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This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies. They are different sk

by atonse 3y ago

This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies. They are different skill sets. It’s worked remarkably well to have Gwynne Shotwell run things at SpaceX (she’s an awesome COO and also an aerospace engineer). I have wished for years that he do that at Tesla. Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product. Update: Updated Gwynne Shotwell's title to COO, not CEO (and fixed spelling of her name).

greenyoda 3y ago
> Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product. And apparently, Twitter has millions of dollars in bills that it hasn't been paying. See this other interesting article, posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253
- megaman821 3y ago
  Not paying vendors and landlords as a negotiation tactic seems slimy. I assume they will eventually sue Twitter and win, but is there any punitive damages? If not, I am guessing Twitter will be rewarded for not paying by getting better terms on existing contracts.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    They would at least get interest. But yes there isn't much in the way of consequences for being an asshole regarding AP.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    I don't think it's uncommon. Big companies have always played dumb games with billing and contracting unless you can nail them to the wall with an ironclad "you pay us X on Y day or you pay us an extra Z per day" contract.
  - failuser 3y ago
    Big companies have a lot of leverage. Vendors don’t want to antagonize them in hope of getting paid eventually and due to a risk of retaliation. Going to court might be a suicide by legal expenses.
- concordDance 3y ago
  Tenporarily not paying vendors is pretty standard for cash strapped companies. (I've worked for some, we got away with a lot)
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Large companies not paying their bills because they can get away with it is such bullshit. Trump famously did this with small business contractors at some of his casinos. The reason it's such bullshit is that it's essentially hostage taking: "Why yes, I know we owe you $10 million and that's what we agreed to, but we're just not going to pay. You can sue us, but we have top notch lawyers that can drag it out for a long time, or else you can settle with us for $7 million right now." I think there should be an equivalent of "small claims court" for cases like these where flat out missed payments are handled quickly and without the need for expensive lawyers, e.g. "Here's our contract, there is no disagreement that we delivered, so freeze their bank accounts if they don't pay us immediately."
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Even if you have top notch lawyers, what exactly can they do, when there is a clear rent contract and no payment?
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Drag it out? Force you to have to hire a lawyer to get paid? Point being, I don't think a top notch lawyer will win, but given the cost of litigation (plus the time value of money), expensive corporate lawyers can force small vendors to settle with a sizable discount.
      - hutzlibu 3y ago
        Yeah, but how can you drag it out, if the case is that clear? And wouldn't have the loosing party pay everything in such a case, making it a very expensive case for them?
- lazide 3y ago
  For a random Joe Schmoe, retaliation via collections harassment, eviction, and credit score problems is a real worry. For a multibillion dollar company, especially one trying to STOP using things it’s currently obligated to use, the math works out different. After all, being evicted actually helps them, as it breaks the lease and they don’t need to keep paying. Especially when there is a huge commercial real estate crunch looming in many of these markets. Plenty of delay and hassle tackles can be used to get some leverage when the letter of the contract/law isn’t in your favor. Scummy, but often effective.
sebzim4500 3y ago
Shotwell is COO, Musk is CEO
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  And she runs the show at SpaceX. Musk, CEO and “Chief Engineer”, mainly just fucks things up like causing DOD investigations into his pot use (a disagreeable government contracting clause due to the War of Drugs), and now most famously overruling the real engineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad, and promoting an FAA and environmental investigation. See also: Overruling Tesla engineers and ordering the removal of radars, directly leading to multiple preventable accidents. He’s fuck up. Rich. But still a fuck up. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173?s=20 https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-radars-cameras/ https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engi...
