14 ms·

Or -- he's stupid.

by abxytg 4y ago

Or -- he's stupid.

appleflaxen 4y ago
He is bipolar, which I think is a more plausible answer. Can a person really become the richest person on earth being stupid? Maybe, but I think it strains credulity a bit.
- scarface_74 4y ago
  Seeing that by no reasonably objective measure should Tesla be worth what it is, maybe he is just a good marketer. I’m not saying that “marketing” alone made Tesla successful. I am saying that it made the stock valuable.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Tesla made almost the same profit as Toyota last Quarter. While having a much, much better position in terms of debts and company value. And while the company is still growing at incredibly rates each quarter. All this while major competitors are shrinking. The Tesla stock really only went up when they had proved they had cracked mass production of the Model 3 and were making an electric vehicle at industry leading margins. One can argue Tesla stock is still to high, but its certainty not 'objective'. Good annalists disagree and you can reach almost any valuation depending on your future assumptions.
poszlem 4y ago
What's stupid is people thinking that someone who successfully rules over some of the most influential companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where in reality they just mean "I don't like them". [1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some applies to blood-thirsty CEOs.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  Agreed. I wouldn’t want to work for Twitter w/o remote work, but I don’t think he’s stupid.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  The smartest man in the world can still make mistakes.
  - epgui 4y ago
    Yes, but does that mean the smartest man in the world is stupid?
    - hirvi74 4y ago
      It's subjective anyway, so depending on the context, then perhaps yes.
  - RavingGoat 4y ago
    He comes across as average to slightly above average IQ so he's not stupid. Definitely not a genius though. Just a really, really great self promoter who likes to take credit for other people's work.
    - bsaul 4y ago
      I have about the same opinion of him, but there’s still something i don’t understand : to build something like tesla or even more space x, you need to attract extremely talented indivuals. How do they keep working for musk if he’s a total fraud ?
      - palata 4y ago
        They are paid to work on what they see as an extremely cool project. They feel special because they work there, and for that I can totally imagine that they are fine having that guy as the CEO.
danans 4y ago
I think the stupidity was in the non-contingent offer to purchase it. Now he's trying to pay for that stupidity. Maybe he's doing that stupidly too, but only time will tell.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  This. He let emotion laden political nonsense lead him into making an extraordinarily bad deal. OK. Fine. Not what prudent businessmen would have done, but now he's where he is with the Twitter deal. So at this point it's all about leading from where you are, and sometimes where you are is in a place where there are zero good options. Every option is terrible, and probably won't work to extricate you from your situation. But here's the thing, you have to take one of the options because you cannot stay where you are. The one thing you know is that where you are leads to certain death. Go left. Go right. But you can't stay here. That's the situation Elon is in.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I'm not convinced Elon has actually considered all his options. He didn't have the company for any time at all before he start trying desperately to massively change things. Personally I feel like taking a minute or two to figure out the state of things before slashing and burning would be helpful for choosing the right path instead of making moves that get reverted the same day they are implemented.
    - jamdamu 4y ago
      If it only took 1 day to reverse a decision then he probably made the right choice in optimizing for fast, if sometimes wrong, decisions.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        He got rid of the grey checkmark in ~2 hours[1]. I'm curious what metrics one could gather in that time for that decision. https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1590382566921543680 https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1590382566921543680
gw98 4y ago
I suspect this is the real problem. Stupid people with money can look like they are clever because the layer of people immediately underneath them actually wields the clue stick. Stupid people with no money look stupid because they can't afford the layer of clever people underneath them. Clever people are either abstracting the liability via stupid person in the layer above them or don't need that kind of shit in their lives and are just getting on with designing and building products with the other clever people around them. Edit: I'd just like to note that I am recognising the work that Tesla and SpaceX engineers and staff do which the PR baboon up the top somehow gets credit for every time.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Yep, it's a whole class of equating X thing with being "virtuous" (or similar). Your height, your sex, your weight, your hairline, your income/savings, etc. It's uncomfortable to talk about or admit but people regularly take controllable (or uncontrollable) traits and assign value to them even though it doesn't have any actual bearing. "Oh that billionaire did something that seems odd/crazy to me? Well he must know something I don't else how would be be a billionaire!" - Yeah, that's not how things work. What's the line? "Past performance is not indicative of future results", paraphrasing it: "Past advantages are not indicative of future results". Very, very few "self-made million/billionaires" are anything of the sort. I'm not saying their lives have never been hard or that they have never worked hard at something but I think you'd find that, at scale, most people would succeed if put into that position (from birth, which is why this is near-impossible to prove).
  - gw98 4y ago
    Indeed. My father said it this way, rather well: there are many more failed assholes than successful assholes. Do not attribute success to being an asshole. Incidentally he was a failed asshole. All his staff deserted him and watched his business burn to the ground. Perhaps ironically a big fan of Musk too.
    - selcuka 4y ago
      > Indeed. My father said it this way, rather well: there are many more failed assholes than successful assholes. Do not attribute success to being an asshole. I don't know. There are also many more failed nice people than successful nice people. We don't have hard stats, so the success/failure ratio for assholes could actually be higher.
whydoyoucare 4y ago
US typically uses pretty strong adjectives. Like my kid keeps on "hating" everything, and there are no shades of gray. Maybe that's how you are using "stupid"? Haha.
- rchaud 4y ago
  $44bn all-cash at a meme-y $54.20....for Twitter, the least profitable of the major social media networks. just think, the board would have accepted $50 per share, but he went with something that included 420, costing himself an additional 8% on the purchase price. Stupid sounds about right.
- rrsmtz 4y ago
  Alternatively, discussing Elon Musk makes people act like children. Something to think about...
- abxytg 4y ago
  Yea definitely a similar usage to hating, being a hater.
hrbf 4y ago
At this point this is the only explanation that makes any sense. Elon Musk may very well be a moron who has been incredibly lucky until now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- willnonya 4y ago
  Available evidence suggest otherwise.
no-dr-onboard 4y ago
Heinlen's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is easily explained by stupidity
- jimsmart 4y ago
  That's Hanlon's razor.
foxylad 4y ago
He's not stupid in the domains he understands. I think his problem is impulse control, and he's impulsively bought into a business that he knows little about. I do think hard times are coming for Musk. As well as burning billions on Twitter, Tesla is no longer the vangard of the EV market, Boring seems to be a dead end, and I haven't heard anything about the solar enterprise for years. Space X seems to be still innovating, and I hope Musk isn't completely cleaned out so his Mars aspirations still bear fruit.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
memish 4y ago
It's intellectual dishonest to the extreme to say he's stupid. If you really can't see the evidence in front of your eyes, here's John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so." Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory: "Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years." Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut: "What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
- sixothree 4y ago
  Have you listened to him speak for any length of time? It's painful.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - atq2119 4y ago
    That take frankly says more about you than about Elon Musk. Yes, his manner of speaking was unusual for somebody in his position, but it's perfectly compatible with great technical depth.
rdtwo 4y ago
I think he just had bipolar or something and does crazy shit
dang 4y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We've had to ask you this kind of thing before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552827.

