Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory: "Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."

You know the old saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It."

That's what's happening here.

That engineer that was humiliated publicly for defending a slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine? Hacker News is filled with people just like him that have built near identical software in other orgs.

Understandably they're upset and are looking for any excuse to dismiss Elon's criticism of not just Twitter, but their entire industry.

If Elon had joined Twitter, and spent time understanding the business and environment and then excised the people he felt weren't contributing towards his vision, that would be one thing... but he has made arbitrary judgements based on absurd metrics like lines of code or willingness to show up at 1am to draw on a whiteboard, he has not made judgements based on the quality of the work or the value people have delivered.

Likewise, to suggest that a software engineer is bad because they were a part of a team that built a "...slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine..." is absurd: what if that person was the only reason that it wasn't 10x slower? What if, they were the lynchpin in that team ensuring that brought everyone else up to a much higher standard which ensured that what they built was usable (even if it was bad)? You cannot judge the contribution of an individual without considering the wider context.

I have no problem with a company cutting most of their software engineers (I encourage clients to minimise their exposure to software engineers, I encourage careful hiring over volume) but what Elon is doing is... not that.

You're probably right, but there's a decent chance that Elon's heavy-handed approach was necessary.

I've seen the "gentle" approach fail.

For example, at $dayjob a bunch of on-prem stuff is being slowly modernised into the cloud. Very slowly. Slow enough to give the dinosaurs time to play politics and protect their turf.

For example, the networks teams that are used to legacy in-line firewalls will cozy up to some non-technical senior manager with a budget and get them to approve a project to roll out this legacy technology in the cloud. That way they don't have to retrain or -- worse -- risk being made redundant.

If instead some team comes in and simply bulk-migrates workloads from on-prem to the cloud... breaking a handful in the process and just fixing forward, then it appears to be messy and crazy, but the effect is that the legacy data centre teams are made redundant virtually overnight. Now they've got no clout, no time, and no pull. They're simply walked, and will find jobs elsewhere.

I've seen both approaches, and the latter style worked better long-term.

Citation needed ;D

Time will tell. I don't think Musk/twitter's case will set any precedent. He is too much of a character to provide broad meaningful insights into industry. Also he has accumulated a list of failures which are rarely mentioned.

It's hard to blame people based on his decades of public behavior and lying about his education, falsely claiming to have a physics degree and to have been admitted to grad school.

Actual quote. Anyone using the term "code commands" comes out a little detached from programming reality, let alone the rest of this request, it is out of a Dilbert strip.

I've seen a lot of mockery of this request, but I suspect people aren't considering the wide variance in employee quality that can exist within a mismanaged organization. What Musk was asking for here wouldn't be a good way to evaluate skilled, conscientious developers, but it would be a pretty effective way to rapidly identify people who are basically incompetent or just aren't really doing anything.

So it's basically a FizzBuzz test, but for existing employees?

He clearly does know how to make incredible sums of money. Why that's not enough and people need to find excuses to exaggerate or demean his intelligence is beyond me.

This is the insane thing to me. He's promised a lot of things, but he has also delivered some pretty huge things. Tesla kicked off the electric car migration and has millions of EVs on the road. SpaceX has reusable first stages on their rockets and are the only private company to send humans to space. Just those two things alone are massive achievements. But people look at some things he's promised but has not yet delivered and that somehow is more important than what he has delivered?

Here's two examples I've found particularly insightful that shows he has some ability to talk about engineering details.

This example where he talks about the choice of steel for Starship as opposed to any other metal, something that would be an otherwise unsual choice: https://youtu.be/vLC5W53Fsyg?t=936

This example that I've personally incorporated into my own thinking where he talks about his "five step process" for engineering design refinement (watch at least until he starts talking about Tesla Model 3 battery stuff): https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=805

I knew what you were talking about when I started reading your comment. "Make your requirements less dumb" first seems so obvious once you've learned it.

All the denigration directed at him seems to come from people who've only read headlines about him from sources who hate him.

