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Jack Ma truly is clueless in general. There was a talk involving him and Elon Musk and it somehow was Elon coming out as the eloquent one in that conversation.

andy_ppp 4y ago
I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.
- midasuni 4y ago
  Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels. However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    I seriously doubt his engineering abilities, but I'll ignore that. One thing he's demonstrated from the beginning is a stark undersupply of emotional intelligence. There are noises that come out of his mouth that my 15yr old would roll her eyes at for being too self-centered and immature.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      There's a fine line between lack of emotional intelligence and simply not caring to placate others. The two are not the same. It is like calling someone an idiot because they won't do what you want and ignoring what they want. You have to admit that it may not be a priority for Elon to maintain his reputation with you in your 15 year old
      - flangola7 4y ago
        There is a fine line, and he is clearly on the side of low emotional intelligence to anyone who does not also have low emotional intelligence
        s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Based on what exactly? Are you sure you aren't confusing EQ with agreeableness, they are orthogonal. Hitler had extremely high EQ, but low agreeability
        flangola7 4y ago
        The fact that you have any doubt about this says a lot about your own intelligence. I'm not interested in chatting with the Weird Nerd defending Elon Musk from Valid Criticism.
  - pedrosorio 4y ago
    > business accuumin I am guessing this couldn't have been just luck either.
  - philipov 4y ago
    People thought he had some engineering skills, until he took over Twitter and started talking about all the idiotic engineering decisions he was making.
    - robocat 4y ago
      Musk could simultaneously be a numpty at Twitter and a superb engineer at SpaceX. You imply that skills are context-free black or white - that is a terrible way to think about people or the world IMHO. And you can’t ignore changes over time either.
      - WalterSear 4y ago
        Not the kind of engineering numpty he's shown himself to be. All engineering absolutely requires humility for situations outside the realm of your expertise. But, the fact that he so clearly doesn't know when he is out of his depth in the first place is the real tell.
      - philipov 4y ago
        Like management, engineering is a discipline of means divorced from ends. There are certain vital skills that are shared amongst engineers regardless of their particular domain, and those are the skills most important for an engineering manager to have. A computer engineer without those skills is merely an amateur physicist. That's enough knowledge to light things on fire. A software engineer without those skills is merely a programmer. Ask a quant with no engineering background to put their ad-hoc scripts into production one day and let's see how that goes once other people start depending on it. Musk might know some science, maybe he's written some scripts in his day, but none of that makes him an engineer. He's proven he doesn't know the first thing about keeping a lit boiler from exploding.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >"less interested in the tech and more in the politics" Once you have x dollars and own companies government is aware of it comes as no surprise
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame. He's a narcissist. People used to worship him - and given just how hard Tesla kicked the butts of the ICE car industry or how SpaceX just completely obliterated Boeing/ULA, rightfully. But let's be honest, both are mainstream now and don't get as much attention as they once did... and then, his wife leaves him for Chelsea Manning and one of his children comes out as trans and sticks the finger to him. A bad enough combination of events for normal people to handle (getting dumped by a partner is one of the chief causes that sends people into depression and other mental health disaster loops), but for a narcissist with no real support structure to fall back on and already on the edge? No surprise he blames everyone but himself and allies with those that are against those whom he feels "wronged" by: the far-right. Note, this doesn't excuse any of his actions. He needs to come out of this rabbit hole either by himself or, when he finally hits rock bottom and commits something that he can't just buy himself out of prison, by the government.
  - munificent 4y ago
    > he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. The odds of any given entrepreneur getting lucky several times in a row is very small. Given a large enough entrepreneurs, the odds of one of them getting lucky several times in a row gets very large. We just don't see all the ones who tried and failed, or succeeded once or twice and fizzled out. I don't doubt that Musk has some skills and appropriate personality traits as well, but luck is likely the dominating factor.
    - gordian-mind 4y ago
      That statement is incredibly disconnected from reality. Are you suggesting that rockets fly through luck?
