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> Investing in PayPal.. C'mon Forbes he made the Business. He made the business sink....so much that the board had to fire him and install Thiel instead, who d

by GDC7 5y ago

> Investing in PayPal.. C'mon Forbes he made the Business. He made the business sink....so much that the board had to fire him and install Thiel instead, who did the only sensible thing: clear the deck, secure the hatches, give it a paintjob and offload the sinking ship to a bigger fool. Musk entire carrer up to this point has been about offloading overpriced and overhyped equity to bigger fools. Other guys at the top of the Forbes list such as Gates, Bezos, Larry&Sergey, Zuckerberg...you can't turn your head without seeing the logo of the company they founded. With Musk, he's a specialist of techno-utopianism and promising about his company becoming as ubiquitous as the other FAAMGs, but it's always 5 years away. Guy is 50, has been doing this for 30 years and I never used a product or a service of a company he was at the helm of, and I am not exactly a subsaharan farmer. The closest was when I was paired with an Uber driver who had a Tesla S but he deleted the trip. It's all about promises, hype and financial engineering to pump the stock so that he can take loans to finance his lifestyle. 20 years from now a whole bunch of people will look so stupid for believing this guy, it's like one of those MLM scams on a global basis.

zibzab 5y ago
Musks idea of leadership can be explained in one sentence: "If I fire a fixed percentage of the workforce every year, everyone will be on their toes and forced to deliver" Which is why people have collapsed and died when working for this man.
- thelastgallon 5y ago
  Whats even better is to have a lot of people pre-fired, always on their toes, forced to deliver and no benefits. This is what all companies do with contracting. Most work is done by contractors, usually 10 - 20x of FTE workers. Or gig work.
rkk3 5y ago
> He made the business sink....so much that the board had to fire him and install Thiel instead, who did the only sensible thing: clear the deck, secure the hatches, give it a paintjob and offload the sinking ship to a bigger fool. Yeah the people who bought PayPal for 1B at EBay must be kicking themselves over that acquisition it is only worth 240B now.
- GDC7 5y ago
  > Yeah the people who bought PayPal for 1B at EBay must be kicking themselves over that acquisition it is only worth 240B now. What does the current market cap have to do with Musk? He has not been at the helm of PayPal since 2000 This is like saying Henry Ford deserves credit for the Mustang Mach-e
  - rkk3 5y ago
    You said the business was a "sinking ship" offloaded to a "bigger fool" when its grown 240x since then and is one of the most successful acquisitions ever...
    - GDC7 5y ago
      A bigger fool in terms of acquisition cost can be great at execution. The 2 are not mutually exclusive. Ebay was a bigger fool as it overpayed for PayPal but their execution was brilliant in making PayPal a platform that is actually used by people, and not just vaporware future hope and dreams, like each and every Musk company.
      - rkk3 5y ago
        Are Google & FB also "fools" for buying Youtube & Instagram or are they outside your fanboy distortion field?
        GDC7 5y ago
        Google overpaid for Youtube, for sure. Facebook could have negotiated harder for Instagram but 600M or 1B doesn't make a huge difference for a giant like them. Facebook also paid 20B for Whatsapp which is nuts. The thing with Musk is that it's his modus operandi, meaning divorcing his net worth from the real and tangible impact of the company he is at the helm of. He has done it again and again, when he perceives that he has a bigger fool ready he offloads the overpriced equity and bails. He'd do it again , only problem Tesla is so big in terms of market cap that the bigger fool at this point can only be the Federal Government. Some people in here excuse him because it's exactly what they want to do too. Creating a startup, hype it up and sell it to a Forbes500 company who'd overpay for it and would then kill it off
thelastgallon 5y ago
> Guy is 50, has been doing this for 30 years and I never used a product or a service of a company he was at the helm of, and I am not exactly a subsaharan farmer. At least 47% (3.6 billion people) don't use Internet [5]. Half the population on earth have never heard of Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. I personally don't buy anything from Microsoft (they make keyboards?), NVidia, Berkshire Hathaway, TSMC. Never bought CISCO switches or Oracle databases. Never went to Disney, don't drink Coke or Pepsi, never bought anything from Toyota. Don't use FB. Looking at the 50 largest companies[0], at least half of those are companies that I've never had any kind of interaction with. Are all these companies MLMs/scams? > It's all about promises, hype and financial engineering to pump the stock so that he can take loans to finance his lifestyle. Guy mostly works all the time (80+ hours), lives in a 50K prefab house (doesn't own a home, very few possessions) [1 - 