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> considered an awful coder in this Paypal position This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or

> considered an awful coder in this Paypal position This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not? I’m not a proponent of Musk but this seems like odd shade to throw on him.

sulam 3y ago
He was CEO of X.com for less than a year and was fired by the board. Then they merged with the predecessor to PayPal, which was more successful. He become CEO of the merged company, but was again fired for poor technical decision making (among other things, he insisted that the company build on the Windows stack instead of Linux) before the company rebranded itself as PayPal. So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.
- scottiebarnes 3y ago
  And then he failed his way up with Tesla and SpaceX, two companies which were better off without his presence. I sure I wish I was that incompetent.
- prepend 3y ago
  I understand all that, my question was why would it matter if he was an awful coder. Or they people thought he was an awful coder. It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills. I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?
dragonwriter 3y ago
> This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed. > Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not? It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.

sulam 3y ago

He was CEO of X.com for less than a year and was fired by the board. Then they merged with the predecessor to PayPal, which was more successful. He become CEO of the merged company, but was again fired for poor technical decision making (among other things, he insisted that the company build on the Windows stack instead of Linux) before the company rebranded itself as PayPal. So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.

scottiebarnes 3y ago
And then he failed his way up with Tesla and SpaceX, two companies which were better off without his presence. I sure I wish I was that incompetent.
prepend 3y ago
I understand all that, my question was why would it matter if he was an awful coder. Or they people thought he was an awful coder. It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills. I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?

dragonwriter 3y ago

> This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed. > Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not? It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.