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Just so much nonsense. > And she runs the show at SpaceX. No she doesn't, and she wouldn't agree that this is the case. Only anti-Musk haters claim this. > mainly just fucks things up Funny thing to say about the most successful space company in history. Shotwell wasn't even COO for the initial success of the company. > causing DOD investigations into his pot use A literally 100% inconsequential thing that changed absolutely nothing and had no effect what so ever.You are really grasping at straws with this one. > most famously overruling the real epromoting an FAA and environmental investigationngineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad He has the finial decision on all things at SpaceX and had them since Falcon 1 days. He didn't 'overrule' his engineers, at SpaceX decisions are usually made in big meeting with input from everybody and Musk makes the final call. Doing the launchpad upgrades before the first launch would have meant further delay of first launch, thus delaying getting flight data. Now they can evaluate the flight and fix the pad at the same time. Also the launch pad isn't destroyed, its slightly damaged. It was the wrong decision in hindsight but it isn't that relevant going forward. He takes responsibility for things he gets wrong. He also decided not to have slosh baffles on Falcon 1. That led to its failure. He made other mistakes, if you want you can go threw the history of SpaceX and point all of them out. He also insisted on Deep Cryo fuel that lead to Amos-6 but it also helped SpaceX in the long run. And he takes ownership for these mistakes. When you make a lot of important technical choices, you get some of them wrong. But its downright sad of you do cherry pick a few things SpaceX got wrong when SpaceX threw-out its history, with Musk as the final decision maker has clearly gotten things right far more often then they have gotten things wrong. Again, SpaceX is literally the most successful space company ever and it isn't really close. Musk has also been the longest serving CEO of pretty much any space company in the industry. > promoting an FAA and environmental investigation The amount of times the Musk haters people have claimed that some federal agency will destroy SpaceX because of 'evil Elon' is ridiculous. They knew the risk and some non toxic concrete wont change anything. If we actually go by factual evidence, companies that Musk was in charge off. How successful are these companies. The result is clearly, Musk is one of the most successful business people ever. You can personally dislike him and dislike him for choices he made, but saying he is not responsible for SpaceX and Tesla success is ridiculous.
nostrademons 3y ago
It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO. It can work - most famously, this was the structure that Google had in its golden years (2001-2011) with Eric as CEO and Larry & Sergey as presidents of Product & Technology, respectively. It also was sort of the structure of Apple with Steve Wozniak as an IC & founder. But it puts the CEO in a very awkward spot where they're in charge of the organization but not really in charge of the organization, which in turn requires leadership with great humility. That's not really what Elon is known for. The structure of SpaceX or Facebook or Apple 1998+, where you have a visionary CEO and then strong COO under them that makes the trains run on time, is much more common and less fraught with conflicting reporting lines.
- dbbk 3y ago
  Yeah, it basically means that at any moment he can decide to momentarily be the CEO again and overrule her.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    But in reality any CEO is at the whim of the board, and if Elon owns > 51% of the voting shares, that's true no matter who holds any nominal title.
    - karpierz 3y ago
      The difference is that normally, the CEO answers to the board every few months. And the board doesn't tell the CEO what to do; the point of a CEO is that they can be trusted to do the right move. If they can't, then they serve no purpose and will be fired. In this structure, Elon is embedded in the decision making loop directly. The CEO normally is responsible for the company, but instead, Elon has decided that the CEO will deal with making money while he makes all of the decisions as to how the product works. Which essentially cuts the CEO of of any decision making aside from business partnerships, making her more of a VP of Sales than CEO.
dwater 3y ago
To make money she has to sell ads, to sell ads she needs to make the platform palatable for advertisers, which means going back to pre-Elon content moderation, which he clearly doesn't want to do. Her title might as well be VP of Sales given the power dynamic he's communicating.
- dboreham 3y ago
  "Golden parachute collector"
  - lapcat 3y ago
    For her sake, I hope the parachute is not in X/Twitter stock...
- _cenw 3y ago
  given the number of (far) right figureheads she follows[1], appealing to advertisers that care about these kinds of optics doesn't seem to be part of the plan [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/13f45mw/comment/jjt9j74/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/13f45mw/com...
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    That doesn't seem a useful metric, as surely that isn't an exhaustive list, and following someone on twitter is not a useful signal that you share their philosophy. Lot's of "hate" following on twitter.
    - _cenw 3y ago
      As a future CEO of Twitter trying to get advertisers back on board, I'd sure as hell curate my follows. It's not like she's a random user.
      - InfiniteRand 3y ago
        I think most famous people, unless they are known for their Twitter handle, farm out the Twitter account to the interns
athenot 3y ago
Indeed, these are 2 different skill sets. But wouldn't that be a Chief Operating Officer then, instead of a CEO?
Veserv 3y ago
