12 ms·

It’s not a popular opinion on this site, and I’m probably going to be savagely downvoted, but whatever talent Musk had for business was eroded at least a decade

It’s not a popular opinion on this site, and I’m probably going to be savagely downvoted, but whatever talent Musk had for business was eroded at least a decade ago by him surrounding himself with ego-stroking yes men. He drank his own cool aid.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xena 3y ago
I don't think he had any talent, he just got lucky and companies insulated themselves from him. With Twitter we're seeing what happens when companies don't insulate themselves from him.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >he just got lucky Several times? Oscar Wilde wrote: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Something of the kind, with an opposite sign, could be said for repeated business success. And in this case it's more than 2 times, and not just some small successess either. Isn't it more like "He's idiosyncratic and often erratic and/or has political views I don't like" that people translate to an absurd "he has no business talent"?
  - presbyterian 3y ago
    It’s easy to get lucky several times when you have a rich family that keeps you from truly failing
    - lordnacho 3y ago
      Basically the "no-life-risk" thesis. I don't think it's entirely crazy either, Elon was going to be comfortable whatever he did, and some people in that position will roll the dice several times, and some of those guys will win several times. Still takes some skill, I don't doubt that. But the main ingredient is risk.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      And yet I don't any great percentage of people from a "rich family" making multi-billion dollar companies. I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
      - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        > And yet I don't any great percentage of people from a "rich family" making multi-billion dollar companies. Because of the rarity of multi-billion dollar companies it makes more sense to flip the question - what are the demographics of those who found those companies? If the odds of doing something are 1:100 who is going to have better odds at succeeding - the person who gets 1 throw or 10 throws? Neither are guaranteed to succeed, but they both have a chance and one is much more likely than the other. That's what's at play here.
        zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        There’s a lot more non-rich people though. So even at 1 throw each you’d expect them to be most of the successes under this theory. Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
        SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        > There’s a lot more non-rich people though. So even at 1 throw each you’d expect them to be most of the successes under this theory. Well, this is why we have to look at the numbers. And it depends on the odds. If it's one in a billion and the rich get ten million throws and the poor get 1 each then the fact there are a lot of non-rich people isn't as impactful. > Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore. Yes, like having cash to throw around and a safety net to rely on so that those shots can be taken as well as easier access to potentially important connections and resources.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      "It’s easy to get lucky several times when you have a rich family that keeps you from truly failing" This hypothesis is somewhat testable statistically. There are approximately 25 thousand people worth 100 million dollars+ in the world, with more than a third of that number residing in the US. [0] I think we can safely say that people worth 100 million and more are rich. If it is easy to get lucky several times with a rich family, you would expect some nontrivial share of Musk equivalents among them or their kids. Say, two hundred? Not observed. Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those, or it is not that easy. [0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us-has-highest-number-of-super-wealthy-worth-100m-or-more/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us...
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        > Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those Maybe? The thing about having a rich family is... you're already rich. That removes one of the prime motivations to take serious risks, of the sort that paid off for Musk; namely, to become rich. I'm sure you get a lot of people who invest, or toss some money into this or that. But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor.
        inglor_cz 3y ago
        "But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor." AFAIK Musk was a relative nobody in the millionaire world when he poured a majority of his wealth into SpaceX (2002). They were very close to bankruptcy during the Falcon 1 experiments and if the fourth launch failed, they would have joined a fairly extensive graveyard of defunct space startups, together with Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and a few hundred others.
        ethbr0 3y ago
        By that point, he'd already been CEO of PayPal for a bit (after co-founding X.com that merged into the company that became PayPal) and made $175M for his stake when eBay bought it. Then $100M went to found SpaceX. But that does seem like a very large bet that millionaires don't often make.
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    If we can refine the "he got lucky" statement I'd say it's this: He's a talented motivational speaker, he can inspire as a leader, he can paint a vivid future of great accomplishments , not in the least bolstered by his extreme confidence of expertise and knowledge (often not actualized). Everything he talks about is at least about the entire planet, sometimes multiple planets, and with xAI even for understanding the entire Universe, and this helps him attract two key resources: - Capital. - Talent. And then when he puts talent and capital together... yes he got lucky couple of times. But he's always been a terrible manager and this is visible not just with Twitter.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      > He's a talented motivational speaker He IS? In what contexts? Because every time I see him speak, it's painful. His delivery is so stilted/awkward, that I think he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen.
      - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
        He's no Steve Jobs, but sometimes when you don't say something people fill-in context themselves. For example when he makes a long dramatic pause, so he seems deeply contemplative. Or when he stops himself midway through a sentence and corrects himself, he seems earnest. We're ready to forgive a lot if we suspect behind the awkwardness hides a genius. The trope of the distracted professor, the autistic savant is at least centuries old. He leans into every such trope, and he's very careful in cultivating an image of a "founder", of an "inventor" of an "engineer". Most people by now know he hasn't founded Tesla, or PayPal (was fired from it in fact), he hasn't engineered the SpaceX rockets (although he had a hand in those that blew up), and he in fact has no engineering degree despite claiming otherwise. So I'd say all this means he's building this image very intentionally, and he's trying to turn his weaknesses into strengths. The more he stutters and repeats, the less we notice how much of what he says is kinda... vapid. Trump has some similar patterns by the way, you can ask him a specific question and he'll say he has great ways of answering that, some of the best people told him he has the best answers, his history of a businessman speaks about long experience providing great answers to all kinds of questions... and he won't answer your question in the end. Trump and Musk are very different in some ways, but very similar in others.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    Yes I think he got lucky multiple times, because his failures are also quite significant. Remember hyperloop? Remember he got kicked out of PayPal? Remember boring company? Remember solar city? If anything it just shows he has enough money that it’s okay when some of his extremely ambitious projects fail. A less wealthy person couldn’t even attempt any of what he does much less fail as often and as publicly as he has. Elizabeth Holmes went to prison, for example.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Remember hyperloop? Remember he got kicked out of PayPal? Remember boring company? Remember solar city? One could say similar things for other well succesful businessmen: Remember NeXT? Remember he got kicked out of Apple? Remember the G4 Cube? Remember MobileMe? Remember Ping?
      - alexb_ 3y ago
        Hey, you're finally understanding that Steve Jobs was a hack!
        marcosdumay 3y ago
        Not quite. He was very good on gathering a specific kind of people and organizing them to an specific kind of work. He got that very reliably. When that kind of work aligned with success, he was successful.
        CamperBob2 3y ago
        Just like that Alexander the Great guy. Way overrated. He didn't kill that many Persians at all, it turns out. Just sat there on a horse barking orders.
      - NicuCalcea 3y ago
        You're right, other businesspeople get lucky too.
      - giantrobot 3y ago
  - esotericimpl 3y ago
    [dead]
  - BobbyJo 3y ago
