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What's wrong with Elon Musk? He deserves it! He single handedly brought forward the EV revolution by at least 1 decade, maybe more. He improved the car emission

What's wrong with Elon Musk? He deserves it! He single handedly brought forward the EV revolution by at least 1 decade, maybe more. He improved the car emissions more than governments worldwide were not able to do for decades before him. EU made it significantly worse by betting on the wrong horse (diesel) and then pushing very hard on it and giving cancer to its citizens. Bill Gates put a computer in every home Steve Jobs put a smartphone in every hand (for better or worse) Bezos revolutionized online shopping AND cloud computing. Why wouldn't these people be billionaires? Governments could never achieve this kind of progress, they are too bureaucratic, corrupt and incompetent. Take away the billionaires' money now, and you will stop the next big innovation.

gaze 5y ago
Do you really think Elon Musk provides orders of magnitude more value than the engineers who actually built the damn thing? His main contribution was the capital.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Of course a leader provides tens or hundreds of times the value of a follower, what an absurd question. But that doesn't mean it's reasonable that he collects 10000 times more of the value. There is so functional difference between having 1 or 10 billion, except the amount of undue influence you can have on politics.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    When the form of wealth is stock, the functional difference between having 1 or XX billion is corporate control of the company.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      If your point is that it's important for founders to keep control, then sure, but you can have different classes of shares. Founders can stay in control of their companies without making tens of billions.
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        In the US, I guess this is true, although non-voting/low voting shares are illegal in many parts of the world.
  - OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
    >Of course a leader provides tens or hundreds of times the value of a follower, what an absurd question. Why is this of course? If it weren't for the followers the leader would have nothing except hot air. The real value is in the followers, it's just distributed over larger numbers. Maybe I'm missing something, but someone actually has to do the work and it's not normally the "leaders"... There are a lot of small businesses getting a really hard education in this right now.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      Because followers are interchangeable, but a leader is someone that wills something into being from nothing. It's incredibly demanding, most people can't even start a hot dog stand from scratch.
  - gaze 5y ago
    Why is it an absurd question? You haven't justified this "tens or hundreds" figure at all, just called it absurd.
lumost 5y ago
All of them started with money and connections, do you think that these things would not exist without these individuals? or perhaps they just happened to be there first in a winner takes all market. In at least Bill Gates case he wasn't first, just better connected (having a Vice President at IBM for an uncle certainly helps!)
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  >do you think that these things would not exist without these individuals? In the case of Elon, no. The technology foundation for SpaceX had been around for decades, with no traction. I'm less familiar with Tesla and EVs, but several people seem to think Tesla advanced the EV industry 5-10 years relative to where it would be in a world without Musk
- flavius29663 5y ago
  None of them "invented" the thing that made them rich, but that thing didn't become a worldwide sensation until they did it! Smartphones were built by Nokia and Microsoft in the 2000s. Computers were thing way before MS, but still it needed Bill Gates' genius to make them ubiquitous. EVs were along for 100+ years...Modern EVs were just ridiculous: ugly and small, nobody wanted to buy them. Musk made the EVs sexy and desirable, and mainstream now. There were many many people with money and connections, yet only some changed the world and became billionaires in the process, don't you think that deserves the recognition? I personally don't like either of the people I talked about, but you must give credit where credit is due.
  - lumost 5y ago
    Credit? Sure, they can take 100x the value of the median engineer who worked on the project. Smartphones failed for a bunch of reasons in the 2000s, recognizing the convergence of touch screens, and mobile broadband was pretty smart. It likely would have happened within 6-12 months of when it did, if an engineer/pm failed to convince Steve jobs that the iPhone was a good idea.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
UncleMeat 5y ago
Singlehandedly? Surely a lot of the people employed at Tesla worked too. And even if he did do something great, plenty of us don't think it is right for people to own that much wealth. Would Musk have really stopped if he knew that he couldn't possess more than a billion dollars? Is "I want to be a megabillionaire" really the only thing pushing innovation?
- flavius29663 5y ago
  But it's not about engineering at all! This is not about who invented what, but about who drives a tech to new highs by inspiring engineers, investors and customers at the same time to create momentum. Tesla is not an engineering marvel, it's not about that. All the tech already existed, the batteries were Panasonic, "self drive" was researched way before them by Mercedes, BMW etc. It's an interesting idea to limit people's wealth a 1 billion. Would you include stock in there? I assume most of these billionaires don't own more than 1 billion in cash anyway. If you cap them at 1 billion, I assume it would be by the government forcibly confiscating their money? That means they will not have funds to further invest in their dreams. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook all really took off way after exceeding 1 billion for their founders. Would you have preferred to not have these large companies succeed just for the purpose to achieve a slightly less unequal world?(that is also significantly poorer too). The bull market of the past decade was mainly driven by the large tech companies, without them you would have had a stagnating US economy.
Razengan 5y ago
> He single handedly ....How does this level of 4chanism even fly on HN..

gaze 5y ago

Do you really think Elon Musk provides orders of magnitude more value than the engineers who actually built the damn thing? His main contribution was the capital.