      - munificent 4y ago
        Musk is not a rocket. There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. Whether that company would be successfully putting rockets into space with someone else at the helm is unknown, but I strongly suspect that his own contribution is not as great as would seem.
        gordian-mind 4y ago
        > There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. What an hilarious amount of bad faith! What drives you to resent him that much? Envy? It's okay: he's achieved a lot, but maybe you can too if you work at it.
        munificent 4y ago
        I think Musk is a bad person, but I don't carry any particular resentment or anger towards him. However, I think it's an unhelpful mindset for others to believe that Musk is some sort of model for entrepreneurial success.
        4y ago
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    As an external observer, I don't square the two different conclusions in your first statement: "equate wealth with ability", "everybody is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire". There is a far stronger underpinning to the American attitude to wealth: It's not "equate wealth with ability", it's more "equate wealth with virtue and morality" - that the owners of wealth "did something right" generally has nothing to do with ability. Even the founders of Hewlett-Packard aren't remembered for their technological advances but for the "HP Way", a marker of virtue rather than business acumen. The absolute veneration of "hard work" as a marker of success over connections/which hoo-ha you accidentally fell out of is rarely raised, despite their being overwhelming evidence that to be successfull in the US, you have to be born on 3rd base. When it comes down to it, it should be absolutely no surprise that these billionaires with feet of clay rarely live up to the image that is built for them by the fanboys. Musk's family had a history of bizarre, he has simply not fallen far from the tree.
- FormerBandmate 4y ago
  The Twitter purchase really just shows how rich and apathetic Elon Musk is. A Ferrari is a difficult to impossible purchase for almost all of us, but rappers buy them for no reason and then trash them all the time. Twitter is that on a much larger scale, and Musk is treating it the same way because he doesn’t care. You don’t build the first successful auto startup in 70 years and revitalize the space industry by being a moron. Everything Elon Musk has ever done with Twitter (including the 2018 SEC debacle) has been the dumbest shit possible, however
  - andy_ppp 4y ago
    Both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt multiple times, we could just as easily be talking about an Elon Musk who had every advantage (government contracts, huge tax breaks and a fantastically wealthy family) and still failed. Maybe this is a case of fortune favoring the bold and I admire his perseverance/grit/marketing ability a lot. I've never heard him explain anything technical in any interview he's ever given and instead just starts behaving autistic if he's asked any detail about things. When he does stray into technical subjects like Twitter code he seems to talk nonsense that any engineer who has worked at a Twitter scale company would laugh at.
    - cmh89 4y ago
      He's really good at selling an image, which is what pushed Tesla ahead of other car makers. His whole 'Tony Stark' image is basically cat nip to tech bros and made Tesla cool and desirable. I think you are spot on. There are dozens of 'Elon Musks' out there we don't notice or talk about because they didn't win. Someone was going to win in the space, the government was heavily incentivizing electric car purchases. Musk was the best salesmen and here we are. That doesn't make him a tactical genius.
    - djmips 4y ago
      I don't believe that Musk's family was fantastically wealthy.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Don't know why you went to rappers. When Musk first got rich, he bought a $million car and immediately destroyed it, uninsured, nearly killing himself and Peter Thiel. Imagine if he succeeded.
bakuninsbart 4y ago
I don't think very highly of Jack Ma, but eloquence for non-native speakers should be judged very differently, especially for someone coming from a language very far away linguistically.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Exactly, Ma was kinda struggling to get a train of thought across linguistically and half the time when Musk interrupted him he was rather making fun of some poor choice of words and being like "lol whatever" than trying to actually engage in a conversation. And I guess now with the Twitter shitshow Musk doesn't exactly look like a genius either.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    Pretty much impossible to defend Elon's Twitter tenure. Can't think of a single thing he did that made that company more valuable.
    - gordian-mind 4y ago
      What about laying off 75% of its workforce and open sourcing the twitter algorithm?
      - kranke155 4y ago
        Is the company more valuable ?
        gordian-mind 4y ago
        Well it increases revenue, so certainly. The open sourcing increases its ethicality; I guess you could say it's not direct value. In terms of pure market cap, which I'm not sure how relevant it is, it seems that the current valuation (41 billion) is higher than when he offered to buy it (34 billion in April 2022).

