5 ms·

Sorry, but Bezos and Buffet are not even in the same league as Elon Musk.

by sixQuarks 11y ago

ncallaway 11y ago
Who, then, would you say is in Mr. Musk's league?
- serge2k 11y ago
  No one is in the same league as HNs God King Musk. Jeff is only worth about 50 billion dollars (only what, 4x Musk?). Plus his rocket company is only landing suborbital flights. What scrub.
- sixQuarks 11y ago
  Musk is in a league of his own. This is based on my own research and comparison. I believe I've watched every interview he's given, read his biography, read the in-depth profile on waitbutwhy.com, and followed his companies fairly closely. I've done the same with Bezos, since the day Amazon went public. While I highly respect Bezos, I believe if you did the same, you would come to the same conclusion.
  - ncallaway 10y ago
    I guess we just have a fundamental disagreement over the definition of the term "league".
billmalarky 11y ago
My gut instinct was to agree with you, but with consideration pbreit is correct in my opinion. Musk is more innovative in areas that matter for meaningful human progress (SpaceX as opposed to Wal-Mart 2.0), but I believe as far as "business" is concerned Bezos is on top right now. They have different priorities. Personally I'm a Musk fanboy.
- serge2k 11y ago
  Musk made money on Paypal before he started Tesla and SpaceX. Bezos made money on Amazon before he started Blue Origin. Plus Bezos doesn't have an obsessive internet cult worshipping him.
  - benologist 11y ago
    Bezos is a much more accomplished business man - Tesla has ~3,000 employees SpaceX has ~5,000 Solar City has ~13,000 PayPal has ~13,000 Total: 34,000 as they stand today which is a very generous measure since it's years after Musk left PayPal and he doesn't even work at Solar City afaik. Amazon has ~222,000 employees, roughly 8x larger than all of those companies combined, not even counting Blue Origin, WaPo, or w/e else Bezos owns, and they did $107,000,000,000 revenue last year, slightly more than all of Musk's companies' combined value. http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-222400-employees-hires-39000-in-last-quarter-alone/ http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-2224...
    - rgbrgb 11y ago
      IDK, employee count seems like a red herring. To me it's much more impressive to do a lot with a small number of employees (like WhatsApp's 18M users/engineer [0]). Amazon incredibly impressive, I just mark the high employee count as a point against them rather than in their favor. [0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use...
      - benologist 11y ago
        There's some notes about how Whatsapp achieved that here [1], they attribute their capacity in part to Erlang's concurrency and in part to cloud hosting with SoftLayer. Amazon is the origin of SoftLayer's cloud services and single biggest reason one engineer can manage arbitrary numbers of servers/users: The popularization of the term can be traced to 2006 when Amazon.com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud. [2] [1] http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/ http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_cloud_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_clo...
electic 11y ago
I think that is shafting Bezos short. His company has built a vast logistics empire. Imagine maintaining millions of product categories, keeping their price up to date, sycing all of that through vendors, suppliers, and finally delivering it to the customer. Not to mention, this happens across multiple countries. That isn't a small feat. I am not even touching on the foresight of AWS or his stewardship of the company in general. I think he deserves far more credit than you are giving him.
eellpp 11y ago
Its childish to compare rich and successful people like that. There had been and will be in future more rich and successful people measured by revenue, profit, employees, product reach etc. This sort of comparison is a silly thing, a hero worship kind of behaviour un-characteristic of HN. However people still want something to compare. How about instead of just being capital etc add some other measures like business risk, turning around from absolute failure, fighting david and goliath in same industry, building something that was just given up by all etc . Again these measures are subjective and there could be somebody else who may like building a steady growth or being more charitable and equitable etc. We like to see the world and measure it up in the way its important to us. When somebody says X is the greatest person, then realise that he is measuring with the qualities he finds important.
dexterdog 11y ago
Why? Buffet and not Bezos are both profit-turners. Musk is not. I like that he's going after the bigger and riskier things, but he's small-scale right now.
joshmarlow 11y ago
Care to elaborate on your opinion?