    One would expect the richest Man in the world to also be the luckiest. The latter is simply not possible without the former. I do think he's also pretty smart, and very hardworking, but let's not pretend that lucky isn't 99.9% what it takes to be the richest man in the world. There is a ton of people out there that are just as smart, and just as hardworking, and none of them have 1/1000th Musk's wealth.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    There are 8 billion people in the world. With such a large population, we expect some people to just be stupidly lucky many times in a row, right? Especially since they aren't really independent events - if you get a lucky break, it keeps you in the game longer, making your second break more likely. And it would make sense that the lucky outliers would be some of the wealthiest, right?
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >With such a large population, we expect some people to just be stupidly lucky many times in a row, right? No, that's not how business work. This is not coin-tossing, the "being lucky" includes attracting VCs and investments, building a good image, picking a good niche, delivering, getting buyers, and several other things besides. You can get lucky with one of those, but not all of those, and several independent times. Else skill doesn't mean anything, and you could make the same argument for any human venture.
      - maxbond 3y ago
        Try thinking about it like a scientist or a statistician rather than a business person. Which is to say, don't think in terms of inviolable rules - that's useful for engineering the system, but can sabotage your ability to understand the system - and think instead in terms of what is possible and at what rate you expect it to happen. Then try multiplying that by 8 billion. > Else skill doesn't mean anything Skill matters, it just isn't the only factor. > You could make the same argument for any human venture. Luck profoundly effects every aspect of our lives, yeah. Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
        coldtea 3y ago
        >Which is to say, don't think in terms of inviolable rules - that's useful for engineering the system, but can sabotage your ability to understand the system - and think instead in terms of what is possible and at what rate you expect it to happen. Then try multiplying that by 8 billion Notice that the above have nothing to with statistics. It's just handwaving based on the "with 8 billion people trying, anything is possible". >Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner. That has already shifted the goalposts, to "luck among the best players" as opposed to "he just got lucky".
  - pavlov 3y ago
    > "Several times?" With enough people in the world, someone will eventually get lucky in several improbable ways and may look like a genius thanks to survivorship bias. I'm not saying Musk is that, but maybe his primary talent is risk-taking and fundraising rather than product innovation.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    He is a talented.. scammer, who is good at hyping up shit on which his people may or may not be able to deliver. It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      << It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people. Oh, but it is based on how hard it is for corporate America to even accept such a notion without going for 'egghead' in their internal vocabulary. I think I disagree.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      "It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people." To employ, no, but to get a stream of important innovations out of them, that might actually be harder than rocket science. The vast majority of smart people around the world are stuck in mediocre jobs. Hotspots of technical productivity like Bell Labs or SpaceX or NASA of the 1960s are pretty rare and rarely last for more than approximately a generation. How to get smart people to be actually scientifically productive is a major question of history. An example: 100 years ago, several very important innovators like von Neumann were Hungarians; nowadays, Hungary is a scientific backwater. (With the exception of Katalin Karikó, the mRNA lady.)
    - ameister14 3y ago
      >It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people. This is a ridiculous statement if you've ever run a company. "Just hire smart people and your company will be successful!" Great, glad you cracked the code.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        You can also employ a hiring manager who will hire smart people for you? He is definitely not operating on startup money, he can do that as well.
        coldtea 3y ago
        If only all those companies who got bankrupt knew this wise advice! HN is trully a trove of business wisdom!
  - onion2k 3y ago
    Several times? I don't know if Musk's success is down to luck or not, but to answer your implied question of "Do you really think it could be luck to succeed on several different occasions?" the answer is yes. To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old "it's been heads 9 times in a row, it must be tails next" gambler's fallacy. Someone could succeed in building billion dollar companies largely on luck many of times in a row. It's very unlikely, but it's not impossible, at least as far as any company's success is down to the luck of the founders.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old "it's been heads 9 times in a row, it must be tails next" gambler's fallacy I don't think you understand how this fallacy (and logic ) works. This is only a fallacy because the coin toss events are trivially expected (and assumed) to be independent chance events in the first place. Business success are not supposed to be independent like that, unless you take for granted what you're supposed to prove. And to do that, you'd have to ignore some pretty big factors different to coin tosses, like the continuity of an agent making business decisions, their promotional and organizational skills, their connections, their reputation with VCs and the press, past performance as part of their image, their experience, and several other factors besides, which makes repeated business successes nothing like independent coin tosses.
      - onion2k 3y ago
        I don't think you understand how this fallacy (and logic ) works. I don't think you understand how similes work. There's no way to really know what extent luck is involved when a business succeeds, but it's probably not zero. It's entirely reasonable to suggest Musk has been lucky many times over. That doesn't mean he'll be lucky again, nor does it mean the lucky events he's had so far have been trivial. Believing that Musk will (or won't if you're not a fan) be lucky again in his next business because things will fall in Musk's favor again is the gambler's fallacy - the belief that past events influence future events. No doubt the things Musk can influence will go his way, but there will be things outside of his control that he might not be so lucky with. Even big, important things. Nothing about the gambler's fallacy says anything about how trivial or otherwise the lucky events are.
  - troupo 3y ago
    > he just got lucky > > Several times? Yes. @notacoward had a perfect comment about this a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      That really is a perfect comment.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      There were tons of 100x richer kids who didn't manage to throw succesfully any such darts, much less do so on highly competitive, highly unrelated domains...
      - kergonath 3y ago
        That is not how statistics work. We are talking about odds, not certainties. If people from the working class are 10 times less likely to end up CEOs of multi-billion corporations (which does sound very generous), you’d still expect to see one every so often.
        coldtea 3y ago
        Which is neither here, nor there. The argument was that Musk was just a lucky incompetent person, not that he was skilled but "only" among a "limited" ten million plus people in the US alone starting at the same wealth levels... Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth starting points had the chance to throw their darts, and Musk just happened by chance to hit bullseye on a major company sale/exit/buildup 4 or more times in a row, including turning out the richest man in the world by mere lucky darting?
        troupo 3y ago
        > The argument was that Musk was just a lucky incompetent person That wasn't the argument. The argument was about luck, not competence > Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth You're assuming all those wealthy Americans decided to throw darts, or threw the same amount of darts. They did not. If you follow his successes, you can see a repeated cycle: "invested millions or billions of his own money, kept the company afloat for years". You don't get to do that on competence alone. All of his companies were on the verge of bankrupcy at one point. And lookey lookey, on "competence alone" NASA awards SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar contract after a single successful launch (after three failed attempts). As an aside, "Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors". Same for Tesla. It existed for 7 years before it delivered its first car. And even by then it was at least 70 million of Musk's own money. And then a huge infusion of government money. SolarCity. Failed, and bought with Tesla's money. Neuralink. No idea if it's a failure yet, exists due to Musk's money. BoringCompany. A non-entity that existed only because of Musk's money, and then due to unlimited investor money (what the US mistakes for "innovation"). It really exists only due to anti-public-transportation lobbying. And so on. He exemplifies the quote I posted.
