Boeing needs to dump the CEO and install someone from an engineering lineage if they want to build their reputation back.
An engineering company run by a longtime manager with a background in accounting is in large part how Boeing got here. Fire the guy and get someone with a technical background in there.
> Boeing needs to dump the CEO and install someone from an engineering lineage if they want to build their reputation back.
I'd argue they need an effective engineering culture, and leadership that enables and values and fights for it, not a former-engineer figurehead. Good engineers within Boeing need to be enabled to do their job properly, within normal business constraints, and bad engineers need to be removed. The business needs to understand that good engineering is a necessity and a profit centre in aerospace.
I don't know how they'd achieve this change. The company seems to have rotted from the head down since it merged with McDonnel Douglas, and its possible that the senior leadership lack the self awareness to comprehend the problem.
I think the MD merge gets the blame by many, however, it seems as though the shift in the market that started around the same time to optimize shareholder value at all costs is really to blame.
I think it's both in a sort of chicken and egg sort of situation. The MD execs taking over Boeing had a terrible effect on safety culture, but the reason the MD execs took over in the first place was because of this shift in the market that you describe.
If the pre-MD Boeing management had managed to retain control of the company things may have been ok from a quality and safety perspective... but the stock would have declined because they would have refused to chase short-term quarterly success at the expense of the long term.
The senior leadership does not lack the self awareness, they know exactly that they are bad and they act to cover it as best as possible. I saw this up close in other similar companies (manufacturing moved to all non-technical leadership).
Turned down for the Boeing CEO position, went to Ford and carried them through the Great recession as one of the big 3 auto makers that did not need a govt bailout.
I'd say call him back, but he's probably enjoying retirement by now.
After Mulally left, Boeing went all in (to an extreme imho) on outsourcing. I don’t know enough to say if he would have done the same. But imho spinning off fundamental items like fuselages is a big source of inefficiency and risk right now for Boeing.
I've read that he was the token engineer in the see of accountants, MBAs and consultants.
Cultural change goes much deeper than changing the CEO. Boeing might not be salvageable on the cheap side. Decapitating the company at levels 1-4 may not even be enough. It may require acknowledging that changing the flight envelope and software-patching it was a mistake.
This is a major can of worms on itself. This means a plane redesign, 6-8 years delay, and probably another round of WTO-unfriendly subsidy.
>The myth that engineers make better leaders may have originated with Andy Grove.
Quite possible, and what's really ironic is that Grove's successor, Craig Barrett (who helped start the company with Grove), also an engineer, was a terrible CEO. He was the one who made a bunch of bad moves: P4/Netburst + RAMBUS, Itanic, refusing to adopt amd64 or make their own x64-64 ISA before AMD, etc. The company did poorly under his leadership and only turned around when his successor, Paul Otellini (an accountant IIRC) took over and moved to the "Core" CPU architecture.
Having an engineer as CEO can get you dumb decisions like thinking the Pentium4 Netburst architecture and dependency on expensive RAMBUS memory is a great idea.
Whatever your opinion of Elon is, it’s extremely generous to say he comes from an engineering background and just flat-out wrong to say he comes from the type of traditional engineering background relevant to companies like Boeing (the PE type of engineering).
If you approve of Elon as a leader, he is basically the embodiment of “you do not need to be an engineer to run a highly technical company”
I think describing Elon as a small-e engineer (not designing powertrains, but at least understanding them) is accurate, and saying that an an engineering-first mindset is important for companies like Boeing and SpaceX would ring true. Engineering background is different than engineering mindset.
People contain multitudes. While I would agree that Elon has more of an engineer mindset than other CEOs I’m still not convinced that would amount to much.
A look at Tesla build quality, or that ridiculous demo where the Cybertruck window smashed are just two things that immediately come to mind to cast doubt on Musk’s commitment to engineering. I think he’s a big picture guy, I absolutely think issues like those we're seeing with Boeing could happen under his watch.
I'm not saying Elon would be a good aerospace CEO, although he seems to do well at SpaceX. I'm saying that his attitude towards technical subjects ("this is ABSOLUTELY my problem and I should understand what we make") is what airplane-making CEOs should be going for.
