One of the weird claims you hear when writing about space tech is that Elon Musk didn't do anything at SpaceX – he just paid for a bunch of engineers. I used to go into an a spiel on how a room of engineers doesn't automatically make useful stuff. Now I'll just say "Metaverse."
— Zach Weinersmith (@ZachWeiner) October 30, 2022
Ex-fucking-actly! That “all he did was hire some engineers” argument is so assclownishly dipshitty. I know why people hate Musk, but that assertion doesn’t even pass the sniff test.
Musk hired and kept Gwynne Shotwell — perhaps the greatest hire of all time. There is more to running a company and hiring than most people realize or will ever understand. Especially if it’s a large company with extremely high capex like SpaceX. Meta is spending $10 billion a year on the Metaverse and that’s the biggest dud since Juicero (but way more expensive).
People’s simplistic explanations for and facile understandings of processes and events just fall apart under even the slightest examination.