What is the appeal of reading biography? Personally I’ve never understood it.
Biographies of historical figures can be interesting to me not for the person themselves but as a vehicle to describe the society they lived in. Thats what makes Plutarch’s “lives” dull but a biography of Cicero interesting (to me).
But a recent or even contemporary figure? Yawn.
Perhaps there’s something insightful that I don’t get?
People are generally interested in the character, psychology and environmental conditions of individuals who have an outsized impact on the world around them. What made them who they are, and how they achieved what they did.
Musk has had an outsized impact on the world and many people want to know more about the type of person that can pull that off in our current climate. I love historical biographies but they aren’t as relatable as contemporary works.
I kinda agree with this, especially when it comes to people who are not just still alive but also actively involved in the writing of the book and dictating what can and cannot go in it (like it was with Elon Musk and Walter Isaacson). At that point you aren't reading a biography but a PR puff piece.
On the other hand well-researched biographies of historical figures who have been out of the public limelight are among the most interesting books you can read, which I'm sure will be the case for Musk as well maybe 30-50 years from now.
The person could be uninteresting, but the stream of successful and not projects which happen to be united by the participant could be useful as a learning material.
TL;DR: Musk is a hyper focused nerdy engineer with poor social skills. The reason people like him is because he genuinely is a nerdy smart engineer. The reason people hate him is because he genuinely has poor people skills.
> Likewise, Musk didn’t found Tesla, and he didn’t invent their revolutionary battery technology.
Do Tesla have revolutionary battery technology?
> But when the founders came to him asking for an investment - and saying the batteries were the main sticking point - he introduced them to a battery inventor with revolutionary ideas
> He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator.
This seems like a bad business decision, yet is apparently the cherry-picked highlight of his technical acumen.
Are you sure about that multiple? Exactly how much did musk spend paying an elite aerospace engineer 9 months of elite aerospace engineer salary plus load, to design something that saved SpaceX maybe 20% of that? This is not even getting into the opportunity cost of all the other things that engineer could have been working on during that time, things that had not already been developed and proven.
It sounds like what Davis got was first quote and must threw it out, if this is the actual story it seems pretty strange that they didn't at least try to work that first-bid number down before discarding the idea of outsourcing the part altogether.
Why? There are countless examples where SpaceX adapted some simpler consumer product to serve their needs. That's why they were able to compete and drastically reduce price. Another reason was they never tried to get cost plus contracts which were the standard for industry (imagine how that affects your incentives)
This isn't software where we can laugh at Uber building their own messaging service. These are somewhat specialized parts that are made for orgs that have no concern of cost controls. he's absolutely right to question everything as that gives him the edge.
You see something similar with Jobs. From reading his bio, I would say his main skill was ability to sniff out BS. So if he wanted something in a certain way or by a certain time and got push back, he was able to ascert whether it was legitimate or he could just push and raise expectations. And more often than not it worked. The best managers I've had always pushed me and knew when something truly wasn't feasible
Are you thinking that the nine month salary wouldn't be worth it to save $115,000? I think the idea is that SpaceX will use multiple copies of this part.
That, and also I don't think Elon planned to spend than long on the project - unless Davis's learning (who "had never built a piece of hardware before in his life") was also taken into account.
It probably was about 2 months of initial CAD and drawings, another 2ish months of manufacturing, a month of testing, a month of iteration, another month of manufacturing, more testing, reviews, qualifications. Add in some time for Davis working on other things + the part waiting for other projects to finish manufacturing or testing, and you get nine months.
For a cleansheet part from a engineer who never built one in his life during the early days of this approach to aerospace, 9 months seem reasonable to me.
This is the standard example that is always used to show the god-like power of these kinds of personalities. Apple employees spend years designing the thinnest phone in the world and show it to Jobs. Instead of praising them he says "no, make it thinner". And by the power of that sentence they go back to their lab and make the phone 20% thinner. Isn't Jobs a genius?
That does not seem like a bad business decision to me. Actuators are used often in rocketry, and SpaceX obtained the necessary know-how to build them in-house for a cost of mere 9 man-months. One fewer external dependency.
Starship gimbals its Raptors electrically as well. Those actuators aren't probably identical to the Falcon 1 ones, but I would guess that there is a lot of inherited knowledge in them.
On top of everyone else’s comments on how this is actually a good business decision, it also could be a very good engineering decision.
An off the shelf actuator could mean they would have to adapt other hardware to the actuator. By in-housing their own, they can make the actuator specific to their needs.
Rockets are tricky because of how very specific everything can be to the specific rocket and system that you built.
There's multiple issues here that apparently others aren't seeing.
The key one: it's a build or buy decision for a non-key part.