To me, it is the way of looking at the world that attempts to transform intractable real-world problems into tractable ones by translating them into the battle-tested model(s) of your field. For example, the RLC model of circuits is certainly not able to express all of EM physics but it sure is easy to solve problems in (although, I only did the degree, maybe working engineers dip back down into physics more often).
Anyway it isn’t obvious how Musk has that mindset, he seems obsessed with innovation rather than tradition, and he seems to have styled himself as some kind of polymath tech guy rather than an expert in any particular field.
Good point, I should define my terms better. I mean holding the product and how it's built above MBA stuff, which is the part I admire about Musk companies. If they want to cut costs, they typically find a new technique or new process to build a part, instead of reaching for typical MBA levers like new suppliers or outsourcing.
Your point about transforming intractability is cogent and I think we agree. To your last point about polymath tactics, you're right to a degree, but you can also watch Everyday Astronaut's SpaceX factory tour and realize that it's far more than a basic understanding, which is probably a big part of SpaceX's wild success.
If the anecdotes are accurate, and based on your own description, it seems Elon Musk is a CEO who makes an effort to thoroughly grasp the products his company develops. That's commendable. This doesn't necessarily make him even a small-e engineer, even in the context of the broader definitions used today. It certainly doesn't make him "someone of engineering lineage," as the original comment implied was essential for Boeing's success, or even "someone with an engineering background" like the comment I replied to.
It's also certainly not clear that Elon has an engineering-first mindset, nor that that would even be helpful for many of the businesses he runs. I can think of plenty of examples of Elon putting business above all else plenty of times, and I don't mean that as a dig: It's often the smart move for the monetary gain of all involved.
And just to be clear, this not a commentary at all on about whether Elon would be effective in running Boeing. To be blunt: I don't care about that conversation.
> It's also certainly not clear that Elon has an engineering-first mindset
If A, then B.
Struggle with definitions all we want, Boeing needs a dose of Musk's attitude towards engineering and manufacturing. It is the most important thing they do, and I don't think the C-suite understands that. That's the most distilled version of what I'm saying. Musk is the best recent example of this attitude, but Henry Ford is an excellent older example.
If Elon's thoroughly understands the products his companies develop, he has an engineering-first mindset? That logic would also apply to many CEOs we wouldn't consider "engineering-first" CEOs.
> Struggle with definitions all we want,
For me, this is the only discussion. My focus is not at all on whether Elon would be a good fit for Boeing. I don't give a shit about that conversation.
I don't want Elon to run Boeing, that's never been part of my argument. I want leadership at Boeing that elevates engineers, understands that engineering is absolutely critical, and punishes bean-counters for pushing against a good engineering culture.
> is being a thin-skinned an emerald mine scion who believes in astonishingly racist tropes.
That's a personal attack. Talking about failures of planning in mass manufacturing, backlash due to public statements, and casual behavior about publicly traded companies and information related to them, those would be material criticisms that we can discuss civilly.
The claims of racism and inheriting some amount of money from a debunked emerald mine conspiracy aren't helpful on their own.
Then make the connection between racism and damages to a company relevant to the discussion, or being thin-skinned and the same.
There is zero evidence that Elon profited off the emerald mine his dad bought shares in, and the allegation is that he conspired to hide that money somehow. It's a normal definition of conspiracy.
> Then make the connection between racism and damages to a company relevant to the discussion, or being thin-skinned and the same.
They both have obvious consequences in a leadership position. Obvious consequences are enough.
> There is zero evidence that Elon profited off the emerald mine his dad bought shares in, and the allegation is that he conspired to hide that money somehow. It's a normal definition of conspiracy.
1. I have never heard this "hiding money" part of it so I don't think that's the crux of it.
2. "Some guy hid his own money" is not a conspiracy. This is baffling.
It's hard for someone outside a company to point to a direct consequence of racism in the company leadership. That doesn't make it not-bad for the leadership to be racist.
Surely you're not saying it's okay to discriminate as CEO if you make enough money.
And if you want a consequence of being thin-skinned, uh, anything to do with twitter? Half his interactions with the SEC?
