Yes, one wonders. Successful? Isn't he one of the most despised men on the planet? Overpaying for Twitter big time, then destroying employment of so many happy home workers, then alienating all these nice corporations with his irresponsible talk about free speech and destroying Twitter's irreplaceable ad revenues---then/so bringing the company to the brink, where it now lingers since a year---wasn't Twitter to go down, down, down at least since September '22. or October, or January '23...
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| The Burning Man Festival, when Musk attended irresponsibly |
...Elon Musk. The richest man of the world (when TSLA is up). What a shame! Even Paul Krugman hates him. And yesterday it transpired that Musk did participate in the Burning Man Festival in Nevada a few years ago, which is now flooded, the festival, flooded, which must be surely his fault.
OK. Here's a relatively short article grabbed from the internet (we lost the source), which explains why Musk (Paypal, OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, etc) is so successful. The piece talks about SpaceX only, but it's easily generalized to his other companies:
SpaceX has no superior engineering access or smarter people than their competition. What they do have is a management structure that not only allows innovation and risk taking, but actively encourages it.
Elon Musk is plain when he states that the penalty for trying something innovative and failing is low, but the penalty for requiring a new solution and not being innovative is high (usually resulting in job loss for the individual concerned). In combination with this top driven philosophy, SpaceX designs systems like a tech company would design new software.
Traditional aerospace companies are risk adverse, and will only reveal a new product when they are very sure that the design is finalised and has all the bugs ironed out. They will spend a huge amount of time designing and redesigning each component with reliability being paramount, and each department is secluded within their own management structure. Design changes that affect another departments work are very difficult to get approved, and anyone who wants to make a significant change has an uphill battle on their hands to get upper management to authorise what may be a risky change.
SpaceX on the other hand is famous for making huge pivots and design changes at the drop of a hat. Look no further than the decision to build the Starship out of stainless steel when at the time everything was focused on carbon fibre, even to the point where major components were being constructed and tested, and the company was actively recruiting carbon fibre specialists. When Musk was convinced of the advantages of the change, he immediately convinced everyone else, then made it happen at a startling pace.
