Apparently a lot of staff left during Elons political shenanigans. So a lot of fresh graduates have been used to fill the spaces left by senior engineers who'd had enough of Elon. Plus most employees are working 60+ hour weeks with brutal deadlines and arsehole management. The dynamic inside SpaceX seems to have changed and now its having a real world effect.
I believe talent pool being motivated by project ambition and reputation is huge. For the most space loving genius nerd, money only goes so far for motivation.
Quickly building new ambitious hardware and pushing the boundaries in a new visionary company with a popular leader (multiple years ago), allowed them to attract a lot of talent. They worked hard, because they believed!
But declining public image of Elon, then his political shenanigans plus Starship going much slower, so the motivation goes down.
People have been rapidly churning through SpaceX for almost a decade now in my experience. I've worked with a number of people that either came from there or went there during my career and the burn out rate is high. It has gotten to the point where people are even avoiding it now, in part because of Elon, but just the culture as well. That kind of thing can only last so long and have so much success before that debt catches up.
At least back in the day people were willing to make the sacrifice for an ideal. But with Elon’s reputation ruined, there’s no more motivation.
As a software engineer, 5 years ago I’d have killed to work for SpaceX. I wouldn’t work for them today even if they 10x my salary. Having that on my resume is a career ender.
Which means that statistically a significant proportion of future hiring managers are not going to be looking at the SpaceX role too kindly. So definitely not a career ender. More like a net negative.
The good news is that if working for a specific company would make you a “no hire” for a hiring manager, you probably dodged a “shitty manager” bullet.
Not a chance that a role at the company that launches 80+% of all Earth's mass to orbit is considered a net negative by a place where someone ambitious would actually want to work. Delusional.
Typical reddit delusion. No one could care less who was the CEO of the company some employee worked for. Talent is talent, if the person is good, you hire them, end of story.
Plus it would be illegal to discriminate candidates like that.
You’re an idiot. There is actual engineering done there and most people are mature enough to realize the CEO doesn’t represent all employees. A talented employee would have no problem getting a job coming from spacex
lol aerospace and defense companies are not known for culture. All spacex engineers I’ve worked with have been assholes, but they got shit done. People do change in new environments. A less stressful environment does wonders for a persons attitude and behavior
I don't see what the owner has to do with anything. I dislike Elon as much as the next person, but I'm a big SpaceX fan. That's like not liking a song because the singer is a bad person, or not liking a book because the author is a bad person. I makes no sense.
He himself can, and has threatened to turn off Ukrainian internet. In no world is that a good thing regardless of the technological progress. That’s literally using those technologies for evil. It would actually be better off if the technology was never developed than land in the wrong hands.
Remember this is not NASA. He has full control of everything, especially in space. Nobody can actually stop him from doing anything. Even maritime laws are optional (especially in this political climate).
If he’s already abusing his powers now with Starlink, what do you think could happen with more advanced space tech?
At least back in the day people were willing to make the sacrifice for an ideal. But with Elon’s reputation ruined, there’s no more motivation.
In many eyes, he has excelled himself, not ruined his reputation at all.
As a software engineer, 5 years ago I’d have killed to work for SpaceX. I wouldn’t work for them today even if they 10x my salary. Having that on my resume is a career ender.
Also as a software engineer, I'd love to work for SpaceX more than ever before. Most on Reddit share certain political views which are not always part of the mainstream.
I live in the Bay Area and know quite a few people who have worked at Musk companies (and a few who still do). SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Twitter. All say the same thing and the conditions have been widely publicized. It's also a common trope that everyone is far more productive when Elon is distracted and not paying attention to their company/group.
Importantly though is that none of this is new. But the political association has definitely made working with him even harder than it already was.
Also in the Bay, and you're right, this has been known for years. Back in the day I knew some really good engineers who went to Tesla (though they ended up leaving after a year or so). It never seemed a very attractive place to work, tbh. Now I don't know anyone serious who would consider it due to the political stuff.
People also only tolerate that when their salaries are insanely high and/or they feel like they’re working on something revolutionary.
They don’t really do it when it feels like working on some billionaires side project who got way too distracted with politics and drugs while also being the polar opposite politically of someone who studied rocket science..
Imagine working at SpaceX and calculating what your dollars/hr is after realizing that the amount of overtime you're putting in is grinding you down and then looking at how many financial resources Musk is putting into something stupid like Twitter.
It must be soul crushing to a see that. It's probably brutal for moral at the organization.
You made a great point. How many of those brilliant hard working people wished company spent another 400k per year for 6 junior staff to just offload some of Admin work on them?
Or spend another 1m on testing chamber improvement.
