition. NASA has not been able to do so, whether that's because of politics, bureacracy, inertia of decades of tradition, or a culture that's too risk-averse.

And that's the whole point: NASA hasn't been able to do these things, despite government funding (i.e., no investors to report to), and over the decades, every bit as many starry-eyed fanboys as follow Musk. NASA has boatloads of brilliant people, but SpaceX has (or seems to have) what's needed to turn the brilliant technical ideas into something real.

IMHO, this isn't something absolutely unique to Musk; it's more a liability in NASA's balance sheet. Their dependence on governmental funding, and thus the whims and nepotism of politics, prevent real success. SpaceX isn't the only entrepreneurial space company, and I believe that at least some of those others will find success as well, since they're also free of NASA's liabilities.

It's not that hard to understand.

There's a lot of talk on this site about changing the world. I think there's some good reasons that happens with this crowd that sort of get back into the history of computing, but in any case, that mindset is a driving force for many in this community.

Musk is doing it. He is, in fact, changing the world, driving change in the directions he wants to see things move. He's being as audacious as hell about it, and he's actually pulling it off.

That's a personal trait, and it's absolutely worth admiring and attempting to emulate.

No one thinks he's engineering the rockets or the cars, but he's shaping the visions and driving them forward, and most crucially- he's making it happen.

Anyone with any sort of vision (90% of this site) knows how hard that is to do, so seeing someone pull it off on that scale gets our attention.

Leadership, true leadership, motivating people to do their best and to reach beyond, is rare as hen's teeth, and people get excited when they see it. Nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

Having said that, I'm with you on the so-called plans to make social widgets and then cash out and THEN start on the big plans. That's a plan that's going to end in tears, and it won't be all the much fun along the way, either.

> No one thinks he's engineering the rockets or the cars, but he's shaping the visions and driving them forward, and most crucially- he's making it happen.

Well, he is lead designer on the Falcon rocket and made a lot of engineering decisions on the Tesla too, afaik. He's more than just a manager/visionary for sure.

Welcome to the human race. This is how it works. :(

Give me a hundred billion dollars in tax money to flush every year and I'll give you a Tesla-like result once every decade. What, you wouldn't consider that a stellar return on investment?