Elon Musk, John Carmack and Gatekeeping Engineering

Elon Musk is an engineer

Elon Musk is a controversial character, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if you look at his resume. He’s largely responsible for the success of Tesla, whose success might usher the end of the internal combustion engine (if you believe the ten year plans of most of the big auto brands). His other company, SpaceX, also brought life to private space exploration. What NASA couldn’t do with a budget of around $23 billion a year, SpaceX did with $10 billion in funding since 2002. And there are other ventures into hard problems with large potential payoffs (e.g. Neurolink and Boring Company).

But no amount of carbon offsets can make up for his love of spicy memes, being vocal on issues surrounding speech and messing with Twitter leadership. Oh and he called someone a “pedo guy” in 2019.

But Elon Musk is an engineer, and society generally gives engineers a lot of leeway in terms of eccentricities. Consider the late Terry Davis, a schizophrenic engineer that created an operating system from scratch based on his directions from God. He is known to use racial slurs and have nonsensical conspiratorial outbursts in public forums. But online communities tried to be forgiving and not write him off entirely due to his engineering brilliance and persistence on a difficult problem.

So one way to discredit Elon Musk is to claim he is not a “real” engineer. It’s a weird move considering a large number of engineers are self trained. Engineering is a difficult subject to bullshit:

Here’s an example of an article that goes to great lengths to argue that Elon Musk is not an engineer. The basic arguments are he doesn’t have an engineering degree *gasp*, rather he majored in economics and physics. Oh and his family was rather well off. So he’s essentially a social engineer. His wealth is built on spicy memes and stock manipulation.

How many social engineers built profitable engineering companies whose combined worth is over 1 trillion dollars? Hell of a social engineer.

But how can we be sure Musk is really an engineer? Most of his interviews are with popular figures. He likes to discuss pie in the sky ideas around consciousness and politics, which tend to be bullshittable topics.

One way to gauge his competency is hear what other engineers that know him have to say about Musk.

John Carmack on Elon Musk

John Carmack is the co-founder of id Software which created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. These games had a huge impact on the gaming and computer industry as a whole. Commander Keen was the first smooth scrolling computer game. This required a huge technical leap that shaped gaming and graphics for years to come. The other titles had similar milestones in creativity and ingenuity. His contributions to the field are difficult to overstate. He really is an engineer’s engineer.

Carmack was on Lex Fridman podcast recently where he briefly discussed his relationship with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Carmack has some experience in the field. Carmack founded Armadillo Aerospace around the same time as SpaceX. In 2008, Armadillo won $350,000 by succeeding in the Level 1 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Armadillo went on to win another $500,000 by succeeding in Level 2 of the same challenge.

Here is what Carmack said about Elon Musk on a recent Lex Fridman interview:

The other thing i get irritated with is people that say it's like oh Elon's just just a business guy you know he just got like he was gifted the money and he's just kind of investing in all of this when he was really deeply involved in a lot of the decisions, not all of them were perfect but you know he cared very much about engine material selection propellant selection and you know for years he'd be kind of telling me it's like get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff it's like you know liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this and i you know and like the the times that I've gone through the factories with him we're we're talking very detailed things about like how this weld is made you know how this sub assembly goes together what are startup shutdown behaviors of the different things so he is really in there at a very detailed level and I think that he is the the best modern example now of someone that tries to that can effectively micromanage some decisions on things on both Tesla you know and SpaceX to some degree where he cares enough about it.

Carmack isn’t one to bullshit, especially when it comes to engineering. So if Carmack says Musk is the real deal engineering wise, I believe him.

The whole interview is very interesting and I recommend watching the whole thing. You can sense a tinge of regret Carmack has about not pursuing the field more aggressively like Musk did:

I had a point years later when i realized okay my like my financial resources at this point are basically what Elon's was when he went all in on SpaceX and Tesla and there's many corners he does not get the respect that he should about being a wealthy person that could just retire and he went all in where he was really going to. He could have gone bust and there's plenty of people you look at the sad athletes or entertainers that had all the money in the world and blew it. He could have been the business case example of that but you know the the things that he was doing space exploration electrification of transportation, solar city type things these are big world level things and I have a great deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that because in contrast with myself I was doing armadillo aerospace with this tightly bounded, it was John's crazy money at the time that had a finite limit on it it was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed and I was still hedging my bets working at id software at the time when he had been you know really all in there and i have a huge amount of respect for that and people do not the other thing i get irritated with is people that say it's like oh Elon's just just a business

Protecting our own

Of course any defense of Elon Musk will be met with the following argument best represented in meme format:

Yeah, I get it. Some people don’t like Musk for his politics or memes or stupid statements or whatever. But if we pick apart a person based on tweets, stock sales or legal actions you’re missing the forest from the trees. It’s just boring. Who cares how he’s voting or if he sells stock before or after a tweet? Who cares if he buys (or doesn’t buy) one social network and tweaks the speech policies? These are the least interesting things about him.

And please don’t make him out to be some business guy because it’s just not true.