  - shreyshnaccount 3y ago
    (Read: investors chasing the next big thing (after seeing the tech boom) give money to a person smart enough to know that to get the money all he has to do is promise the next big thing from the next tech boom) (and later use the money to hire smart people who sometimes actually do build a big thing)
  - JustFinishedBSG 3y ago
    > Several times? Yes ? Not only there is no reason for it not to be the case ( it's not like rolling 6 two times in a row is impossible... ) but anyway once you've achieved your first success it's easier to buy the next ones.
  - delfinom 3y ago
    >Several times? People that are wealthy very very very very often, fail upwards.
  - rvba 3y ago
    Statistically shouldnt someone get lucky 2 or 3 times? Say there are million people with 1 million to invest. Then 1/100 chance to get lucky. Do it 3 times (1/100)^3? Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
    - kergonath 3y ago
      > Then 1/100 chance to get lucky. Do it 3 times (1/100)^3? It’s easier to do when you can be bailed out by friends and family after the first failure, compared to people who end up sleeping on the street. Considering that even succeeding once is a rare event, it is not that surprising that the final population is heavily skewed. > Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them? There is certainly a bit of that. And to be fair, it is the best strategy: a single human has only so much bandwidth them handling all the aspects of a large-ish company is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention, a single point of failure, so the company’s dead the moment anything happens to them. It’s been the same with Jobs, one of his talents was to hire the right people.
  - lucideer 3y ago
    > Several times? Yes. Capital tends to make it easier on each iteration.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Not lucky, subsidized [1]. [1] Company with $15 million revenue in 2008 gets $465 million "loan" in 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-through-for-tesla-with-a-465-million-loan-for-its-electric-sedan https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla Of course, Ford got $5.9 billion bailout, because capitalism is the lie profiteers tell to the wage slaves as they privatize profits while socializing losses.
  - ianai 3y ago
    I’m not seeing reputable sources reporting ford got bailouts. Nor do I see ford on this list. https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      It's in the first paragraph of the linked article [1]. They were called "loans" in the government-speak of the post-2008 crash, but if you look at the semantics, they were just risk-free bailouts. [1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"
      - dahdum 3y ago
        How is not a loan if they’ve been repaying it?
        ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
        Can I, just a random citizen, get a loan from the government for not even billions or hundreds of millions but let's say $100,000? I will of course repay "in due course, at the appropriate juncture, in the fullness of time" [1], at 0% interest. There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI [2] "How Did PPP Scammers Steal $100+ Billion", https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud
- valval 3y ago
  Nice hypothesis. I’ll remember you when I need to sell my Oceanside property in Arizona.
- treeman79 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kaba0 3y ago
    It’s no free speech, it’s just elon-style censorship. Somehow calling out his private jet trips is no longer free speech, right?
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      Sadly, yes. I am pretty out there on free speech and Elon is not messiah in this space. If anything, he may be one of those false prophets.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    > when he allowed free speech Well, the fact that he said a whole bunch of things about free speech, and proceeded to walk all of them back in short order—while still claiming to be a staunch supporter of free speech—probably pissed off a lot of people.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Wasn’t one of the first things he did to let Kanye back on the platform “for free speech” then immediately ban him again for posting a Swastika (which is clearly protected by free speech?) Seems to me like you’re just taking a known liar’s words at face value.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    He hasn't "allowed free speech", he's just been more forgiving of some free speech and less forgiving of others, for political reasons. Actually, very free people want absolute free speech on a social media platform because we don't want 4chan, we want a place we can talk to friends and family.
  - aCoreyJ 3y ago
    Did he allow free speech or did he make different, and more opaque, decisions about who to ban while laying off anyone who handles appeals. Also being able to pay to make your speech more visible isn't what most people have in mind when they think of "free speech absolutism"
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  How can you be so sure that it was just luck? Why should anyone trust you above Carmack and Karpathy who are talented without any doubt and who have worked closely with him, who has nothing but high praise for him.
- amelius 3y ago
  > I don't think he had any talent He has a talent: self-promotion.
- api 3y ago
  Once can be luck. Succeeding multiple times at very hard things is not luck. People can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone can be simultaneously a genius and an idiot. In the real world this is very common. I like to put it this way: how many musicians do you like who are geniuses at composition, drums, guitar, vocals, or some other musical skill but are absolutely intolerable assholes and/or complete lunatics in the rest of their lives? Can you still enjoy their music? Does their music cease to be good when you learn about their personality flaws? IMHO much of Elon's success can be attributed to two things: (1) He is at least a good enough engineer or has good enough "engineers' intuition" to hire people who know what they are talking about and get them working on the right things. He seems much stronger in physical areas like rockets can cars though, not software. (2) He doesn't listen to pessimists and nihilists who say things are impossible if, when reasoning from first principles, they can be shown to be quite possible. Example: ignoring people who said you can't land a rocket or that an EV could never do well in the market. Ignoring pessimism can be a superpower. I do think Elon shows signs of chronic burnout at this point. The far-right / conspiranoid brain worm infection he's developed is IMHO a symptom. Opportunistic infections take hold when the immune system is weak.
shri_krishna 3y ago
> It’s not a popular opinion on this site Lmfao your opinion is literally the popular opinion on this site. Talk of bubbles within bubbles within bubbles!
- passwordoops 3y ago
  I've come to view this qualifier as HN's answer to LinkedIn's humblebrag. Note I am guilty of using that qualifier once or twice prior to stating a popular opinion on HN...
  - mcv 3y ago
    I tend to downvote the "this will probably be downvoted but..." comments (except when it's an extraordinarily insightful comment). Just leave that sentence out. It adds nothing to the discussion.
    - InitialLastName 3y ago
      Yeah, any complaint/presaging about imaginary internet points gets an automatic downvote from me.
deburo 3y ago
Why isn't he seeing his successful companies fail then?
- baz00 3y ago
  Yet. They don't do anything which can't be done by someone else for less money and at less risk to investors.
- rovr138 3y ago
  Which other ones did he run directly where he had the 'expertise'? Basically, they had other people to help guide it vs just Musk doing it himself.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    As opposed to Bezos and Jobs and Cook and Ellisson and Zuckerberg every other CEO, which doesn't have "people to run it"?
    - valval 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - kaba0 3y ago
      They fail to amuse me either, like, CEOs not being some gods is not a controversial statement, you ain’t disproving anything. That myth (or rather propaganda) that they are some übermensch that work more than you could ever imagine and are so productive and it’s all thanks to the magic of powernaps or whatever bullshit they make up to sell you the temporarily embarrassed billionaire tale is thoroughly debunked. They are ordinary people who got into a very lucky situation and didn’t fuck up too bad.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >CEOs not being some gods is not a controversial statement, you ain’t disproving anything. Bro, do you even HN? That's like the gospel here...
scarmig 3y ago
I think it's more that being terminally online has given him the brain worms when it comes to Twitter, and everything he does with Twitter has to be interpreted through the mass of brain worms.
- mcv 3y ago
  He does come across as Twitter-addicted. And now I'm wondering if Trump's lunacy may also have been caused by Twitter, and that he may have been a more reasonable person in the past.