My guess would be that he has some knowledge but also is very good at faking it which is not necessarily a bad thing - those are good traits for a CEO. Though people should be aware of this fact when evaluating the whole persona.

Brute forcing a problem with better technology not always the actual solution when technical problems aren't actually the problem.

“She had somehow been able to take and synthesize these pieces of science and engineering and technology in ways that I had never thought of.”

“I never encountered a student like this before of the then thousands of students that I had talked”

“You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.”

He also maintained that Holmes was a once-in-a-generation genius, comparing her to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Excerpt from: "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou.

In response to someone saying on Twitter how Elon doesn't understand the technical stuff of rocketry, Tom Meuller, former CTO of Propulsion at SpaceX and the designer of many of their engines responded

"I worked for Elon directly for 18 1/2 years, and I can assure you, you are wrong"

https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929?s=20&...

And if you're going to claim that his successes have been due to the people surrounding him who actually know what they are doing, then all that tells me is that you are acknowledging that he knows how to surround himself with people who know what they are doing.

We're not fans (I'm certainly not), but it takes a special kind of mind to look at Musk's track record of successes and conclude that his latest project is doomed.

But I didn't call it "simple", I called it "simpler", and it is.

For further reading, I'd recommend this article in the Atlantic. The relevant portion is about midway through.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/elon-musk-...

Which point?

> It's not about the tech, it's about the community, and communities are far harder to predict and manage than a rocket or a car.

While I broadly agree with you, and also agree that twitters founders and/or leaders are better equipped to manage a community than Musk is, I fail to see how having someone with a track record of success (some in turning around failing businesses) automatically dooms the company.

That was the point I was responding to, in the original post. It's also why I ended of with "it takes a special kind of mind to automatically assume something is doomed just because someone with a track record of successes took it over".

It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another. Especially when the founder in question has displayed increasingly erratic behavior in the meantime.

Is today's Elon capable of doing what Elon from 15 years ago did at Tesla? I don't think that is necessarily in evidence, much less in a very different industry.

> It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another

I didn't say it was. I was responding the notion that Musk blundered into success at Tesla and SpaceX.

Rolls-Royce (of the last century) would qualify, but it was more aero than space.

Look, I don't know if Elon is a genius or an opportunistic parasite with really good PR. It seems unlikely if we ever will know that. What I object to is people pointing at his ultimate financial success and crediting him with the current result of 2 big companies whose future is very much not determined.

When I look at his process from this ant's perspective, I think he is an abusive unstable individual who takes credit for everyone's work and lies a lot. He also flip-flops depending on the wind. Is that success? Not based on my personal values. Have his companies accomplished a lot? Some of them, absolutely.

The definitions and evidence matter a lot, and I personally don't think any of us are qualified to make blanket statements based on incomplete outcomes. Further, I don't think his other companies that require primarily good engineering are very relevant to inherently people problems, like Twitter. My evaluation of how Musk handles people problems is that he is very bad at them, and I anchor my prediction about his Twitter leadership based on that.

Yes. Social media is easier.

> It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another.

This is precisely about leveraging the Halo Effect fallacy. Elon Musk might not know social media, but the markets don't know that, nor do they care. The average retail trader sees "Elon Musk's company" and buys and holds, regardless of absurd PEs.

Musk knows the power his brand has. He's simply going to use that to pump up Twitter's valuation, all through the virtue of his "halo"

There are no easy answers if you want to satisfy everybody. One easy answer is to stop trying to satisfy everybody.

BTW I am a fan of your work.

Tesla, to this day but especially early, had the govt subsidize their products to help make them more competitive.

I don’t think those are even a bad thing, but it isn’t a supportive argument that he’s a great free market capitalist.

This is just a misdirection. I could just as easily said, nobody did it by themselves, including Musk.

What is “it” in this case?

NASA (and the DoD) had vertically landing reusable rockets designed for orbital flights back in the early 1990s. They were being successfully tested but budget cuts killed the program. They weren’t doing “it” because it wasn’t the same priority in that era. NASA has been researching COPVs for decades, etc.

