I mostly hope that Blue Origin will be a worthy competitor.

For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.

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0xffff2 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Fun trivia fact of the day: BO was founded 2 years _before_ SpaceX. 25 years later, SpaceX has revolutionized the launch industry. Meanwhile, BO has only just had their first (and only) orbital launch at the beginning of this year. It's unclear to me what, if anything BO could do to really catch up at this point.

It's clear that money isn't the defining factor at least. When BO was founded Bezos was the richest man in the world. It has floundered for so long that Musk was able to build up a cult of personality around SpaceX and parlay that into even more money than Bezos.

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terminalshort 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos had way more money back then. And when Elon Musk founded SpaceX few people had heard of him and he wasn't even a billionaire. Tesla didn't exist yet, so there was no "massively overblown stock." And where is the "unrealistic vision?" Looks like it turned out to be pretty realistic to me.

	▲	metabagel 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Musk has a self-destructive streak where his ambition exceeds his understanding. Examples are over-automation of Tesla Model 3 production, autonomous vehicles without Lidar, and the Cybertruck. Will Starship every carry a large enough payload to justify the launch cost? I'm skeptical. Musk's Mars fixation is nuts.

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Zigurd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They each have different failings. Elon is taking an absolutely bullshit approach to project management: if Starship can't meet payload specs, it can't refuel in orbit. Neither of those monumentally risky milestones are even close to being attempted.

Jeff loves measurement and control. So he replaced his experienced aerospace guy with the Alexa guy. Because the Alexa guy works the Amazon way: everything measured and tightly controlled.