  - delecti 3y ago
    Everything I've heard is that Trump has been regarded as a moron for more than 50 years. He was a moron, raised by uncaring parents, and is now dealing with dementia. I'm sure the addictive nature of social media engagement didn't help, but as a person Trump is just like that.
    - rvba 3y ago
      Didnt Musk smoke drugs?
      - delecti 3y ago
        As far as I've heard, yes, though I'm not sure why it would be relevant in this conversation. I don't expect there are many rich or famous people who haven't.
        rvba 3y ago
        [flagged]
shortrounddev2 3y ago
Gavin Belson: All I hear from everybody is good news. Have I just surrounded myself with sycophants, who are just telling me whatever I want to hear, regardless of the truth? Denpok: *gulp* ... no. Gavin Belson: Thank you Denpok. I really needed to hear that.
- 101008 3y ago
  What a great TV show. I miss Sunday nights...
- tunnuz 3y ago
  This scene is perfect.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Any time I see Naval Ravikant's mystical musings on the philosophy of innovation or whatever, I think of Denpok guy in Silicon Valley.
  - SkyMarshal 3y ago
    Naval cribs a lot of his musings from various books, but never credits them, passes them off as his own. Folks who have read most or all of the same books he has can recognize the source. He so desperately wants to be a philosopher, but is cheating at it.
    - davnicwil 3y ago
      Does any philosopher mostly come up with their own unique ideas in a black box, uninfluenced by and not based upon ideas that preceded them in culture and literature? This is an actual question, I don't know the answer, but it does seem extremely unlikely to me that this would be the case.
      - Kye 3y ago
        I don't think getting ideas from elsewhere was the issue.
mcv 3y ago
That Musk's genius acumen were either fake or something that he has since lost, is not an unpopular opinion, but the ruling wisdom here and elsewhere. It's true, lots of people did fall for his Tony Stark act, but the past year has really opened people's eyes to the fact that it was all narcissism. The signs were there long before, but they were easy to ignore in light of the success of innovative companies like Tesla and SpaceX. But now people are wondering whether the success of those companies was really because of him, or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory.
- meroes 3y ago
  I became convinced when he said he was putting CPUs in the Tesla Wall batteries during the cpu shortage for mining. I knew there were signs (cybertruck, the robot gimmick possibly being earlier one) but that was it for me. This is separate from his personality which I disliked earlier.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory The "raising money" part is the inarguably most important part of any startup. Given enough money, you can ride through absolutely anything - and the kind of projects that Musk provided with money always need a crapton of them: Tesla to even have a tiny chance at surviving against the established behemoths, and SpaceX because (prior to them) spaceflight was something for rich developed nation states only.
monero-xmr 3y ago
Criticizing elon musk is very popular on HN…
drexlspivey 3y ago
[flagged]
prasadjoglekar 3y ago
Maybe; and yet Tesla still rolls off cars off the assembly line and SpaceX is still reliably launching and recovering rockets. He's playing with his own money, no different than Bezos losing money and 500K subs on the WaPo.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Teslas notoriously has very shit QA before they're released to customers at this point, and is this the same SpaceX that destroyed their launch pad on the last launch? Real stellar performance.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
okeuro49 3y ago
[flagged]
- stormfather 3y ago
  It's such a radioactive opinion on here that you got downvoted just for saying it exists and is unpopular. You didn't even endorse it. Wow. I noticed that Musk became unpopular here right after the media and social media turned on him. It's disappointing that even top-tier intelligent people don't usually think for themselves.
  - okeuro49 3y ago
    Now not only downvoted, but also censored. Despite the issue being covered in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-twitter-files-should-disturb-liberal-critics-of-elon-musk-and-heres-why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-tw...
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
If you read the history, it sounds like many of his... dysfunctions... go back to the start of his business career, and the latest debacles look a lot like stuff that went down at PayPal/X.com over 20 years ago; where it sounds like he got evicted and Peter Thiel had to clean up the mess. And in fact this X.com renaming sounds like him dealing with personal baggage and vendettas from back then. Basically the opposite of the stoic and calculating personality one expects a giant of capitalism to be. So I actually just wonder if it's more than there was a 10 year period of Musk... getting lucky... by surrounding himself with some competence. That, and the investing world after 2008, with its intensely low interest rates and high tech-sector profits made it easy to "swim naked." The efforts of a narcissistic showman Dunning-Kruger personality like Musk... are a great place to dump your money as long as you're not the last one holding the bag when shit hits the fan (aka Twitter).
GhostVII 3y ago
I don't think he really had special talent for business, he had strong beliefs that happened to line up with what was profitable at the time. I don't think when he invested in Tesla or started SpaceX he was thinking about whether it made business sense - he just wanted to build futuristic technology, and he was one of the few people willing to spend a lot of money on a new company to actually make it happen. That doesn't really mean he is a genius at business, just that he is really good at pitching his vision and getting people excited about it.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> at least a decade ago by him surrounding himself with ego-stroking yes men It’s more recent. The Sacks-Chamatch-Calacanis axis didn’t go into gear until Covid. Somewhere between the election of Trump and lockdown, the rot set in. That suggests it’s still excusable.
Symmetry 3y ago
I can see why you think that, but I think you're wrong. Musk's success in Zip2 and X.com was mostly realizing there was a market opportunity and working long hours personally on the code to get the sites up and running. With SpaceX and Telsa mostly his value-add has been looking at things and saying "This isn't elegantly designed enough" sort of like Steve Jobs but for internals. And he seems to be right often enough to be successful. But he seems to think that he has this ability for software engineering and user interfaces too, but he doesn't. Which is why he was canned at PayPal and why he's making such a mess of Twitter. All people are composed of both strengths and weaknesses. The important part is finding a position which plays to your strenths. Sadly, I think critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess He absolutely does. We’ve seen it in his prior reversals, when fortunes at his firms were down and he changed course savvily. The sycophants he’s surrounded himself with, namely, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, do not. And that’s rubbing off on him.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    The sycophants are one thing, but he's gone off the loon end himself for extremely personal stuff as well such as the names of his children with Grimes.
    - Robotbeat 3y ago
      Grimes also wanted a weird name.
      - omnibrain 3y ago
        Yes, but she‘s an artist.
        3y ago
bipop5000 3y ago
Imagine being the world's richest man, even for a little bit. I would imagine that does some stuff to your ego.
rossjudson 3y ago
Do any of these "yes men" have names or positions? Do you have an example? A lot of these criticisms read like "extrapolations on an unsupported basis that aligns with my current over-simplification".
BrotherBisquick 3y ago
> It’s not a popular opinion on this site Oh come on.
goodbyesf 3y ago
> It’s not a popular opinion on this site, and I’m probably going to be savagely downvoted At best, it's hard to take someone seriously when they intentionally lie about the obvious. At worst, it makes it seem like you are part of a pr campaign. Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I genuinely interested. Maybe your experience on hn is different from everyone else's.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I see more people complaining about hidden posts than hidden posts (which I do read every time, and I have seen once or twice a hidden post that should not have been). It’s difficult to take seriously people banging on about a down-voting cabal being after them because they’re so edgy and right.
Pxtl 3y ago
I tend to think it's more internet-poisoning than yes-men. When he was sleeping in his office and living and breathing his companies, he didn't have time to get corrupted by social media. Then he slowed down once his companies got big-enough and stable-enough to run themselves. His transphobia (combined with his hatred of the COVID policies that were hurting his bottom line) led him down the worst internet rabbit-holes and now he's off the deep end.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

