44 ms·

Elon Musk, master promoter

100 points by keith1 5y ago

mk81 5y ago
I guess the author forgot about the part where they developed rockets that are actually 10 years ahead of anyone else's.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  I have long suspected that if he knows one thing, elon knows to keep his nose out of spaceX and just throw cash at it.
  - simondotau 5y ago
    Elon spends nearly as much time at SpaceX as he does Tesla. There's no question that Elon mucks in at the lowest levels of engineering at SpaceX. If you want evidence from a reasonably neutral observer, take Sandy Munro (himself an engineer who has worked on everything from cars to aeroplanes). He recently interviewed Elon, ostensibly about Tesla but the interview was in a meeting room at SpaceX. After the interview he was invited to a two hour design review meeting and was "blown away" at Elon's depth of involvement. https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=370 https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=370 (6:10 to 8:45)
    - mcot2 5y ago
      Yes, I saw that interview and the follow up. He can talk very in-depth about the engineering of the cars as well but he is _Chief Engineer_ at SpaceX. I don’t think people quite understand this when they call him a businessman, promoter or marketing guru.
      - SuchAnonMuchWow 5y ago
        He is also _Techno-king_ at Tesla... I have no ideas about the depth of his technical knowledge at both companies, but the titles themselves don't hold much value when he gave them himself.
        simondotau 5y ago
        It does hold a lot of value when it comes to the legal liability if/when things go wrong.
    - clouddrover 5y ago
      Tesla's own engineers say Musk is disconnected from reality when it comes to the engineering side: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-autopilot-dmv-fsd-exaggeration https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
      - simondotau 5y ago
        I have no doubt that Elon brings zero expertise to the table with regards to machine learning and automation. That's certainly not his domain of expertise—which is more in the realm of science and physics. In this respect I'd imagine he's more akin to an overly excited tech geek who loves to obsess over the progress made by Andrej Karpathy and his team, but is otherwise leaving them alone to do their thing.
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    This is demonstrably not true https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
  - reasonabl_human 5y ago
    A friend of mine working down at Boca Chica on the starship says elon is there multiple times a week, and heavily involved. It’s well documented that he has been heavily involved at the engineering level in the past so I don’t see why he’d step back now.
  - nickik 5y ago
    That people still make this asinine argument shows that it has nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with people not liking the person and not wanting to give him credit because they don't like him.
  - inawarminister 5y ago
    That... Sounds more like Bezos and Blue Origin to me, from what I've heard. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos-idUSKBN1772ZQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos-idUSKBN1772ZQ
- skrebbel 5y ago
  You don't raise funds for such a risky endeavour without a fantastic narrative. I don't think they're doubting that Musk is also capable of building a company that actually achieves results. Everybody knows this by now. I think the key argument is that he's also a master promoter and that that skill is underappreciated compared to the engineering angle. The way I read the article, it's suggesting that if you start by to coming up with the best possible VC pitch for a moonshot business, and let everything follow from that, you'd get pretty close to Musk's approach.
- vertnerd 5y ago
  Elon is able to develop these things because he is using his own money. In the US at least, Congress, the media, and the public would never allow NASA to use public money to blow up a series of rockets in pursuit of a working design. The recent test flights of Starship prototypes is a good example. No one knew for sure when Spacex would have the belly flop maneuver mastered, but as long as no one gets hurt and he spends his own money, no one cares. Next they have to master successful launch into space, successful booster recovery, successful orbital rendezvous and docking, successful lunar landing, successful long-term life support, and successful high speed atmospheric reentry. All of these are very daunting technical challenges for a totally new spacecraft. When will the money run out?
  - swsieber 5y ago
