Maybe it's an American thing I don't get or just the way I was raised but even though I do believe in SpaceX as a company they are still just that to me i.e. the fact that some people treat them like a sports team is a little jarring to me.
Wanting to buy stock is completely understandable, but why do SpaceX fans on Reddit collect lists of evidence that musk is really in charge of engineering for example? I wouldn't stop them from doing it, but at the end of the day this is Mr "pedo guy" they're talking about so the personality cult is odd.
Well, call it a personality cult if you want. However there is also a anti-personality cult where people shit on everything he does. If you are well known you have haters.
It is very common that these people claim Musk is only a marketing and finance guy who sites in an office and comes up with tweets. They claim he has no technical knowledge and all the success of SpaceX and Tesla are 'despite' Musk, they assign everything positive to other factors and all negatives are because of Musk.
This is simply not an accurate statement, and it should be in the interest of all fans of engineering and space flight to correct this nonsense. Its precisely because he is a CEO with such technical knowledge that his companies are successful.
You can think about Musk personality what you will, but the fact is, he is in charge of engineering. He is Chief Engineer at SpaceX and has been since the beginning. He has significant engineering knowledge, no matter if he has an engineering degree or not. The evidence of this is overwhelming and the people denying it are not doing it on the strength of evidence, but rather personal dislike.
Fans can go to far in what that means, and media sometimes acts as if Musk does and decides everything. This is of course not the case and he certainty is more involved in some programs then in others. However Musk is as involved in SpaceX as Von Braun or Korolev were in their respective programs.
Exactly and I hate that we live in a world where something has to be either greatest or worst. Some people act as if he's a god among us mortals and some as if he's the worst human being that has ever lived.
Instead of jumping on any of those ships, why don't people just see good and bad things a person has done, and move on? (Also, it might be just vocal minorities at both ends)
This is true for every single famous person and I still haven't got an answer to the above question.
My take: Human brains are good at building generalized models. We can't keep track of all the good/bad things that each important person does so we build a belief model based on our initial evidence which is often only partial and biased. Famous people like Elon tend to have strong opinions that pull this model to one extreme or the other depending on whether or not you agree with those opinions and actions.
The age of Twitter isn't known for its subtle judgment of human character. This problem is older than Twitter, but the black-and-white worldview has been enormously strenghtened by mobs jumping at people for a single misstep / bad joke.
Maybe it's an American thing I don't get or just the way I was raised but even though I do believe in SpaceX as a company they are still just that to me i.e. the fact that some people treat them like a sports team is a little jarring to me.
Why would you believe that it's just a business? Rocketry is a really shitty business to get in the first place. Nobody does it unless they're crazy.
Wanting to buy stock is completely understandable, but why do SpaceX fans on Reddit collect lists of evidence that musk is really in charge of engineering for example?
Because critics said he's not an engineer?
Mr "pedo guy" they're talking about so the personality cult is odd.
There may be a personalty cult, which is surely unwarranted even for the most saintly of individual, but why the focus on that instead of what SpaceX is doing and their goals?
I think it's more odd that sports teams are treated as they are and that fandom isn't redirected at orgs/people making a real difference like Moderna or SpaceX.
It's definitely not an American thing. People idolize other people and groups of people all over the world.
The "pedo guy" story is just noise. Elon's fans are much more interested in the positive things he has done and consider Elon to be a significant net positive character.
I think a lot of it is just believing in the goals. If we want to see humans going to Mars in any larger capacity than a one off mission in our lifetimes, Spacex seems like the only path to that.
Elon is a complicated figure, but no one else has been able to make these big bets to get into the same position. At least not in a successful way.
Agreed. I don't particularly like Musk as a person but I think that we should all be cheering him on wishing for him to succeed. It's like Howard Hughes part II.
(I bought stock in Tesla as a sort of consolation prize because I couldn't buy SpaceX.)