JBee
Well-known member
- First Name
- JB
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2019
- Threads
- 18
- Messages
- 4,913
- Reaction score
- 6,362
- Location
- Australia
- Vehicles
- Cybertruck
- Occupation
- . Professional Hobbyist
So in your world only what you learnt in college is what you are and can do? If it's all "luck" than why bother at all? And your spouse is comparable, but not special, just rare, but studying, because she doesn't know it all, but was just unlucky? Do words still have meaning in Cal? ?Yes, lucky.
His first company Zip2 did encoding. He was bought out, got a good deal.
For PayPal, he again did encoding. Network communications. But he was even higher up in the ranks, so of course when he was bought out, he got hundreds of millions.
SpaceX, he provided funding. It took him years to get up to speed, but up to speed he did. What do they do really well? Communications. Encoding.
Tesla, he provided funding. Again, it took years for him to get up to speed - and the company nearly died making the Model 3. He overreached, corrected, and was lucky to get the funding he needed at the right time. His skills here? Knowing that everything is interconnected, that EVs are constrained by batteries. What's special about Tesla? There were other EVs. Over the air updates. Communication again.
Now SpaceX is flourishing. What is going to be their next product? Network communications.
Neurolink he's financing. What does it do? Encoding. Communications.
And what does autonomy do? Well, he's not the one leading that one. He's hiring smart people and giving them the tools they need.
In this, his skills are no different than my spouse's. She's worked in telecomunications. She's built phone trees, online stores (in 1994 no less!), rebuilt cellular networks, designed testing equipment, and then did communications software and science data visualization, then went into networked virtual worlds and now visual feature tracking using arbitrary sensors. But her first company laid her off and went and formed a new core business around the technology she designed. She reformed another, and there a jealous productions manager sunk her project and nearly sunk the company. From there, she worked for a NASA contractor. She had code in space before Elon! But contractors don't get the contracts if the President doesn't find them sexy enough and she had to find new work. She didn't know the kinds of math when she left college that she does now because like Elon, she keeps studying. It's not unique. Any of us could do that.
But we're not millionaires. Because only one company she worked for got bought out. Only one succeeded enough in its market space - no matter how brilliant her work - and paid out. But it was only worth the cost of a Cybertruck.
If you look at all his companies, they're all special in one way, digital communications. What's his engineering specialty?
Luck, plus genius plus workaholic.. But mostly luck.
-Crissa
No wonder EM doesn't require a degree to get employed in his companies.
BTW EM is lead engineer for SpaceX. He is the definition of a rocket scientist as well as it's CEO.
On code in space, does sending this forum message via EM's Starlink count?
Would be hilarious if not so sad.
Sponsored