Sorry, but Bezos and Buffet are not even in the same league as Elon Musk.

ncallaway 11y ago

Who, then, would you say is in Mr. Musk's league?

serge2k 11y ago
No one is in the same league as HNs God King Musk. Jeff is only worth about 50 billion dollars (only what, 4x Musk?). Plus his rocket company is only landing suborbital flights. What scrub.
sixQuarks 11y ago
Musk is in a league of his own. This is based on my own research and comparison. I believe I've watched every interview he's given, read his biography, read the in-depth profile on waitbutwhy.com, and followed his companies fairly closely. I've done the same with Bezos, since the day Amazon went public. While I highly respect Bezos, I believe if you did the same, you would come to the same conclusion.
- ncallaway 10y ago
  I guess we just have a fundamental disagreement over the definition of the term "league".

billmalarky 11y ago

My gut instinct was to agree with you, but with consideration pbreit is correct in my opinion. Musk is more innovative in areas that matter for meaningful human progress (SpaceX as opposed to Wal-Mart 2.0), but I believe as far as "business" is concerned Bezos is on top right now. They have different priorities. Personally I'm a Musk fanboy.

serge2k 11y ago
Musk made money on Paypal before he started Tesla and SpaceX. Bezos made money on Amazon before he started Blue Origin. Plus Bezos doesn't have an obsessive internet cult worshipping him.
- benologist 11y ago
  Bezos is a much more accomplished business man - Tesla has ~3,000 employees SpaceX has ~5,000 Solar City has ~13,000 PayPal has ~13,000 Total: 34,000 as they stand today which is a very generous measure since it's years after Musk left PayPal and he doesn't even work at Solar City afaik. Amazon has ~222,000 employees, roughly 8x larger than all of those companies combined, not even counting Blue Origin, WaPo, or w/e else Bezos owns, and they did $107,000,000,000 revenue last year, slightly more than all of Musk's companies' combined value. http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-222400-employees-hires-39000-in-last-quarter-alone/ http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-2224...
  - rgbrgb 11y ago
    IDK, employee count seems like a red herring. To me it's much more impressive to do a lot with a small number of employees (like WhatsApp's 18M users/engineer [0]). Amazon incredibly impressive, I just mark the high employee count as a point against them rather than in their favor. [0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use...
    - benologist 11y ago
      There's some notes about how Whatsapp achieved that here [1], they attribute their capacity in part to Erlang's concurrency and in part to cloud hosting with SoftLayer. Amazon is the origin of SoftLayer's cloud services and single biggest reason one engineer can manage arbitrary numbers of servers/users: The popularization of the term can be traced to 2006 when Amazon.com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud. [2] [1] http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/ http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_cloud_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_clo...

electic 11y ago

I think that is shafting Bezos short. His company has built a vast logistics empire. Imagine maintaining millions of product categories, keeping their price up to date, sycing all of that through vendors, suppliers, and finally delivering it to the customer. Not to mention, this happens across multiple countries. That isn't a small feat. I am not even touching on the foresight of AWS or his stewardship of the company in general. I think he deserves far more credit than you are giving him.

eellpp 11y ago

Its childish to compare rich and successful people like that. There had been and will be in future more rich and successful people measured by revenue, profit, employees, product reach etc. This sort of comparison is a silly thing, a hero worship kind of behaviour un-characteristic of HN. However people still want something to compare. How about instead of just being capital etc add some other measures like business risk, turning around from absolute failure, fighting david and goliath in same industry, building something that was just given up by all etc . Again these measures are subjective and there could be somebody else who may like building a steady growth or being more charitable and equitable etc. We like to see the world and measure it up in the way its important to us. When somebody says X is the greatest person, then realise that he is measuring with the qualities he finds important.

dexterdog 11y ago

Why? Buffet and not Bezos are both profit-turners. Musk is not. I like that he's going after the bigger and riskier things, but he's small-scale right now.

joshmarlow 11y ago

Care to elaborate on your opinion?