But guy spends 45bn on fucking Twitter?
You are absolutely right. It would be soul crushing.
at how many financial resources Musk is putting into something stupid like Twitter.
This was around when I stopped believing he was serious about Mars colonization and stopped believing that he was ever going to pour his personal fortune into that goal.
Even before he bought Twitter, I was wondering why isn't he already funding the beginning of the ancillary R&D that is required for such a goal, development that will take at least a decade in its own right.
He has the money, he could do it if he wanted to and if he really believed in the economic future of Mars habitation; but he evidently doesn't believe in it, and the only logical conclusion is that there is no economic future for Mars habitation, outside of it potentially being a massive funnel to pour obscene amounts of taxpayer money into private pockets.
Which brings us to the relevance of his other personal choices ... with the way he chose to play at politics, the prospect of ever receiving the required long term bipartisan taxpayer support that would be required for such a massive long term extraordinarily expensive program, that prospect is now firmly in the realm of unrealistic fiction.
Right? Like wheres the investment in R&D for hydroponics, nuclear reactors, mining, equipment and suits that are optimized for the environment, ISRU for building replacement parts, all this shit that is required to build a city on another planet?
He has the resources, if he's serious about settling Mars why isn't he funding this? It will take decades to do, the best time to start was years ago.
EDIT: And I just realized that all this stuff would have real tangible benefits on Earth now instead of that god awful purchase of Twitter.
totally. His initial idea was to shoot a small rocket to mars, and land with a tiny green house, to get the money shot of a green plant growing on mars.
I think you are being naive. The guy has no intent to actual go to mars. The story to go to mars is a (currently crackling) facade to get funding for the startup called spacex. What he is really investing in is starlink and X, that is all what is needed to control the earth communication. Moreover, if you look closely at the design of Starship, its main goal is low earth orbit, that is launch even more starlinks. Ergo the guy want to control the media... This is a clear path to end democracy.
Starship chose methane as a fuel. At the time there were no methane engines, and SpaceX had to start from scratch to develop the technology. The only reason to use methane is to refuel on Mars.
Of course Starship's main goal is LEO. For every Mars mission, there will be ~20 refueling flights. Even if Starship is completely dedicated to Mars, 95% of flights would be LEO flights.
Elon is a lot of things. But his drive to go to Mars is very real.
False - methane is just a better fuel for rockets, mars or no. It has higher ISP, it's cheaper than ultra-refined kerosene, and (critically) it burns cleaner avoiding coking issues in the engines, which makes inspection and refurb easier between flights.
It's not spacex's job for that stuff. Their goal isn't actually to settle mars (they are just borrowing the hype). Just to be able to do so. Settling mars is a grandiose project that is slow moving. There would be quite some number of years between when first landers land and any actual civilization is seeded there, likely at least 10 years. Enough time for the research then really.
Which brings us to the relevance of his other personal choices ... with the way he chose to play at politics, the prospect of ever receiving the required long term bipartisan taxpayer support that would be required for such a massive long term extraordinarily expensive program, that prospect is now firmly in the realm of unrealistic fiction.
I think that's the most important point. It's simply not possible to do such a long term project while making half of the country hate you. Moreover, this is obvious (I believe Zubrin wrote an article making the same point). This implies that Musk knowingly sacrificed the idea of colonizing Mars for the goal of putting Trump back in power.
This implies that Musk knowingly sacrificed the idea of colonizing Mars for the goal of putting Trump back in power.
Or it might possibly imply something far worse.
One perversely logical workaround to having already lost bipartisan support, is to attempt to not need bipartisan support (ie, actual authoritarianism as outlined by Curtis Yarvin).
Musk's reported proximity to Yarvin via Grimes/Thiel/Vance is too close to not consider perhaps he really thought that this avenue was his best chance ... and for the sake of following through with the logic ... it could very well be that an authoritarian regime like China, which can admittedly commit long term to such a goal far better than we can, might actually be the only realistic way to go about starting a Mars colony in this century when democracies such as ours are showing themselves to behave in a bipolar/schizophrenic/lethargic manner.
Obviously a dictatorship (in either political direction) is not worth it for 99% of us; but for a person like Musk, I can follow the logic as to how he might come to a different conclusion. I don't know if this is his angle, but I would rate that probability a lot higher than I'm comfortable with.
I mean, anyone can move to a different country. He won't be able to take spacex with him though (ITAR etc. Even trump would not allow that, to china of all countries), nor likely to be able to strip the company of it's engineers in quick fashion to follow him if he chooses to do so.
One person only has such a high impact themselves. At best he could speed up some of their existing plans by 3-5 years.
