Ian Bergman

Oh, why not. Haven't had a chance to watch the movie yet but have heard you on a couple of podcasts and find this line of criticism the most confusing. It's not difficult to find employees across the companies who will talk at length about him making engineering decisions. I've seen this happen at Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink firsthand. Mostly, though, I tend to think of the companies as being built by the thousands of employees and as group engineering exercises. There are tons of choices that have to be made and things that have to be fixed and resources marshalled. The top end of these tasks has quite often fallen to Musk. People had pretty much given up on electric cars until Tesla came along. You will argue that Martin and Marc had the idea for Tesla, which is fine. But it would not be a going concern without the engineering fixes that took place to finally get the Roadster over the line and then the tons of choices that turned the Model S into a very surprising success. This totally revitalized the electric car industry and made it a thing again. It changed the automotive industry worldwide. Many people made many engineering choices along the way. Musk included. There are just too many stories and anecdotes to deny this. SpaceX is perhaps the most dramatic example. People had tried and failed to build a commercial rocket company before. They have tried and failed since. Blue Origin and SpaceX started almost the same year, but only one of the two companies has changed the dynamics of the worldwide aerospace industry and our access to space. Many people deserve credit for this, but it's hard to argue that Musk was not the driving force behind a great deal of what SpaceX has achieved. SpaceX had far less resources than Blue Origin. The engineering accomplishments of SpaceX are pretty nuts. The US aerospace industry would be in terrible shape without them. We'd be unable to put humans in space, behind China on all fronts and very, very slow to do launches. Space is one of the last manufacturing and engineering strongholds for the US. Is this entirely because of Musk? Certainly not. Did he push the company forward on engineering? Certainly yes. Neuralink has a great, great deal still to prove. But it took products that were trapped in acamedia and advanced them dramatically. I would argue that this does not happen without the engineering pattern matching Musk has done across these other two industries. He pushed changes on semiconductor, materials, robotics and implant design. It's important to ask all these other questions about his empire and power and his evolution over time. And you're a tremendous filmmaker. This will no doubt come off as cheerleading. All I can say is that Elon and I have had a very tumultous relationship, and he's been plenty unkind to me at times. I don't really have a need to speak up here. Me writing this comes more from a place of confusion than anything else. The products are all very real, and there's a common denominator across them. It's difficult for me to see them as lucky accidents, particularly when rivals trying to do similar things have struggled so badly. All of these things are so difficult to build. Like verging on impossible. Why do you fixate on the engineering thing when there are so many other more real avenues to explore?