The SpaceAct agreement between NASA and SpaceX allows for sharing of this kind of information. If you think SpaceX has done all their great work alone, you are misinformed and likely making you data fit your conclusion instead of the other way around.

SpaceX has some competitive advantages, but I don’t think they are what you think they are.

Obviously, cheap launches into space.

> If you think SpaceX has done all their great work alone

What I'm saying is SpaceX got it done. No other organization in the world did. The fact that SpaceX had an obvious learning curve of failing and exploding rockets makes it obvious it wasn't just copy and install NASA technology.

NASA's reusable rockets were on the space shuttle, which turned out to be fantastically expensive and impractical.

> NASA has been researching COPVs for decades

Somehow not resulting in a practical, inexpensive reusable rocket.

It's undeniable that NASA has made many great achievements. But making space accessible in an economic manner isn't one of them.

I wasn't referring to the shuttle. Note I said "vertically landing reuseable rockets".

Are you claiming SpaceX doesn't use COPV's, or that don't benefit from prior COPV research? I don't think either position is accurate. Of course no single technological advancement defines space exploration.

Can you elaborate on what you think SpaceX's key advantages are? I can use that to gauge if you really know what you're talking about. I don't want to sound rude, but it's starting to come across as a poorly informed discussion, but one where you have strongly held beliefs. That's not the relationship we should probably hope for.

Ok. So where are they? SpaceX obviously didn't copy a working system, as it took many failures for SpaceX's reusable rockets to work.

> Are you claiming SpaceX doesn't use COPV's, or that don't benefit from prior COPV research?

I was very clear on what SpaceX's success was. Has NASA ever re-used a booster?

> Can you elaborate on what you think SpaceX's key advantages are?

I was very clear on that, too. They provide a cheap way into space, something that NASA has utterly failed on (and every other government, too).

I meant what advantages do they have to facilitate that. You gave me the outcome but haven’t shown any understanding of the why. When somebody asks what makes Tom Brady special, saying “because he wins more” isn’t really saying much and doesn’t take show you know much about football.

I ask because I suspect you will just give some rote public vs. private answer but that’s only a superficial reason. There are underlying systemic reasons, but you need to remove yourself of that false dichotomy first to get there.

FWIW, I’m not a big fan of NASA. I think they are largely a broken culture and a shell of what they were in the 1960s.

I've said it over and over. The profit motive.

I'll try to illustrate a more nuanced perspective. It's no secret that NASA levies a lot of tough requirements. For example, contractors must have a robust pressure systems program. This includes managing/certifying systems all the way down do small air compressors in a vehicle maintenance shop. Same goes for software quality and a million other aspects of spaceflight. Contractors hate these types of requirements because they're expensive. Many within NASA hate them, too. Certainly some of this is bureaucratic overreach, but a lot of it is also good, sound engineering practice. There are mechanisms to waive these requirements, but few people want to openly do so for a variety of reasons. I could go deeper into the why but it's a bit of a digression.

So what does this have to do with SpaceX? CCP, IMO, is a clever work-around to avoid accountability to these requirements. NASA, rather than buying a product, is buying a service. So even though NASA expects them to meet those same requirements, there's very little oversight to force them to do so. Some people have raised flags about these issues but are essentially told to stand down because they don't want to tell the contractors how to provide the service. It also gives NASA a smokescreen to get what they want (faster, cheaper production) while avoiding accountability when things go wrong (they can always point to the requirements they claimed they wanted, but didn't provide the oversight to ensure). NASA knows those requirements rapidly increase costs and on one hand they don't want them, but on the other they want plausible deniability if something goes wrong. Minimizing requirements can streamline the process. The fact that they manage way less requirements is why SpaceX can have a single 23 year-old managing a program that takes a team at NASA. In other respects, it turns a blind eye to the very requirements that manage risk.