While you seem to be getting downvoted a lot, I think it's not unlikely. If Boeing appears to be in serious trouble financially (and I think it does), then you will see the gov't try to rescue them somehow. How many people would be willing to take over Boeing at this point? Of those, how many have experience at getting gov't contracts and running a company in the aero/space industry? It's a short list.
If it's not Elon, it will probably be Airbus, and there is a chance that the US feds will want someone more America-based instead.
If you would hire Elon Musk as CEO, he would substitute all the pilots by FSD beta version 2.3.4, and change all the airplane seats USB chargers for a Neuralink plug.
Why? The CEO of a company this big, no matter their background, has no business building an intimate understanding of the tech. They’re there to set up an incentive system to further the goals of their choosing. Neither seems to call for deep understanding of neither. And no background absolves a CEO from building a surface understanding of all aspects of running the business.
TBF, from my experience with VPs, technical background might be a hindrance to executives. The guy who used to work on databases worries about persistence, even though nobody raised that issue. Networking background? Oh well, good that I know why we put this many bits into this field, despite it only needs a couple bytes and we can afford megabytes. Sure, they know their job enough to leave enough time for the actual question. I even understand why they first interrogate the room about some arbitrary cog in the machine. Still makes me wonder if there aren’t better ways to do this.
> Why? The CEO of a company this big, no matter their background, has no business building an intimate understanding of the tech.
This is certainly a point of contention in modern schools of business thought, but the concept of a CEO who doesn't understand what the company builds is bizarre to me.
The CEO of Boeing, IMO, should probably have aircraft engineering experience, and, ideally, also be a pilot with the suitable type ratings to fly the stuff they build.
And they should be open to "Hey, if you have engineering concerns about the airplanes we're building for the traveling public, you come to me!" style office visits. Someone with concerns about the "single sensor fault runaway trim" style system should have been able to bring it up, and have him understand it.
I know this isn't what Boeing has. And they've lost a lot. This is now increasingly clear to people outside aviation circles.
Does the CEO need to know these things? I would argue no. What needs to happen is the CEO needs to listen and trust the technical people that report to him.
There is a misalignment of priorities that will never be fixed as long as the primary incentive for the CEO is to maximize shareholder value. If you remove that, and force the primary incentiven to be safety over profits, the rest of the business will follow.
> needs to listen and trust the technical people that report to him.
If the CEO has no clue what the company does, those people could be blowing smoke up his/her ass
There has to be assurance of technical competency somewhere, and someone that has ultimate authority to get rid of the incompetent.
This doesn't disagree with your second sentence. The pursuit of profit seems to turn everything into a bank or gacha machine. Both safety and competency fall by the wayside.
He has to trust his CTO (whatever that title is at boeing for their top engineer manager) to be the judge of that. The incentives have to align wrt quality engineering for there to be trust all the way down to the junior most engineer.
A CEO of an aircraft manufacturer that does not know anything about flying and engineering is too disconnected from their core business (which is engineering planes, not managing techies), it does not trust and understand engineers and it is not trusted and followed by their technical reports. I saw that in technical fields, when you have a bozo as a manager (search for Steve Jobs interview on this matter) things go wrong, very wrong.
For products/services tied to real engineering, that idea that you can maximize profits without leadership that understands it at a deep level is wrong. If you want to maximize profits in that kind of company, you'd better be able to build and sustain a culture to systematically knock out catastrophic risks stemming from real world physical constraints.
A management accounting guy is great at hedging financial risks, but that is what they'll always focus on, not the real world. What we are seeing with Boeing now is what happens if leadership is adrift without a good intuition about real world physical risks and what it takes to address them. You can't maximize profits while regularly causing catastrophic events.
In every case? No. Not every business, not every industry needs that.
In cases where the company builds machines that millions of people every day depend on to not die, yeah, the leadership should probably know some of this, if only to be able to realize when someone is trying to blow smoke up their ass.
Yeah, he should probably trust the people below him, but the cost of having that trust be violated is way too high. The consequences aren't just a bunch of people losing their jobs, maybe local business being depressed because the nearby widget factory closed. The consequences are airplanes falling out of the sky and lots of people dying. So he needs to be able to verify that the information being given to him, that he's trusting, is actually trustworthy.