    > When will the money run out? It won't? They've secured a pretty good revenue stream with their satellite launch business + Starlink.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Which was the whole point of their satellite launch business and of Starlink, as outlined by Elon Musk years before SpaceX first landed a rocket. This is what angers me about articles like this. Yes, SpaceX attracted lots of interest because of its ambitious mission statement. No, that mission statement wasn't a bunch of empty statements like it typically is for most businesses. SpaceX is consistently following the path it outlined, the path from reusability, through launch business, pouring all the money into R&D for the ultimate goal of opening up access to Mars. I would've thought that after so many years, the skeptics would figure out the company is serious about it.
  - Terretta 5y ago
    > Elon is able to develop these things because he is using his own money Though an alternate narrative is he arguably used public money through government credits: These opportunities to leverage government programs, some designed for people much further down the income ladder, have driven Musk throughout his career: The megabillionaire built his companies on the backs of enormous government subsidies, tax breaks, and exclusive contracts. A 2015 Los Angeles Times investigation estimated that Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX had together benefited from “$4.9 billion in government support.” https://newrepublic.com/article/160500/elon-musks-big-government-grift https://newrepublic.com/article/160500/elon-musks-big-govern... // Note: Consider sources
fxtentacle 5y ago
This is both the shortest and one of the best pieces of business advice I've read recently.
- alexpetralia 5y ago
  I remember on an podcast episode of Patrick O'Shaughnessy's "Invest Like the Best", his guest had mentioned the "villain test". Essentially, it is summarized as "looks good, feels good." Whatever you're selling should have a noble call to action (looks good) but also have a more visceral, primitive appeal (feels good).
- Terretta 5y ago
  Can’t tell if “deferentiation” is a typo or a pun.
totololo 5y ago
I believe this article completely ignores the product side of the story. Elon doesn't pitch, he builds. His products are significantly better than market alternatives, with a steady momentum of improvement over time. In the unofficial biography there's the story of how Tesla pulled an unlikely funding from Daimler. The Daimler executives visiting Tesla were unimpressed, skeptical and bored to death by the PowerPoints. Then the Tesla team took them for a ride in the electrified Smart they had built in a hurry. All the executives stepped out of it with a smile. The check arrived later. It was about the product, not the "save the earth" narrative.
- Cancan82 5y ago
  This is a huge point - promoters works up until a point - but eventually you have to deliver on the promise or people walk. Somehow, Elon delivers on damn near all his major promises (with delays and whatnot, but stil)
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    You could drive a bus through that “whatnot”.
  - justapassenger 5y ago
    Elon is great at setting ambitious goals and later changing them to be less ambitious. He gets hype from initial goals, and rarely he’s being hold accountable for what’s actually delivered. And quite a few products he delivered are really cool, not gonna deny it. But they are nowhere close to what they were hyped to be.
    - taneq 5y ago
      This is because his initial promises are so completely unbelievable that even getting in the same ballpark is an amazing accomplishment. Barring a couple of obvious outliers (looking at you, FSD) he's typically within an order of magnitude of his completely insane predictions. Line that performance up against anyone else and the difference is stark.
haxiomic 5y ago
The subtext of this would seem to be that - in reality - the narrative is just an unsubstantive marketing device I’m not convinced that’s the case with these companies - I think people really do start businesses to have an positive impact and those businesses being profitable is a necessary part of that (but of course many will use “changing the world” meaninglessly too!) Trying to have a positive impact on the future certainly underpins the career decisions I make and project I work on, and I think the same is true for others I know who are lucky enough to make those choices
- the_cat_kittles 5y ago
  his first business was paypal though
  - sumedh 5y ago
    It was actually Zip2 and then X.com which became Paypal later.
willeh 5y ago
It is like mankind woke up one day in 1980s and gave up on the future, a world that had gone the first powered flight to landing on the moon in a generation, woke up that one morning realizing the problems that this evolution has caused. We started rewarding the pessimists pointing out the problems, the zero-sum gamers of wall street. Our universities emptied of optimists and filled up with problematizing relativists... These pessimists are smart of course, we are destroying our planet, our political economy is unjust, our chances of survival are slim to none. On the whole this depression of the human soul produces more accurate predictions, but the prognosis becomes self fulfilling and we stagnate. I think we need the dreamers today more than ever, to find the unlikely solutions that are closer than we think, to find the miracles of the cosmos stil hidden from us and to find a better live for us all. Let's all dare to dream.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ You really just need one disastrous monetary decision to precipitate all the rest of what you mention.