E.g., Falcon 9 had supplier quality issues that lost a rocket [1]. Most who work with flight hardware would be surprised to learn SpaceX wasn't applying industry-standard supplier quality checks on critical flight material. Once a mishap happens, NASA gets to swoop in and investigate. And the result is SpaceX now has multiple reliability layers to mitigate that risk. It's not that it was some unknown risk, it's just that they weren't managing it properly. To the uninitiated it looks like they were running a tight, streamlined ship but in practice it was being played a little too fast and loose. Boeing did the same with Starliner but had a bad roll of the dice. The real question is how many times can this happen before SpaceX starts to look like their bloated competitors? NASA could do the same by just peeling back requirements and upping the risk.

Starliner also had it's own host of quality issues as part of CCP. People at NASA were concerned, but their hands were essentially tied until there was a smoking gun in the form of a botched demo that risked crashing into ISS. Again, the "profit motive" at work can sometimes mean more risk than intended.

As a different example of risk, SpaceX can create an assembly line of manufacturing to reduce financial risk. NASA can't because they they are also forced to reduce political risk by spreading programs all around the country. It's not that NASA is so incompetent that they can't figure it out, it's that they are managing a different set of risks. NASA manages the risk that ensures funding for SpaceX while SpaceX manages the financial risk of manufacturing. It's a symbiotic relationship, but one that can be misconstrued by the ignorant as some public/private dichotomy.

Yet another example of risk: Lots of people want to point to SpaceX rapid iteration as a strong point. It is, but people also need to understand that rapid iteration is also at odds with reliability. SpaceX may just quickly change a design (see their COPV mishap) but it's up to NASA to figure out the true failure mechanisms on their own dime. This rapid iteration is also why Tesla's quality measures are usually quite bad. They can't stabilize a design or supply chain long enough to generate high quality.

Suffice to say, there's lots of good and bad tradeoffs of the public/private dynamic, but just saying "it's the profit motive" explains none of them.

[1] https://parabolicarc.com/2016/06/28/nasa-investigation-space...

1. https://patents.justia.com/inventor/elon-musk

And he hates bloated inefficient teams. His decrees on meetings are infamous. Tripling the team at Twitter implies a lot of internal politics, fiefdoms, communication overhead, and generally a lot of headless chickens running around. There's no nice way to fix such a team. A sledge hammer is one way to fix it and obviously he likes getting results quickly.

So, the notion of laying off most of that team was a foregone conclusion. The notion that a lot of the better people would get upset about that and leave as well is also highly predictable. What's left is a team with some gaps but also a lot of breathing room. And he can always lure key people back in by throwing money at them.

Simple plan. It might actually work. At the cost of a bit of drama, temporary instability, and lots of free publicity. Exactly his style. Cringe worthy and effective. I can see the logic here.

The point is that Twitter doesn't really needed someone to build a world class software and hardware team. The technical challenges in reliability and speed seemed pretty much solved or on track to be solved already. The problem of Twitter was that they never knew how to properly manage the community and make the company profitable.

Twitter doesn't have a tech problem, it has a community problem.

Fixing the community starts with rolling back all the things that clearly did not work. He's using the sledge hammer method there too. So, not very subtle but generally just getting of rid of a lot of failed and failing policy.

The technical challenges in speed and scaling are not challenges at all anymore. Twitter built a lot of stuff in house when you couldn't get that stuff as a commodity. That has changed since then. You need a cache, you can get one from any number of cloud providers or spin up something off the shelf you run yourself. Same with databases, CDNs, large scale object storage, search infrastructure, message brokers, and all the rest. So, yes, there might be a need for changing some of that necessitated by some key people disappearing but it's not a massive technical challenge.

And which ones are those? Knowing what did and did not work is an actual challenge by itself.

> You need a cache, you can get one from any number of cloud providers or spin up something off the shelf you run yourself. Same with databases, CDNs, large scale object storage, search infrastructure, message brokers, and all the rest. So, yes, there might be a need for changing some of that necessitated by some key people disappearing but it's not a massive technical challenge.

