8 ms·

Today’s CEOs are essentially carnival barkers (2021)

75 points by browserman 4y ago

paulpauper 4y ago
"get up at 4 am and be rich" "cut the daily latte habit, cancel your Netflix is the key to prosperity" Favoritism, luck (which includes having rich and generous parents), and connections plays such a huge, largely uncredited role for success, especially in businesses. Even Bill Gates, as smart as he is, benefited from lots of luck. The business racket is not much different from the pundit racket. It's the same insularity and being out of tough with reality.
- melony 4y ago
  Being the scion of a well-connected family in law and banking probably helped him the most.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Yes, well-known his mother put him where he needed to be.
    - staunch 4y ago
      No doubt Bill Gates had massive privilege (in the traditional sense the word). He came from an upper class family with particularly powerful connections. The same is true of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to a possibly lesser extent. But almost every person with even greater levels of privilege manages to do so much less than them. Which proves that one can't rightly attribute their great success to privilege alone. If one wants to be correct (and not just feel good) one has to admit that they did some amazing things based in large part on merit. And that's the rub. Merit alone is often not enough. Privilege alone is often not enough. And luck always plays a role in determining the magnitude of anyone's success. It takes extraordinary merit to be a John Carmack, Palmer Luckey, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs. People who had no privilege (in the traditional sense) and yet their merit (and luck) was so great that they did big things despite the fact. Many people use the privilege argument to try to dismiss what people like Elon Musk have done. As if they could have done just as well had they been privileged. Envy is clearly clouding their thinking and confusing them. It's totally understandable for people to feel this way but ultimately and obviously incorrect in most cases. A goal for modern societies should be to give everyone the kinds of opportunities that only the privileged historically had. But this won't prevent some people from doing much more with new opportunities than others. Merit will come to dominate outcomes instead of privilege. This will make the world much richer but won't solve everything.
      - melony 4y ago
        You are missing the network effects. Wealth compounds, capital grows, assets beget assets. If an ordinary person is lucky, he or she may win the literal lottery and may never have to work again. If a massively privileged person wins the proverbial lottery, he or she will have enough money to rival the GDP of nations and appear on Forbes magazine. The difference is hardly linear.
        mxkopy 4y ago
        I think this makes sense, but luck is a weird way to put it. I'm sure Bill Gates' family had plans to create generational wealth; at the very least they didn't ignore the possibility. The question of whether or not Bill is lucky because he wasn't responsible for starting those plans is the same question of if I'm more lucky to have been born in this body or in one 500 years into the future.
        wpasc 4y ago
        One of your examples I believe hurts your point: "Whether they win $500 million or $1 million, about 70 percent of lotto winners lose or spend all that money in five years or less." https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=Whether%20they%20win%20%24500%20million,taking%20the%20money%20and%20running https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=W....
        staunch 4y ago
        How do network effects apply here? Do you mean to refer to compounding growth? It's true that wealth begets wealth. Zuckerberg's kids are billionaires without having to do anything. Bill Gates would've been rich even if he had not started Microsoft, just through inheritance. But Steve Jobs led the creation of the most valuable company on the planet. There was no blocker to him being richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Larry Ellison is among the richest people on the planet. John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have generational wealth. Creating a massive company is what makes someone as rich as an Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They had more opportunity to create a massive company than a person from a lower class, but it's got nothing to do with network effects. The main driver of these people's massive fortunes is technology that scales globally.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Sounds like that actually happened, at least in one instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207040
- rektide 4y ago
  Notably Bill Gates's mom got to know the board of IBM & helped connect & land her son's contract for a disk operating system[1] at a time when the DoJ used to have active anti-trust deparments, and was hounding IBM for vertically owning the market. [1] https://www.biography.com/video/bill-gates-help-from-mom-2080036377 https://www.biography.com/video/bill-gates-help-from-mom-208...
- creaghpatr 4y ago
  Unpopular opinion: becoming the beneficiary of favoritism is a skill that can be cultivated.
  - zeruch 4y ago
    ...unpopular or unsavory in its implications?
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      I guess a lot depends of what are the grounds of favoritism. You know, sometimes just being good at doing stuff and having somebody who has first hand experience of you being good at something and then backs you for something else that they couldn't objectively know you'd be good (compared to tons of other candidates) but, you know, good old gut feeling "I know this person has it" ... well that's technically favoritism, yet it certainly feels quite different from favouring somebody for other reasons like being family or doing some kind of personal favours.
    - browningstreet 4y ago