3]. Why so much resentment against a guy who has broken the oil industry's stranglehold on electric cars? [4] Should he emulate the frugal lifestyle of CEOs who aren't hated as much? Perhaps like Larry Ellison? >20 years from now a whole bunch of people will look so stupid for believing this guy, it's like one of those MLM scams on a global basis. Yep! Tesla is not a real product. SpaceX rockets are a fiction. Starlink doesn't exist. All these just materialized from thin air. [5] https://stlpartners.com/research/understanding-why-half-the-people-in-the-world-dont-have-access-to-the-internet/ https://stlpartners.com/research/understanding-why-half-the-... [0] https://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm https://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap... [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 [2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1050811017221963776 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1050811017221963776 [3] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/elon-musk-lives-prefab-tiny-house-texas https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/elon-musk-lives-pr... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/08/11/how-did-tesla-win-against-the-oil-lobby/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/08/11/how-did-tesla-... From vaporizing gas to replacing it with batteries, the Achilles heel of the Oil industry has always been a drop in demand. That is why, for decades, it encouraged big 5 Lt, V8 engines that practically spew wasted gasoline from the exhaust. And that is why Big Oil kept buying out any advancement fiercely - especially in the area of batteries. They bought patents and companies left and right. Bought and controlled. Bought and buried. As a result, electric cars in 2004 had the same range as electric cars did in… the 1890’s. (edit:formatting)
WastingMyTime89 5y ago
I am going to reply to this obvious flamebait despite knowing I should know better because why not. > Guy is 50, has been doing this for 30 years and I never used a product or a service of a company he was at the helm of, and I am not exactly a subsaharan farmer. Last time I checked, Musk is the CEO of a rocket company so not a business I expect a normal consumer to be involved with. They are sending rockets at a previously unseen speed by the way. He is also the CEO of Tesla and I don’t know where you live but these cars are now everywhere in Europe. A friend of mine has one. There is one parked in my street. It’s not really a niche product. I have little sympathy for the man and dislike the way he acts as much as anyone else but to pretend his businesses are only promises and invisible you would have to seriously distord reality.
- GDC7 5y ago
  > There is one parked in my street OMG! ONE! In a well off European street. You might want to check how many BMWs and Benz and Land Rovers are also in your street. If you are a car person you'll get this: Teslas are as niche as Alfa Romeos. Moving on to really ubiquitous companies...as 20th century stuff that we take for granted such as old Pentium Desktops are first installed in remote places in Subsaharan Africa...what's the first logo these people see? Microsoft Windows XP, what's the second? the Google doodle , what's the third? Facebook's blue F. These are deserving trillion dollar companies, they fit the definition of "being everywhere", not Tesla.
  - thelastgallon 5y ago
    > OMG! ONE! In a well off European street. You might want to check how many BMWs and Benz and Land Rovers are also in your street. I live in a condo complex in US, I see several Teslas parked on the street. I don't see a single BMW, Benz or Land Rover. Teslas are almost always parked in garages (for charging). So what you see parked on the street is a small fraction of actual footprint. > Moving on to really ubiquitous companies...as 20th century stuff that we take for granted such as old Pentium Desktops are first installed in remote places in Subsaharan Africa...what's the first logo these people see? Microsoft Windows XP, what's the second? the Google doodle , what's the third? Facebook's blue F. 20th century (1901 - 2000) - facebook was founded in 2004. According to you, FB is ubiquitous in subsaharan Africa even before its founded! - Even more interesting is the fact that as of 2016, 47% of people in the world not on the internet. If we are talking about subsaharan Africa, that may be 80%! But they use facebook. Using what? IP over Avian Carriers? - The first iPod was released in Oct 2001, but it was widely adopted in subsaharan africa before it was launched! I'm sure they are using credit cards to buy the music, dancing to the tunes on their commutes to work. - Windows XP, GA Oct 2001. Widely adopted by subsaharan Africa. All of them have PCs and extensive experience in cybercrime, stole Windows source code before its released, fixed all the bugs (those darned BSODs!), bought a billion PCs, turned them on (while having no electricity) and are the first billion adopters of Windows XP - Google founded in 1998, immediately widely adopted by a billion subsaharan africans? You fit the textbook definition of a troll.

