It’s staggering how much money they wasted because Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts. It was years late because stainless steel is so much harder to work with, especially when it has so many complicated geometries, and every one of those delays was a chance for him to say “maybe the people I hired for their expertise know something I don’t” rather than “I’m the boss, make it work”.
They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
Part of the delay was also the 48V architecture. So in addition to the obvious new things like stainless steel panels they also had to redesign mundane parts like window motors and interior lighting. The Cybercab is also using a 48V architecture so even though they've never talked about it being an R&D platform maybe they'll retcon it that way.
That forces a redesign of all the car electronics. While it might well be a good idea anyway from an R&D point of view it's undeniably expensive.
(I have a very slight visibility on 48V car audio R&D, for example. Most digital electronics could be adapted with a different DC-DC converter but the audio power amp stage takes direct supply voltage)
Real experts said reusable rockets were impossible ...
Did they?
A real expert told Elon that self landing rockets were possible over chutes. The retconning to build the myth of Elon is ridiculous.
Lars Blackmore was doing self-landing rocket research before he went to spacex. Musk's reusable rockets (who doesn't want that, this is why the shuttle exists) wanted to use parachutes.
Yes. Is my comment ambiguous or something?
Seems to me like a sentence that's quite easy to understand.
I understood what you wrote, my question was whether it is true.
Lots of false sentences are easy to understand.
No, no rocketry expert ever said that reusable rockets were impossible. They would have told you that the cost to develop them would not recoup itself based on the then-existing demand for orbital payloads, and that banking on such demand materializing would be a massive gamble (which is why Starlink exists).
"What I’m discovering in the market is that SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream, which is good. We should all dream. I think a $5 million launch or a $15 million launch is a bit of a dream. I think reusability is a dream. How am I going to respond to a dream? First of all, you don't wake people up. They have to wake up on their own."
https://www.facebook.com/61572338938589/videos/in-june-2013-...
Pathetic argumentation in this thread, to be real.
Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
The highest number though is like 30 uses and Starship still hasn't profen itself.
Also the boring company, Doge, Solar City, the cybertruck etc.
So what do we get out of this? Musk is for sure not just an idiot, he for sure sees sometimes good opportunities, but also he had the money to invest in these and he got lucky a few times too.
Btw. the cybertruck he announced, never came.
> Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
How much money have Americans gifted NASA to pay Russia for launching payloads ton Soyuz rockets?
Do you frame all government funding as "gifting"?
And you could just as easily frame it as Musk "gifting" something to the US government by offering cheaper launches than Roscosmos and Boeing/ULA, and developing new capabilities cheaper than Boeing
Are you trying to argue against me? Because you are doing a strawman.
Let me criticsize NASA for paying / gifting Russia for launching payloads.
So we are now back to square one.
Pls continue
> They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
They could have Roadstered it.
Buy Ford Transit 350 "gliders", work out how to make them FWD, RWD, or AWD using your own transaxles and batteries. Pickup, van, or just a bare chassis-cab to go to a coachbuilder, it doesn't matter.
The Transit has been around for 61 years. Sticking electric motors in it that you already have is a no-brainer.
Arguably the longest lived successful British vehicle, the Transit. https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/eur/en/articles/2025/transi...
> Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts
"real experts" are not always correct. A bet a lot of people told him that the original Teslas were a bad idea or SpaceX would never...wait for it...take off.
But sometimes people win when they push the boundary of what might work, push the problems to the surface and then solve them.
I don't like the guy but you can't really deny his ethusiasm and single-mindedness.
An engineers isn’t going to say “EVs will never work” or “reusable rockets are impossible”. They’d say things like “we’re really going to need to minimize weight and try to build better batteries to hit that range goal” or “it’s going to require a lot of money to do the R&D for reusable boosters, you need to land a NASA contract so we can afford dozens of tests”. Engineers express tradeoffs far more than absolutes.
Musk has enthusiasm, yes, but he’s let his luck at PayPal and successfully buying Tesla from the original founders go to his head. Nobody is right all of the time, and no serious project goes perfectly according to the original vision without adjustments. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an electric truck — companies with better engineering culture are making great ones — but the Cybertruck failed exactly the way everyone who isn’t a superfan expected: it’s designed in a way which guarantees high costs and it just doesn’t deliver corresponding benefits for most people. Diving into the culture wars against a large chunk of potential Tesla buyers was a bad idea but even if he hadn’t, there just aren’t that many people who have that kind of money to spend and the ones who do usually won’t accept so many limitations and flaws.
That’s a little bit revisionist. I don’t like Musk much either but to be fair:
- no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible. Sure, there may have been individuals, but it didn’t make it into corporate strategy or product delivery. The Model S plus the Supercharger network changed the face of the car industry.
- none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality. They had an infinite head start vs. SpaceX and failed to innovate. Even now, having their lunch money regularly stolen by SpaceX, where is the reusable competition?
