The question still stands on what your advice to Elon would be to do it better. I assume you have some if you have an opinion on why he wasn't making moves you'd describe as smart.
Elon always had a smarter-than-thou attitude, it's just that when he was only using it to sell cool sci-fi projects, it didn't stick out as much. But when he started branching out into other projects, where his lack of knowledge was more apparent to most people, it became increasingly clear just how petulant he was when he found it he wasn't the smartest person in the room.
For me, not that I ever gave much thought to Elon since space wasn't really my thing, it was the idiocy of the Loop proposal that turned me off of him. For other people, it might have been hyperloop, or it might have been the rejection of his submarine idea (see sibling comment for more details there). If you didn't notice it until after he was chafing at all the covid restrictions, you weren't paying enough attention.
Almost a decade ago, I invited Elon to speak at a conference I was helping to organise at Oxford. Would've been very on-topic for him, but he declined with a pithy one-line reply. Was a solid enough opportunity that it was probably worth wasting a minute of his time. Had I come to him with something more trivial, I suspect the response would have been pithier and less polite.
The impression I've gotten is that Elon likes to work with smart people, and that part of being smart is being able to make good calls about when to escalate something and to whom. Escalating an issue too high (or too low) is probably not a mistake one gets to make very often.
It would be impossible to impose a discipline like this on a bunch of worker-drones. But amongst reasonably intelligent people, with honest leadership at the top levels, it seems achievable.
I think understanding the difference between a poorly considered plan and real progress is very important. Elon seems to demonstrate repeatedly (even if he has a mythos otherwise) he does not think multiple detailed steps ahead as illustrated by several failures like Boring company.
In my (lay) opinion, this is still evidence that he at least has some idea of what he's talking about and not all his suggestions to Elon are "pants on head dumb". I was never under the impression he actually suggested something the team had never thought of.
Elon is not that smart. He's an anomalously hard worker. He can focus on one thing for 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for years. That's his super power. I think he's made a lot of impressive accomplishments, and he certainly keeps a lot of smart people on his teams, but his intelligence never played an outsize role in his success
Can you name the specifics of Elon's dumb antics? I can think of a couple of dumb Tweets, but on the whole, I think he is more right than wrong on his takes, he just has less of a filter than most people.
Elon is super smart. He’s also a snake oil salesman.
These are not contradictory statements.
Unfortunately he chose his intelligence to enrich himself by fooling others. He could have chosen other options. It looked like that was the direction he was going in. By trying to help people. But it’s clear at some point he realized he can make far more money claiming to do something than by actually doing something and decided to focus on that.
What's with the second guessing of Elon's motivations as some kind of clever ploy? Let's consider the possibility that this just isn't his cup of tea and he's acting stupid beyond reason.
If you asked me to perform brain surgery on someone I'd first refuse, then if you pointed a gun at me I hope I would probably still refuse but on the off chance that I did not I think I would have more success than Elon has at formulating a social media policy that has a fighting chance of working. This just isn't an engineering problem and bringing an engineering mindset to it ("let's fix the bugs and plug the holes") is going to make things much worse even than doing nothing.
For this to work you need to have a fairly broad understanding of social affairs, a high degree of empathy and an ability to work with a team of people who may disagree with you on key points. Musk does not seem to have any of these to a sufficient degree (to be polite) to make this happen.
Tell us about your corporate acquisition experience and how you bring better insight into this process than Elon. What is your perspective on how Elon did this poorly to the extent that you would declare him an idiot?
Elon is undoubtedly smart. It also seems like maybe he's on a mental health episode or just got so rich he decided he's done with building companies and just wants to be an asshole out of spite. Who knows? But he's accomplished plenty of things that suggest he's not an idiot.
He's risked more for less in the past. Does Elon strike you as being acting purely from a place of logic and reason? If so you might be the only one to think so.
It's intellectual dishonest to the extreme to say he's stupid.
If you really can't see the evidence in front of your eyes, here's John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
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