And nevermind the economic effects here. If people stop trusting certain aircraft as being safe, they're not going to care whose name is painted on the fuselage.
> Does the CEO need to know these things? I would argue no. What needs to happen is the CEO needs to listen and trust the technical people that report to him.
He should probably know enough to sense if the people who report to him are talking nonsense or not, and to properly weigh what they say.
I mean, what's going to happen if two technical leaders have a disagreement, and all he knows is how to count beans? How could someone with that background make an effective decision in that context?
People also tend to fall back on what they know in unfamiliar circumstances, and I don't think you want an aircraft-manufacturer CEO falling back on picking the "cheapest option" and accepting am unappreciated safety risk in the process.
>> also be a pilot with the suitable type ratings to fly the stuff they build.
Why the pilot? When it comes to handling these machines, the pilots are one small corner. I would think that someone with experience keeping them safe and functional would be more on point these days. How about someone with the ratings for maintaining the machines? No pilot has ever inspected let alone installed a door plug.
It takes ~ 50 hours to get a pilot license and understand what is that. You don't need ATPL as a CEO, but flying regularly will keep you connected in a way that cannot be substituted, definitely not by the glasshouse that is a MBA.
Can you be a successful CEO of a car manufacturer if you cannot drive a car?
50 hours? To fly an airliner you need way more than 50 hours. This isn't bouncing around the circuit in a Cessna. Boeing sells aircraft for use by airlines. Short of a handful people who own their own, to fly an airliner you need to be employed by an airline. You generally need something more like 1500 to 3000 hours before an airline is going to trust you with their equipment.
Read again. I said you don't need ATPL to be the CEO of Boeing. If you don't agree, state that, don't pick on the 50 hours because you are wrong there. And don't be pedantic about ATPL requirements, I am a pilot and I know how this works. I do support my original comment.
If you're not flying it in passenger revenue service, I believe the requirements get a lot fuzzier - I would expect you'd need at a minimum a commercial multiengine cert to get rated for airliners, but I don't know that you actually need the ATP, unless you're going to fly in revenue service.
And, tbh, I don't care if the CEO of Boeing can take one around the pattern on their own. If they need a rated instructor with them to go fly one legally, so be it. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
But I stand by my statement that the CEO should be able to understand airplanes and fly them reasonably competently, if they're the CEO of a company that builds airplanes. I don't mean "press release of them flying it straight and level on autopilot" - but to actually be able to get it competently around the sky in manual flight modes.
I consider the financialization (turning into loan servicers and financial service providers as their main stream of income) of "every company who used to build things" to be one of the worst things that's happened to American industry as a whole.
There are plenty of engineers who are not suited for leadership positions, and inability to detach from the technical details and focus on the bigger picture is certainly something you'd want to watch out for. No one said these jobs are easy, or that the right people are easy to find.
But it seems just as likely that an accountant as CEO would be unable to detach from irrelevant details about accounting systems, cost savings, tax classifications, or whatever it is that low-level accountants worry about.
Lack of understanding of X almost inevitably leads to a lack of valuing of X. Then the incentives will become perverse.
The best bosses I've worked for are the minority who took the time to understand at least some of the technical side of things.
I'm always struck by the fact that I, as a lowly dev, am expected to understand the business yet the suits floating far above me think they don't need to know what actually happens down below. Bad mistake. Lack of knowledge is never a good thing.
IME it helps tremendously on close calls where the leader needs to pick a side, and the finance/sales/legal people have very clear numbers or other quantitative data and Eng has more subjective and hard to quantify concerns like quality.
So ip theft without re-percussions was not at the heart of that downfall. Honestly, if ip is that blatantly stolen, a company should have the right to penalty Tarif all products there IP flows into without licenses in perpetuity until a patent would have expired.
Sun Microsystems never had an engineering-career CEO; whether Scott McNealy, Ed Zander, or Ponytail ... all on the sales side. No doubt it had strong "CTO" type people. Though not in the CEO, chairman or president/COO positions.
