>>43080
>The other thing that really annoys me about that is how they attribute anything that his companies do to him personally, like it is him that personally designed the Tesla cars and Space X rockets, he is just the CEO and has no relevant education in those fields.

It is true, but he is actually pretty idealistic person and very good manager (and maybe cruel manager too, but there is no other way). US space tech was always private, at least as private as Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman can be (i.e. "private", with large government influence). NASA rarely does anything big by themselves, especially in launch field, and everything is made by private companies (with mostly state funding).

And Musk looks much better than anyone. Others get endless amount of money and do nothing remarkable compared to Space X (in launch market), while having bigger resource pool. Having money and engineers still doesn't guarantee success without proper management. It is clear that Musk is slightly crazy, and this helps. His company made successful cheap reusable first stage, while ULA still sells tech from 90s at large price. Reusable first stage that actually works may be no groundbreaking technology achievement, bus still very hard engineering task that no one did.

It is sad that nowadays proper management is a rare thing, because most of "managers" are just some idiots with MBA who can't think about anything except profits and losses, and don't even understand how electric circuit works.

So, even while hype about Musk is exaggerated, but he is not just another millionaire with government contract in pocket. Just compare Space X that pretend to be a commercial launch market leader soon, and Boeing that is only good in building electronically assisted self-crashing planes. Or Roskosmos, that had advantage over everyone 20 years ago and now only can publish cheap unfunny memes in twitter.

Considering Tesla, it is also pretty interesting that everyone messed with electric cars for years, but only Tesla started real movement on market. It is also good example to GM or Ford who just can't do anything right because mismanagement.

Other Musk things like hyperloop are just memes though.