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.
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.