xena 3y ago

I don't think he had any talent, he just got lucky and companies insulated themselves from him. With Twitter we're seeing what happens when companies don't insulate themselves from him.

coldtea 3y ago
>he just got lucky Several times? Oscar Wilde wrote: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Something of the kind, with an opposite sign, could be said for repeated business success. And in this case it's more than 2 times, and not just some small successess either. Isn't it more like "He's idiosyncratic and often erratic and/or has political views I don't like" that people translate to an absurd "he has no business talent"?
- presbyterian 3y ago
  It’s easy to get lucky several times when you have a rich family that keeps you from truly failing
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    Basically the "no-life-risk" thesis. I don't think it's entirely crazy either, Elon was going to be comfortable whatever he did, and some people in that position will roll the dice several times, and some of those guys will win several times. Still takes some skill, I don't doubt that. But the main ingredient is risk.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    And yet I don't any great percentage of people from a "rich family" making multi-billion dollar companies. I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      > And yet I don't any great percentage of people from a "rich family" making multi-billion dollar companies. Because of the rarity of multi-billion dollar companies it makes more sense to flip the question - what are the demographics of those who found those companies? If the odds of doing something are 1:100 who is going to have better odds at succeeding - the person who gets 1 throw or 10 throws? Neither are guaranteed to succeed, but they both have a chance and one is much more likely than the other. That's what's at play here.
      - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        There’s a lot more non-rich people though. So even at 1 throw each you’d expect them to be most of the successes under this theory. Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
        SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        > There’s a lot more non-rich people though. So even at 1 throw each you’d expect them to be most of the successes under this theory. Well, this is why we have to look at the numbers. And it depends on the odds. If it's one in a billion and the rich get ten million throws and the poor get 1 each then the fact there are a lot of non-rich people isn't as impactful. > Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore. Yes, like having cash to throw around and a safety net to rely on so that those shots can be taken as well as easier access to potentially important connections and resources.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - 3y ago
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    "It’s easy to get lucky several times when you have a rich family that keeps you from truly failing" This hypothesis is somewhat testable statistically. There are approximately 25 thousand people worth 100 million dollars+ in the world, with more than a third of that number residing in the US. [0] I think we can safely say that people worth 100 million and more are rich. If it is easy to get lucky several times with a rich family, you would expect some nontrivial share of Musk equivalents among them or their kids. Say, two hundred? Not observed. Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those, or it is not that easy. [0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us-has-highest-number-of-super-wealthy-worth-100m-or-more/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us...
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      > Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those Maybe? The thing about having a rich family is... you're already rich. That removes one of the prime motivations to take serious risks, of the sort that paid off for Musk; namely, to become rich. I'm sure you get a lot of people who invest, or toss some money into this or that. But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor.
      - inglor_cz 3y ago
        "But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor." AFAIK Musk was a relative nobody in the millionaire world when he poured a majority of his wealth into SpaceX (2002). They were very close to bankruptcy during the Falcon 1 experiments and if the fourth launch failed, they would have joined a fairly extensive graveyard of defunct space startups, together with Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and a few hundred others.
        ethbr0 3y ago
        By that point, he'd already been CEO of PayPal for a bit (after co-founding X.com that merged into the company that became PayPal) and made $175M for his stake when eBay bought it. Then $100M went to found SpaceX. But that does seem like a very large bet that millionaires don't often make.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  If we can refine the "he got lucky" statement I'd say it's this: He's a talented motivational speaker, he can inspire as a leader, he can paint a vivid future of great accomplishments , not in the least bolstered by his extreme confidence of expertise and knowledge (often not actualized). Everything he talks about is at least about the entire planet, sometimes multiple planets, and with xAI even for understanding the entire Universe, and this helps him attract two key resources: - Capital. - Talent. And then when he puts talent and capital together... yes he got lucky couple of times. But he's always been a terrible manager and this is visible not just with Twitter.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    > He's a talented motivational speaker He IS? In what contexts? Because every time I see him speak, it's painful. His delivery is so stilted/awkward, that I think he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen.
    - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
      He's no Steve Jobs, but sometimes when you don't say something people fill-in context themselves. For example when he makes a long dramatic pause, so he seems deeply contemplative. Or when he stops himself midway through a sentence and corrects himself, he seems earnest. We're ready to forgive a lot if we suspect behind the awkwardness hides a genius. The trope of the distracted professor, the autistic savant is at least centuries old. He leans into every such trope, and he's very careful in cultivating an image of a "founder", of an "inventor" of an "engineer". Most people by now know he hasn't founded Tesla, or PayPal (was fired from it in fact), he hasn't engineered the SpaceX rockets (although he had a hand in those that blew up), and he in fact has no engineering degree despite claiming otherwise. So I'd say all this means he's building this image very intentionally, and he's trying to turn his weaknesses into strengths. The more he stutters and repeats, the less we notice how much of what he says is kinda... vapid. Trump has some similar patterns by the way, you can ask him a specific question and he'll say he has great ways of answering that, some of the best people told him he has the best answers, his history of a businessman speaks about long experience providing great answers to all kinds of questions... and he won't answer your question in the end. Trump and Musk are very different in some ways, but very similar in others.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  Yes I think he got lucky multiple times, because his failures are also quite significant. Remember hyperloop? Remember he got kicked out of PayPal? Remember boring company? Remember solar city? If anything it just shows he has enough money that it’s okay when some of his extremely ambitious projects fail. A less wealthy person couldn’t even attempt any of what he does much less fail as often and as publicly as he has. Elizabeth Holmes went to prison, for example.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Remember hyperloop? Remember he got kicked out of PayPal? Remember boring company? Remember solar city? One could say similar things for other well succesful businessmen: Remember NeXT? Remember he got kicked out of Apple? Remember the G4 Cube? Remember MobileMe? Remember Ping?
    - alexb_ 3y ago
      Hey, you're finally understanding that Steve Jobs was a hack!