      Take away the born-to connections, in orgs at the upper levels, there’s often a temperament that prevails. That may come from experience, confidence, connection, etc. could come from support (err, favoritism) or the golden contract.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    As true as that may be it also completely ignores the point that luck might include that an individual's parents are wealthy, as well as generous enough with their wealth to lend - or give - some to said individual. I think to your point: all the luck in the world won't fix a bad execution. It could still be commendable when a person who gets lucky is able to turn that luck into success.
    - creaghpatr 4y ago
      Yes, and I think the points about wealth and nepotism still hold true.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  I am up at 4am. At work by 5am most days. I'm not rich. In fact none of my many bosses are ever at the office before 8am.
- jjmorrison 4y ago
  The "credit" one deserves in business success isn't about having created a successful business. It's for having fought and survived the psychological trauma that one goes through to create a successful business. Not everyone will have the opportunity to slay a dragon. But in my opinion those who have the opportunity, and succeed, are deserving of recognition.
- bsder 4y ago
  > Even Bill Gates, as smart as he is, benefited from lots of luck. Luck ... read as rich parents. Bill Gates had parents who had connections with extremely important people in multi-national companies. Bill Gates had access to a computer as a child (via his expensive private academy) back when computers were ferociously expensive. Bill Gates had parents who could cut a check for $50,000 (in the 1970s) on the whim of their child. Bill Gates had the ability to drop out of Harvard knowing that he could always go back or to somewhere else because his parents could pay for it. The child of a steelworker, for example, has no ability to take any of these chances because if they fail there is no recovery. If you get into Harvard, you will go the full four years. Even if your business idea is great, your parents will not cut a $50K check as that would pay for your college (and a house and a car and college for your siblings and still have about $25K left over) at the time. Even including the adults around you, none of the people around you have access to those expensive "computers". And your parents certainly don't have access to the senior executives of US Steel, for example. The "leeway to fail" is a big deal in allowing you to roll the dice to make "luck".
McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago
In a world where people work less and less and participate in culture more and more it only makes sense that CEOs become essentially influencers, self-promoters and politicians. The stock price isn't seen as a KPI anymore, back in the days businessmen would make sure the company would sell quality products and services in the real world and then the stock price going up was just a mere consequence of that. Nowdays it's all about transforming the company into a mission, a political movement or an outright cult. The stock is seen as a something to sell and if you can do so without any product sold in the real world then it's so much better because as a CEO you managed to efficiently skip a very labor-intensive and capital-intensive process to get to what you really want: Market Cap glory. It used to be that corporate America had a certain arrogance of being superior to politics, religion and cults. People who resorted to that were singled out as desperate and it was the hint that their company was about to go under. Nowadays it's the opposite: CEOs and companies which don't shitpost, don't talk politics and don't try to recruit people in their cults are left behind. It's "fake it till' you make it" on an unprecedented level out there. And the worst offender is the one is worshipped the most on here, irony because game should recognize game. I think if we coldly examine the moves like in a chess game, he's doing all the right things to be successful in this environment. As I said when the population consumes culture at an unprecedented rate, you gotta become culture to be relevant. Hate the game, not the player.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  “Nowadays it's the opposite: CEOs who don't shitpost, don't talk politics and don't try to recruit people in their cults are left behind” Having recently read one of those “Top 2021 CEO Compensation” reports for my metro, I think they’re doing just fine.
- josh_carterPDX 4y ago
  I completely disagree. I think WeWork and Theranos are causing a ripple effect in all stages of VC right now. No one wants to be the investor of the next catastrophic failure. Investors are looking under the hood to ensure the company is real, has something that can scale, and that the team can legit do the work. Anything else is a dated view of how to grow a business. If a CEO wants to be an influencer then run the marketing department and let a real CEO run the company.
meany 4y ago
This is overly hyperbolic. The article references 3 high profile CEOs and states “Todays CEOs” are essentially carnival barkers. The majority of CEOs aren’t in tech and don’t have anywhere near this life or career trajectory. Also, if you read biography of Edison, Ford, Rockfeller, etc. Many of there behaviors will seem tame. For instance, Edison electrocuted an elephant to make Teslas AC current seem too dangerous compared the DC current he was pushing.
- jshier 4y ago
  Thomas Edison, the person, had nothing to do with the electrocution of Topsy. An employee of one of the various Edison electric companies, long since out of Edison's control, was the one who set that up.
- hhs 4y ago
  Please note, this piece seems to be a review of five books: “The cult of we”, “Power play”, “Bad blood”, “Amazon unbound”, and “An ugly truth”.
- esotericimpl 4y ago
