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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 i

by 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...
  - serge2k 11y ago
    Except most of those are fulfillment center employees anyway. Plus they are working on the robots.
- brightball 11y ago
  Employee count should get some heavy value since the real benefit to society from most companies comes from payouts to the rest of the economy via payroll and stock. Unless we're enabling larger ecosystems around what they've done that creates even more. So far I'm seeing very little in terms of ecosystem around Musk's companies. On the contrary, he seems more focussed on doing exactly the opposite (like Tesla's focus on going around local car dealers).
  - rgbrgb 11y ago
    That's kind of a 0-sum outlook on the role of businesses in society (gather wealth to distribute to employees). Most of the businesses we're talking about are benefiting society not through job creation but through technology creation. Google is not important because they employ tens of thousands of engineers, they're important because Search benefits general knowledge and decision making of everyone with an internet connection. Likewise Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX are pushing humanity forward through invention.
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      This is one of the things that Henry Ford got right. If nobody can afford to buy anything, you don't need any engineers.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        Multiple mistakes in your comment: It is not possible to be making things that nobody can afford to buy. This is because consuming or otherwise using something that already exists has no real cost. This is Say's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law ). And Henry Ford paid his workers a high wage because he tried a low wage and had massive, business-crippling problems with employee turnover. Working on an assembly line is hell. One minute of analysis will show that it can never be more profitable to a company to sell product to its own paid workers than to just not make the product in the first place.
        11y ago
- serge2k 11y ago
  Yeah but he's not as cool as Elon Musk (AKA LITERALLY TONY STARK). People want a Tesla. SpaceX (and I do like this) is really open compared to Jeff SECRECY! Bezos' Blue Origin.
- wott 11y ago
  > PayPal has ~13,000 What do these people do? I mean, for the other companies you quoted, there are physical products to be designed, manufactured, mounted or moved, I get it. But Paypal?
  - vacri 11y ago
    Customer complaints don't just ignore themselves!
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  Most of those are employees of Integrity staffing, not Amazon. The company that makes Wal-mart look like the paragon of worker empowerment.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

by 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...
- serge2k 11y ago
  Except most of those are fulfillment center employees anyway. Plus they are working on the robots.
brightball 11y ago
Employee count should get some heavy value since the real benefit to society from most companies comes from payouts to the rest of the economy via payroll and stock. Unless we're enabling larger ecosystems around what they've done that creates even more. So far I'm seeing very little in terms of ecosystem around Musk's companies. On the contrary, he seems more focussed on doing exactly the opposite (like Tesla's focus on going around local car dealers).
- rgbrgb 11y ago
  That's kind of a 0-sum outlook on the role of businesses in society (gather wealth to distribute to employees). Most of the businesses we're talking about are benefiting society not through job creation but through technology creation. Google is not important because they employ tens of thousands of engineers, they're important because Search benefits general knowledge and decision making of everyone with an internet connection. Likewise Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX are pushing humanity forward through invention.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    This is one of the things that Henry Ford got right. If nobody can afford to buy anything, you don't need any engineers.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      Multiple mistakes in your comment: It is not possible to be making things that nobody can afford to buy. This is because consuming or otherwise using something that already exists has no real cost. This is Say's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law ). And Henry Ford paid his workers a high wage because he tried a low wage and had massive, business-crippling problems with employee turnover. Working on an assembly line is hell. One minute of analysis will show that it can never be more profitable to a company to sell product to its own paid workers than to just not make the product in the first place.
      - 11y ago
serge2k 11y ago
Yeah but he's not as cool as Elon Musk (AKA LITERALLY TONY STARK). People want a Tesla. SpaceX (and I do like this) is really open compared to Jeff SECRECY! Bezos' Blue Origin.
wott 11y ago
> PayPal has ~13,000 What do these people do? I mean, for the other companies you quoted, there are physical products to be designed, manufactured, mounted or moved, I get it. But Paypal?
- vacri 11y ago
  Customer complaints don't just ignore themselves!
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
Most of those are employees of Integrity staffing, not Amazon. The company that makes Wal-mart look like the paragon of worker empowerment.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]