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>Elon Musk provides another example. Today, Tesla is worth more than $1 trillion. Without his will and personality, Tesla probably wouldn’t exist. Yes it would

by pydry 5y ago

>Elon Musk provides another example. Today, Tesla is worth more than $1 trillion. Without his will and personality, Tesla probably wouldn’t exist. Yes it would. Mark Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard founded Tesla. They were later forced out by Elon. They were arguably quite poorly compensated for their part in starting this company. This speaks to the fundamental problem with this theory - it's all very well saying that Elon is worth his money because Tesla would be nothing without him, but what if it actually would have been wildly successful without him and he mostly rode the wave with his $6 million series A investment? Of course, you cant prove what "would" have happened, you only know what actually did, so your valur is measured by whomever tells the most compelling story.

martindbp 5y ago
You can't prove it, but Musk is not a one-hit wonder. He's transformed the space industry by sheer force of will (as a part time founder & CEO), as Tesla has done for EVs, so it's quite reasonable to assign the success of Tesla to him.
- pydry 5y ago
  His perception management skills are top notch and he works as an effective conduit for getting capital to engineers. The rest is...meh. In SpaceX's case they picked up on rocketry research where NASA left off because its budget was squeezed.
  - martindbp 5y ago
    Getting funding, finding the most talented engineers, deciding what to build and motivating people are the high-level skills needed from a founder/CEO. I don't see any argument here against his importance to all companies that he's been involved in. Nobody's claiming he's building rockets all by himself.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    NASA is a massively ineffective bureaucratic organisation. Even with an “unsqueezed” budget it still wouldn’t have achieved what SpaceX has achieved.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  In this case it makes sense but in general you have to also ask about the environment. Was money cheap in that era? Was there a favourable media environment for that type of business? Was politics favourable? Etc.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    To be fair, Elon took over as CEO in 2008. Hardly a favourable environment for risky endeavours or capitalists in general.

by pydry 5y ago

martindbp 5y ago

You can't prove it, but Musk is not a one-hit wonder. He's transformed the space industry by sheer force of will (as a part time founder & CEO), as Tesla has done for EVs, so it's quite reasonable to assign the success of Tesla to him.

pydry 5y ago
His perception management skills are top notch and he works as an effective conduit for getting capital to engineers. The rest is...meh. In SpaceX's case they picked up on rocketry research where NASA left off because its budget was squeezed.
- martindbp 5y ago
  Getting funding, finding the most talented engineers, deciding what to build and motivating people are the high-level skills needed from a founder/CEO. I don't see any argument here against his importance to all companies that he's been involved in. Nobody's claiming he's building rockets all by himself.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  NASA is a massively ineffective bureaucratic organisation. Even with an “unsqueezed” budget it still wouldn’t have achieved what SpaceX has achieved.
lordnacho 5y ago
In this case it makes sense but in general you have to also ask about the environment. Was money cheap in that era? Was there a favourable media environment for that type of business? Was politics favourable? Etc.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  To be fair, Elon took over as CEO in 2008. Hardly a favourable environment for risky endeavours or capitalists in general.