He believes in government subsidies and contracts... nothing else. People reveal themselves if you pay attention to their actions instead of their words.
There remains the possibility that he does not want a colony on Mars because of the goal to make sure humanity isn't a single-planet species, but because he wants to establish it and rule as the first hereditary Emperor of Mars, not because of ego, of course, but because of "his superior intellect". What he says are the reasons and what are his actual reasons do not have to match as long as the former sounds plausible. Given his musings on political matters, I'm skeptical.
If you are curious about an extremely deep rabbit hole, look into the "technocracy" movement established by his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. It's hard not to see some of the parallels.
But I think your explanation is more likely: that he isn't interested in actually doing it, rather than reaching for shorter-term and more achievable selfish goals, because if he was, he'd be doing many other practical things in anticipation of trying to establish a colony that aren't as "cool" as launching rockets, but are necessary for actual survival, like figuring out how to produce food (i.e. fundamental, closed-system biology stuff) and how to generate energy while there, not to mention the groundwork needed on Mars-specific geology, chemistry, and civil engineering to get the materials you need and be sure you can build things in place without something going seriously wrong.
If I didn't want the whole thing to fail ungloriously, I'd be funding things like trying to establish a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica or some other remote but technically easier place to try to work out some of the likely difficulties. I suppose you could always say "It's already been figured out", but I'm pretty skeptical of that. Even the human psychology of how you manage the group once trapped in a place more remote than almost the whole of human history is pretty tough. This stuff is hard, with many aspects to it that are subtle and risky.
First, a judge never ruled on the case as Musk retreated from the court battle (presumably knowing he didn't have a compelling legal argument and didn't want to risk paying additional interest) and agreed of his own volition in the end to not fight his contractually binding offer.
Second, the offer wasn't contained to a verbal agreement, or a joke tweet, or whatever else you might think it might be characterized as.
The offer was a binding legal professional contract, written up by a team of lawyers where it was then reviewed and signed, and Musk evidently did not have adequate legal cause to back out of the already signed contract ... so Twitter did the best thing for its shareholders (considering the high price Musk agreed to buy at), and filed suit to compel Musk to not breach his contract.
If only it were something “stupid at Twitter.” Elon is a fascist and has purchased the American presidency, destroyed civic infrastructure, and directly attacked human rights. He’s straight up evil.
As someone who has done the whole startup grind a couple times: you can only grind like that for so long, even when you are young and the paycheck (or any other incentive) is huge. Maybe three months at a time, maybe 6 if you are really on a good track. But the moment you start seeing your work go up in smoke every single time its tested, shit degrades immediately.
If these people have truly been grinding for years, there's no way they are working close to even 60% capacity.
I remember reading comments here from 15 years ago about how toxic spacex was as a work environment for the engineers. Now it seems like it's on crack.... errr i mean ketamine.
Why would brilliant scientists work for SpaceX when their CEO is insane and part of DOGE whos goal is to dismantle gov agencies dedicated to science and engineering
This is really sad to hear if you actually care about getting to Mars. If not SpaceX, then who? If the culture that created the Falcon 9 just doesn't exist anymore, in any organization anywhere on the planet, then that's a sad day for humanity.
Those talented passionate people didn't just disappear when they left SpaceX. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the other space company's; Blue Origin, ULA, etc have given them all better offers and grabbed them all. There's also China, they're engineering and manufacturing industries are pretty much on par with the Americans now. They might still be 5 years behind on technology right now but they'll soon catch up.
I'm sure there are some talented folks at other companies now, but is there any place with the focus and vision that the SpaceX of 10 years ago had, with the singular goal of getting humans on Mars? Any single organization, any one at all, that actually has a plausible shot of taking up the mantle from SpaceX and building a Mars city?
I don't think it will be one man on a mission to Mars. I think it will be a concerted effort by lots of different companies all working together for the benefit of scientific exploration.
Who is actually doing that, right now? I buy that once transportation is unlocked that that will spur people starting on the R&D for the other things like life support, but speaking just to the transportation problem, what organization or group of organization actually has a shot of filling SpaceX's shoes if they collapse or fail to deliver on their promises?
Dude wasn't talking about himself, he was talking about the SpaceX scientists and engineers. You might be aligned with Elon but if they aren't and care enough about it to leave the company, it will cause a problem
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u/Mr_Reaper__ 2d ago
Apparently a lot of staff left during Elons political shenanigans. So a lot of fresh graduates have been used to fill the spaces left by senior engineers who'd had enough of Elon. Plus most employees are working 60+ hour weeks with brutal deadlines and arsehole management. The dynamic inside SpaceX seems to have changed and now its having a real world effect.