Interesting. Last night I watched the excellent 2018 biopic "First Man" (starring Ryan Gosling) about Neil Armstrong and was struck by NASA's selection criteria for Gemini and Apollo astronauts: they required pilots with an engineering background.
Frank Borman, chosen for Gemini and Apollo missions, "earned a Master of Science degree at Caltech in 1957, and then became an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point." [Wikipedia]
"After retiring from NASA and the Air Force in 1970, Borman became senior vice president for operations at Eastern Air Lines. He became chief executive officer of Eastern in 1975, and chairman of the board in 1976. Under his leadership, Eastern went through the four most profitable years in its history...." [Wikipedia]
I don't buy the oft-repeated claim that you can re-make a company simply by replacing the CEO. I don't believe that CEOs in large companies have much influence on the company's direction, except in terms of decisions to downsize/outsource, how to use money, and who's on the board. There's only so much one person can do (and accordingly, I think all big-company CEOs are vastly overpaid).
Moving the deckchairs in the boardroom isn't going to solve systemic problems in a company.
You can't "re-make" a company by replacing the CEO/CxO, but I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the influence of the c-suite either. What they care about and talk about filters down, often through unofficial channels of communication, and it does have an impact on how front-line employees do their work. Of course, this does take time and often involves some changes in management as well.
I've been watching the Post Office Horizon Inquiry sessions, and reading transcripts. From what I've seen, a completely new board would have no noticeable effect on the PO; they'd have to remove most of the management. It looks as if the company ethos is driven by line management.
Well, that really means tearing the company up completely. I can't see how a new board could effect reform. And replacing all the middle management would destroy the company.
And as you say, it takes time for a new culture to move through the layers; but the PO doesn't have time. Does Boeing? I realize the companies are very different, but both have marinated in an unhealthy culture for a long time.
If replacing all of middle management to effect an essential change will destroy a company, then that company maybe needs to be destroyed.
Because that's how the CEO makes big change happen: management -- from the C-suite down to line managers -- needs to get on board with that change. If they refuse, they get fired and are replaced by people who will carry out the change. If this process will take too long to save the company, then... again, maybe the company needs to fail.
Take a simpler thing: if a new CEO sets an example of taking a decent amount of time off and promoting that as what people should be doing, because they value mental health, then that will gradually trickle down into upper and middle management, and down to the rank-and-file.
Management types who resist that will be replaced or marginalized, because this aspect of culture matters to the CEO and this is something they want to promote. It won't happen overnight, but ultimately management will be filled with people who are taking solid amounts of vacation and push their reports to do the same.
A CEO that wants to push an engineering-first/safety-first culture will be firing executives and management types that try to hide problems or push through things that don't meet the quality bar that the CEO is looking for. This sort of shift will not happen overnight. It can take years. Whether or not a company like Boeing can survive this sort of change, and if they even have years left to make that change, is another question, of course.
But I argue the opposite: the CEO (critically, with the unwavering support of the board, which requires the support of shareholders) is the only person who can make this sort of shift.
"Replacing the CEO" isn't a panacea because most CEOs are pretty average, but when an exceptional CEO does take the helm, they can pull off some amazing feats (e.g. Satya Nadella).
I agree that most people are "average" (truism?), and that some are exceptional. And I agree that exceptional people sometimes achieve amazing feats in their field of endeavour. But what's so special about CEOs?
I think you think Boeing's purpose in life is to make planes. I think it's primary objective is to make money for execs and short term traders. If airplanes come out of the company, it's a random side-effect.
> I think it's primary objective is to make money for execs...
Plausibly, yes.
> ... and short term traders.
Nope. Not even on the radar. Stockholders, maybe. Not short term traders. Short term traders have no say on the makeup of the board, nor on executive compensation. They therefore have zero input into the direction of the company.
Muilenburg was an aerospace engineer by training, that is how he ended up at Boeing. To be fair, though it sounds like he was on the management track early on, so not sure how much engineering he did after graduation.
It's frequently framed as an issue with Boing now having an accounting-driven culture instead of an engineering-driven culture. In that framing a CEO with engineering background is a logical choice to effect that culture change.
