Posted on 08/04/2026 5:49:49 PM PDT by SmokingJoe
Katherine Boyle just named Elon Musk's greatest contribution to America, and it isn't sitting on a launchpad.
Boyle, General Partner at a16z: "I think that Elon's most important contribution to this country is training two generations of engineers … on how to work with their hands again."
For a decade, America's sharpest technical minds optimized ad clicks and shipped messaging apps. Software consumed ambition.
The physical world became something you abstracted into an API, not something you touched. Building real things became what you did if you couldn't code.
Elon didn't reverse that with inspiration. He reversed it by building companies where you either understood manufacturing or you failed.
SpaceX and Tesla forced engineers to learn how metal fractures, how tolerances cascade, how one physical iteration costs months and millions. No hotfix. No rollback. Physics doesn't negotiate.
Boyle: "Training two generations of engineers."
The product was never the cars. It was the people.
Look at who's founding America's hard-tech companies now. The common thread isn't Stanford or MIT. It's time on a factory floor at SpaceX or Tesla.
They learned to weld. They learned that "impossible" means unsolved engineering, not violated physics. They learned that failure in the physical world compounds, because nothing reverts.
Elon didn't just build companies. He rebuilt industrial knowledge that had been decaying for thirty years while the country's best minds chased digital scale.
He made atoms matter again. Made manufacturing the hardest problem worth solving. Made physical engineering prestigious in a way it hadn't been since humans walked on the moon.
Boyle: "Work with their hands again."
Five words that sound quaint. They describe the moment America started building again.
The blueprints for the Saturn V still exist. No one can build one from them.
Knowledge that lives in hands doesn't survive on paper. It dies in a single generation of neglect, and no archive brings it back. That is how a civilization loses the ability to make things while still holding every document that explains how.
America was one generation from that. It got the generation back instead.
The best technical talent no longer asks which app to build. It asks what should exist that doesn't. From engagement metrics to launch cadence. From scaling users to scaling factories.
That shift outlives every vehicle and spacecraft he delivered. Products obsolesce. Engineers who know how to make things do not.
We stopped coding the future. We started machining it, welding it, breaking it until physics signs off.
Those engineers are training the next wave now. The School of Elon doesn't need Elon anymore. It's self-sustaining, spreading through a generation that learned the higher calling is building real things.
That isn't a business achievement. It's a civilization remembering how to make things.
You can copy a design. You can't copy a generation that knows how to build one.
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I get what she is trying to say, and kudos to Elon, but many people (like me) have been building real world hardware for a while that actually impacts the physical world.
Good article.
I suspect that a generation of builders won’t tolerate being hamstrung by communists.
Aside from training, them seeing his drive and wide ranging thinking is more important for our future, the engineers and others of current generations are getting to see a man like Walt Disney, or Henry Ford, or other creative men who daily thought in terms of doing what others think is impossible, Musk is a throwback to the inspired greats of America, something we really needed and that wasn’t being fulfilled by the computer guys, Musk also thinks about America, like some of the old greats did.
I have thought of him as a modern day Howard Hughes.
Hopefully he won’t lose his marbles as he gets older.
This is AI.
There are very few Elon's in charge who know how all of this works and why. Getting good engineers doesn't fix the managerialist dystopia that rules most of America. Elon is the exception to our national incompetence. It's a big exception. But it an exception. It's a good start.
As the article does realize, the gap that was killing America was manufacturing. McKinsey and the business schools exported it thinking it was a cost. Manufacturing and testing was where you found what worked, what might be a better idea, and what was garbage. We forgot that as we offshored the most important step in technology development - the how do you make it part leading to a how could you make it better and how cold you better make it. Elon focused on that stuff.
Here's an unreadable version, but you get the idea of the family tree...
I met the VP of Customer Support of Pebble a couple weeks ago at an Art & Wine Festival. Pebble is a Fremont, CA-based startup that has developed an all-electric recreational vehicle (RV) trailer, the Pebble Flow, and is backed by veterans from Tesla and other tech companies. The company recently opened a new manufacturing facilityThey really have brought some clever innovation to the RV industry.
At some point, we will all lose our marbles, even if our bodies aren’t ready to quit.
All good and fine but what if the engineers get their hands dirty - THEY MIGHT DIE!
“””” Manufacturing and testing was where you found what worked, what might be a better idea, and what was garbage. We forgot that as we offshored the most important step in technology development - the how do you make it part leading to a how could you make it better and how could you better make it. Elon focused on that stuff””””
I had never seen that described but it seems obvious now that you describe it, setting up, solving, and doing the manufacturing is even more important than I knew.
Nice charts! Probably others that show Stanford University being at the center. I’ve worked on some products made by those companies, either programming them or upgrading electronics. So much history there.
What is AI? The article or Musk’s engineering feats?
IMO neither is.
Engineers don’t work with their hands very much, they work with their heads. The Machinists (like myself), assemblers and workmen and women, do most all of the by-hand work. Just something she probably wouldn’t know first hand unless she were working in the trades.
Not so. I’ve known a number of people who have lived long lives and been sharp until the end. My maternal grandfather for one who lived to be 97.
In any case, HH lost his marbles at a relatively young age so not the same thing.
That second chart really is unreadable. It looks like a microchip. lol
It is the cars.
Every guy had to fix his car.
How many times in the driveway, that stuff was hard but Chilton’s carried the day. Lots of great talent all around to help out.
Haynes came along and specialized in your make and model.
No phone to bail you out. Fix it or your stuck. Still some talent around to help.
Now, nothing.
I had to remove and replace a 2400cc motor in a 1973 pinto.
It was a muddy November in E.TN. I was 16, (the car was in the front yard).
I learned every hand tool that existed (or so I thought), and I was successful with the guidance of an older brother.
The kids don’t get that experience anymore.
*****
I love that. It’s so true.
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