  https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/musk-brain-chip-company-neuralink-admits-to-killing-8-monkeys-in-experiments/ https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/musk-brain-chip-company-neura...
  - echelon 4y ago
    Your comment was dead, but I vouched for it because I wanted to respond. Many research protocols that interface with the brains of animals call for euthanasia. Non-invasive study simply isn't adequate, and most of what we know about the brain comes from dissection and vivisection. In fact, much of animal-based biological research imparts permanent physical trauma on the animals in order to study some disease pathway. They may even be born (or cloned) with immune systems that give them cancer and certain death. Live animal protocols are designed to be as humane and ethical as possible. Lab researchers are taught how to painlessly euthanize rodents, for instance, and there is a lot of reporting and accountability involved. Biological research seeks to make our lives better and to put an end to debilitating diseases and disorders, including ultimately death itself. Another way to look at this is to consider other perspectives: (I mean this in a gentle way and please don't read if you're easily triggered by strong visceral imagery) lions are eating gazelle on the savannah while they are still alive, certain wasp larva eat their hosts from the inside out, orcas play with their food and torture it for hours, primates turn to cannibalism and infanticide, our ancestors had to eat animals and quite possibly cousins, and our sun will eventually boil all of our oceans before the universe itself goes dark. Nature is brutal when it comes to capturing and transforming energy, and physics even more so. These lab protocols, though they may seem macabre, are seeking to extend our knowledge and end suffering in a humane way. Edison's stunt was marketing. Elon's company is attempting to fix broken bodies.
jjmorrison 4y ago
This person has clearly never been CEO. There's like a hundred thousand CEOs in the US. Adam Neuman doesn't make a trend.
- fallingfrog 4y ago
  Have you been a CEO? Edit: come on guys, you're going to criticize the author for not having been a CEO? If you haven't been one either, what's the basis for the criticism? It makes no logical sense. Edit 2: Regardless of whether the author is right or wrong, "You can't judge because you were never a CEO" is a silly comment to make. Maybe, the author is wrong, but in any case it's not because he's never been a CEO. Almost nobody has been a CEO. Does that mean they are immune from criticism by the rest of us? I just really felt the need to point out the sloppy thinking there. I'm clearly right about this. It seems as though pointing out obvious logical mistakes is now justification for downvotes and taking personal offence?
  - pram 4y ago
    I guess the point is it's painting with a wide brush. Not every company needs a charlatan sociopath at the head. The CEO of a lawn care service is probably living a pretty mundane life.
    - fallingfrog 4y ago
      OK but I was clearly responding to the comment "The author has never been a CEO." The reasoning is faulty regardless of whether the conclusion is correct.
  - jjmorrison 4y ago
    Yes. And yes "You can't judge because you were never a CEO" is a silly comment to make. Take my point as a shorthand for "this person has neither experienced what that job is or bothered learning what it is".
flappyeagle 4y ago
[flagged]
logicalmonster 4y ago
Say around 150 years ago, this sort of article might have appeared in some prestigious newspaper of record. Without the technology to link rebuttals or comments to it, maybe 30+ years later when the history books of that original time period were being written and most of the influential people alive during that time period were gone, it would be trivially easy for some historian to interpret a really bad take like this as gospel, get it in front of school-children, and have it taught as truth. They could be well-intentioned, but still easily get things grossly wrong without the ability to see rebuttals to it. Opinions are always fair to have: everybody has them, and even bad ones. But you have to wonder how much of history is really just garbage takes like this. This to me is a large argument in favor of more sites having blog comments and not censoring opinions, even if 99% of the takes are usually garbage. When the journalists and historians of the future are writing about this time period, it would be horrific if the only sources available were equally garbage takes like this with no commentary available in rebuttal.
zeruch 4y ago
..as a general statement, I think that's being too kind.
passivate 4y ago
That's harsh. I don't think people should be taken to task for for taking advantage of the "privilege" they were born in. Why wouldn't you take advantage of college (and thus a decent well paying job) when someone born in poverty in a low-income country can barely make ends meet? Why wouldn't you take advantage of access to a mainframe when you were a kid because your dad worked for the university? Successful non-CEO people also benefit from luck and other factors. The world is fundamentally unfair. I don't think anyone owes anyone anything, but its my personal philosophy that its up to me to make sure I'm given a fair shake by others - to the extent that I can influence things.
- ngold 4y ago
  Most journalists have the same path. Rich parents that can afford good schools and more importantly, internships unpaid in cities like new york. So all your news is filtered mostly by the rich, hence the success of union busting in the minds of most Americans.
  - passivate 4y ago
    Sure, but you can say that about a lot of things. Students who have the means to pay for tutors have a higher chance of success at admissions. Athletes with access to expensive training programs/equipment/supplements/time-off to train versus poor people who need two jobs to survive. Like I said, the world is fundamentally unfair. What policy proposals do you think would help reduce the divide?