It was arguably under Muilenberg, an engineer, that many of the current issues with Boeing's culture were either created or allowed to flourish. I think it is "frequently framed" as an engineers-vs-accountants thing by engineers or others who like to think that STEM people can do no wrong.
If a customer wants to buy thousands of a widget at $1500 and you usually sell them at $2000 a widget but you can move the slider on maintainability or make an agreement that the customer accepts some reduced quality -- if that's something the two businesses can agree on and it's not a negligent change to make then it's probably worth prioritizing that. I think we might agree on that.
Trying to figure out what to do in any given business situation is usually challenging because the devil is in the details. It happens that in this particular case, Boeing should be checking that their supplier installs bolts and drills holes correctly because their supplier has screwed it up so many times. But in a lot of industries, cheaping out on materials is a reasonable thing to do if your customers agree it's a reasonable thing to do and it's not going to kill anyone.
Accounts ask how much things cost and go from there. MBA's figure out how much things need to cost to make their spreadsheet work and tell you that's what you get.
Which is what happened at Boeing. They told the engineers they were going to develop the 787 for half the cost of previous models (we are very very smart). And it took twice as long and cost twice as much. Given that they couldn't afford a clean slate redesign of the 737 even if they wanted to. The result is the 737 Max which will cost them more than a clean redesign would have.
The point of the 737max was that it was a brownfield design which wouldn't require recertification by airlines of all the pilots who are certified for 737min planes.
A 7B7 greenfield narrow body plane would probably have been faster to design and a better plane in lots of "don't lie to the pilot and fly into the ground when a sensor is busted" ways, but would have required all airlines to re-certify their pilots, which is both expensive and would have caused the airlines to consider airbus and boeing on the merits...
I’d actually say it’s the safety culture that’s missing. Go have a phone call with someone at Shell and they’ll ask you if you’re in a safe place to have a call and if you know where the emergency exits are before starting the call. And the safety culture comes from the top regardless of if you’re an engineer or lawyer, or finance exec.
Being an engineer does not make someone a good person, though. Engineers are perfectly able to cut corners. Putting an engineer in the CEO seat won’t solve anything if there is no culture of responsibility. The problems continued under Dennis Muilenburg, which AFAICT has 2 degrees in engineering and none in business management.
Boeing apparently can't withstand the immense quarterly financial scrutiny it is under without making dangerous engineering trade offs. Time to take the company private?
I think you also need to be expecting the CEO to "clean house" at the top if you realistically want anything to change.
The CEO may set the culture, as much as that is set from the top down, but by the time a company actually starts having problems visible to the outside, its entire suite of executives, VPs, etc, have optimized their career for the sort of problematic attitude the previous CEOs demanded.
Ah yes the fantasy that an IC can just magic this all away.
This would likely result in a CEO with no pull and a CFO that had all the hard power to call the shots.
The reality seems to be, for some reason, building profitable and safe planes in America is becoming increasingly difficult.
A company most be able to do both: build a quality and safe product and make a margin. It can’t exist without revenue.
I’m guessing the real problem is somewhere between low quality or overworked and poorly trained line workers, complex systems, and a revenue strategy that obscures what the company is selling.
It takes more than a random ic manager to fix that — but I agree they should come from that past maybe.
No matter how profitable building good planes is, building slightly worse planes that are bought in equal numbers is more profitable. The profit maximizing move is to lower quality until sales suffer more than profitability is increased. And if you have a strong reputation, and feedback cycles on product quality are long, lower quality might take a long time to actually be noticeable in sales.
Boeing profits and sales had been on a steady upwards trajectory for 20 years until 2019:
> Building airplanes it a bit like running a restaurant... it's a business no sane person would willingly go in to.
Other people with a similar perspective about rockets tried to convince Musk that as well. Thankfully he didn’t listen. You’re never going to realize gains that surpass the return on the S&P if you don’t take risks in business.
Maybe the secret sauce is to not build a rocket company at all. You build a Mars Exploration company that gives people a purpose and objective beyond just money. A company where quality/efficiency/price have a direct benefit to a broader mission.
And dozens of his projects have utterly failed. Remember The Boring Company? Hyperloop? The-site-formerlly-and-forever-known-as-Twitter-until-Musk-ruined-it?
