>Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team. If you are olympic class you only want to be working with those kinds of people.
This is a common fallacy.
If you are truly an intelligent person, and you know what the right solution is, what you want to be is around people who work for you. You don't want to have to spend time convincing other people of your correctness, you want to be able to just tell everyone what to do in detail and have them do it without asking questions, preferably with ability to figure the minutia stuff on their own.
The "A" players team is basically people who see value in working 60 hour weeks. With enough ambition and motivation, stuff can definitely get gone, but its not the same as intelligence. Space X didn't win with reusable launch stage because of the smart people working on it, they won because Elon had money to throw at test over and over again, while almost scamming their supplies in not paying them until way past due. Trying something over and over doesn't take intelligence.
And now, everyone is working on the Starship. While its cool, its absolutely impractical. It would take 8 -20 launches to refuel it in orbit for an actual mission, and the engines are basically on the verge of blowing up when operating due to how precise the system has to be for that high of a pressure ratio.
Personally Im very close friends with someone that worked at Space X early enough to retire at 40 with $2mil+ after stock sale. A mechanical engineer. Yet, I have to help him fix problems with his bicycle of all things, because he can't figure out how a simple bearing interface works (he was tightening an axle that was clamping the frame instead of the bearing inner race due to a missing washer, and as a result his suspension pivot was getting stuck)
>And now, everyone is working on the Starship. While its cool, its absolutely impractical. It would take 8 -20 launches to refuel it in orbit for an actual mission, and the engines are basically on the verge of blowing up when operating due to how precise the system has to be for that high of a pressure ratio.
When he does achieve it I imagine you will create a new post saying something like "he didn't achieved Starship because of the smart people working on it, but because he had the money to throw at test over and over again".
All of these statements are based around very loose definition of mechanic vs mechanical engineer.
A mechanic for example can just memorize a bunch of procedures on how to service a car or a bike, and follow them. An engineer can memorize a bunch of advanced stuff like CAD and Stress analysis, and never really work with his hands.
So in this case, your statement would be correct. But both of these would just be average good, not exceptional, like SpaceX hiring makes it seem.
In general, as a mechanical engineer, your expertise is putting different materials together in certain shapes, matter states, and so on to make them do things. You may not know specifically how a bearing assembly works if you have never worked with it, but you should realize that a bearing is designed to provide rotational freedom to a part, and that mechanically, the thing that is connected to the inner part that rotates should be fully separate from the part that does not.
Look im just telling you what they told me. I am not in the field of aerospace engineering but I do want to push back and state that if it was just about money and bullying suppliers, boeing would already be on Mars. You are providing an anecdote about your friend. Great, same as my anecdote when I questioned Starlink employees. It would be wonderful if there was some legit competitor to Starlink in the US so that everyone can just ignore Musk but right now many people can't.
Regarding the tesla link its crazy to see that post crop up again. I remember reading it the day it was posted. I was one of the first people on /r/realtesla. I genuinely believed that they were toast in 2018. That sub has been proven wrong time and time again and now they have devolved into whatever absurdity as long as it is negative of Musk companies. That post has not aged well at all. Looking back, I suspect a lot of corners were cut when the company was running on fumes. The model 3 rollout was so bad that not even the shorts could have anticipated the nonsense they pulled(for example: the famous tent) but they managed to survive and improve significantly since the early model 3 days.
Like I said in my initial post whether there is still enough talent remaining post-Trump remains to be seen.
This is a common fallacy.
If you are truly an intelligent person, and you know what the right solution is, what you want to be is around people who work for you. You don't want to have to spend time convincing other people of your correctness, you want to be able to just tell everyone what to do in detail and have them do it without asking questions, preferably with ability to figure the minutia stuff on their own.
The "A" players team is basically people who see value in working 60 hour weeks. With enough ambition and motivation, stuff can definitely get gone, but its not the same as intelligence. Space X didn't win with reusable launch stage because of the smart people working on it, they won because Elon had money to throw at test over and over again, while almost scamming their supplies in not paying them until way past due. Trying something over and over doesn't take intelligence.
And now, everyone is working on the Starship. While its cool, its absolutely impractical. It would take 8 -20 launches to refuel it in orbit for an actual mission, and the engines are basically on the verge of blowing up when operating due to how precise the system has to be for that high of a pressure ratio.
Personally Im very close friends with someone that worked at Space X early enough to retire at 40 with $2mil+ after stock sale. A mechanical engineer. Yet, I have to help him fix problems with his bicycle of all things, because he can't figure out how a simple bearing interface works (he was tightening an axle that was clamping the frame instead of the bearing inner race due to a missing washer, and as a result his suspension pivot was getting stuck)
A good read on the Talent at Tesla https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...