75 points by browserman 4y ago

"get up at 4 am and be rich" "cut the daily latte habit, cancel your Netflix is the key to prosperity" Favoritism, luck (which includes having rich and generous parents), and connections plays such a huge, largely uncredited role for success, especially in businesses. Even Bill Gates, as smart as he is, benefited from lots of luck. The business racket is not much different from the pundit racket. It's the same insularity and being out of tough with reality.

melony 4y ago
Being the scion of a well-connected family in law and banking probably helped him the most.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Yes, well-known his mother put him where he needed to be.
  - staunch 4y ago
    No doubt Bill Gates had massive privilege (in the traditional sense the word). He came from an upper class family with particularly powerful connections. The same is true of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to a possibly lesser extent. But almost every person with even greater levels of privilege manages to do so much less than them. Which proves that one can't rightly attribute their great success to privilege alone. If one wants to be correct (and not just feel good) one has to admit that they did some amazing things based in large part on merit. And that's the rub. Merit alone is often not enough. Privilege alone is often not enough. And luck always plays a role in determining the magnitude of anyone's success. It takes extraordinary merit to be a John Carmack, Palmer Luckey, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs. People who had no privilege (in the traditional sense) and yet their merit (and luck) was so great that they did big things despite the fact. Many people use the privilege argument to try to dismiss what people like Elon Musk have done. As if they could have done just as well had they been privileged. Envy is clearly clouding their thinking and confusing them. It's totally understandable for people to feel this way but ultimately and obviously incorrect in most cases. A goal for modern societies should be to give everyone the kinds of opportunities that only the privileged historically had. But this won't prevent some people from doing much more with new opportunities than others. Merit will come to dominate outcomes instead of privilege. This will make the world much richer but won't solve everything.
    - melony 4y ago
      You are missing the network effects. Wealth compounds, capital grows, assets beget assets. If an ordinary person is lucky, he or she may win the literal lottery and may never have to work again. If a massively privileged person wins the proverbial lottery, he or she will have enough money to rival the GDP of nations and appear on Forbes magazine. The difference is hardly linear.
      - mxkopy 4y ago
        I think this makes sense, but luck is a weird way to put it. I'm sure Bill Gates' family had plans to create generational wealth; at the very least they didn't ignore the possibility. The question of whether or not Bill is lucky because he wasn't responsible for starting those plans is the same question of if I'm more lucky to have been born in this body or in one 500 years into the future.
      - wpasc 4y ago
        One of your examples I believe hurts your point: "Whether they win $500 million or $1 million, about 70 percent of lotto winners lose or spend all that money in five years or less." https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=Whether%20they%20win%20%24500%20million,taking%20the%20money%20and%20running https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=W....
      - staunch 4y ago
        How do network effects apply here? Do you mean to refer to compounding growth? It's true that wealth begets wealth. Zuckerberg's kids are billionaires without having to do anything. Bill Gates would've been rich even if he had not started Microsoft, just through inheritance. But Steve Jobs led the creation of the most valuable company on the planet. There was no blocker to him being richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Larry Ellison is among the richest people on the planet. John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have generational wealth. Creating a massive company is what makes someone as rich as an Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They had more opportunity to create a massive company than a person from a lower class, but it's got nothing to do with network effects. The main driver of these people's massive fortunes is technology that scales globally.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Sounds like that actually happened, at least in one instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207040
