this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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I will say it again:
Musk is not an engineer. E.g. he has not played Kerbel Space Program.
He demonstrably does not understand the tyranny of the rocket equation, and how obscenely uneconomical getting anything to, and doing anything in, space is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Geoengineering is something worth seriously discussing (and TBH I hope he draws attention to it), and "solar shades" are theoretically neat, but this is not the way. Not with the trajectory of launch tech we have.
I hate this accusation. It is demonstrably false and reeks of a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. He knows a lot more about rockets than you… or at least he did during the Falcon 9 days. Watch any technical interview with him from ~5 years ago and he can very clearly explain why they made the engineering decisions they did.
That being said, his involvement in the development has obviously stopped because he can barely put together a coherent sentence about Starship these days.
Just because he’s the most dangerous fascist on the planet right now doesn’t automatically mean he’s never been an engineer.
If you said this a decade ago, sure. But at this point there have been so many examples of musk misunderstanding fundamental concepts in areas that he likes to pretend to be an expert on that he doesn't get benefit of the doubt. The dude is only good at being rich and bullying people. He has no engineering acumen, be it software, vehicles, or spacecraft.
He's good at repeating things that smart people have told him, but as soon as he is asked to think rather than simply regurgitate, he's useless.
I've heard that real software engineers had to re-write or fix all of his code even back when he was working on paypal.
I think that’s essentially the same thing I said, just a slightly different timeline. You can see the man’s understanding of rockets deteriorating over the years just by comparing the technical interviews he’s done against each other.
We have overwhelming evidence of this documented on YouTube for everyone to see.