I'm not arguing that he's flawless, I just get annoyed when people try to suggest that he simply lucked out in making the right hiring decisions in an industry where "How do you become a millionaire in aerospace? Start with a billion" was (and to an extent still is) a common adage. I feel that boiling it down to luck is pretty insulting to all the work people have put into putting SpaceX a decade or two ahead of the rest of the world.
That said, the people who I'm referring to aren't really in the position you describe. Most of them have either retired or are doing their own thing and having been early members of SpaceX are pretty much the best rocket engineers around (eg Tom Mueller), so I doubt that they have any concerns about their income.
Musk appears to at least be able to keep up with technical details enough to be able to discuss them with technically oriented YouTubers. So while it's hard to say if he's a particularly good technical innovator on his own, he's capable of understanding various design decisions, discussing tradeoffs, questioning assumptions and thus appropriately leading his engineers. I believe that is a big aspect of why SpaceX has been so successful. Shotwell also has an engineering background, so the same probably goes for her ability to balance business and technical considerations.
Nobody is suggesting that he "simply" lucked out. But this part makes no sense: "I feel that boiling it down to luck is pretty insulting to all the work people have put into putting SpaceX a decade or two ahead of the rest of the world."
One, there's no conflict between believing that Musk was lucky and other people worked hard. Two, if the hard labor of "the best rocket engineers around" was what made SpaceX successful, then that helps prove the point that Musk's reputation as a genius technical innovator is perhaps overblown.
> I doubt that they have any concerns about their income.
That is spoken like somebody who has never been through a lawsuit. Or incurred the disfavor of somebody powerful. You can bet that every one of the people who has worked for Musk has signed agreements that would let him brutalize them in court for years. Lawsuits, even ones you are confident of winning, are incredibly stressful and draining. If Musk is happy to fire people just for criticizing him privately, there's no reason to think he wouldn't sue somebody for publicly making him look like an asshole. So as with Jobs, they tell the positive stories loudly and the negative ones quietly or not at all.
> Musk appears to at least be able to keep up with technical details enough to be able to discuss them with technically oriented YouTubers.
Oh dang, YouTubers? Well then.
As a person who has spent years doing anti-abuse work, including at Twitter, I can tell you that what he's been saying about Twitter's issues has a plausible gloss but is both ignorant and wrongheaded. Musk is happy to pretend to be an expert genius when he doesn't know shit. That gets lots of Twitter/YouTube likes, but that's not what matters when running a real business.
Or we could look at his attempts to automate the Tesla factories. Tesla almost went bankrupt because this nominal genius vastly overestimated what was possible, ignoring decades of manufacturing experience in favor of huffing his own... vapors. This was a multi-billion dollar error.
So is it possible that he was helpful technically at SpaceX? Sure. But it's also possible that the difference at SpaceX is that he had a stronger staff that kept him at bay while they did their "best rocket engineers" thing.
That said, the people who I'm referring to aren't really in the position you describe. Most of them have either retired or are doing their own thing and having been early members of SpaceX are pretty much the best rocket engineers around (eg Tom Mueller), so I doubt that they have any concerns about their income.
Musk appears to at least be able to keep up with technical details enough to be able to discuss them with technically oriented YouTubers. So while it's hard to say if he's a particularly good technical innovator on his own, he's capable of understanding various design decisions, discussing tradeoffs, questioning assumptions and thus appropriately leading his engineers. I believe that is a big aspect of why SpaceX has been so successful. Shotwell also has an engineering background, so the same probably goes for her ability to balance business and technical considerations.