by GDC7 5y ago

zibzab 5y ago

Musks idea of leadership can be explained in one sentence: "If I fire a fixed percentage of the workforce every year, everyone will be on their toes and forced to deliver" Which is why people have collapsed and died when working for this man.

thelastgallon 5y ago
Whats even better is to have a lot of people pre-fired, always on their toes, forced to deliver and no benefits. This is what all companies do with contracting. Most work is done by contractors, usually 10 - 20x of FTE workers. Or gig work.

rkk3 5y ago

> He made the business sink....so much that the board had to fire him and install Thiel instead, who did the only sensible thing: clear the deck, secure the hatches, give it a paintjob and offload the sinking ship to a bigger fool. Yeah the people who bought PayPal for 1B at EBay must be kicking themselves over that acquisition it is only worth 240B now.

GDC7 5y ago
> Yeah the people who bought PayPal for 1B at EBay must be kicking themselves over that acquisition it is only worth 240B now. What does the current market cap have to do with Musk? He has not been at the helm of PayPal since 2000 This is like saying Henry Ford deserves credit for the Mustang Mach-e
- rkk3 5y ago
  You said the business was a "sinking ship" offloaded to a "bigger fool" when its grown 240x since then and is one of the most successful acquisitions ever...
  - GDC7 5y ago
    A bigger fool in terms of acquisition cost can be great at execution. The 2 are not mutually exclusive. Ebay was a bigger fool as it overpayed for PayPal but their execution was brilliant in making PayPal a platform that is actually used by people, and not just vaporware future hope and dreams, like each and every Musk company.
    - rkk3 5y ago
      Are Google & FB also "fools" for buying Youtube & Instagram or are they outside your fanboy distortion field?
      - GDC7 5y ago
        Google overpaid for Youtube, for sure. Facebook could have negotiated harder for Instagram but 600M or 1B doesn't make a huge difference for a giant like them. Facebook also paid 20B for Whatsapp which is nuts. The thing with Musk is that it's his modus operandi, meaning divorcing his net worth from the real and tangible impact of the company he is at the helm of. He has done it again and again, when he perceives that he has a bigger fool ready he offloads the overpriced equity and bails. He'd do it again , only problem Tesla is so big in terms of market cap that the bigger fool at this point can only be the Federal Government. Some people in here excuse him because it's exactly what they want to do too. Creating a startup, hype it up and sell it to a Forbes500 company who'd overpay for it and would then kill it off