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        Not quite. He was very good on gathering a specific kind of people and organizing them to an specific kind of work. He got that very reliably. When that kind of work aligned with success, he was successful.
      - CamperBob2 3y ago
        Just like that Alexander the Great guy. Way overrated. He didn't kill that many Persians at all, it turns out. Just sat there on a horse barking orders.
    - NicuCalcea 3y ago
      You're right, other businesspeople get lucky too.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
- esotericimpl 3y ago
  [dead]
- BobbyJo 3y ago
  One would expect the richest Man in the world to also be the luckiest. The latter is simply not possible without the former. I do think he's also pretty smart, and very hardworking, but let's not pretend that lucky isn't 99.9% what it takes to be the richest man in the world. There is a ton of people out there that are just as smart, and just as hardworking, and none of them have 1/1000th Musk's wealth.
- maxbond 3y ago
  There are 8 billion people in the world. With such a large population, we expect some people to just be stupidly lucky many times in a row, right? Especially since they aren't really independent events - if you get a lucky break, it keeps you in the game longer, making your second break more likely. And it would make sense that the lucky outliers would be some of the wealthiest, right?
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >With such a large population, we expect some people to just be stupidly lucky many times in a row, right? No, that's not how business work. This is not coin-tossing, the "being lucky" includes attracting VCs and investments, building a good image, picking a good niche, delivering, getting buyers, and several other things besides. You can get lucky with one of those, but not all of those, and several independent times. Else skill doesn't mean anything, and you could make the same argument for any human venture.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      Try thinking about it like a scientist or a statistician rather than a business person. Which is to say, don't think in terms of inviolable rules - that's useful for engineering the system, but can sabotage your ability to understand the system - and think instead in terms of what is possible and at what rate you expect it to happen. Then try multiplying that by 8 billion. > Else skill doesn't mean anything Skill matters, it just isn't the only factor. > You could make the same argument for any human venture. Luck profoundly effects every aspect of our lives, yeah. Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >Which is to say, don't think in terms of inviolable rules - that's useful for engineering the system, but can sabotage your ability to understand the system - and think instead in terms of what is possible and at what rate you expect it to happen. Then try multiplying that by 8 billion Notice that the above have nothing to with statistics. It's just handwaving based on the "with 8 billion people trying, anything is possible". >Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner. That has already shifted the goalposts, to "luck among the best players" as opposed to "he just got lucky".
- pavlov 3y ago
  > "Several times?" With enough people in the world, someone will eventually get lucky in several improbable ways and may look like a genius thanks to survivorship bias. I'm not saying Musk is that, but maybe his primary talent is risk-taking and fundraising rather than product innovation.
- kaba0 3y ago
  He is a talented.. scammer, who is good at hyping up shit on which his people may or may not be able to deliver. It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    << It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people. Oh, but it is based on how hard it is for corporate America to even accept such a notion without going for 'egghead' in their internal vocabulary. I think I disagree.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    "It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people." To employ, no, but to get a stream of important innovations out of them, that might actually be harder than rocket science. The vast majority of smart people around the world are stuck in mediocre jobs. Hotspots of technical productivity like Bell Labs or SpaceX or NASA of the 1960s are pretty rare and rarely last for more than approximately a generation. How to get smart people to be actually scientifically productive is a major question of history. An example: 100 years ago, several very important innovators like von Neumann were Hungarians; nowadays, Hungary is a scientific backwater. (With the exception of Katalin Karikó, the mRNA lady.)
  - ameister14 3y ago
    >It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people. This is a ridiculous statement if you've ever run a company. "Just hire smart people and your company will be successful!" Great, glad you cracked the code.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      You can also employ a hiring manager who will hire smart people for you? He is definitely not operating on startup money, he can do that as well.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        If only all those companies who got bankrupt knew this wise advice! HN is trully a trove of business wisdom!
- onion2k 3y ago
  Several times? I don't know if Musk's success is down to luck or not, but to answer your implied question of "Do you really think it could be luck to succeed on several different occasions?" the answer is yes. To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old "it's been heads 9 times in a row, it must be tails next" gambler's fallacy. Someone could succeed in building billion dollar companies largely on luck many of times in a row. It's very unlikely, but it's not impossible, at least as far as any company's success is down to the luck of the founders.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old "it's been heads 9 times in a row, it must be tails next" gambler's fallacy I don't think you understand how this fallacy (and logic ) works. This is only a fallacy because the coin toss events are trivially expected (and assumed) to be independent chance events in the first place. Business success are not supposed to be independent like that, unless you take for granted what you're supposed to prove. And to do that, you'd have to ignore some pretty big factors different to coin tosses, like the continuity of an agent making business decisions, their promotional and organizational skills, their connections, their reputation with VCs and the press, past performance as part of their image, their experience, and several other factors besides, which makes repeated business successes nothing like independent coin tosses.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      I don't think you understand how this fallacy (and logic ) works. I don't think you understand how similes work. There's no way to really know what extent luck is involved when a business succeeds, but it's probably not zero. It's entirely reasonable to suggest Musk has been lucky many times over. That doesn't mean he'll be lucky again, nor does it mean the lucky events he's had so far have been trivial. Believing that Musk will (or won't if you're not a fan) be lucky again in his next business because things will fall in Musk's favor again is the gambler's fallacy - the belief that past events influence future events. No doubt the things Musk can influence will go his way, but there will be things outside of his control that he might not be so lucky with. Even big, important things. Nothing about the gambler's fallacy says anything about how trivial or otherwise the lucky events are.
- troupo 3y ago
  > he just got lucky > > Several times? Yes. @notacoward had a perfect comment about this a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That really is a perfect comment.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    There were tons of 100x richer kids who didn't manage to throw succesfully any such darts, much less do so on highly competitive, highly unrelated domains...
    - kergonath 3y ago
      That is not how statistics work. We are talking about odds, not certainties. If people from the working class are 10 times less likely to end up CEOs of multi-billion corporations (which does sound very generous), you’d still expect to see one every so often.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        Which is neither here, nor there. The argument was that Musk was just a lucky incompetent person, not that he was skilled but "only" among a "limited" ten million plus people in the US alone starting at the same wealth levels... Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth starting points had the chance to throw their darts, and Musk just happened by chance to hit bullseye on a major company sale/exit/buildup 4 or more times in a row, including turning out the richest man in the world by mere lucky darting?