  - 0xfaded 5y ago
    I see this thrown up regularly and often the poster implies that everyone knows why wage growth separated from economic growth. You've alluded to monetary policy, so in this case I guess inflation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Up until the 1970s unions were incredibly powerful and this was coupled with labour friendly "full-employment" policies. People still argue over exactly what triggered the inflation, but it's clear (at least in my reading) that this was a rare period were labour held sufficient negotiations power to claim it's share of productivity growth. What follows is known as the revolt of capital, where for many reasons, including the inflation, it became impossible for return on capital to keep up with the printing press. Then begins a continuing period of dismantling of labor's power through union busting, policy, and globalization. Fundamentally, labour lost it's negotiating power, and hence it's claim to wage growth. Inflation was merely a driver of change.
    - 5y ago
tasssko 5y ago
Elon is a personality, what the author gets right is he sets out by identifying the vision for the organisation, this helps to align the employees and customers in a way no corporate does (i.e especially not his competitors). Most corporate visions are poorly put together and sound similar “we want to do well to make our shareholders richer”. Elon’s vision involves humanity in its success, this is a unique differentiator. Elon has worked on building a controversial personal brand and as a result also put his companies in the lime light for free. Tesla and Spacex own a significant percent of the news today in their respective categories. He has disrupted corporate communications from the old faceless corporate PR to a champion of and relatable corporate personality.
- clouddrover 5y ago
  > Elon’s vision involves humanity in its success That sounds complicated. Let's test that ideal against something simple and practical. If Elon's vision involves humanity in its success, then why don't Tesla's EV chargers charge all brands of EV?
  - tasssko 5y ago
    It is not as complicated as fitting defeat devices to diesel vehicles and lying about emissions repeatedly. I hardly see the value of your comment. Is it Elon’s and Teslas responsibility to work with old-guard car manufacturers to ensure compatibility? Anyway I think you mistake the purpose of a vision.
    - clouddrover 5y ago
      So no room for humanity, just Tesla buyers. Those ideals didn't last long. Having a balkanized charging infrastructure is a stupid outcome for everyone. I can fuel my ICE vehicle at any fueling station and I should be able to charge my EV at any charging station. Anything less just makes EVs worse.
      - tasssko 5y ago
        The charging infrastructure is a competitive advantage. Tesla is a business we are talking about capitalism. You can charge your EV at home, you won’t need a fuelling station. That is progress.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
When both his companies needed money desperately in 2008 Musk couldn't raise it. He ended up leveraging his last penny of his own money to save both of them. He's raised lots of money, but only after he invested tons of his own to get a great product. And a great product sells itself. The only significant money he raised before he had a working product was the initial NASA commercial cargo award. And that has nothing to do with being a master promoter. To win a NASA award requires a rock solid technical proposal.
- titzer 5y ago
  > He ended up leveraging his last penny of his own money I somehow think there was absolutely zero chance that Elon could have been ruined financially.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Bankruptcy was highly likely. But bankruptcy does not ruin someone in Musk's position.
  - tinalumfoil 5y ago
    History becomes inevitable after it happens.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  If he hadn't been rich enough to do that, we'd probably all be talking about how he ran them into the ground (if we remembered him).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tareqak 5y ago
Tesla is saving the world, but not by selling an increasing number of electric vehicles. Instead, they’ve been the largest seller of electric vehicle credits to other car manufacturers manufacturing electric vehicles [0][1]. In my honest opinion, if Teslas did not invest their efforts into self-driving vehicles (per vehicle costs for LIDAR and other technology, R&D costs, headcount, etc) their base offering for the Model 3 could actually be competitively priced with similar offerings by other car manufacturers. In addition, there would not be any deaths from people putting their faith into FSD/Autopilot (6 deaths as of this writing) [2]. In all fairness, governments should only allow these EV credits to be used by the original car manufacturer that gets them, and they should only give one EV credit per electric vehicle produced. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ev-regulatory-credits-why-tesla-113115520.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ev-regulatory-credits-why-tes... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/715421/tesla-quarterly-vehicle-production/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/715421/tesla-quarterly-v... [2] https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/