rektide 4y ago
Notably Bill Gates's mom got to know the board of IBM & helped connect & land her son's contract for a disk operating system[1] at a time when the DoJ used to have active anti-trust deparments, and was hounding IBM for vertically owning the market. [1] https://www.biography.com/video/bill-gates-help-from-mom-2080036377 https://www.biography.com/video/bill-gates-help-from-mom-208...
creaghpatr 4y ago
Unpopular opinion: becoming the beneficiary of favoritism is a skill that can be cultivated.
- zeruch 4y ago
  ...unpopular or unsavory in its implications?
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    I guess a lot depends of what are the grounds of favoritism. You know, sometimes just being good at doing stuff and having somebody who has first hand experience of you being good at something and then backs you for something else that they couldn't objectively know you'd be good (compared to tons of other candidates) but, you know, good old gut feeling "I know this person has it" ... well that's technically favoritism, yet it certainly feels quite different from favouring somebody for other reasons like being family or doing some kind of personal favours.
  - browningstreet 4y ago
    Take away the born-to connections, in orgs at the upper levels, there’s often a temperament that prevails. That may come from experience, confidence, connection, etc. could come from support (err, favoritism) or the golden contract.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  As true as that may be it also completely ignores the point that luck might include that an individual's parents are wealthy, as well as generous enough with their wealth to lend - or give - some to said individual. I think to your point: all the luck in the world won't fix a bad execution. It could still be commendable when a person who gets lucky is able to turn that luck into success.
  - creaghpatr 4y ago
    Yes, and I think the points about wealth and nepotism still hold true.
sandworm101 4y ago
I am up at 4am. At work by 5am most days. I'm not rich. In fact none of my many bosses are ever at the office before 8am.
jjmorrison 4y ago
The "credit" one deserves in business success isn't about having created a successful business. It's for having fought and survived the psychological trauma that one goes through to create a successful business. Not everyone will have the opportunity to slay a dragon. But in my opinion those who have the opportunity, and succeed, are deserving of recognition.
bsder 4y ago
> Even Bill Gates, as smart as he is, benefited from lots of luck. Luck ... read as rich parents. Bill Gates had parents who had connections with extremely important people in multi-national companies. Bill Gates had access to a computer as a child (via his expensive private academy) back when computers were ferociously expensive. Bill Gates had parents who could cut a check for $50,000 (in the 1970s) on the whim of their child. Bill Gates had the ability to drop out of Harvard knowing that he could always go back or to somewhere else because his parents could pay for it. The child of a steelworker, for example, has no ability to take any of these chances because if they fail there is no recovery. If you get into Harvard, you will go the full four years. Even if your business idea is great, your parents will not cut a $50K check as that would pay for your college (and a house and a car and college for your siblings and still have about $25K left over) at the time. Even including the adults around you, none of the people around you have access to those expensive "computers". And your parents certainly don't have access to the senior executives of US Steel, for example. The "leeway to fail" is a big deal in allowing you to roll the dice to make "luck".

McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago

In a world where people work less and less and participate in culture more and more it only makes sense that CEOs become essentially influencers, self-promoters and politicians. The stock price isn't seen as a KPI anymore, back in the days businessmen would make sure the company would sell quality products and services in the real world and then the stock price going up was just a mere consequence of that. Nowdays it's all about transforming the company into a mission, a political movement or an outright cult. The stock is seen as a something to sell and if you can do so without any product sold in the real world then it's so much better because as a CEO you managed to efficiently skip a very labor-intensive and capital-intensive process to get to what you really want: Market Cap glory. It used to be that corporate America had a certain arrogance of being superior to politics, religion and cults. People who resorted to that were singled out as desperate and it was the hint that their company was about to go under. Nowadays it's the opposite: CEOs and companies which don't shitpost, don't talk politics and don't try to recruit people in their cults are left behind. It's "fake it till' you make it" on an unprecedented level out there. And the worst offender is the one is worshipped the most on here, irony because game should recognize game. I think if we coldly examine the moves like in a chess game, he's doing all the right things to be successful in this environment. As I said when the population consumes culture at an unprecedented rate, you gotta become culture to be relevant. Hate the game, not the player.

germinalphrase 4y ago
“Nowadays it's the opposite: CEOs who don't shitpost, don't talk politics and don't try to recruit people in their cults are left behind” Having recently read one of those “Top 2021 CEO Compensation” reports for my metro, I think they’re doing just fine.
josh_carterPDX 4y ago
I completely disagree. I think WeWork and Theranos are causing a ripple effect in all stages of VC right now. No one wants to be the investor of the next catastrophic failure. Investors are looking under the hood to ensure the company is real, has something that can scale, and that the team can legit do the work. Anything else is a dated view of how to grow a business. If a CEO wants to be an influencer then run the marketing department and let a real CEO run the company.

meany 4y ago

This is overly hyperbolic. The article references 3 high profile CEOs and states “Todays CEOs” are essentially carnival barkers. The majority of CEOs aren’t in tech and don’t have anywhere near this life or career trajectory. Also, if you read biography of Edison, Ford, Rockfeller, etc. Many of there behaviors will seem tame. For instance, Edison electrocuted an elephant to make Teslas AC current seem too dangerous compared the DC current he was pushing.

jshier 4y ago
Thomas Edison, the person, had nothing to do with the electrocution of Topsy. An employee of one of the various Edison electric companies, long since out of Edison's control, was the one who set that up.
hhs 4y ago
Please note, this piece seems to be a review of five books: “The cult of we”, “Power play”, “Bad blood”, “Amazon unbound”, and “An ugly truth”.
esotericimpl 4y ago
https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/musk-brain-chip-company-neuralink-admits-to-killing-8-monkeys-in-experiments/ https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/musk-brain-chip-company-neura...
- echelon 4y ago
  Your comment was dead, but I vouched for it because I wanted to respond. Many research protocols that interface with the brains of animals call for euthanasia. Non-invasive study simply isn't adequate, and most of what we know about the brain comes from dissection and vivisection. In fact, much of animal-based biological research imparts permanent physical trauma on the animals in order to study some disease pathway. They may even be born (or cloned) with immune systems that give them cancer and certain death. Live animal protocols are designed to be as humane and ethical as possible. Lab researchers are taught how to painlessly euthanize rodents, for instance, and there is a lot of reporting and accountability involved. Biological research seeks to make our lives better and to put an end to debilitating diseases and disorders, including ultimately death itself. Another way to look at this is to consider other perspectives: (I mean this in a gentle way and please don't read if you're easily triggered by strong visceral imagery) lions are eating gazelle on the savannah while they are still alive, certain wasp larva eat their hosts from the inside out, orcas play with their food and torture it for hours, primates turn to cannibalism and infanticide, our ancestors had to eat animals and quite possibly cousins, and our sun will eventually boil all of our oceans before the universe itself goes dark. Nature is brutal when it comes to capturing and transforming energy, and physics even more so. These lab protocols, though they may seem macabre, are seeking to extend our knowledge and end suffering in a humane way. Edison's stunt was marketing. Elon's company is attempting to fix broken bodies.