andy_ppp 4y ago

I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.

midasuni 4y ago
Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels. However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame.
- flangola7 4y ago
  I seriously doubt his engineering abilities, but I'll ignore that. One thing he's demonstrated from the beginning is a stark undersupply of emotional intelligence. There are noises that come out of his mouth that my 15yr old would roll her eyes at for being too self-centered and immature.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    There's a fine line between lack of emotional intelligence and simply not caring to placate others. The two are not the same. It is like calling someone an idiot because they won't do what you want and ignoring what they want. You have to admit that it may not be a priority for Elon to maintain his reputation with you in your 15 year old
    - flangola7 4y ago
      There is a fine line, and he is clearly on the side of low emotional intelligence to anyone who does not also have low emotional intelligence
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Based on what exactly? Are you sure you aren't confusing EQ with agreeableness, they are orthogonal. Hitler had extremely high EQ, but low agreeability
        flangola7 4y ago
        The fact that you have any doubt about this says a lot about your own intelligence. I'm not interested in chatting with the Weird Nerd defending Elon Musk from Valid Criticism.
- pedrosorio 4y ago
  > business accuumin I am guessing this couldn't have been just luck either.
- philipov 4y ago
  People thought he had some engineering skills, until he took over Twitter and started talking about all the idiotic engineering decisions he was making.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Musk could simultaneously be a numpty at Twitter and a superb engineer at SpaceX. You imply that skills are context-free black or white - that is a terrible way to think about people or the world IMHO. And you can’t ignore changes over time either.
    - WalterSear 4y ago
      Not the kind of engineering numpty he's shown himself to be. All engineering absolutely requires humility for situations outside the realm of your expertise. But, the fact that he so clearly doesn't know when he is out of his depth in the first place is the real tell.
    - philipov 4y ago
      Like management, engineering is a discipline of means divorced from ends. There are certain vital skills that are shared amongst engineers regardless of their particular domain, and those are the skills most important for an engineering manager to have. A computer engineer without those skills is merely an amateur physicist. That's enough knowledge to light things on fire. A software engineer without those skills is merely a programmer. Ask a quant with no engineering background to put their ad-hoc scripts into production one day and let's see how that goes once other people start depending on it. Musk might know some science, maybe he's written some scripts in his day, but none of that makes him an engineer. He's proven he doesn't know the first thing about keeping a lit boiler from exploding.
- FpUser 4y ago
  >"less interested in the tech and more in the politics" Once you have x dollars and own companies government is aware of it comes as no surprise
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame. He's a narcissist. People used to worship him - and given just how hard Tesla kicked the butts of the ICE car industry or how SpaceX just completely obliterated Boeing/ULA, rightfully. But let's be honest, both are mainstream now and don't get as much attention as they once did... and then, his wife leaves him for Chelsea Manning and one of his children comes out as trans and sticks the finger to him. A bad enough combination of events for normal people to handle (getting dumped by a partner is one of the chief causes that sends people into depression and other mental health disaster loops), but for a narcissist with no real support structure to fall back on and already on the edge? No surprise he blames everyone but himself and allies with those that are against those whom he feels "wronged" by: the far-right. Note, this doesn't excuse any of his actions. He needs to come out of this rabbit hole either by himself or, when he finally hits rock bottom and commits something that he can't just buy himself out of prison, by the government.
- munificent 4y ago
  > he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. The odds of any given entrepreneur getting lucky several times in a row is very small. Given a large enough entrepreneurs, the odds of one of them getting lucky several times in a row gets very large. We just don't see all the ones who tried and failed, or succeeded once or twice and fizzled out. I don't doubt that Musk has some skills and appropriate personality traits as well, but luck is likely the dominating factor.
  - gordian-mind 4y ago
    That statement is incredibly disconnected from reality. Are you suggesting that rockets fly through luck?
    - munificent 4y ago
      Musk is not a rocket. There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. Whether that company would be successfully putting rockets into space with someone else at the helm is unknown, but I strongly suspect that his own contribution is not as great as would seem.
