I think the sentiment is more widespread than you think. SpaceX has always succeeded despite Elon’s clown work. I for one would be absolutely humiliated to work for someone like him.
Isaacson isn’t an objective biographer. He needs access to continue pumping out more work, and he won’t get access if he doesn’t show his subject in a positive light.
I don’t doubt these anecdotes that show the guy’s intuition was correct in a few cases. I’d be interested to know when it was wrong.
For example, he had an intuition that his engineers could build full self driving in 12 months 10 years ago. And every 12 months he’d show up promising that it would be ready for real for real in 12 months. Nah bro, he was just lying to pump up the stock price. Yeah, maybe. Or his intuition was just wrong.
He’s exceptionally good at taking credit for work done by others. SpaceX is the classic example, but him playing Path of Exile claiming to have reached the maximum level possible when actually he was taking credit for someone else playing on his behalf is another good example.
> (Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
This is a really useless statistic. How many times was Musk wrong and his engineers were right? We don't know, we only have those two hand-picked examples from a less than neutral source.
Not even an overall error rate is helpful: it's fine to make a huge number of incorrect guesses when your goal is R&D and the payoff from the few correct guesses covers the expense of the incorrect ones.
For example, engineers also warned the launch pad wasn't suitable for the first test flight, those enineers were correct, it didn't matter as much as it would have for e.g. a Saturn V or a Space Shuttle launch because Starship was (and still is) a test flight of a shockingly cheap unmanned vehicle.
That said, if the people currently raising alarm over Kessler cascade risks are correct, that would be an example of something essentially unsurvivable for Starlink and similar constellations.
Musk gambles when he thinks the expected return is positive; you can do that while winning hardly any bets, let alone loosing hardly any. What you have to avoid fooling yourself over are the odds, the costs, and the rewards, and I do think Musk is fooling himself about political costs if nothing else.
Found an HL-22070DW at Goodwill for $12 and immediately slapped some third party toner in there. It's been going strong for about 3 years and haven't experienced this at all.
