[TechnicolorByte]

SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. Their initial designs were based on NASA designs. Stop perpetuating the “genius engineer” myth around Elon Musk.

[SirensOfTitan]

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch You must first invent the universe”

…no one “started from scratch", the sum of all knowledge is built on prior foundations.

[KyleOneill]

I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals.

We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.

[8372049]

Someone far more deserving of the title, Dennis Ritchie, died a week after Jobs' stupidity caught up with him. So much attention to Jobs who didn't really deserve it, and so little to Dennis Ritchie who made such a profound impact on the tech world and society in general.

[KyleOneill]

The people downvoting have never read the Isaacson book obviously.

[hanspeter]

By that logic nothing has started from scratch.

[ekianjo]

SpaceX is still the only company with reusable rockets. NASA only dreams about it and cant even make a regular rocket launch on time

[colibri727]

Altman is riding a new tech wave, and his team has a couple of years' head start. Musk's reusable rockets were conceptualized a long time ago (Tintin's Destination Moon dates back to 1953) and could have become a reality several decades ago.

[treme]

You seriously trying to take his credit away for reusable rocket with "nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow.

"A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”