      - gordian-mind 4y ago
        > There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. What an hilarious amount of bad faith! What drives you to resent him that much? Envy? It's okay: he's achieved a lot, but maybe you can too if you work at it.
        munificent 4y ago
        I think Musk is a bad person, but I don't carry any particular resentment or anger towards him. However, I think it's an unhelpful mindset for others to believe that Musk is some sort of model for entrepreneurial success.
        4y ago
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  As an external observer, I don't square the two different conclusions in your first statement: "equate wealth with ability", "everybody is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire". There is a far stronger underpinning to the American attitude to wealth: It's not "equate wealth with ability", it's more "equate wealth with virtue and morality" - that the owners of wealth "did something right" generally has nothing to do with ability. Even the founders of Hewlett-Packard aren't remembered for their technological advances but for the "HP Way", a marker of virtue rather than business acumen. The absolute veneration of "hard work" as a marker of success over connections/which hoo-ha you accidentally fell out of is rarely raised, despite their being overwhelming evidence that to be successfull in the US, you have to be born on 3rd base. When it comes down to it, it should be absolutely no surprise that these billionaires with feet of clay rarely live up to the image that is built for them by the fanboys. Musk's family had a history of bizarre, he has simply not fallen far from the tree.
FormerBandmate 4y ago
The Twitter purchase really just shows how rich and apathetic Elon Musk is. A Ferrari is a difficult to impossible purchase for almost all of us, but rappers buy them for no reason and then trash them all the time. Twitter is that on a much larger scale, and Musk is treating it the same way because he doesn’t care. You don’t build the first successful auto startup in 70 years and revitalize the space industry by being a moron. Everything Elon Musk has ever done with Twitter (including the 2018 SEC debacle) has been the dumbest shit possible, however
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  Both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt multiple times, we could just as easily be talking about an Elon Musk who had every advantage (government contracts, huge tax breaks and a fantastically wealthy family) and still failed. Maybe this is a case of fortune favoring the bold and I admire his perseverance/grit/marketing ability a lot. I've never heard him explain anything technical in any interview he's ever given and instead just starts behaving autistic if he's asked any detail about things. When he does stray into technical subjects like Twitter code he seems to talk nonsense that any engineer who has worked at a Twitter scale company would laugh at.
  - cmh89 4y ago
    He's really good at selling an image, which is what pushed Tesla ahead of other car makers. His whole 'Tony Stark' image is basically cat nip to tech bros and made Tesla cool and desirable. I think you are spot on. There are dozens of 'Elon Musks' out there we don't notice or talk about because they didn't win. Someone was going to win in the space, the government was heavily incentivizing electric car purchases. Musk was the best salesmen and here we are. That doesn't make him a tactical genius.
  - djmips 4y ago
    I don't believe that Musk's family was fantastically wealthy.
- lupire 4y ago
  Don't know why you went to rappers. When Musk first got rich, he bought a $million car and immediately destroyed it, uninsured, nearly killing himself and Peter Thiel. Imagine if he succeeded.

bakuninsbart 4y ago

I don't think very highly of Jack Ma, but eloquence for non-native speakers should be judged very differently, especially for someone coming from a language very far away linguistically.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
Exactly, Ma was kinda struggling to get a train of thought across linguistically and half the time when Musk interrupted him he was rather making fun of some poor choice of words and being like "lol whatever" than trying to actually engage in a conversation. And I guess now with the Twitter shitshow Musk doesn't exactly look like a genius either.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Pretty much impossible to defend Elon's Twitter tenure. Can't think of a single thing he did that made that company more valuable.
  - gordian-mind 4y ago
    What about laying off 75% of its workforce and open sourcing the twitter algorithm?
    - kranke155 4y ago
      Is the company more valuable ?
      - gordian-mind 4y ago
        Well it increases revenue, so certainly. The open sourcing increases its ethicality; I guess you could say it's not direct value. In terms of pure market cap, which I'm not sure how relevant it is, it seems that the current valuation (41 billion) is higher than when he offered to buy it (34 billion in April 2022).