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But we have made assholes extremely successful in the past (e.g. Steve Jobs). May be they all just want to follow the trend.
by piyush_soni 10y ago
But we have made assholes extremely successful in the past (e.g. Steve Jobs). May be they all just want to follow the trend.
- codr4life 10y agoI couldn't care less about their preferences, we're moving on now.
- simplehuman 10y agoTravis is already successful. He is worth billions.
- codr4life 10y agoThat's a very depraved measure of success, like piling up money is something to be admired; even seeing clearly what kind of behavior is driving this apparently isn't enough for the penny to drop.
- simplehuman 10y agoYears from now, he will donate to charity and do philanthropic things and all will be forgotten. Just like another billionaire we know.
- codr4life 10y agoAll is never forgotten, all is revealed sooner or later; it may look like Billy boy is getting away with his bullshit; but he's as doomed as the rest of them.
- piyush_soni 10y agoI'm not sure. Unlike other millionaires and billionaires (lot of them donate money), Bill is actually working directly on the fields and giving almost all his time to improving Health and Education in the world. That's something big and I really appreciate him for that. Had he been 'only' giving money, I wouldn't be moved much.
- simplehuman 10y agoFor all you know, zuck and Travis will do the same in future. Not sure if you know how many companies and lives, gates made bankrupt with his shady business practices. No different from Travis here.
- bogomipz 10y agoSo being a successful human being is gauged solely on the size of one's bank account?
- gingerbread-man 10y agoNo, but saving thousands (millions?) of lives through philanthropy goes a long way towards making up for being kind-of-a-dick-sometimes.
- michaelmrose 10y agoIf you got rich wholly or partly through wrong doing I don't understand how you can assign them any of the credit for giving some of it away. Imagine if I mugged you for $100 and gave $20 to the red cross?
- bogomipz 10y agoSo its OK to act crappy now as long as you do something philanthropic later with the money you made while treating people badly? What is that called humanity arbitrage? I don't think that basic human decency is something you should keep in a ledger to run credit and debits against.
- gingerbread-man 10y agoSteve Jobs wasn't just an asshole, he was a phenomenally effective CEO. The problem with Kalanick isn't that he's brusque-- it's that his company isn't making money.
- dowjones 10y agoWhen Steve Jobs was 40, which Travis Kalanick is now, he had been kicked out of the first company he founded (Apple), and his second company (NeXT) was failing miserably. Pretty much everything that Steve is remembered fondly for -- his success at Apple and Pixar -- came after 1995.
- gingerbread-man 10y ago> Pretty much everything that Steve is remembered fondly for -- his success at Apple and Pixar -- came after 1995. I strongly disagree. I think Steve is more remembered for the Macintosh than for the iMac/iPod/iPhone/iPad, at least amongst HN readers and the like.
- dowjones 10y agoYou're changing the subject. You imply Travis isn't a good CEO because his company is losing money, whereas Steve Jobs was "was a phenomenally effective CEO." At the age of 40, he most certainly was not.
- gingerbread-man 10y agoThe core presumption of my argument is that Uber isn't really succeeding as a company in the way that Apple (or even NeXt) did at the same "age." There are a lot of articles out there making the case that Uber's current business is not sustainable, and I tend to agree. If NeXt wasn't profitable, it was because their sales hadn't yet caught up with their fixed engineering costs. Uber's unprofitability isn't because they're waiting for sales to grow large enough to cover the cost of their engineering operation, it's because they're heavily subsidizing the unit costs of their business.