- soared 5y ago
  No.. Tesla is saving the planet by forcing market trends to accelerate very quickly. Prior to Tesla the only real electric car with market share was a Prius. Now every car manufacturer is fully bought in to electric, thanks to Tesla.
  - conception 5y ago
    This is amazingly true if you look at someone like VW’s annual report in 2011 and 2012... and the the S was released and then look at 2013.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    > Prior to Tesla the only real electric car with market share was a Prius. Now every car manufacturer is fully bought in to electric You could say that about any first to market product. The first one who got serious market share must have caused everyone who followed, right? That's not the simplest explanation.
- 5y ago
blueyes 5y ago
This article has it backwards. Elon doesn’t start a company and then promote it with a world-saving narrative. He is trying to figure out how to preserve our species, and fearlessly building companies that will do that. The narrative is a derivative of this. If you want to look at how Elon is effective in promotion, look at his demos: a Tesla in space, a monkey playing mind pong. Those are works of art, advertising, and genius. If you want the earned media that Elon gets, here is the secret: * figure out how to save the species from first principles * be a good enough engineer to hire other very good ones * build what needs building over many years at the risk of bankrupting yourself. * come up with cool, highly visual and dramatic demos
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ptr2voidStar 5y ago
  Chile, step away from the koolaid please.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Tell me, devotee, how does selling carbon offsets help save the species? https://insideevs.com/news/438345/tesla-428-million-carbon-credits-q2-2020/ https://insideevs.com/news/438345/tesla-428-million-carbon-c...
api 5y ago
This only captures half the equation. The skills of creation and the skills of promotion seldom occur in the same person. Most great promoters are con artists; most creators and inventors can’t sell. Elon Musk is a person with the promotional skills of a con artist but who actually knows how to do things. He can sell a vision and then also is a good enough engineer to make the right high level design choices and hire the right talent to have some chance of realizing it. He also seems to have the intent of shipping. A good percentage of master promoters are conscious con artists with no desire to actually create value. (Most of the rest are delusional unconscious con artists.) SpaceX has built the first economically reusable booster and is rapidly iterating on the first economically and fully reusable (including the second stage) heavy lift launch system. Tesla validated the market for EVs and is in many ways still the best EV maker. I strongly doubt the EV revolution would be happening so fast without Tesla. The competence part is not even mentioned here. The world is full of master promoters. The vast majority of them sell snake oil.
zedshawmotherfu 5y ago
Elon Musk, masterbater.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
TFA is basically right. In a The Boring Company presentation, one of the lead engineers started to answer a question technically, then Musk stepped in and built an inspiring context within which to frame the question. His role in his conpmanies, that is visible from the outside, is that of a promoter. He also put money up in the first place. And for all I know, he is personally a brilliant engineer - but there's no evidence of that visible. A Jobsian RDF. Jobs appreciated the technical aspects, inspired great work out of technical people - but didn't invent anything himself.
divbzero 5y ago
I think OP is broadly correct but doesn’t specify cause and effect. Elon is not a master promoter who takes his companies and crafts compelling narratives around them. Instead, he begins with compelling ideas that he considers worth his while and then crafts his companies around them. An adjacent concept you hear (from YC among others) is that big problems can actually be more likely to succeed than niche problems because they can more easily attract capital and talent.
- vile 5y ago
  >he begins with compelling ideas that he considers worth his while and then crafts his companies around them Elon bought Tesla.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
AzzieElbab 5y ago
So what? Elon Musk is a master promoter and sales grandmaster(according to Peter Thiel). What are the negative implications of these qualities?

