[aphyt]

Building a subway is infrastructure, not manufacturing. Elon recently said the sheet metal in the cyber truck needed to be machined to the precision of a red blood cell. This is not somebody who understands manufacturing.

[edrxty]

The Elon stans need to read up on his history. He claims to have significant engineering experience but in reality he does not, he mostly got lucky a couple times early on and hired well. There are millions of people much more capable than him but will never have their chance because they don't have the resources to make their ideas actionable.

[reducesuffering]

I'm no Elon stan, but I think telling others to "read up" is ironic.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk#%C2%A...

Feel free to point me to people actually around him that thinks he doesn't know physics or engineering.

"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does." - Garret Reisman, former SpaceX director and USC Professor

[aphyt]

Even reading up on his history is difficult given how credulous tech media is in general. With tech media basically turning the smoke machines on all around something, I can't blame people from assuming there is fire somewhere. I've often said that the most reliable way to get "rich rich" is to watch where money is flowing from point A to point B, stand in the middle and stick your hand out. Elon has certainly mastered that, but I don't have to ascribe "genius" to it.

[SyzygistSix]

Are you saying Jeff Bezos and Boeing/ULA had less resources than Elon did? They had far more resources. And SpaceX hires from the same pool of talent as they do.

[joshxyz]

we literally got reusable rockets because of him.

no one says he is a great engineer, but oh boy he sure does well in finding those great engineers and funding them to work on large scale projects.

he hires people greater than him in other fields, no doubt.