Musk is not a engineer and has never been good at making things. What he is good at is marketing and raising ridiculous gobs of money which he plows into various companies. All credit for engineering successes at those companies is entirely because of the leadership of those companies, like Gwynne Shotwell, and despite Musk's interference which we have seen time and time again to be actively detrimental to engineering success. That is not to say that Musk's interference is "bad" from a company valuation standpoint as he clearly has a pretty good idea of what features he can effectively market to customers, it is just that those features are not markers of good engineering or actively detract from good engineering. For instance, selling FSD to the general public despite it not working is a criminal engineering decision, but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price.
- RegularOpossum 3y ago
  It might not even be raising money that he's good at but rather structuring business to optimize around government subsidies (ev credits, government space contracts).
  - Veserv 3y ago
    Nah, he is shockingly good at raising money. SpaceX has been losing billions of dollars per year and making it up by raising money to cover the shortfall. In the last year or so they raised $1.7B at a $137B valuation [1]. This is a company that is only estimated to make $4.6B in revenue [2] in a industry with a total addressable market (TAM) of ~$13.5B. SpaceX is being valued at ~30x revenue and ~10x the revenue of the entire industry, not earnings, revenue. Of course, this is all small potatoes compared to the immense amount of money Musk has raised for Tesla from consumers by falsely claiming they will have autonomous vehicles next year, every year, for 7+ years. These raises are distinct from any government support they may have received, though his ability to structure the companys to receive government support and the cash flow generated from those activitys may have been helpful in supporting the companys and the narratives they built to achieve the valuations and funding levels they got. It really just all leads back to him being amazing at getting his hands on huge gobs of money. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/01/03/spacex-reportedly-raises-750-million-in-fresh-funding-at-137-billion-valuation/?sh=5e1580bb64b9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/01/03/spacex-... [2] https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2023-revenue/ https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2023-revenue/ [3] https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/space-launch-services-market https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/spac...
bobsil1 3y ago
> Musk’s strengths have always been in building things *Hyping things, pumping stock, raising $.
- kernal 3y ago
  How many Billion dollar companies have you created?
  - belter 3y ago
    How many have you run to the ground?
    - kernal 3y ago
      It's funny how you've created the mental gymnastics needed to conceptualize Twitter as a healthy, profitable non propagandist and non leftist controlled company before Elon bought it.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  This might hold up on Twitter or maybe some reddit. If you actually want to argue on HN, you need to actually provide some analysis. Because factually speaking, if you actually compare Tesla and SpaceX with peer companies rather then by themselves they have not raised a lot of money relative to what you achieved. Go and actually compared Tesla, Rivian, Lucid (not to mention other bullshit companies like Nikola, Faraday Future, Better Place) and so many others. You will see that Tesla for a such a capital intensive business didn't raise that much. A few times they optimistically raised when the stock jumped, but that's just good business. And if you actually look at their cash balance, that money was never even spent. It permanently raised the balance. Tesla would have been totally fine without the last 2 cash raises. And for SpaceX its far harder to do the pump and raise shit you are talking about. Its only large institutional investors who don't randomly just buy lots because of some 'pump'. The funds investing in SpaceX have a lot of their own technical knowlage and evaluate things deeply. So in summation, your claims have zero bases in reality, its just away to justify your hate for a person.
arcticbull 3y ago
> This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies. Are they? The majority of his successes came from investment, not from building. [edit] I think his superpower may be wealth, like iron man.
- concordDance 3y ago
  The baseless myth that Elon inherited millions still won't die it seems... (To cut to the chase there, Elon seems to have gotten around $90k from his father, of which $28k was a loan. You can check out Errol Musk's Sun interview and the wikipedia article for more info)
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    I didn't say anything about the emerald mine rumor that Elon himself is responsible for. It was his quote from a 2014 Forbes article no longer live on their site. [1] > Elon Musk: "... In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia." I was talking about how a lot of his success came from Tesla, where he wasn't a founder, but instead an early investor. He started calling himself a founder one day, and the actual founders sued him. They settled. [2] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2014/07/28/elon-musk-tells-me-his-secret-of-success-hint-it-aint-about-the-money/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes... [2] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-ceo-settles-for-founder-title/2088887/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-ceo-settles-for-...
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Thank you for clarifying.
andrewjl 3y ago
In the case of both Apple and Meta the (then, in the case of the former) founder-CEOs delegated the "how do we pay the bills" thing to a trusted COO instead, a markedly different approach from what Musk did.

