““Chief” of anything is the guy who gets to say “no”.”

“No” is important, but “Yes” is just as important. And I’m not sure you appreciate how much effort goes into defining the product in the first place.

For instance, Musk has stated that before they started designing their rockets, that they looked at the failure rates and root causes of all the rockets they could. That led them down the path of having multiple engines. Looking at engine technology they decided to go with something simple, which opened up the ability for them to manufacture it in-house.

There are many, many decisions that are made before you get into engineering-only decisions like wall thicknesses and 6061 vs 7075 tradeoffs. But it starts with business decisions, and as time goes on transitions into pure engineering ones.

“When you own the company, that’s you.”

Musk doesn’t do everything. He may talk with the people that do a lot, and talk about the high-level goals and how they are helped or impacted. He is the Chief Designer, not the only one.

Just as Steve Jobs did not do everything at Apple. In fact, after Jobs death it came out that there were many times his team wanted to go in a direction he didn’t, and he decided to trust them. You never saw that when he presented though, because he always said “We”, not “I”.

Works for me, as does “Chief Innovator”. Maybe “Chief Designer”, as he’d like to be called. The very specific question was who was the “vehicle designer” who was a computer nerd. Still waiting …

“Chief” of anything is the guy who gets to say “no”. When you own the company, that’s you.

“Spacex May be in the lead but (assuming they can do reusability) others will quickly follow and may even surpass them.”

And that would be good.

The lower the price goes, the more likely it will be that we can expand humanities presence out into space.

Congress still may not want to give NASA more money, and Congress may still be forcing NASA to build and use the SLS, but that’s OK. Once the price falls far enough, the private sector in America will be able to make their own push out beyond LEO – and we already see the beginnings of it today with efforts like Inspiration Mars, Deep Space Industries, and Planetary Resources.

There we simply disagree. Shrug. If I hire a “vehicle designer”, it’s going to be someone who designs vehicles, not someone who worries about business strategy. The definition is right in the words.

“But that is not what Musk as said. He has stated that he would only IPO if that is what was needed to accomplish his goals (and it isn’t right now).”

I’m not aware he stated that. What he basically said (in his post-tweets) was that he simply didn’t want to talk about it, because doing an early IPO would unnecessarily constrain progress and make for conflicting priorities. Musk’s other companies are publicly traded, so I can only assume this is what he intends for SpaceX eventually.