Throw an unlimited supply of darts and you're going to get a few bulleyes. Doesn't make you the worlds greatest dart's player.
> And dozens of his projects have utterly failed. Remember The Boring Company? Hyperloop? The-site-formerlly-and-forever-known-as-Twitter-until-Musk-ruined-it?
You say dozens and name two, one of which (X) is still up and running with active user engagement. Many people have thrown darts, none have developed self-landing reusable rockets and outcompeted ULA or developed a satellite based global internet provider. Not even Google at its peak was able to come up with anything better than Project Loon. I’ll concede there’s a little luck in every venture, but what Musk and SpaceX have accomplished is well beyond luck and quite remarkable.
I mean, I dispute your implication that he's not destroying twitter (I mean, ever since he took it private we don't have hard numbers. But that itself doesn't suggest _good_ things).
But aside from that, and the two examples above,
1. x.com (the original)
2. tesla has been killing way more people since he retroactively became a founder (there was a delay while existing products moved through the pipeline)
3. solarcity
4. optimus
5. neuralink (well, ok, it hasn't failed yet. But _I'm_ not betting on it...)
6. the Tham Luang cave rescue
7. crypto
8. his relationships with his kids / exes
TBF, spacex appears to be his baby, and it has done _much_ better than I ever thought it would. There are rumors about the existence of a whole team there preventing him from breaking things, and personally, I believe them. But I have nothing _remotely_ like proof. And even if those rumors are true, spacex appears to have been his idea, he hired the first batch of people, etc. He can definitely take loads of credit for it, even if I don't think he deserves as much of said credit as he clearly thinks he deserves.
Two of those three are operating and possibly even growing. The other was thrown out for others to pursue rather than Musk companies.
Surely there are better examples of failures than these? Personally, I would have focused on "FSD". That one has been a huge debacle with a lot of potential to get worse.
I'm no fan of Musk, but it's hard to argue that SpaceX hasn't been revolutionary, to the point where I question if there's anyone else who could have pulled that off. Moving focus to The Boring Company or Hyperloop feels a little like whataboutism. No one succeeds at everything they do. Musk is in the unique (and lucky, for him) position that he can throw a lot of darts and lose a lot of money, but keep on going even if many of his bets don't work out.
And I don't think the usual "throw shit at the wall until something sticks" thing applies to Musk. Certainly he's had some things that slid to the floor, but he hardly has an "unlimited" supply of darts. And even if his finances were infinite, he still only has 24 hours in a day, and can only focus on a certain number of things. By and large, the things with a lot of his focus do seem to be doing pretty well.
Twitter is clearly a huge blind spot for Musk; while I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand, it does seem like an outlier. Regardless, it's still running, somehow, when I expected it to have been shut down by the middle of last year. While I know people who have stopped using it, I know more people who still use it and get value out of it, regardless of the negatives since Musk bought it.
Boeing will be as well for the 737 Max, in the history books that is. And so far, Space X only got more junk up to places we already did junk up to before. SpaceX ahs yet to get us some place we haven't been in space, or at the very least one we have not been to in a long time. By themselves, if they deliver portions of the mission equipment they are a supplier like everyone else.
SpaceX achieved impressive things, the over glorification so rubs me the wrong way. And equalizing SpaceX successes with Musk a person does way more than just rub me the wrong way.
> SpaceX ahs yet to get us some place we haven't been in space, or at the very least one we have not been to in a long time.
It got us to a place where the cost of a rocket launch is 10 times less than it was before, and soon it will get us to 100 times less. It's just a matter of time that this is leveraged to bring us to new physical places.
> And equalizing SpaceX successes with Musk a person does way more than just rub me the wrong way.
He is the person that single-handedly made the decision to start a rocket company, decided on the initial architecture, hired the key people and finance the whole operation.
Inane comparison, SpaceX will be in the history books because their rockets demonstrably work. They've already beaten every other rocket organization on the planet, including the state-run ones.
An engineering company run by a longtime manager with a background in accounting is in large part how Boeing got here. Fire the guy and get someone with a technical background in there.