Or -- he's stupid.

by abxytg 4y ago

Or -- he's stupid.

He is bipolar, which I think is a more plausible answer. Can a person really become the richest person on earth being stupid? Maybe, but I think it strains credulity a bit.

scarface_74 4y ago
Seeing that by no reasonably objective measure should Tesla be worth what it is, maybe he is just a good marketer. I’m not saying that “marketing” alone made Tesla successful. I am saying that it made the stock valuable.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Tesla made almost the same profit as Toyota last Quarter. While having a much, much better position in terms of debts and company value. And while the company is still growing at incredibly rates each quarter. All this while major competitors are shrinking. The Tesla stock really only went up when they had proved they had cracked mass production of the Model 3 and were making an electric vehicle at industry leading margins. One can argue Tesla stock is still to high, but its certainty not 'objective'. Good annalists disagree and you can reach almost any valuation depending on your future assumptions.

poszlem 4y ago

What's stupid is people thinking that someone who successfully rules over some of the most influential companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where in reality they just mean "I don't like them". [1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some applies to blood-thirsty CEOs.

Ancapistani 4y ago
Agreed. I wouldn’t want to work for Twitter w/o remote work, but I don’t think he’s stupid.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
The smartest man in the world can still make mistakes.
- epgui 4y ago
  Yes, but does that mean the smartest man in the world is stupid?
  - hirvi74 4y ago
    It's subjective anyway, so depending on the context, then perhaps yes.
- RavingGoat 4y ago
  He comes across as average to slightly above average IQ so he's not stupid. Definitely not a genius though. Just a really, really great self promoter who likes to take credit for other people's work.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    I have about the same opinion of him, but there’s still something i don’t understand : to build something like tesla or even more space x, you need to attract extremely talented indivuals. How do they keep working for musk if he’s a total fraud ?
    - palata 4y ago
      They are paid to work on what they see as an extremely cool project. They feel special because they work there, and for that I can totally imagine that they are fine having that guy as the CEO.

danans 4y ago

I think the stupidity was in the non-contingent offer to purchase it. Now he's trying to pay for that stupidity. Maybe he's doing that stupidly too, but only time will tell.