> no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible
No executive in the established "expert" car companies had any reason to rock the boat. Establishing EVs as a credible alternative to ICEs required a build-out of charging infrastructure that none of them were willing to commit to. But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existed.
> none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality
All of them would have told you that there's nothing impossible about a reusable rocket, only that their customers were happily served by their current offerings. Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
> But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existe
Yes. And in fact, Tesla existed before Musk, who merely invested in the company and then rewrote the history to make him a “founder”.
Fast forward 20 years, and now we have musk shills calling people “revisionists” when they just state facts.
> Tesla existed before Musk, who merely invested in the company and then rewrote the history to make him a “founder”.
The world is scattered with the skeletons of failed car startups. Outside of China, there hadn’t been one to succeed at a meaningful level for a long time, and no one gave any new entrant much hope of survival, much less one that was also trying to create a whole new sector and the infrastructure to support it.
Like it or not, Tesla’s survival let alone its level of success has been extraordinary.
It’s impossible to know whether it would have succeeded without Musk’s involvement; but… the probabilities suggest perhaps not.
> Fast forward 20 years, and now we have musk shills calling people “revisionists” when they just state facts.
I assume this barb is aimed at me.
I’m far from a Musk “shill”. I strongly dislike the person he’s become, the way he behaves, and the huge opportunities he’s squandered as a result and along the way. I refuse to buy his products.
However, I’m just not emotionally involved in either direction and try to be factual and neutral. He’s a horrible person who has led companies that have achieved extraordinary things.
Ironically, people who can’t see past their emotions and spend time on the internet throwing insults around in discussions exist on both sides, whether they’re a “shill” or an anti-shill, or hater, or whatever terms fits (you) best.
Yes. Musk and his colleagues revolutionised two technical and entrenched industries. You make it sound like this wasn't a difficult proposition.
> Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
Not sure about this analysis.
a) SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 relatively cheaply - ~$300m to it simply being a viable launch platform (i.e. without reuse, Dragon, etc.)
b) NASA contributed to some of the costs.
c) SpaceX was already offering launch services cheaper than their competition before perfecting reuse or conceiving of Starlink.
Therefore it's likely that they'd have had a positive (albeit lower) business case and made back R%D costs over time, simply by offering launch services and capturing a majority of the market thanks to their lower prices. Reusability lowered their launch costs, when it came. Starlink was an answer to the question of how to capitalise on all of the cheap surplus launch capacity they'd made available.
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The clever brains at JPL worked on self landing rockets before they went to spacex. Your tax dollars at work.
https://www.alphaxiv.org/@lars-blackmore
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Blackmore
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xZvK9z0AAAAJ&hl=en
Indeed. That was why I deliberately wrote "made a reusable commercial rocket a reality".
It's not just high costs, its high costs that are only there to appease one man. The stainless steel sheets don't provide features that the average consumer even considers and has more than a few drawbacks
I can deny that his enthusiasm and single-mindedness are the reasons for his success.
His initial success, PayPal, was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Online payments are an obvious thing and a natural monopoly. He guessed right that PayPal would be the one that succeeded.
That gave him the opportunity to place more big bets that paid off. Neither electric cars nor reusable spacecraft were obvious wins the way online payments were, but it's also no sign of genius to have happened to place bets on companies that succeeded.
The evidence for that is that his luck ran out. He keeps backing audacious projects, and they keep failing. Anybody else would have been bankrupted a dozen times over. He keeps going because he got lucky the first time, with so much money that it's almost impossible for him to lose it all.
That is to say, I think it's more survivorship bias than the merits of his "enthusiasm and single-mindedness". A decade ago he had such a string of successes that I would consider the case that he was actually smarter than average, but he's had such a string of conspicuous and obvious catastrophes that the net result simply seems average at best.
I can deny it because he overpromises on everything just like Elizabeth Holmes. Only difference in space isn’t something new the us government did it in 1960’s and didn’t destroy nearly as many rockets. Elon isn’t smart enough to try an interfere with production rockets. His distance from decision making is what made it a success.
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You invented a fictional group of people, got mad at them, then declared what you imagined they did was wrong.
I want you to know that.
Musk came into Tesla as funding. People were trying to make the cars.
With regards to SpaceX, he was looking for people to build rockets to go to Mars. But no one wanted to sell to him. So he hired rocket scientists to build the rockets.
And yes, while there will always be some asshole who says "That won't work", there were plenty of ""real experts"" who were working at those companies.
And the "real experts" left us dependent on Russia for launching a couple capsules a year to the space station.
They could have done what Musk did with Falcon 9 in the 90's. Instead they chose to mess around more with solid fueled heavy lift vehicles, all the while proclaiming that they were the experts/science.
The fallacy you are committing here is making all the non-spacex experts a homogeneous straw people.
Found Elizabeth Holmes's alt.
(I don't necessarily disagree with you, but there's a difference between thinking outside the box and trying new ideas, and literally ignoring factual reality and repeated clear feedback from people who actually know what they're talking about.)
> "real experts" are not always correct
That's why you should always hire someone unqualified.
not always, but usually!