3 ms·
Perhaps he's good at getting the right people to run the stuff he owns?
by wsgeorge 5y ago
Perhaps he's good at getting the right people to run the stuff he owns?
- KerrAvon 5y agoTesla doesn't seem that well run?
- xeromal 5y agoTesla is the first U.S. auto company to go public since Ford did so in 1956. Is that not good enough? Seems well run enough to pull that off.
- adoxyz 5y agoBy what metric? Love it or hate it, Tesla is a huge success story.
- hooande 5y agothere are tons of known problems with their hardware and engineering. plus lawsuits from employees, etc. stock price covers a lot of things up, but "well run" can still be evaluated
- fastball 5y agoTesla was started less than 20 years ago and sold nearly 1 million cars last year.
- Slartie 5y agoThat's a definitive 'yes'. He is extremely good at finding great and very qualified people, placing them in the right positions and getting 110% out of them.
- Certhas 5y agoTo me this is the fascinating thing about Musk that really sets him apart: He has succeeded at building several companies that make real stuff and tackle hard engineering challenges. And it's not just having money to throw at the problem, we know that because Bezos also wanted a Rocket company and threw tons of Cash at it. Hard to say from the outside what it is exactly that allows him to do that. It makes sense that its hard to say what it is, because if it was easy to describe, chances are it wouldn't be what sets him apart (the other option being that it's hard to emulate).
- Graffur 5y agoThere's a short list of people who can start a rocket company and want to: Bezos, Branson and Musk. I think it is fair to say that starting a rocket company is hard. The small sample size of people trying doesn't really let us learn anything from the success or failures.
- kjkjadksj 5y agoThe fact that there are so few examples doesn’t tell me its hard, it just tells me its unprofitable. Look at these examples, primarily bankrolled by the megalomaniac billionaire themselves vs the value investors who dollar cost average into lockheed martin et al.
- steveoscaro 4y agoMust wasn't a billionaire when he started his rocket company. He had in the ballpark of 100 million. There are thousands and thousands of people that could start a rocket company. And he did it when no private entity had ever even reached orbit with a liquid fuel rocket.