thelastgallon 5y ago

> Guy is 50, has been doing this for 30 years and I never used a product or a service of a company he was at the helm of, and I am not exactly a subsaharan farmer. At least 47% (3.6 billion people) don't use Internet [5]. Half the population on earth have never heard of Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. I personally don't buy anything from Microsoft (they make keyboards?), NVidia, Berkshire Hathaway, TSMC. Never bought CISCO switches or Oracle databases. Never went to Disney, don't drink Coke or Pepsi, never bought anything from Toyota. Don't use FB. Looking at the 50 largest companies[0], at least half of those are companies that I've never had any kind of interaction with. Are all these companies MLMs/scams? > It's all about promises, hype and financial engineering to pump the stock so that he can take loans to finance his lifestyle. Guy mostly works all the time (80+ hours), lives in a 50K prefab house (doesn't own a home, very few possessions) [1 - 3]. Why so much resentment against a guy who has broken the oil industry's stranglehold on electric cars? [4] Should he emulate the frugal lifestyle of CEOs who aren't hated as much? Perhaps like Larry Ellison? >20 years from now a whole bunch of people will look so stupid for believing this guy, it's like one of those MLM scams on a global basis. Yep! Tesla is not a real product. SpaceX rockets are a fiction. Starlink doesn't exist. All these just materialized from thin air. [5] https://stlpartners.com/research/understanding-why-half-the-people-in-the-world-dont-have-access-to-the-internet/ https://stlpartners.com/research/understanding-why-half-the-... [0] https://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm https://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap... [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 [2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1050811017221963776 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1050811017221963776 [3] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/elon-musk-lives-prefab-tiny-house-texas https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/elon-musk-lives-pr... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/08/11/how-did-tesla-win-against-the-oil-lobby/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/08/11/how-did-tesla-... From vaporizing gas to replacing it with batteries, the Achilles heel of the Oil industry has always been a drop in demand. That is why, for decades, it encouraged big 5 Lt, V8 engines that practically spew wasted gasoline from the exhaust. And that is why Big Oil kept buying out any advancement fiercely - especially in the area of batteries. They bought patents and companies left and right. Bought and controlled. Bought and buried. As a result, electric cars in 2004 had the same range as electric cars did in… the 1890’s. (edit:formatting)

WastingMyTime89 5y ago

I am going to reply to this obvious flamebait despite knowing I should know better because why not. > Guy is 50, has been doing this for 30 years and I never used a product or a service of a company he was at the helm of, and I am not exactly a subsaharan farmer. Last time I checked, Musk is the CEO of a rocket company so not a business I expect a normal consumer to be involved with. They are sending rockets at a previously unseen speed by the way. He is also the CEO of Tesla and I don’t know where you live but these cars are now everywhere in Europe. A friend of mine has one. There is one parked in my street. It’s not really a niche product. I have little sympathy for the man and dislike the way he acts as much as anyone else but to pretend his businesses are only promises and invisible you would have to seriously distord reality.

GDC7 5y ago
> There is one parked in my street OMG! ONE! In a well off European street. You might want to check how many BMWs and Benz and Land Rovers are also in your street. If you are a car person you'll get this: Teslas are as niche as Alfa Romeos. Moving on to really ubiquitous companies...as 20th century stuff that we take for granted such as old Pentium Desktops are first installed in remote places in Subsaharan Africa...what's the first logo these people see? Microsoft Windows XP, what's the second? the Google doodle , what's the third? Facebook's blue F. These are deserving trillion dollar companies, they fit the definition of "being everywhere", not Tesla.
- thelastgallon 5y ago
  > OMG! ONE! In a well off European street. You might want to check how many BMWs and Benz and Land Rovers are also in your street. I live in a condo complex in US, I see several Teslas parked on the street. I don't see a single BMW, Benz or Land Rover. Teslas are almost always parked in garages (for charging). So what you see parked on the street is a small fraction of actual footprint. > Moving on to really ubiquitous companies...as 20th century stuff that we take for granted such as old Pentium Desktops are first installed in remote places in Subsaharan Africa...what's the first logo these people see? Microsoft Windows XP, what's the second? the Google doodle , what's the third? Facebook's blue F. 20th century (1901 - 2000) - facebook was founded in 2004. According to you, FB is ubiquitous in subsaharan Africa even before its founded! - Even more interesting is the fact that as of 2016, 47% of people in the world not on the internet. If we are talking about subsaharan Africa, that may be 80%! But they use facebook. Using what? IP over Avian Carriers? - The first iPod was released in Oct 2001, but it was widely adopted in subsaharan africa before it was launched! I'm sure they are using credit cards to buy the music, dancing to the tunes on their commutes to work. - Windows XP, GA Oct 2001. Widely adopted by subsaharan Africa. All of them have PCs and extensive experience in cybercrime, stole Windows source code before its released, fixed all the bugs (those darned BSODs!), bought a billion PCs, turned them on (while having no electricity) and are the first billion adopters of Windows XP - Google founded in 1998, immediately widely adopted by a billion subsaharan africans? You fit the textbook definition of a troll.