100 points by keith1 5y ago

mk81 5y ago

I guess the author forgot about the part where they developed rockets that are actually 10 years ahead of anyone else's.

hprotagonist 5y ago
I have long suspected that if he knows one thing, elon knows to keep his nose out of spaceX and just throw cash at it.
- simondotau 5y ago
  Elon spends nearly as much time at SpaceX as he does Tesla. There's no question that Elon mucks in at the lowest levels of engineering at SpaceX. If you want evidence from a reasonably neutral observer, take Sandy Munro (himself an engineer who has worked on everything from cars to aeroplanes). He recently interviewed Elon, ostensibly about Tesla but the interview was in a meeting room at SpaceX. After the interview he was invited to a two hour design review meeting and was "blown away" at Elon's depth of involvement. https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=370 https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=370 (6:10 to 8:45)
  - mcot2 5y ago
    Yes, I saw that interview and the follow up. He can talk very in-depth about the engineering of the cars as well but he is _Chief Engineer_ at SpaceX. I don’t think people quite understand this when they call him a businessman, promoter or marketing guru.
    - SuchAnonMuchWow 5y ago
      He is also _Techno-king_ at Tesla... I have no ideas about the depth of his technical knowledge at both companies, but the titles themselves don't hold much value when he gave them himself.
      - simondotau 5y ago
        It does hold a lot of value when it comes to the legal liability if/when things go wrong.
  - clouddrover 5y ago
    Tesla's own engineers say Musk is disconnected from reality when it comes to the engineering side: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-autopilot-dmv-fsd-exaggeration https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
    - simondotau 5y ago
      I have no doubt that Elon brings zero expertise to the table with regards to machine learning and automation. That's certainly not his domain of expertise—which is more in the realm of science and physics. In this respect I'd imagine he's more akin to an overly excited tech geek who loves to obsess over the progress made by Andrej Karpathy and his team, but is otherwise leaving them alone to do their thing.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  This is demonstrably not true https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
- reasonabl_human 5y ago
  A friend of mine working down at Boca Chica on the starship says elon is there multiple times a week, and heavily involved. It’s well documented that he has been heavily involved at the engineering level in the past so I don’t see why he’d step back now.
- nickik 5y ago
  That people still make this asinine argument shows that it has nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with people not liking the person and not wanting to give him credit because they don't like him.
- inawarminister 5y ago
  That... Sounds more like Bezos and Blue Origin to me, from what I've heard. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos-idUSKBN1772ZQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos-idUSKBN1772ZQ
skrebbel 5y ago
You don't raise funds for such a risky endeavour without a fantastic narrative. I don't think they're doubting that Musk is also capable of building a company that actually achieves results. Everybody knows this by now. I think the key argument is that he's also a master promoter and that that skill is underappreciated compared to the engineering angle. The way I read the article, it's suggesting that if you start by to coming up with the best possible VC pitch for a moonshot business, and let everything follow from that, you'd get pretty close to Musk's approach.
vertnerd 5y ago
Elon is able to develop these things because he is using his own money. In the US at least, Congress, the media, and the public would never allow NASA to use public money to blow up a series of rockets in pursuit of a working design. The recent test flights of Starship prototypes is a good example. No one knew for sure when Spacex would have the belly flop maneuver mastered, but as long as no one gets hurt and he spends his own money, no one cares. Next they have to master successful launch into space, successful booster recovery, successful orbital rendezvous and docking, successful lunar landing, successful long-term life support, and successful high speed atmospheric reentry. All of these are very daunting technical challenges for a totally new spacecraft. When will the money run out?
- swsieber 5y ago
  > When will the money run out? It won't? They've secured a pretty good revenue stream with their satellite launch business + Starlink.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Which was the whole point of their satellite launch business and of Starlink, as outlined by Elon Musk years before SpaceX first landed a rocket. This is what angers me about articles like this. Yes, SpaceX attracted lots of interest because of its ambitious mission statement. No, that mission statement wasn't a bunch of empty statements like it typically is for most businesses. SpaceX is consistently following the path it outlined, the path from reusability, through launch business, pouring all the money into R&D for the ultimate goal of opening up access to Mars. I would've thought that after so many years, the skeptics would figure out the company is serious about it.
- Terretta 5y ago
  > Elon is able to develop these things because he is using his own money Though an alternate narrative is he arguably used public money through government credits: These opportunities to leverage government programs, some designed for people much further down the income ladder, have driven Musk throughout his career: The megabillionaire built his companies on the backs of enormous government subsidies, tax breaks, and exclusive contracts. A 2015 Los Angeles Times investigation estimated that Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX had together benefited from “$4.9 billion in government support.” https://newrepublic.com/article/160500/elon-musks-big-government-grift https://newrepublic.com/article/160500/elon-musks-big-govern... // Note: Consider sources