by atonse 3y ago

greenyoda 3y ago

> Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product. And apparently, Twitter has millions of dollars in bills that it hasn't been paying. See this other interesting article, posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253

megaman821 3y ago
Not paying vendors and landlords as a negotiation tactic seems slimy. I assume they will eventually sue Twitter and win, but is there any punitive damages? If not, I am guessing Twitter will be rewarded for not paying by getting better terms on existing contracts.
- dboreham 3y ago
  They would at least get interest. But yes there isn't much in the way of consequences for being an asshole regarding AP.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  I don't think it's uncommon. Big companies have always played dumb games with billing and contracting unless you can nail them to the wall with an ironclad "you pay us X on Y day or you pay us an extra Z per day" contract.
- failuser 3y ago
  Big companies have a lot of leverage. Vendors don’t want to antagonize them in hope of getting paid eventually and due to a risk of retaliation. Going to court might be a suicide by legal expenses.
concordDance 3y ago
Tenporarily not paying vendors is pretty standard for cash strapped companies. (I've worked for some, we got away with a lot)
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Large companies not paying their bills because they can get away with it is such bullshit. Trump famously did this with small business contractors at some of his casinos. The reason it's such bullshit is that it's essentially hostage taking: "Why yes, I know we owe you $10 million and that's what we agreed to, but we're just not going to pay. You can sue us, but we have top notch lawyers that can drag it out for a long time, or else you can settle with us for $7 million right now." I think there should be an equivalent of "small claims court" for cases like these where flat out missed payments are handled quickly and without the need for expensive lawyers, e.g. "Here's our contract, there is no disagreement that we delivered, so freeze their bank accounts if they don't pay us immediately."
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Even if you have top notch lawyers, what exactly can they do, when there is a clear rent contract and no payment?
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Drag it out? Force you to have to hire a lawyer to get paid? Point being, I don't think a top notch lawyer will win, but given the cost of litigation (plus the time value of money), expensive corporate lawyers can force small vendors to settle with a sizable discount.
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      Yeah, but how can you drag it out, if the case is that clear? And wouldn't have the loosing party pay everything in such a case, making it a very expensive case for them?
lazide 3y ago
For a random Joe Schmoe, retaliation via collections harassment, eviction, and credit score problems is a real worry. For a multibillion dollar company, especially one trying to STOP using things it’s currently obligated to use, the math works out different. After all, being evicted actually helps them, as it breaks the lease and they don’t need to keep paying. Especially when there is a huge commercial real estate crunch looming in many of these markets. Plenty of delay and hassle tackles can be used to get some leverage when the letter of the contract/law isn’t in your favor. Scummy, but often effective.

sebzim4500 3y ago

Shotwell is COO, Musk is CEO

jonathankoren 3y ago
And she runs the show at SpaceX. Musk, CEO and “Chief Engineer”, mainly just fucks things up like causing DOD investigations into his pot use (a disagreeable government contracting clause due to the War of Drugs), and now most famously overruling the real engineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad, and promoting an FAA and environmental investigation. See also: Overruling Tesla engineers and ordering the removal of radars, directly leading to multiple preventable accidents. He’s fuck up. Rich. But still a fuck up. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173?s=20 https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-radars-cameras/ https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engi...
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Just so much nonsense. > And she runs the show at SpaceX. No she doesn't, and she wouldn't agree that this is the case. Only anti-Musk haters claim this. > mainly just fucks things up Funny thing to say about the most successful space company in history. Shotwell wasn't even COO for the initial success of the company. > causing DOD investigations into his pot use A literally 100% inconsequential thing that changed absolutely nothing and had no effect what so ever.You are really grasping at straws with this one. > most famously overruling the real epromoting an FAA and environmental investigationngineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad He has the finial decision on all things at SpaceX and had them since Falcon 1 days. He didn't 'overrule' his engineers, at SpaceX decisions are usually made in big meeting with input from everybody and Musk makes the final call. Doing the launchpad upgrades before the first launch would have meant further delay of first launch, thus delaying getting flight data. Now they can evaluate the flight and fix the pad at the same time. Also the launch pad isn't destroyed, its slightly damaged. It was the wrong decision in hindsight but it isn't that relevant going forward. He takes responsibility for things he gets wrong. He also decided not to have slosh baffles on Falcon 1. That led to its failure. He made other mistakes, if you want you can go threw the history of SpaceX and point all of them out. He also insisted on Deep Cryo fuel that lead to Amos-6 but it also helped SpaceX in the long run. And he takes ownership for these mistakes. When you make a lot of important technical choices, you get some of them wrong. But its downright sad of you do cherry pick a few things SpaceX got wrong when SpaceX threw-out its history, with Musk as the final decision maker has clearly gotten things right far more often then they have gotten things wrong. Again, SpaceX is literally the most successful space company ever and it isn't really close. Musk has also been the longest serving CEO of pretty much any space company in the industry. > promoting an FAA and environmental investigation The amount of times the Musk haters people have claimed that some federal agency will destroy SpaceX because of 'evil Elon' is ridiculous. They knew the risk and some non toxic concrete wont change anything. If we actually go by factual evidence, companies that Musk was in charge off. How successful are these companies. The result is clearly, Musk is one of the most successful business people ever. You can personally dislike him and dislike him for choices he made, but saying he is not responsible for SpaceX and Tesla success is ridiculous.

