Not to defend the Musk... but absolutely to defend the extremely talented and hard working employees who have to do double-duty managing him so their rockets still work:
Rocket blow up. That's literally what they do. They're bombs that, with enough hard work and effort, will eventually get to a point where they make it to space safely more often than not.
Falcon 9 exploded a lot too. Now it doesn't.
Somebody was talking about how the Apollo engineers must be furious at how happy that guy is to let his rockets explode, but drumroll their rockets ALSO exploded.
Rockets explode. they are hard to build. There are maybe a handful of rocket models that are genuinely reliable, and even then it only takes one slip-up, one aged component that somebody forgot to replace, one falling bit of ice, one perished O-Ring, one heater element in an oxygen tank that accidentally got over-voltaged 5 years ago, to cause a catastrophic explosion.
The dude's a prick, sure, and his stupid ideas about tunnels are dumb and his shitty "autopilot" that isn't is dangerous, and his social media adventures are failing faster than our schadenfraude can track, and there are so many reasons to hate on him that we don't actually need to invent stupid ignorant shitty reasons of our own. SpaceX is working miracles, Starship is exceeding all expectations of people who actually know what they're talking about. That thing is going to work, and it's going to achieve incredible things (even if "building a Mars colony" is very definitely not one of them, because that rocket will be an obsolete museum piece before the first colony is established on Mars.
@leoncowle I suppose I'm just looking at this in a historical context, where the old monopoly (duopoly? Other word?) which was slow, expensive and corrupt ("We'll build a factory in your state so you can take credit for creating jobs, senator, if you approve the budget for this project that only we're qualified to complete") has now been broken.
Which, like you said, isn't a disagreement at all. I suspect it's actually just me trying to get the last word in #Mature