Despite what he may say at times. He's not necessary for SpaceX operations. Gwynne Shotwell runs the day to day company, and they aren't public so no need to say anything publicly for headlines like he does with Tesla.
Sure, but that is a valid concern nonetheless. One major reason for the early successes of SpaceX and Tesla was their ability to attract top talent. I don't think anyone with any self respect wants to work there these days.
The topic of conversation is how tons of people don’t want to be associated with anything eel-on-musk is doing anymore after he more or less took the mask off, did his “weird hand motion (twice in a row, on national television, one of which was in the direction of orangeboi)”, and then started (and is continuing) to take a chainsaw to silly little government agencies like the CDC, NOAA, CFPB, Social Security Administration, and so on.
Most smart people don’t like dumb and evil people. I would not at all be shocked to learn SpaceX is facing some serious brain drain.
Ah, yes, the SpaceX method of rapid development and iterative design by... testing in production and making debris rain over the Caribbean, disrupting air traffic in the region.
I'm done with fanboys calling this method genius. "Oh, it would make the production lines idle for months". Bullshit. Just make it right. Compare it to the Saturn V, it only needed one test flight to orbit and never had a major failure, and the Saturn V had components welded and drilled by hand, with 60's tech. Oh, and it launched once every two or three months in 1969, just like Starship today.
If SpaceX could do this shit in a way that's more respectful to the environment and other humans then I think it'd make a lot of sense.
A lot of the early US space program used what is basically iteratively design. The military wanted big nukey rocket quick like what for to exploderate the Ruskis, and even NASA was honestly pretty cavalier until the Apollo 1 tragedy.
This doesn't excuse SpaceX for their shit at all. Find a way to do this shit safely or don't do iterative design.
I get the criticism but this method obviously works, spaceX is the most successful and profitable launch company because of this iterative design strategy on Falcon 9.
In the not too distant future starship will be successful as well and everyone will move on to reiterating the same complaints to whatever project they work on next that will also succeed. The engineers at SpaceX are modern day magicians, no matter how much you disagree with their method to achieve success