nostrademons 3y ago

It's an awkward structure to have the executive chairman and/or majority shareholder take a position (usually CTO or CPO) elsewhere in the org chart, because it means that that person is simultaneously the boss and subordinate of the CEO. It can work - most famously, this was the structure that Google had in its golden years (2001-2011) with Eric as CEO and Larry & Sergey as presidents of Product & Technology, respectively. It also was sort of the structure of Apple with Steve Wozniak as an IC & founder. But it puts the CEO in a very awkward spot where they're in charge of the organization but not really in charge of the organization, which in turn requires leadership with great humility. That's not really what Elon is known for. The structure of SpaceX or Facebook or Apple 1998+, where you have a visionary CEO and then strong COO under them that makes the trains run on time, is much more common and less fraught with conflicting reporting lines.

dbbk 3y ago
Yeah, it basically means that at any moment he can decide to momentarily be the CEO again and overrule her.
- justrealist 3y ago
  But in reality any CEO is at the whim of the board, and if Elon owns > 51% of the voting shares, that's true no matter who holds any nominal title.
  - karpierz 3y ago
    The difference is that normally, the CEO answers to the board every few months. And the board doesn't tell the CEO what to do; the point of a CEO is that they can be trusted to do the right move. If they can't, then they serve no purpose and will be fired. In this structure, Elon is embedded in the decision making loop directly. The CEO normally is responsible for the company, but instead, Elon has decided that the CEO will deal with making money while he makes all of the decisions as to how the product works. Which essentially cuts the CEO of of any decision making aside from business partnerships, making her more of a VP of Sales than CEO.

dwater 3y ago

To make money she has to sell ads, to sell ads she needs to make the platform palatable for advertisers, which means going back to pre-Elon content moderation, which he clearly doesn't want to do. Her title might as well be VP of Sales given the power dynamic he's communicating.

dboreham 3y ago
"Golden parachute collector"
- lapcat 3y ago
  For her sake, I hope the parachute is not in X/Twitter stock...
_cenw 3y ago
given the number of (far) right figureheads she follows[1], appealing to advertisers that care about these kinds of optics doesn't seem to be part of the plan [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/13f45mw/comment/jjt9j74/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/13f45mw/com...
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  That doesn't seem a useful metric, as surely that isn't an exhaustive list, and following someone on twitter is not a useful signal that you share their philosophy. Lot's of "hate" following on twitter.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    As a future CEO of Twitter trying to get advertisers back on board, I'd sure as hell curate my follows. It's not like she's a random user.
    - InfiniteRand 3y ago
      I think most famous people, unless they are known for their Twitter handle, farm out the Twitter account to the interns

athenot 3y ago

Indeed, these are 2 different skill sets. But wouldn't that be a Chief Operating Officer then, instead of a CEO?

Veserv 3y ago

Musk is not a engineer and has never been good at making things. What he is good at is marketing and raising ridiculous gobs of money which he plows into various companies. All credit for engineering successes at those companies is entirely because of the leadership of those companies, like Gwynne Shotwell, and despite Musk's interference which we have seen time and time again to be actively detrimental to engineering success. That is not to say that Musk's interference is "bad" from a company valuation standpoint as he clearly has a pretty good idea of what features he can effectively market to customers, it is just that those features are not markers of good engineering or actively detract from good engineering. For instance, selling FSD to the general public despite it not working is a criminal engineering decision, but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price.

