coldblade2000

coldblade2000 t1_j7w9l0y wrote

Reply to comment by funkboxing in SpaceX prepares for a massive test this week: Firing all 33 Starship engines at once by upyoars

>you accepted government funding to research

It'd be nice if you actually pointed to this "research funding". I looked over and all the money SpaceX was given by NASA was "service contracts" which are fulfilled or being fulfilled, or the Commercial Crew Program. In this one, SpaceX didn't receive money in the first round. In the second, seed money was first given to a few companies like BlueOrigin, Boeing and SpaceX to develop technologies for crewed vehicles. In SpaceX's case, their proposal was making their ALREADY EXISTING Dragon capsule human-rated, and finishing its abort system. The Falcon 9 had already flown various resupply missions to the ISS by then. The rest of their funding was NASA paying SpaceX to render services, or specifically making changes to SpaceX's vehicles for NASA's purposes

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coldblade2000 t1_j7sxt8l wrote

Reply to comment by afterburners_engaged in SpaceX prepares for a massive test this week: Firing all 33 Starship engines at once by upyoars

They got seed money from NASA, and plenty of contracts, but not much that could be considered a "subsidy". At worst, they may have gotten some fat contracts as an investment by NASA, who desperately needed private companies to fill the LEO hole, and quick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX#Funding

Supposedly, by 2012, about half of their funding had been government contracts that provided down payments, while the rest were private investments. A year later, they would be undercutting the costs of the Ariane 5 and Proton-M

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coldblade2000 t1_j7sw8ka wrote

Reply to comment by kenrnfjj in SpaceX prepares for a massive test this week: Firing all 33 Starship engines at once by upyoars

> Gwynne Shotwell

From what I understand: As COO (Chief Operating Officer), she's basically in charge of running the company itself and making sure it's running at peak performance. Who to hire, tracking internal goals, evaluating the performance of middle management, etc. Whenever a company has plenty of people not doing anything, has big work bottlenecks, has useless managers, is ignoring laws & oversight, or is otherwise running in an inefficient manner, it is the COO's role to make sure those things get fixed. An engineer may or may not be good at that job. Management-oriented engineers, like industrial engineers, logistics or systems engineers would probably do well at a COO job, as long as they have plenty of managerial experience. A mechanical or electronic engineer that are top of their field but aren't necessarily managers would probably not be able to keep up in that role.

A CEO (Chief Executive Officer) is tasked with executive tasks, and is the primary ambassador for the company. By executive, I mean they are in charge of "making sure things are happening (being executed)". They ultimately decide and shape the directions the company will take in the medium and long term (acquisitions, looming market threats, new product lines, etc), and are also in charge of making sure stockholders and other stakeholders are kept happy. Often enough, they will be the ones who will ultimately face potential big investors, and represent their company in public (interviews and interrogations). CEOs are paid so disproportionately much not because their job is necessarily super hard (it depends, some are way more hands-on than others), but because their decisions carry the largest impact on the company's performance in the long run, so the pressure they are under is massive. A COO hiring a bad project lead, or a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) choosing a cloud service provider that was ultimately terrible, will not be as catastrophic to the company medium-term as a CEO deciding to branch out into a market the company is woefully unequipped to handle, or the CEO failing to secure crucial investments to finish a large project.

So Elon is CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and now Twitter, and he's famously a very involved CEO, at least in one of them at a time (he kind of neglects SpaceX and Tesla while he focuses on Twitter). Very likely, he made the final call on approving SpaceX's Starlink, which deviated from their core rocket-building business. He was also likely the one who ultimately decided Tesla should focus on expanding their production with Gigafactories, and launching Powerwall to branch into infrastructure projects. Not only that, but in these cases, he was certainly very involved in steering the course these projects would take, based upon the recommendations of his subordinates. You'll also recognize that it will be hard for you to name a single current Tesla, SpaceX or Twitter employee aside from him, and that is by design (especially since his companies have the habit of firing their PR teams). As CEO, he focuses all negative attention the company attracts on himself, and ideally liberates his team from that negative attention.

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