arcosapphire t1_jczkhb3 wrote on March 20, 2023 at 7:24 PM

Reply to comment by MouthfeelEnthusiast in The SpaceX steamroller has shifted into a higher gear this year by returnofjuju

It's because he has the technical knowledge to focus on technical aspects. He likes designing rockets, he's happy to get involved with that process and he doesn't make a mess of it.

With Twitter, he doesn't know a damn thing about software architecture at that level or how to manage a social media site. There is no lightning rod to occupy his attention. His interest is literally just in getting to say what he wants and making people read it. And he wasn't part of building Twitter up to what it is. He simply joined when it was already a working thing; anything he does is going to make it worse.

pompanoJ t1_jd0oyul wrote on March 20, 2023 at 11:56 PM

You do realize he made his first fortune building a payment processing system, right? As in, he is a software guy turned rocket nerd, not the other way around.

arcosapphire t1_jd0pqf1 wrote on March 21, 2023 at 12:01 AM

Actually what he founded was x.com, an online bank. It merged with software company Confinity, which had developed the payment processing software that became PayPal. So he was not actually a software developer.

CMDR_Shazbot t1_jd22zt1 wrote on March 21, 2023 at 7:53 AM

He developed the software for his first company, zip2. Enough to get the POC off the ground and attract investors and hire additional developers to clean up the code, sell it off, build up X.com, sell it off, and fund SpaceX.

No matter how skilled you think he is at it, he is by definition a self taught software developer, who then learned rocket science through the people around him and his employees. People seem to think spending 20 years around literal rocket scientists who are building things for him doesn't cover what you'd learn in 4 years of university.

People dont seem to realize SpaceX is also a software company.

Bensemus t1_jd3pdr5 wrote on March 21, 2023 at 4:47 PM

He worked on the software for both Zip2 and X.com.

arcosapphire t1_jd3qi0z wrote on March 21, 2023 at 4:54 PM

Neither of which resemble the architecture of Twitter.

Kindly_Blackberry967 t1_jd0fgx8 wrote on March 20, 2023 at 10:48 PM

You go tell a bunch of young engineers that they will have to work grueling hours to work on rockets that land themselves and bringing people to Mars.

Then tell them that they will have to work grueling hours to make people pay for a blue checkmark on Twitter.

You will get wildly different results, and Elon's spent too much time in the former to think the latter would be any different.