Grustaf 5y ago
Of course a leader provides tens or hundreds of times the value of a follower, what an absurd question. But that doesn't mean it's reasonable that he collects 10000 times more of the value. There is so functional difference between having 1 or 10 billion, except the amount of undue influence you can have on politics.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  When the form of wealth is stock, the functional difference between having 1 or XX billion is corporate control of the company.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    If your point is that it's important for founders to keep control, then sure, but you can have different classes of shares. Founders can stay in control of their companies without making tens of billions.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      In the US, I guess this is true, although non-voting/low voting shares are illegal in many parts of the world.
- OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
  >Of course a leader provides tens or hundreds of times the value of a follower, what an absurd question. Why is this of course? If it weren't for the followers the leader would have nothing except hot air. The real value is in the followers, it's just distributed over larger numbers. Maybe I'm missing something, but someone actually has to do the work and it's not normally the "leaders"... There are a lot of small businesses getting a really hard education in this right now.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Because followers are interchangeable, but a leader is someone that wills something into being from nothing. It's incredibly demanding, most people can't even start a hot dog stand from scratch.
- gaze 5y ago
  Why is it an absurd question? You haven't justified this "tens or hundreds" figure at all, just called it absurd.

lumost 5y ago

All of them started with money and connections, do you think that these things would not exist without these individuals? or perhaps they just happened to be there first in a winner takes all market. In at least Bill Gates case he wasn't first, just better connected (having a Vice President at IBM for an uncle certainly helps!)

s1artibartfast 5y ago
>do you think that these things would not exist without these individuals? In the case of Elon, no. The technology foundation for SpaceX had been around for decades, with no traction. I'm less familiar with Tesla and EVs, but several people seem to think Tesla advanced the EV industry 5-10 years relative to where it would be in a world without Musk
flavius29663 5y ago
None of them "invented" the thing that made them rich, but that thing didn't become a worldwide sensation until they did it! Smartphones were built by Nokia and Microsoft in the 2000s. Computers were thing way before MS, but still it needed Bill Gates' genius to make them ubiquitous. EVs were along for 100+ years...Modern EVs were just ridiculous: ugly and small, nobody wanted to buy them. Musk made the EVs sexy and desirable, and mainstream now. There were many many people with money and connections, yet only some changed the world and became billionaires in the process, don't you think that deserves the recognition? I personally don't like either of the people I talked about, but you must give credit where credit is due.
- lumost 5y ago
  Credit? Sure, they can take 100x the value of the median engineer who worked on the project. Smartphones failed for a bunch of reasons in the 2000s, recognizing the convergence of touch screens, and mobile broadband was pretty smart. It likely would have happened within 6-12 months of when it did, if an engineer/pm failed to convince Steve jobs that the iPhone was a good idea.
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

UncleMeat 5y ago

Singlehandedly? Surely a lot of the people employed at Tesla worked too. And even if he did do something great, plenty of us don't think it is right for people to own that much wealth. Would Musk have really stopped if he knew that he couldn't possess more than a billion dollars? Is "I want to be a megabillionaire" really the only thing pushing innovation?

flavius29663 5y ago
But it's not about engineering at all! This is not about who invented what, but about who drives a tech to new highs by inspiring engineers, investors and customers at the same time to create momentum. Tesla is not an engineering marvel, it's not about that. All the tech already existed, the batteries were Panasonic, "self drive" was researched way before them by Mercedes, BMW etc. It's an interesting idea to limit people's wealth a 1 billion. Would you include stock in there? I assume most of these billionaires don't own more than 1 billion in cash anyway. If you cap them at 1 billion, I assume it would be by the government forcibly confiscating their money? That means they will not have funds to further invest in their dreams. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook all really took off way after exceeding 1 billion for their founders. Would you have preferred to not have these large companies succeed just for the purpose to achieve a slightly less unequal world?(that is also significantly poorer too). The bull market of the past decade was mainly driven by the large tech companies, without them you would have had a stagnating US economy.

Razengan 5y ago

> He single handedly ....How does this level of 4chanism even fly on HN..