fxtentacle 5y ago

This is both the shortest and one of the best pieces of business advice I've read recently.

alexpetralia 5y ago
I remember on an podcast episode of Patrick O'Shaughnessy's "Invest Like the Best", his guest had mentioned the "villain test". Essentially, it is summarized as "looks good, feels good." Whatever you're selling should have a noble call to action (looks good) but also have a more visceral, primitive appeal (feels good).
Terretta 5y ago
Can’t tell if “deferentiation” is a typo or a pun.

totololo 5y ago

I believe this article completely ignores the product side of the story. Elon doesn't pitch, he builds. His products are significantly better than market alternatives, with a steady momentum of improvement over time. In the unofficial biography there's the story of how Tesla pulled an unlikely funding from Daimler. The Daimler executives visiting Tesla were unimpressed, skeptical and bored to death by the PowerPoints. Then the Tesla team took them for a ride in the electrified Smart they had built in a hurry. All the executives stepped out of it with a smile. The check arrived later. It was about the product, not the "save the earth" narrative.

Cancan82 5y ago
This is a huge point - promoters works up until a point - but eventually you have to deliver on the promise or people walk. Somehow, Elon delivers on damn near all his major promises (with delays and whatnot, but stil)
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  You could drive a bus through that “whatnot”.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  Elon is great at setting ambitious goals and later changing them to be less ambitious. He gets hype from initial goals, and rarely he’s being hold accountable for what’s actually delivered. And quite a few products he delivered are really cool, not gonna deny it. But they are nowhere close to what they were hyped to be.
  - taneq 5y ago
    This is because his initial promises are so completely unbelievable that even getting in the same ballpark is an amazing accomplishment. Barring a couple of obvious outliers (looking at you, FSD) he's typically within an order of magnitude of his completely insane predictions. Line that performance up against anyone else and the difference is stark.

haxiomic 5y ago

The subtext of this would seem to be that - in reality - the narrative is just an unsubstantive marketing device I’m not convinced that’s the case with these companies - I think people really do start businesses to have an positive impact and those businesses being profitable is a necessary part of that (but of course many will use “changing the world” meaninglessly too!) Trying to have a positive impact on the future certainly underpins the career decisions I make and project I work on, and I think the same is true for others I know who are lucky enough to make those choices

the_cat_kittles 5y ago
his first business was paypal though
- sumedh 5y ago
  It was actually Zip2 and then X.com which became Paypal later.