        troupo 3y ago
        > The argument was that Musk was just a lucky incompetent person That wasn't the argument. The argument was about luck, not competence > Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth You're assuming all those wealthy Americans decided to throw darts, or threw the same amount of darts. They did not. If you follow his successes, you can see a repeated cycle: "invested millions or billions of his own money, kept the company afloat for years". You don't get to do that on competence alone. All of his companies were on the verge of bankrupcy at one point. And lookey lookey, on "competence alone" NASA awards SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar contract after a single successful launch (after three failed attempts). As an aside, "Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors". Same for Tesla. It existed for 7 years before it delivered its first car. And even by then it was at least 70 million of Musk's own money. And then a huge infusion of government money. SolarCity. Failed, and bought with Tesla's money. Neuralink. No idea if it's a failure yet, exists due to Musk's money. BoringCompany. A non-entity that existed only because of Musk's money, and then due to unlimited investor money (what the US mistakes for "innovation"). It really exists only due to anti-public-transportation lobbying. And so on. He exemplifies the quote I posted.
- shreyshnaccount 3y ago
  (Read: investors chasing the next big thing (after seeing the tech boom) give money to a person smart enough to know that to get the money all he has to do is promise the next big thing from the next tech boom) (and later use the money to hire smart people who sometimes actually do build a big thing)
- JustFinishedBSG 3y ago
  > Several times? Yes ? Not only there is no reason for it not to be the case ( it's not like rolling 6 two times in a row is impossible... ) but anyway once you've achieved your first success it's easier to buy the next ones.
- delfinom 3y ago
  >Several times? People that are wealthy very very very very often, fail upwards.
- rvba 3y ago
  Statistically shouldnt someone get lucky 2 or 3 times? Say there are million people with 1 million to invest. Then 1/100 chance to get lucky. Do it 3 times (1/100)^3? Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
  - kergonath 3y ago
    > Then 1/100 chance to get lucky. Do it 3 times (1/100)^3? It’s easier to do when you can be bailed out by friends and family after the first failure, compared to people who end up sleeping on the street. Considering that even succeeding once is a rare event, it is not that surprising that the final population is heavily skewed. > Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them? There is certainly a bit of that. And to be fair, it is the best strategy: a single human has only so much bandwidth them handling all the aspects of a large-ish company is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention, a single point of failure, so the company’s dead the moment anything happens to them. It’s been the same with Jobs, one of his talents was to hire the right people.
- lucideer 3y ago
  > Several times? Yes. Capital tends to make it easier on each iteration.
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Not lucky, subsidized [1]. [1] Company with $15 million revenue in 2008 gets $465 million "loan" in 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-through-for-tesla-with-a-465-million-loan-for-its-electric-sedan https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla Of course, Ford got $5.9 billion bailout, because capitalism is the lie profiteers tell to the wage slaves as they privatize profits while socializing losses.
- ianai 3y ago
  I’m not seeing reputable sources reporting ford got bailouts. Nor do I see ford on this list. https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    It's in the first paragraph of the linked article [1]. They were called "loans" in the government-speak of the post-2008 crash, but if you look at the semantics, they were just risk-free bailouts. [1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"
    - dahdum 3y ago
      How is not a loan if they’ve been repaying it?
      - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
        Can I, just a random citizen, get a loan from the government for not even billions or hundreds of millions but let's say $100,000? I will of course repay "in due course, at the appropriate juncture, in the fullness of time" [1], at 0% interest. There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI [2] "How Did PPP Scammers Steal $100+ Billion", https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud
valval 3y ago
Nice hypothesis. I’ll remember you when I need to sell my Oceanside property in Arizona.
treeman79 3y ago
[flagged]
- kaba0 3y ago
  It’s no free speech, it’s just elon-style censorship. Somehow calling out his private jet trips is no longer free speech, right?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    Sadly, yes. I am pretty out there on free speech and Elon is not messiah in this space. If anything, he may be one of those false prophets.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > when he allowed free speech Well, the fact that he said a whole bunch of things about free speech, and proceeded to walk all of them back in short order—while still claiming to be a staunch supporter of free speech—probably pissed off a lot of people.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Wasn’t one of the first things he did to let Kanye back on the platform “for free speech” then immediately ban him again for posting a Swastika (which is clearly protected by free speech?) Seems to me like you’re just taking a known liar’s words at face value.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  He hasn't "allowed free speech", he's just been more forgiving of some free speech and less forgiving of others, for political reasons. Actually, very free people want absolute free speech on a social media platform because we don't want 4chan, we want a place we can talk to friends and family.
- aCoreyJ 3y ago
  Did he allow free speech or did he make different, and more opaque, decisions about who to ban while laying off anyone who handles appeals. Also being able to pay to make your speech more visible isn't what most people have in mind when they think of "free speech absolutism"
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
How can you be so sure that it was just luck? Why should anyone trust you above Carmack and Karpathy who are talented without any doubt and who have worked closely with him, who has nothing but high praise for him.
amelius 3y ago
> I don't think he had any talent He has a talent: self-promotion.
api 3y ago
Once can be luck. Succeeding multiple times at very hard things is not luck. People can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone can be simultaneously a genius and an idiot. In the real world this is very common. I like to put it this way: how many musicians do you like who are geniuses at composition, drums, guitar, vocals, or some other musical skill but are absolutely intolerable assholes and/or complete lunatics in the rest of their lives? Can you still enjoy their music? Does their music cease to be good when you learn about their personality flaws? IMHO much of Elon's success can be attributed to two things: (1) He is at least a good enough engineer or has good enough "engineers' intuition" to hire people who know what they are talking about and get them working on the right things. He seems much stronger in physical areas like rockets can cars though, not software. (2) He doesn't listen to pessimists and nihilists who say things are impossible if, when reasoning from first principles, they can be shown to be quite possible. Example: ignoring people who said you can't land a rocket or that an EV could never do well in the market. Ignoring pessimism can be a superpower. I do think Elon shows signs of chronic burnout at this point. The far-right / conspiranoid brain worm infection he's developed is IMHO a symptom. Opportunistic infections take hold when the immune system is weak.

