And yet every biography and early employee of SpaceX will say otherwise about Musk's importance to the success of the company. Shotwell however does not get enough credit in the eye of the general public (she's quite popular among people who keep up with SpaceX), Musk has always emphasized how important she was/is for securing contracts for them and keeping engineering from going too wild.
Like when Musk wanted to cancel Falcon Heavy because it was turning out to be much more challenging than expected, was a dead end in terms of Mars ambitions and Falcon 9 had improved enough that it basically took most of the launches FH had been intended for, but she pushed for them to work on it anyway because IIRC they had enough potential customers lined up to go forward with it.
One, saying that he was important to the success of the company is not the same thing as saying he's a particularly good technical innovator on his own. Take Steve Jobs as an example: important to the success of the Mac, but as a visionary who was also enough of an asshole that he got fired.
Two, what people will say about an egotistical, litigious billionaire is limited. Even more so when he controls their income and/or they still hold a lot of illiquid stock. Note, for example, that Musk fired 5 people just for internal criticism: https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-fires-employees-in...
I saw a lot more negative accounts about Steve Jobs starting a few years after his death than I did in the years leading up to it. I expect to see something similar with Musk.
I'm not arguing that he's flawless, I just get annoyed when people try to suggest that he simply lucked out in making the right hiring decisions in an industry where "How do you become a millionaire in aerospace? Start with a billion" was (and to an extent still is) a common adage. I feel that boiling it down to luck is pretty insulting to all the work people have put into putting SpaceX a decade or two ahead of the rest of the world.
That said, the people who I'm referring to aren't really in the position you describe. Most of them have either retired or are doing their own thing and having been early members of SpaceX are pretty much the best rocket engineers around (eg Tom Mueller), so I doubt that they have any concerns about their income.
Musk appears to at least be able to keep up with technical details enough to be able to discuss them with technically oriented YouTubers. So while it's hard to say if he's a particularly good technical innovator on his own, he's capable of understanding various design decisions, discussing tradeoffs, questioning assumptions and thus appropriately leading his engineers. I believe that is a big aspect of why SpaceX has been so successful. Shotwell also has an engineering background, so the same probably goes for her ability to balance business and technical considerations.
Nobody is suggesting that he "simply" lucked out. But this part makes no sense: "I feel that boiling it down to luck is pretty insulting to all the work people have put into putting SpaceX a decade or two ahead of the rest of the world."
One, there's no conflict between believing that Musk was lucky and other people worked hard. Two, if the hard labor of "the best rocket engineers around" was what made SpaceX successful, then that helps prove the point that Musk's reputation as a genius technical innovator is perhaps overblown.
> I doubt that they have any concerns about their income.
That is spoken like somebody who has never been through a lawsuit. Or incurred the disfavor of somebody powerful. You can bet that every one of the people who has worked for Musk has signed agreements that would let him brutalize them in court for years. Lawsuits, even ones you are confident of winning, are incredibly stressful and draining. If Musk is happy to fire people just for criticizing him privately, there's no reason to think he wouldn't sue somebody for publicly making him look like an asshole. So as with Jobs, they tell the positive stories loudly and the negative ones quietly or not at all.
> Musk appears to at least be able to keep up with technical details enough to be able to discuss them with technically oriented YouTubers.
Oh dang, YouTubers? Well then.
As a person who has spent years doing anti-abuse work, including at Twitter, I can tell you that what he's been saying about Twitter's issues has a plausible gloss but is both ignorant and wrongheaded. Musk is happy to pretend to be an expert genius when he doesn't know shit. That gets lots of Twitter/YouTube likes, but that's not what matters when running a real business.
Or we could look at his attempts to automate the Tesla factories. Tesla almost went bankrupt because this nominal genius vastly overestimated what was possible, ignoring decades of manufacturing experience in favor of huffing his own... vapors. This was a multi-billion dollar error.
So is it possible that he was helpful technically at SpaceX? Sure. But it's also possible that the difference at SpaceX is that he had a stronger staff that kept him at bay while they did their "best rocket engineers" thing.
And yet there have only been 2 commercial launches of Falcon Heavy launches. There are more on the manifest but I wonder how many of those would be served by Starship, especially if the effort put into FH had been used to pull forward Starship.
There should have been a few more by now but they keep getting delayed. Overall though, I think FH might have been made worth developing because of Europa Clipper, NSSL launches and Dragon XL despite not necessarily making back R&D yet. Falcon Heavy is easier for risk averse government agencies to choose.
Remember that Lunar Starship winning HLS was not at all expected, most people assumed NASA would consider it too radical, going for the other more conservative proposals.
In that environment, FH offers best in the world capability at low costs while still being pretty close to what people (especially uninformed politicians and bureaucrats) think of as a rocket.
Like when Musk wanted to cancel Falcon Heavy because it was turning out to be much more challenging than expected, was a dead end in terms of Mars ambitions and Falcon 9 had improved enough that it basically took most of the launches FH had been intended for, but she pushed for them to work on it anyway because IIRC they had enough potential customers lined up to go forward with it.