willeh 5y ago

It is like mankind woke up one day in 1980s and gave up on the future, a world that had gone the first powered flight to landing on the moon in a generation, woke up that one morning realizing the problems that this evolution has caused. We started rewarding the pessimists pointing out the problems, the zero-sum gamers of wall street. Our universities emptied of optimists and filled up with problematizing relativists... These pessimists are smart of course, we are destroying our planet, our political economy is unjust, our chances of survival are slim to none. On the whole this depression of the human soul produces more accurate predictions, but the prognosis becomes self fulfilling and we stagnate. I think we need the dreamers today more than ever, to find the unlikely solutions that are closer than we think, to find the miracles of the cosmos stil hidden from us and to find a better live for us all. Let's all dare to dream.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ You really just need one disastrous monetary decision to precipitate all the rest of what you mention.
- 0xfaded 5y ago
  I see this thrown up regularly and often the poster implies that everyone knows why wage growth separated from economic growth. You've alluded to monetary policy, so in this case I guess inflation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Up until the 1970s unions were incredibly powerful and this was coupled with labour friendly "full-employment" policies. People still argue over exactly what triggered the inflation, but it's clear (at least in my reading) that this was a rare period were labour held sufficient negotiations power to claim it's share of productivity growth. What follows is known as the revolt of capital, where for many reasons, including the inflation, it became impossible for return on capital to keep up with the printing press. Then begins a continuing period of dismantling of labor's power through union busting, policy, and globalization. Fundamentally, labour lost it's negotiating power, and hence it's claim to wage growth. Inflation was merely a driver of change.
  - 5y ago

tasssko 5y ago

Elon is a personality, what the author gets right is he sets out by identifying the vision for the organisation, this helps to align the employees and customers in a way no corporate does (i.e especially not his competitors). Most corporate visions are poorly put together and sound similar “we want to do well to make our shareholders richer”. Elon’s vision involves humanity in its success, this is a unique differentiator. Elon has worked on building a controversial personal brand and as a result also put his companies in the lime light for free. Tesla and Spacex own a significant percent of the news today in their respective categories. He has disrupted corporate communications from the old faceless corporate PR to a champion of and relatable corporate personality.

clouddrover 5y ago
> Elon’s vision involves humanity in its success That sounds complicated. Let's test that ideal against something simple and practical. If Elon's vision involves humanity in its success, then why don't Tesla's EV chargers charge all brands of EV?
- tasssko 5y ago
  It is not as complicated as fitting defeat devices to diesel vehicles and lying about emissions repeatedly. I hardly see the value of your comment. Is it Elon’s and Teslas responsibility to work with old-guard car manufacturers to ensure compatibility? Anyway I think you mistake the purpose of a vision.
  - clouddrover 5y ago
    So no room for humanity, just Tesla buyers. Those ideals didn't last long. Having a balkanized charging infrastructure is a stupid outcome for everyone. I can fuel my ICE vehicle at any fueling station and I should be able to charge my EV at any charging station. Anything less just makes EVs worse.
    - tasssko 5y ago
      The charging infrastructure is a competitive advantage. Tesla is a business we are talking about capitalism. You can charge your EV at home, you won’t need a fuelling station. That is progress.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

When both his companies needed money desperately in 2008 Musk couldn't raise it. He ended up leveraging his last penny of his own money to save both of them. He's raised lots of money, but only after he invested tons of his own to get a great product. And a great product sells itself. The only significant money he raised before he had a working product was the initial NASA commercial cargo award. And that has nothing to do with being a master promoter. To win a NASA award requires a rock solid technical proposal.

titzer 5y ago
> He ended up leveraging his last penny of his own money I somehow think there was absolutely zero chance that Elon could have been ruined financially.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Bankruptcy was highly likely. But bankruptcy does not ruin someone in Musk's position.
- tinalumfoil 5y ago
  History becomes inevitable after it happens.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
If he hadn't been rich enough to do that, we'd probably all be talking about how he ran them into the ground (if we remembered him).

