I mean, you're not wrong. The COO, Gwynne Shotwell, at SpaceX, is known to handle a lot of the day to day stuff, and I feel that further reinforces the point. If she can handle all of that in her role as COO then what's the point of a CEO?
A CEO will set the grand vision, long term goals, and direction for the company - typically approved by the board (which the CEO has to convince). The COO literally operates the company, while the CEO will nudge them in certain directions to accomplish broader goals.
> A CEO will set the grand vision, long term goals, and direction for the company
I thought determining vision/goals/direction was the responsibility of the board. The Chief Executive Officer is supposed to execute the board's wishes.
A board is often a consulting group. They're there to see the 30,000ft view of what's going on, areas that need focus, and suggest grand strategy/guidance. A board is usually comprised of executives from other companies. The CEO is usually the one selling the board on their vision and execution. The board acts like guard rails for that vision.
Hot take: Musk is a great CEO. He's a horrible person, but I feel it's undeniable that his weight behind a project greatly increases the chance of interesting and profitable things happening (despite the over-optimistic claims and missed deadlines). I think he achieves this in large part _because_ he is an asshole, tweeting all the time to drum up publicity, being notorious for doing K, being too optimistic about what can be achieved, etc. I think somebody can be a good CEO without being such a jerk, it's just that Musk doesn't take the good-person strategy. And the bad-person strategy works well for him.
A CEO's job is (roughly) to maximize a company's valuation. It is not to run the company themselves, not to be nice, not to improve the world. I'm not claiming this is what _should_ be, just how it _is_. By this metric, I think Musk has done really well in his role.
Edit: Tangentially related -- at the end of the musical "Hadestown", the cast raise their glasses to the audience and toast "to the world we dream about, and the one we live in today." I think about that a lot. It's so beautiful, helps enforce some realism on me, and makes me think about what I want to change with my life.
The first part works because otherwise reusable rockets wouldn't have been invented (or maybe they'd have been invented 20 years later). It's the same as Steve Jobs, the Android guys were still making prototypes with keyboards until they saw the all screen interface of the iPhone. Sometimes it requires a single individual pushing their will through an organization to get things done, and sometimes that requires lying.
It did, and it needed a direction to be pushed towards. Are you familiar with the great man theory of history [0]? It is no different here (well, historians these days use a blend of great man theory and historical materialism as you're stating in your example, as no one theory explains the majority of historical changes).
> The first part works because otherwise reusable rockets wouldn't have been invented (or maybe they'd have been invented 20 years later).
I do not want to take credit away from SpaceX in what they achieved. It sure is complex. But it's also possible to give someone excess credit by denying others what is due. I don't know which part of 'reusable rockets' you are talking about, whether it's the reusable engines and hardware or if it's the VTOL technology. But none of that was 'invented' by SpaceX. NASA had been doing that for decades before that, but never had enough funding to get it all together. Talking about reusable hardware and engines, the Space Shuttle Orbiter is an obvious example - the manned upper stage of a rocket that entered orbit and was reused multiple times for decades. SpaceX doesn't yet have an upper stage that has done that. The only starship among the 9 to even survive the reentry never entered orbit in the first place. Now comes the 'reusable engine'. Do you need a better example than the RS-25/SSME of the same orbiter? Now let's talk about VTOL rockets. Wasn't Apollo LMs able to land and takeoff vertically in the 1960s itself? NASA also had a 'Delta Clipper' experiment in the 1990s that did more or less the same thing as SpaceX grasshopper and Starship SN15 - 'propulsive hops', multiple times. Another innovation at SpaceX is the full-flow stage combustion cycle used in the Raptor engine. To date, it is the only FF-SCC engine to have operated in space. But both NASA and USSR had tested these things on the ground. Similarly, Starship's silica heat tiles are entirely of NASA heritage - something they never seem to mention in their live telecasts.
I see people berating NASA while comparing them with SpaceX. How much of a coincidence is it that the technologies used by SpaceX are something under NASA's expertise? The real engineers at SpaceX wouldn't deny those links. Many of them were veterans who worked with NASA to develop them. And that's fine. But it's very uncharitable to not credit NASA at all. The real important question right now is, how many of those veterans are left at SpaceX, improving these things? Meanwhile unlike SpaceX, NASA didn't keep getting government contracts, no matter how many times they failed. NASA would find their funding cut every time they looked like they achieved something.
> It's the same as Steve Jobs, the Android guys were still making prototypes with keyboards until they saw the all screen interface of the iPhone.
Two things that cannot be denied about Steve Jobs is that he had an impeccable aesthetic sense and an larger-than-life image needed to market his products. But nothing seen in the iPhone was new even in 2007. Full capacitive touch screens, multi-touch technology, etc were already in the market in some niche devices like PDAs. The technology wasn't advanced enough back then to bring it all together. Steve Jobs had the team and the resources needed to do it for the first times. But he didn't invent any of those. Again, this is not to take away the credit from Jobs for his leadership.
> Sometimes it requires a single individual pushing their will through an organization to get things done, and sometimes that requires lying.
This is the part I have a problem with. All the work done by the others are just neglected. All the damages done by these people are also neglected. You have no idea how many new ideas from their rivals they drive into oblivion, so as to retain their image. Leaders are a cog in the machine - just like everyone else working with him to generate the value. But this sort of hero worship by neglecting everyone else and their transgressions is a net negative for human race. They aren't some sort of divine magical beings.
