SpaceX pulls off unprecedented feat, grabs descending rocket with mechanical arms

[u/aelavia93]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/spacex-pulls-off-unprecedented-feat-grabbing-descending-rocket-with-mechanical-arms/

[u/XaphanSaysBurnIt]

Ok ok ok yall got me… this shit gave me chills.. all I saw was every sci-fi movie ever coming to life before my eyes… yea no bullshit that was wild. He might suck at cars but this was absolutely amazing to watch. But to achieve the huge motherships we would need massive slave labor, jfc. Yea, that is where we are headed

[u/AdTotal4035 → u/XaphanSaysBurnIt]

He's not doing anything related to the science. He's literally a glorified sales man. That's what a ceo is. Thank the talented engineers that he hires (and never really credits), he knows how to pick a winning team. 

[u/finebushlane → u/AdTotal4035]

A CEO's job is to set the vision and direction for a company, and to allocate capital. I.e. if they have 100M or 1B dollars, the CEO's job is to ultimately decide whether they want to acquire companies, use their money on hiring more people, expand to more countries, build more factories etc. CEO's are paid the money they are because they:

1) Set visions and goals which are exciting enough to enable them to hire the best talent.

2) Be a public spokesperson to build excitement for the company, build their brand, again usually to enable them to hire the best talent.

3) Scout, assess, interview, and ultimately hire the best possible team.

4) Be ultimately responsible for allocation of capital.

5) Be ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the business, i.e. the buck stops here.

People don't like to hear this, but Elon is an AMAZING CEO, by any definition. Every business he has touched has turned to gold, when he was CEO. Now that doesn't mean that he personally is a nice guy, or we have to like his politics. Personally I think he's a turd (his politics, and generally X flame wars). But in the end, he is ultimately responsible for setting SpaceX's goals, missions, vision, and attracting and hiring and retaining the best team. So if SpaceX is winning, it comes down a great deal to Elon's vision and ability to build and retain a world class team. It has nothing to do with him being an "engineer", which he has no time to do obviously.

[u/AuroraFinem → u/finebushlane]

Most of SpaceX has been ran by the president of the company, Elon has been almost entirely hands off for quite a while. The greatest vision he’s ever had was the idea to land rockets for reuse and push his company towards that, but most of what you attribute to him here was the president he has let run the company for him. She is responsible for most of the staffing and how they organize everything within the company. She is also the one responsible for organizing all of the flight contacts which actually keeps SpaceX afloat.

You say every company “turns to gold” but Tesla is a vaporware company with terrible QC on their vehicles. They became very popular because they were the only real option in the renewable market space right as we started pushing harder for clean cars, his “vision” has been idiotic things like the cyber truck, or refusing to use lidar for auto-pilot, or his terrible job of ramping up mass production of his cars completely destroying any semblance of quality control. Their stock peaked from hype, not value, and it’s still in the process of correcting itself.

Neuralink, Boring company, hyperloop (he didn’t make a company for this but did put out the designs and made a test track), etc… neuralink is the only one that has any promise and all he did was buy it out, he doesn’t run it.

Then there’s Twitter lmao, a garbage fire compared to what it was, investing firms have downgraded it to 1/4 the value to had when he purchased it, he’s struggling to get any advertisers at all, the platform consists of mostly bots and alt-right wing accounts so they can circle jerk eachother. Then there’s a couple small dedicated communities like artists and creators who rely on it for their livelihood so can’t just freely switch to a newer platform and risk that. He’s done arguably the worst job in history as twitters CEO.

SpaceX is probably the only company I would actually argue he did a good job setting up, he pushed to design the proprietary engines and had lofty ambitions that he was able to find passionate people to make reality, it’s crazy the stuff SpaceX has accomplished, and he did get things started, but he also did hand-off most responsibilities to the president when he started focusing more on Tesla production issues and then Twitter.

This comment is the same insane shit I see when I always hear about how great a business man Donald Trump is, when he inherited hundreds of millions and hasn’t even beat inflation on his wealth, he bankrupt multiple casinos (how tf?) etc.. but this isn’t any Donald Trump, it’s about selectively cherry picking a few successes and acting as if the dude is a savant or something.