The massive technical challenge is migrating existing infrastructure to something off the shelf, then finding and fixing the new bugs in that existing infrastructure and/or your deployment/configuration. That shouldn't be underestimated.

It's short term disruptive and might involve some fail whales. And then it is solved again. Break it, fix it. Like it or not, that seems to be the plan. If you accept things might temporarily break, it's going to be a lot easier to act.

It's a microblog, not star ship. At least from Elon Musk's point of view, there's going to be a difference between those two and the amount of brain cycles he's going to dedicate to things breaking or not. He's not going to be afraid to break the team (check), the platform (still running fine), or the community (in progress, engagement seems up so far).

Ever watch someone do CAD/CAM modelling? They need extreme precision of input that AR sausage fingers just aren't going to help with. You need a num-pad and a good mouse with a stepped click wheel.

I get it. We share some similar neurodivergence traits. He wants to be right in the detail. Constantly jumping from interest to interest, seeing the hidden patterns and connections that aren't apparent to others. But there are a times when I know I just need to shut up and let someone more experienced talk despite my brain wanting to lead every discussion right into solution mode, or providing additional context mode.

I've spent the last 6 years in management consulting (without formal business education), I agree with him when he says MBAs are useless. We know that the best solutions come from diverse teams with diverse backgrounds, skills and knowledge. Not 5 clones who know how to build value driver trees, not to say the tools they bring aren't useful, but they can be incredibly limiting.

For someone who hates MBAs he's sure going about this take-over like someone who barely passed one (i.e. knows more than enough to be dangerous). Sure, you're hemorrhaging money in operations. You need to cut costs and find new revenue streams.

What are your biggest costs?

Labor. Slash / Burn. The old McKinsey 7% FTE reduction will give you some extra operating cash from the years remaining budget and you know it's not so much that people (in fear of their jobs) won't just pick up the slack to keep everything moving. Do it quick because you need to rip the band-aid off and get rid of all that accrued leave, restricted cash etc. off your books too.

Equipment. Redundancy? Sounds like unused resources we can fire sale.

Contracts. Renegotiate? The only two meaningful levers are price and quantity. Start cutting quantity now, renegotiate price later.

This is all dummies guide stuff and tends to go terribly in reality when implemented all at once all together.

For instance, research has shown companies that lay-off when under pressure end up underperforming against the ones who chose not to.

Now who's going to help build and operate those new revenue streams?

Quick fixes for a quick buck and a whole lot of extra risk.

"Must" might be.

No one has figured out a way to monetize a social network without advertising, at least not at the scale Twitter has to operate.

I think the statement probably is more like "no one has figured out an easier way to monetize a social network"...

A "de facto public square" would be public in conception, construction, and support from the start, which is one of the ways we know that Twitter is no such thing. Though it would likely also have some rules for how speech is/isn't conducted.

And all things considered, advertiser-friendliness is a sort of low-resolution but approximate passable democratic mechanism for marking boundaries of civilized discourse.

But then again, if you're scare-quoting expertise, maybe that's not the conversation you're here to have.

And that's a very progressive sensibility towards corporations, and precisely why they actually like them (what's more appealing to a progressive other than a huge centrally-planned organization run by credentialed experts) despite claiming otherwise.

And corporations are not generally progressive in outlook either, there are too many values higher up on ladder of concerns.

Advertisers are one subset that bring a rough approximation of democratic to their decisions, knowing that each person in the market they hope to reach will be deploying something like a vote with their dollars. As with any democratic approximation, it's only progressive to the extent that population is, though it's poor compared to other democratic mechanisms.

You can take issue with whether democratic decisions are good decisions, of course, but that's likely to be an unpopular opinion for obvious reasons. And hey, I hear the person currently running twitter recently went so far as to say vox populi vox dei. Was his expertise in running corporations part of what you meant to scare quote, or is your challenge to expertise, shall we say, selective?

While most aren't self-conscious enough to realize it now, they still love corporations as evidenced by how they zealously defend them when they serve progressive ambitions and power.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169590/il...