SpaceX's USP (as far as I'm aware, not a rocket nerd) was reusable rockets. If they can successfully demonstrate that, then they've won. They don't want to run out of money before then but chasing down every inefficiency in the existing system seems more like OCD than good business sense.
Subsidiary issues:
Sending the guy who "had never built anything" to negotiate hardware orders.
Getting the guy who "had never built anything" to build a vital part when off the shelf alternatives were available.
Celebrating this as business genius not unnecessary risk.
IIRC this was a key part. Anything that “moves” and alters the state of a Rocket in flight could be considered key.
And this story, as far as I remember from the book, was from the Falcon 1 days, where reusability was not on the table. Early days type stuff where cash reserve preservation was tantamount.
The guy “had never built anything like the actuator” but he was an engineer who (hopefully by virtue of being an engineer) understood the first principles behind designs.
To put into context, a large part of SpaceX’s unique competitive advantage comes actions like this. The Aerospace industry up until SpaceX mostly operated in the manner you suggest: buy the outsourced parts, design only what is “truly key”, and then cobble it all together.
Except that exposes yourself to large amounts of supply chain risk, design constraints, and price gouging like no other. The actuator costed $120k because there were no competitors and they knew the old primes would buy it anyways.
Elon definitely went against the grain of established thinking at the time and it’s clearly paid off. Maybe not “business genius” but it’s not a small undertaking and went against decades of ingrained engineering culture and business practice.
Substack's comment handling is a dumpster fire, which you mostly don't notice on other substacks because (a) they hide almost all comments on a post by default (Scott got them to disable that for him because the comments are a big part of his blog), and (b) most blogs hosted there don't have a community the size of Scott's.
Open the network requests tab in developer tools and cry a little: they actually have an elegant system that would let them minimize the data churn needed to host exactly this size of comment thread, but instead it reprocesses the entire comment tree every time just about _anything_ happens on the page.
Lightly mentioned in the article, but I think a key part of Musk's success comes down to two traits: he's willing to take large risks if he thinks the "right answer" requires it and he's willing to put significant capital up to do so. For Tesla, things like the aluminum bodies mentioned in the article or the "gigacasting" later took the kind of significant investment that most companies aren't comfortable making; SpaceX, for its part, blew up enough rockets to have put most companies off their lunches. There's shades of Jobs, who would not accept an inferior product made for expediency, and of Bezos, who's one of the few other company leaders with a history of gambling like that, but really, I think the willingness to aggressively deploy the capital required to achieve the answer he thinks is the right one is the core trait underpinning his success.
(I think the article's also broadly correct in the diagnosis of his failings, too - the gods don't give with both hands, as they say.)
I think Elon Musk is a very rich guy who's easily persuadable with the argument "Wouldn't it be super cool if...?"
This works well for him when the people trying to persuade him are engineers, accountants, and other professionals that have an idea that could benefit from having a lot of money thrown at it.
It doesn't work as well when he gets surrounded by people caught up in his cult of personality that are no longer trying to persuade him, but rather following his visions. And it certainly doesn't go well for him when he's trying to impress his various social media followers.
The article and book it’s sourced from make a pretty compelling claim that he does actually know the technical details of the things he’s working on, and that jives with other things I’ve read. I think a lot of what he’s doing is the kind of first-principles argument that can drive seasoned engineers nuts (“factor X is the root problem, so what if we just changed factor X?” “Yeah gee golly nobody’s ever thought of that”), but it turns out if you’ve got enough money, patience, and latitude, there’s a lot of meat on that bone.
Agree though that the echo chamber around him really does feed into his worst instincts - I feel like it’s similar to George Lucas, who, with constraints, made the first Star Wars trilogy, and without constraints made the second.
And, yeah, he’s got a strong engineering affinity and what looks like a strong anti-affinity for anything involving people.
I don’t mean any of this to gas up Musk. I don’t particularly like him, I don’t think he’s a good person, and I think the fact that he’s as influential as he is is an indictment of our society broadly. I do think he’s had some outlier successes, and with both Tesla and SpaceX he’s shifted the world in what I’d consider a positive direction, so I think it’s worth taking a dispassionate look at how he’s done it, both the positives and negatives.
That's fair, but I don't think it necessarily contradicts my perspective. He could have a strong engineering background and still throw money at the rule of cool, and it could still turn out to be not the worst strategy in a country that's looking to innovate and to subsidize innovation.
> Musk has a saying: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely”. The most entertaining outcome here would be for Peter Thiel to take over Twitter and rename it “PayPal”. I can’t wait.
Amazing review. Opened my eyes. I need to read the book now...!
35 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 91.2 ms ] threadBiographies of historical figures can be interesting to me not for the person themselves but as a vehicle to describe the society they lived in. Thats what makes Plutarch’s “lives” dull but a biography of Cicero interesting (to me).
