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Posted on 02/16/2026 8:13:27 AM PST by Hojczyk
Elon didn’t reverse that through inspiration. He reversed it by building companies that required understanding manufacturing or failing completely.
SpaceX and Tesla forced engineers to learn how metal fractures, how tolerances cascade through systems, how physical iteration costs months and millions per failure. No debugging. No patches. Just physics that doesn’t negotiate.
Boyle: “Training two generations of engineers.”
The product isn’t the cars. It’s the people. Look at who’s founding America’s critical hard-tech companies now. The common thread isn’t Stanford or MIT. It’s time on factory floors at SpaceX or Tesla.
They learned welding. They learned that “impossible” just means unsolved engineering, not violated physics. They learned failure in the physical domain where mistakes compound instead of reverting.
Elon didn’t build companies. He accidentally rebuilt industrial knowledge that had been decaying for thirty years while America’s best minds chased digital scale.
Boyle: “Work with their hands again.”
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
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I really hope Elon opens up space quickly before the retarded socialists take over.
I worked for defense contractors for decades. The money flowed, no matter what. Everything was behind schedule, over budget, and failed to meet technical requirements. Because none of that mattered. The money flowed, no matter what. Sure, some projects got cancelled. But there were always new projects and the pattern would just repeat. No one had to do any serious engineering, because the money was always there.
Elon doesn’t live in that world.
Bkmk
Yeah Rightttt. This aint new.
90% of engineering problems are managers with their heads up their ass.
“SpaceX and Tesla forced engineers to learn how metal fractures, how tolerances cascade through systems, how physical iteration costs months and millions per failure.”
Two excellent books about SpaceX, Liftoff and Reentry, by Eric Bergen, detail the amazing development of SpaceX from inception to about the end of 2023.
Emphasizes the engineers and their brilliance, along with Musk’s input to push time lines. I was encouraged to know that these innovative engineers are still around during a time of DEI and nothing but digital development for decades.
The author, as all Musk biographers do, gets a little preachy about the Twitter buy. But good, solid, inspirational accounts of what we’re still able to do.
These three sentences explain why Elon is the world's richest man.
The man crosses over to the wild side, but he has fantastic, real world knowledge.
Thank God he is an American Patriot.
Good summary why socialism fails.
You can blame some bad design decisions on managers but almost 100% of bugs were created by engineering. A software bug was written into the code by software engineers. Yes some managers also code and introduce bugs too. Same with hardware bugs
“but almost 100% of bugs were created by engineering....”
due to management ignoring engineering input.
You mean like the faculty of Star Fleet Academy?
On most of my projects, leadership was shared between the Program Manager and the Chief Engineer.
The Program Manager focuses on budget and schedule. It’s about money and time, and the PM will push hard to save on both. That’s the theory.
The Chief Engineer focuses on technical requirements. Does the system do what it is supposed to do? Is it well documented? Can it be fielded and meet requirements? The CE is looking for engineering excellence. That’s the theory.
The theory: the Push-and-Pull between the two managers will result in a good system delivered at reasonable cost and within a reasonable timeframe.
In reality — every program I supported, the PM focused on budget and schedule, and the CE also focused on budget and schedule. And since no one in management was watching the engineering, everything was always going wrong. Which screwed up the budget and the schedule. And then the PM and CE would point fingers at each other for screwing up the budget and schedule.
That’s the real race, isn’t it.
And by union rules. At a large manufacturing company where I worked, the engineers were told on their first day on the job: never touch a tool. If you do, you’re fired. Union rules specified that engineers could plan and direct the work, but never actually find out how it worked in practice. Only union workers could do that.
Elon has changed all that, because it was idiotic.
Great name for a rock band.
“90% of engineering problems are managers with their heads up their ass.”
Yup.
That and the fact that managers, like generals fighting the last war, are usually solving modern problems with 30+-year old concepts or other kinds of bad/out-moded thinking.
Good, fast, cheap.
Pick 2 out of 3.
Managers, planners and accountants don’t want to hear that. They always think they can outsmart or out ego physics.
I’m speaking as an aerospace ane electro-mecanical guy. Not a software guy.
Engineers, as a breed, typically are very conservative, inquizative and quality minded, among other things.
Across my 30+ years in global monsters and small startups I’ve seen management at its best, and worst (think oceanone).
To wrap it around to the above leading comment...engineers will normally get you whatever product you want....but be prepared to give us enough time and money to get there. Save all the BS for departments other than engineering cuz we DO NOT want to deal with that. 95% of us just want to build and achieve.
yes. Most managers/owners don’t like risk taking. That greatly stagnates innovation. imo
Elon doesnt seem to mind it. And that seems to be part of his success...Mostly proper risk/benefit analysis. imo
“Union rules specified that engineers could plan and direct the work, but never actually find out how it worked in practice. Only union workers could do that.”
Just a month on my first engineering job I was in the field with my union craft worker. He was having a difficult time.
I asked if he would be OK ‘supervising’ me doing the work.
He smiled!
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