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tareqak 5y ago

Tesla is saving the world, but not by selling an increasing number of electric vehicles. Instead, they’ve been the largest seller of electric vehicle credits to other car manufacturers manufacturing electric vehicles [0][1]. In my honest opinion, if Teslas did not invest their efforts into self-driving vehicles (per vehicle costs for LIDAR and other technology, R&D costs, headcount, etc) their base offering for the Model 3 could actually be competitively priced with similar offerings by other car manufacturers. In addition, there would not be any deaths from people putting their faith into FSD/Autopilot (6 deaths as of this writing) [2]. In all fairness, governments should only allow these EV credits to be used by the original car manufacturer that gets them, and they should only give one EV credit per electric vehicle produced. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ev-regulatory-credits-why-tesla-113115520.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ev-regulatory-credits-why-tes... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/715421/tesla-quarterly-vehicle-production/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/715421/tesla-quarterly-v... [2] https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/

soared 5y ago
No.. Tesla is saving the planet by forcing market trends to accelerate very quickly. Prior to Tesla the only real electric car with market share was a Prius. Now every car manufacturer is fully bought in to electric, thanks to Tesla.
- conception 5y ago
  This is amazingly true if you look at someone like VW’s annual report in 2011 and 2012... and the the S was released and then look at 2013.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > Prior to Tesla the only real electric car with market share was a Prius. Now every car manufacturer is fully bought in to electric You could say that about any first to market product. The first one who got serious market share must have caused everyone who followed, right? That's not the simplest explanation.
5y ago

blueyes 5y ago

This article has it backwards. Elon doesn’t start a company and then promote it with a world-saving narrative. He is trying to figure out how to preserve our species, and fearlessly building companies that will do that. The narrative is a derivative of this. If you want to look at how Elon is effective in promotion, look at his demos: a Tesla in space, a monkey playing mind pong. Those are works of art, advertising, and genius. If you want the earned media that Elon gets, here is the secret: * figure out how to save the species from first principles * be a good enough engineer to hire other very good ones * build what needs building over many years at the risk of bankrupting yourself. * come up with cool, highly visual and dramatic demos

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ptr2voidStar 5y ago
Chile, step away from the koolaid please.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Tell me, devotee, how does selling carbon offsets help save the species? https://insideevs.com/news/438345/tesla-428-million-carbon-credits-q2-2020/ https://insideevs.com/news/438345/tesla-428-million-carbon-c...

api 5y ago

This only captures half the equation. The skills of creation and the skills of promotion seldom occur in the same person. Most great promoters are con artists; most creators and inventors can’t sell. Elon Musk is a person with the promotional skills of a con artist but who actually knows how to do things. He can sell a vision and then also is a good enough engineer to make the right high level design choices and hire the right talent to have some chance of realizing it. He also seems to have the intent of shipping. A good percentage of master promoters are conscious con artists with no desire to actually create value. (Most of the rest are delusional unconscious con artists.) SpaceX has built the first economically reusable booster and is rapidly iterating on the first economically and fully reusable (including the second stage) heavy lift launch system. Tesla validated the market for EVs and is in many ways still the best EV maker. I strongly doubt the EV revolution would be happening so fast without Tesla. The competence part is not even mentioned here. The world is full of master promoters. The vast majority of them sell snake oil.

zedshawmotherfu 5y ago

Elon Musk, masterbater.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

TFA is basically right. In a The Boring Company presentation, one of the lead engineers started to answer a question technically, then Musk stepped in and built an inspiring context within which to frame the question. His role in his conpmanies, that is visible from the outside, is that of a promoter. He also put money up in the first place. And for all I know, he is personally a brilliant engineer - but there's no evidence of that visible. A Jobsian RDF. Jobs appreciated the technical aspects, inspired great work out of technical people - but didn't invent anything himself.

divbzero 5y ago

I think OP is broadly correct but doesn’t specify cause and effect. Elon is not a master promoter who takes his companies and crafts compelling narratives around them. Instead, he begins with compelling ideas that he considers worth his while and then crafts his companies around them. An adjacent concept you hear (from YC among others) is that big problems can actually be more likely to succeed than niche problems because they can more easily attract capital and talent.

vile 5y ago
>he begins with compelling ideas that he considers worth his while and then crafts his companies around them Elon bought Tesla.
- deleted 5y ago
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AzzieElbab 5y ago

So what? Elon Musk is a master promoter and sales grandmaster(according to Peter Thiel). What are the negative implications of these qualities?