SpaceX is the most successful Musk company because it is the one he has the LEAST direct involvement with. Compare SpaceX to how Musk is causing Tesla to crash and burn.
Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
> SpaceX is the most successful Musk company because it is the one he has the LEAST direct involvement with.
> Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
Weird take. If you read any of the biographies or books about SpaceX, you would know that many key personnel at SpaceX (e.g. Tom Mueller [1], Hans Koeniggsman[2], Tim Buzza [3], Jim Cantrell[4], Garrett Reisman [5]) have all mentioned his major role in the engineering decisions there.
Gwynne has done an amazing job at running the company - but she doesn't make the engineering decisions. You cannot deny the achievements of the company - so you just say that he had no role in it. This sort of retconning of history just because people don't like him, is super weird.
> When we first started he didn't know a lot about propulsion. He knew quite a bit about structures and helped the structures guys a lot. Over the twenty years that we worked together, now he's practically running propulsion there because he's come up to speed and he understands how to do rocket engines, which are really one of the most complex parts of the vehicle. He's always been excellent at architecting the whole mission, but now he's a lot better at the very small details of the combustion process. Stuff I learned over a decade-and-a-half at TRW he's picked up too."
> Musk "didn't know a lot about rockets initially, but he learned a lot over time," Koenigsmann said. Musk picked knowledge up quickly, which was "amazing to watch," he added.
"I really enjoyed working with him and learning how he sees things," Koenigsmann said. "He sees things from a different perspective."
Musk provided a "unique perspective" on scenarios involving basic physics by asking what the limiting factor was, according to Koenigsmann.
An example of this was when Musk pushed his engineers to shorten the time it took to fuel SpaceX's rockets. Musk said SpaceX should aim to reduce the time from 30 minutes to eight minutes — the same time it takes to empty a rocket tank, according to Koenigsmann.
SpaceX uses propellant at very low temperatures to increase its density, allowing engineers to cram more into each rocket, Insider previously reported. Rockets need to be fueled quickly before launch so the propellant doesn't warm up.
As a result of Musk's direction, SpaceX's rockets are fueled "in a remarkably short time," Koenigsmann said."
> Elon Musk is our chief designer. I think between himself and the technical design teams, they came up with the initial concepts of the size of the vehicle, how much propellant's on board, what the engine thrust is going to be, two stage rocket, that kind of stuff.
> The thing that impresses me the most is his ability to reach very, very, very deep into particular technical topics, but across an incredibly wide scope. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen that can really do it with that level of acumen. He can jump from talking to our electronic experts about the arcane details about the architectures of the processor inside the flight computer, and then talk to our structures guys about a particular type of alloy in their welding techniques. His ability to switch gears and interact at such a very high technical level with experts in each of these subjects, and not only keep up, but surpass them in many cases, is remarkable.
We are talking about the same moron who made the Cybertruck fiasco. I can only imagine how many people told Musk how bad of an idea it was to make a body out of hard stainless steel, and how he probably fired them all. and he shut down one of Twitters data centers after being told not to by the engineers who built Twitter. This directly caused many outages because the IP addresses of that data center were hard coded all over.
Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.