As it happened, the only people willing to pay von Braun to build rockets were Nazis, so (shrug) Nazis it was. If the Americans had recruited him in the 1930s, he would have become a loyal American and a credit to his adopted country, just as he ended up doing after the war. If Stalin had been willing to sponsor him, well, he'd have raised the red banner and become a loyal Communist.
There was never any point in prosecuting von Braun as a Nazi, or even thinking of him as one. Treating him as a war criminal, even though he technically was one, would have been a pointless, performative waste of badly-needed talent, like destroying captured V2s instead of studying them.
Elon Musk? He has no such excuse. Musk can be anything, do anything, say anything. He came to America early and made his fortune doing things that a lot of us respected and even envied him for. Then he chose to attach his name to far-right causes, throw Nazi salutes, and do the Kraft durch Freude dance at Trump rallies. Turned out Musk didn't care about building rockets or going to Mars quite so much as he cared about being an immature asshole. In that sense he took a path diametrically opposite that of Wernher von Braun.
So, yeah, if I worked for SpaceX, I wouldn't exactly bust my ass to make the leader's vision happen after losing trust in the integrity of said leader. I'd simply leave and find employment elsewhere, leaving behind people with fewer options.
Turns out skillset usually trumps justice, as long as you're willing to make the right post-hoc mea culpas.
As a developer I'll manually change those numbers if and when they appear.
however..
when he started spamming political misinformation on twitter i had to block him. very concerned he was burnt out and brainwashed into into politics. the nazi salute, then making nazi jokes about it, was just insane.
doge is a joke, he lost the plot.
now i barely check updates on whats happening at starbase, cheer on when the rockets explode, couldn't care less about tesla.. it's a real shame. all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
he needs to resign from everything and go hide under a rock for a few years until he finally gets into orbit and burns up on rentry.
And Musk was personally responsible - not just for that atrocity, but for poisoning the world's leading progressive social media site, for being complicit in the neutering of countless world-leading science projects, for defunding basic research at NASA and firing hundreds of employees with solid achievements and genuine passion for space science, for gutting the FAA, and so on.
I cannot say enough unkind things about the man. The fact that he has any kind of following at all after the last year is both shocking and disappointing.
No, he did not. I still can't believe people bought his BS so easily - "it must be true, because he said it!" No, it isn't, never was, never will be. And I don't even care about that salute - Musk lost all his credibility around 2015 when he promised self-driving cars (coming next year! for the past 10 years, and counting), then by lying about the Solarcity roof tiles (and basically committed fraud for which he didn't go to prison - go figure).
It is also quite dehonestating to those _real_ engineers working for Tesla or Spacex, who actually know their stuff. It was them who made Musk possible, not the other way around.
> all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
Exactly.
Engineering great organizations is still engineering (a fact that I personally wish I'd appreciated at a much younger age.)
And yes, speaking of engineering: FEM.
I still have to respect Starlink, accelerating adoption of EVs and the work SpaceX does. His businesses have reshaped several industries big time. It takes a lot of courage and insight to pull this off.
When he baselessly accused a hero rescue driver of a terrible crime and then refused to back down (if it’s not true sue me for defamation) then hid behind a technicality… yeah that’s the end.
That’s the behavior of a childish bully shithead not a leader. I can’t believe people still think he’s the man to lead the companies he runs.
You must have missed the part where he got divorced and then predictably shifted hard right.
(Being credibly accused of being a sex pest is the only thing more powerful than divorce when it comes to putting men on the right-wing-shift pipeline).
If you're loud, that collapses into a more realistic appraisal.