But a recent or even contemporary figure? Yawn.
Perhaps there’s something insightful that I don’t get?
On the other hand well-researched biographies of historical figures who have been out of the public limelight are among the most interesting books you can read, which I'm sure will be the case for Musk as well maybe 30-50 years from now.
Do Tesla have revolutionary battery technology?
> But when the founders came to him asking for an investment - and saying the batteries were the main sticking point - he introduced them to a battery inventor with revolutionary ideas
Who is this, and what did he invent?
This seems like a bad business decision, yet is apparently the cherry-picked highlight of his technical acumen.
A key reason SpaceX matters at all is that it can launch things into space at a fraction of what it costs NASA, Russia, China or any other rival to.
It sounds like what Davis got was first quote and must threw it out, if this is the actual story it seems pretty strange that they didn't at least try to work that first-bid number down before discarding the idea of outsourcing the part altogether.
This isn't software where we can laugh at Uber building their own messaging service. These are somewhat specialized parts that are made for orgs that have no concern of cost controls. he's absolutely right to question everything as that gives him the edge.
You see something similar with Jobs. From reading his bio, I would say his main skill was ability to sniff out BS. So if he wanted something in a certain way or by a certain time and got push back, he was able to ascert whether it was legitimate or he could just push and raise expectations. And more often than not it worked. The best managers I've had always pushed me and knew when something truly wasn't feasible
Reminds me of the "Bill Gates Excel review" story - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
For a cleansheet part from a engineer who never built one in his life during the early days of this approach to aerospace, 9 months seem reasonable to me.
Starship gimbals its Raptors electrically as well. Those actuators aren't probably identical to the Falcon 1 ones, but I would guess that there is a lot of inherited knowledge in them.
An off the shelf actuator could mean they would have to adapt other hardware to the actuator. By in-housing their own, they can make the actuator specific to their needs.
Rockets are tricky because of how very specific everything can be to the specific rocket and system that you built.
There's multiple issues here that apparently others aren't seeing.
The key one: it's a build or buy decision for a non-key part.
SpaceX's USP (as far as I'm aware, not a rocket nerd) was reusable rockets. If they can successfully demonstrate that, then they've won. They don't want to run out of money before then but chasing down every inefficiency in the existing system seems more like OCD than good business sense.
Subsidiary issues:
Sending the guy who "had never built anything" to negotiate hardware orders.
Getting the guy who "had never built anything" to build a vital part when off the shelf alternatives were available.
Celebrating this as business genius not unnecessary risk.
And this story, as far as I remember from the book, was from the Falcon 1 days, where reusability was not on the table. Early days type stuff where cash reserve preservation was tantamount.
The guy “had never built anything like the actuator” but he was an engineer who (hopefully by virtue of being an engineer) understood the first principles behind designs.
To put into context, a large part of SpaceX’s unique competitive advantage comes actions like this. The Aerospace industry up until SpaceX mostly operated in the manner you suggest: buy the outsourced parts, design only what is “truly key”, and then cobble it all together.
Except that exposes yourself to large amounts of supply chain risk, design constraints, and price gouging like no other. The actuator costed $120k because there were no competitors and they knew the old primes would buy it anyways.
Elon definitely went against the grain of established thinking at the time and it’s clearly paid off. Maybe not “business genius” but it’s not a small undertaking and went against decades of ingrained engineering culture and business practice.
Open the network requests tab in developer tools and cry a little: they actually have an elegant system that would let them minimize the data churn needed to host exactly this size of comment thread, but instead it reprocesses the entire comment tree every time just about _anything_ happens on the page.
(I think the article's also broadly correct in the diagnosis of his failings, too - the gods don't give with both hands, as they say.)
This works well for him when the people trying to persuade him are engineers, accountants, and other professionals that have an idea that could benefit from having a lot of money thrown at it.
It doesn't work as well when he gets surrounded by people caught up in his cult of personality that are no longer trying to persuade him, but rather following his visions. And it certainly doesn't go well for him when he's trying to impress his various social media followers.
Agree though that the echo chamber around him really does feed into his worst instincts - I feel like it’s similar to George Lucas, who, with constraints, made the first Star Wars trilogy, and without constraints made the second.
And, yeah, he’s got a strong engineering affinity and what looks like a strong anti-affinity for anything involving people.
I don’t mean any of this to gas up Musk. I don’t particularly like him, I don’t think he’s a good person, and I think the fact that he’s as influential as he is is an indictment of our society broadly. I do think he’s had some outlier successes, and with both Tesla and SpaceX he’s shifted the world in what I’d consider a positive direction, so I think it’s worth taking a dispassionate look at how he’s done it, both the positives and negatives.
Amazing review. Opened my eyes. I need to read the book now...!