bilbo0s 4y ago
This. He let emotion laden political nonsense lead him into making an extraordinarily bad deal. OK. Fine. Not what prudent businessmen would have done, but now he's where he is with the Twitter deal. So at this point it's all about leading from where you are, and sometimes where you are is in a place where there are zero good options. Every option is terrible, and probably won't work to extricate you from your situation. But here's the thing, you have to take one of the options because you cannot stay where you are. The one thing you know is that where you are leads to certain death. Go left. Go right. But you can't stay here. That's the situation Elon is in.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I'm not convinced Elon has actually considered all his options. He didn't have the company for any time at all before he start trying desperately to massively change things. Personally I feel like taking a minute or two to figure out the state of things before slashing and burning would be helpful for choosing the right path instead of making moves that get reverted the same day they are implemented.
  - jamdamu 4y ago
    If it only took 1 day to reverse a decision then he probably made the right choice in optimizing for fast, if sometimes wrong, decisions.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      He got rid of the grey checkmark in ~2 hours[1]. I'm curious what metrics one could gather in that time for that decision. https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1590382566921543680 https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1590382566921543680

gw98 4y ago

I suspect this is the real problem. Stupid people with money can look like they are clever because the layer of people immediately underneath them actually wields the clue stick. Stupid people with no money look stupid because they can't afford the layer of clever people underneath them. Clever people are either abstracting the liability via stupid person in the layer above them or don't need that kind of shit in their lives and are just getting on with designing and building products with the other clever people around them. Edit: I'd just like to note that I am recognising the work that Tesla and SpaceX engineers and staff do which the PR baboon up the top somehow gets credit for every time.

joshstrange 4y ago
Yep, it's a whole class of equating X thing with being "virtuous" (or similar). Your height, your sex, your weight, your hairline, your income/savings, etc. It's uncomfortable to talk about or admit but people regularly take controllable (or uncontrollable) traits and assign value to them even though it doesn't have any actual bearing. "Oh that billionaire did something that seems odd/crazy to me? Well he must know something I don't else how would be be a billionaire!" - Yeah, that's not how things work. What's the line? "Past performance is not indicative of future results", paraphrasing it: "Past advantages are not indicative of future results". Very, very few "self-made million/billionaires" are anything of the sort. I'm not saying their lives have never been hard or that they have never worked hard at something but I think you'd find that, at scale, most people would succeed if put into that position (from birth, which is why this is near-impossible to prove).
- gw98 4y ago
  Indeed. My father said it this way, rather well: there are many more failed assholes than successful assholes. Do not attribute success to being an asshole. Incidentally he was a failed asshole. All his staff deserted him and watched his business burn to the ground. Perhaps ironically a big fan of Musk too.
  - selcuka 4y ago
    > Indeed. My father said it this way, rather well: there are many more failed assholes than successful assholes. Do not attribute success to being an asshole. I don't know. There are also many more failed nice people than successful nice people. We don't have hard stats, so the success/failure ratio for assholes could actually be higher.

whydoyoucare 4y ago

US typically uses pretty strong adjectives. Like my kid keeps on "hating" everything, and there are no shades of gray. Maybe that's how you are using "stupid"? Haha.

rchaud 4y ago
$44bn all-cash at a meme-y $54.20....for Twitter, the least profitable of the major social media networks. just think, the board would have accepted $50 per share, but he went with something that included 420, costing himself an additional 8% on the purchase price. Stupid sounds about right.
rrsmtz 4y ago
Alternatively, discussing Elon Musk makes people act like children. Something to think about...
abxytg 4y ago
Yea definitely a similar usage to hating, being a hater.

hrbf 4y ago

At this point this is the only explanation that makes any sense. Elon Musk may very well be a moron who has been incredibly lucky until now.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
willnonya 4y ago
Available evidence suggest otherwise.

no-dr-onboard 4y ago

Heinlen's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is easily explained by stupidity

jimsmart 4y ago
That's Hanlon's razor.

foxylad 4y ago

He's not stupid in the domains he understands. I think his problem is impulse control, and he's impulsively bought into a business that he knows little about. I do think hard times are coming for Musk. As well as burning billions on Twitter, Tesla is no longer the vangard of the EV market, Boring seems to be a dead end, and I haven't heard anything about the solar enterprise for years. Space X seems to be still innovating, and I hope Musk isn't completely cleaned out so his Mars aspirations still bear fruit.

dr-detroit 4y ago

memish 4y ago

It's intellectual dishonest to the extreme to say he's stupid. If you really can't see the evidence in front of your eyes, here's John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so." Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory: "Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years." Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut: "What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."

sixothree 4y ago
Have you listened to him speak for any length of time? It's painful.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- atq2119 4y ago
  That take frankly says more about you than about Elon Musk. Yes, his manner of speaking was unusual for somebody in his position, but it's perfectly compatible with great technical depth.

rdtwo 4y ago

I think he just had bipolar or something and does crazy shit

dang 4y ago

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We've had to ask you this kind of thing before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552827.