jjmorrison 4y ago

This person has clearly never been CEO. There's like a hundred thousand CEOs in the US. Adam Neuman doesn't make a trend.

fallingfrog 4y ago
Have you been a CEO? Edit: come on guys, you're going to criticize the author for not having been a CEO? If you haven't been one either, what's the basis for the criticism? It makes no logical sense. Edit 2: Regardless of whether the author is right or wrong, "You can't judge because you were never a CEO" is a silly comment to make. Maybe, the author is wrong, but in any case it's not because he's never been a CEO. Almost nobody has been a CEO. Does that mean they are immune from criticism by the rest of us? I just really felt the need to point out the sloppy thinking there. I'm clearly right about this. It seems as though pointing out obvious logical mistakes is now justification for downvotes and taking personal offence?
- pram 4y ago
  I guess the point is it's painting with a wide brush. Not every company needs a charlatan sociopath at the head. The CEO of a lawn care service is probably living a pretty mundane life.
  - fallingfrog 4y ago
    OK but I was clearly responding to the comment "The author has never been a CEO." The reasoning is faulty regardless of whether the conclusion is correct.
- jjmorrison 4y ago
  Yes. And yes "You can't judge because you were never a CEO" is a silly comment to make. Take my point as a shorthand for "this person has neither experienced what that job is or bothered learning what it is".

flappyeagle 4y ago

[flagged]

logicalmonster 4y ago

Say around 150 years ago, this sort of article might have appeared in some prestigious newspaper of record. Without the technology to link rebuttals or comments to it, maybe 30+ years later when the history books of that original time period were being written and most of the influential people alive during that time period were gone, it would be trivially easy for some historian to interpret a really bad take like this as gospel, get it in front of school-children, and have it taught as truth. They could be well-intentioned, but still easily get things grossly wrong without the ability to see rebuttals to it. Opinions are always fair to have: everybody has them, and even bad ones. But you have to wonder how much of history is really just garbage takes like this. This to me is a large argument in favor of more sites having blog comments and not censoring opinions, even if 99% of the takes are usually garbage. When the journalists and historians of the future are writing about this time period, it would be horrific if the only sources available were equally garbage takes like this with no commentary available in rebuttal.

zeruch 4y ago

..as a general statement, I think that's being too kind.

passivate 4y ago

That's harsh. I don't think people should be taken to task for for taking advantage of the "privilege" they were born in. Why wouldn't you take advantage of college (and thus a decent well paying job) when someone born in poverty in a low-income country can barely make ends meet? Why wouldn't you take advantage of access to a mainframe when you were a kid because your dad worked for the university? Successful non-CEO people also benefit from luck and other factors. The world is fundamentally unfair. I don't think anyone owes anyone anything, but its my personal philosophy that its up to me to make sure I'm given a fair shake by others - to the extent that I can influence things.

ngold 4y ago
Most journalists have the same path. Rich parents that can afford good schools and more importantly, internships unpaid in cities like new york. So all your news is filtered mostly by the rich, hence the success of union busting in the minds of most Americans.
- passivate 4y ago
  Sure, but you can say that about a lot of things. Students who have the means to pay for tutors have a higher chance of success at admissions. Athletes with access to expensive training programs/equipment/supplements/time-off to train versus poor people who need two jobs to survive. Like I said, the world is fundamentally unfair. What policy proposals do you think would help reduce the divide?