RegularOpossum 3y ago
It might not even be raising money that he's good at but rather structuring business to optimize around government subsidies (ev credits, government space contracts).
- Veserv 3y ago
  Nah, he is shockingly good at raising money. SpaceX has been losing billions of dollars per year and making it up by raising money to cover the shortfall. In the last year or so they raised $1.7B at a $137B valuation [1]. This is a company that is only estimated to make $4.6B in revenue [2] in a industry with a total addressable market (TAM) of ~$13.5B. SpaceX is being valued at ~30x revenue and ~10x the revenue of the entire industry, not earnings, revenue. Of course, this is all small potatoes compared to the immense amount of money Musk has raised for Tesla from consumers by falsely claiming they will have autonomous vehicles next year, every year, for 7+ years. These raises are distinct from any government support they may have received, though his ability to structure the companys to receive government support and the cash flow generated from those activitys may have been helpful in supporting the companys and the narratives they built to achieve the valuations and funding levels they got. It really just all leads back to him being amazing at getting his hands on huge gobs of money. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/01/03/spacex-reportedly-raises-750-million-in-fresh-funding-at-137-billion-valuation/?sh=5e1580bb64b9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/01/03/spacex-... [2] https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2023-revenue/ https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2023-revenue/ [3] https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/space-launch-services-market https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/spac...

bobsil1 3y ago

> Musk’s strengths have always been in building things *Hyping things, pumping stock, raising $.

kernal 3y ago
How many Billion dollar companies have you created?
- belter 3y ago
  How many have you run to the ground?
  - kernal 3y ago
    It's funny how you've created the mental gymnastics needed to conceptualize Twitter as a healthy, profitable non propagandist and non leftist controlled company before Elon bought it.
panick21_ 3y ago
This might hold up on Twitter or maybe some reddit. If you actually want to argue on HN, you need to actually provide some analysis. Because factually speaking, if you actually compare Tesla and SpaceX with peer companies rather then by themselves they have not raised a lot of money relative to what you achieved. Go and actually compared Tesla, Rivian, Lucid (not to mention other bullshit companies like Nikola, Faraday Future, Better Place) and so many others. You will see that Tesla for a such a capital intensive business didn't raise that much. A few times they optimistically raised when the stock jumped, but that's just good business. And if you actually look at their cash balance, that money was never even spent. It permanently raised the balance. Tesla would have been totally fine without the last 2 cash raises. And for SpaceX its far harder to do the pump and raise shit you are talking about. Its only large institutional investors who don't randomly just buy lots because of some 'pump'. The funds investing in SpaceX have a lot of their own technical knowlage and evaluate things deeply. So in summation, your claims have zero bases in reality, its just away to justify your hate for a person.

arcticbull 3y ago

> This is actually a smart model given Musk’s strengths have always been in building things and not in the day to day running of companies. Are they? The majority of his successes came from investment, not from building. [edit] I think his superpower may be wealth, like iron man.

concordDance 3y ago
The baseless myth that Elon inherited millions still won't die it seems... (To cut to the chase there, Elon seems to have gotten around $90k from his father, of which $28k was a loan. You can check out Errol Musk's Sun interview and the wikipedia article for more info)
- arcticbull 3y ago
  I didn't say anything about the emerald mine rumor that Elon himself is responsible for. It was his quote from a 2014 Forbes article no longer live on their site. [1] > Elon Musk: "... In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia." I was talking about how a lot of his success came from Tesla, where he wasn't a founder, but instead an early investor. He started calling himself a founder one day, and the actual founders sued him. They settled. [2] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2014/07/28/elon-musk-tells-me-his-secret-of-success-hint-it-aint-about-the-money/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes... [2] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-ceo-settles-for-founder-title/2088887/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-ceo-settles-for-...
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Thank you for clarifying.

andrewjl 3y ago

In the case of both Apple and Meta the (then, in the case of the former) founder-CEOs delegated the "how do we pay the bills" thing to a trusted COO instead, a markedly different approach from what Musk did.