shri_krishna 3y ago

> It’s not a popular opinion on this site Lmfao your opinion is literally the popular opinion on this site. Talk of bubbles within bubbles within bubbles!

passwordoops 3y ago
I've come to view this qualifier as HN's answer to LinkedIn's humblebrag. Note I am guilty of using that qualifier once or twice prior to stating a popular opinion on HN...
- mcv 3y ago
  I tend to downvote the "this will probably be downvoted but..." comments (except when it's an extraordinarily insightful comment). Just leave that sentence out. It adds nothing to the discussion.
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    Yeah, any complaint/presaging about imaginary internet points gets an automatic downvote from me.

deburo 3y ago

Why isn't he seeing his successful companies fail then?

baz00 3y ago
Yet. They don't do anything which can't be done by someone else for less money and at less risk to investors.
rovr138 3y ago
Which other ones did he run directly where he had the 'expertise'? Basically, they had other people to help guide it vs just Musk doing it himself.
- coldtea 3y ago
  As opposed to Bezos and Jobs and Cook and Ellisson and Zuckerberg every other CEO, which doesn't have "people to run it"?
  - valval 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - kaba0 3y ago
    They fail to amuse me either, like, CEOs not being some gods is not a controversial statement, you ain’t disproving anything. That myth (or rather propaganda) that they are some übermensch that work more than you could ever imagine and are so productive and it’s all thanks to the magic of powernaps or whatever bullshit they make up to sell you the temporarily embarrassed billionaire tale is thoroughly debunked. They are ordinary people who got into a very lucky situation and didn’t fuck up too bad.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >CEOs not being some gods is not a controversial statement, you ain’t disproving anything. Bro, do you even HN? That's like the gospel here...

scarmig 3y ago

I think it's more that being terminally online has given him the brain worms when it comes to Twitter, and everything he does with Twitter has to be interpreted through the mass of brain worms.

mcv 3y ago
He does come across as Twitter-addicted. And now I'm wondering if Trump's lunacy may also have been caused by Twitter, and that he may have been a more reasonable person in the past.
- delecti 3y ago
  Everything I've heard is that Trump has been regarded as a moron for more than 50 years. He was a moron, raised by uncaring parents, and is now dealing with dementia. I'm sure the addictive nature of social media engagement didn't help, but as a person Trump is just like that.
  - rvba 3y ago
    Didnt Musk smoke drugs?
    - delecti 3y ago
      As far as I've heard, yes, though I'm not sure why it would be relevant in this conversation. I don't expect there are many rich or famous people who haven't.
      - rvba 3y ago
        [flagged]

shortrounddev2 3y ago

Gavin Belson: All I hear from everybody is good news. Have I just surrounded myself with sycophants, who are just telling me whatever I want to hear, regardless of the truth? Denpok: *gulp* ... no. Gavin Belson: Thank you Denpok. I really needed to hear that.

101008 3y ago
What a great TV show. I miss Sunday nights...
tunnuz 3y ago
This scene is perfect.
rchaud 3y ago
Any time I see Naval Ravikant's mystical musings on the philosophy of innovation or whatever, I think of Denpok guy in Silicon Valley.
- SkyMarshal 3y ago
  Naval cribs a lot of his musings from various books, but never credits them, passes them off as his own. Folks who have read most or all of the same books he has can recognize the source. He so desperately wants to be a philosopher, but is cheating at it.
  - davnicwil 3y ago
    Does any philosopher mostly come up with their own unique ideas in a black box, uninfluenced by and not based upon ideas that preceded them in culture and literature? This is an actual question, I don't know the answer, but it does seem extremely unlikely to me that this would be the case.
    - Kye 3y ago
      I don't think getting ideas from elsewhere was the issue.

mcv 3y ago

That Musk's genius acumen were either fake or something that he has since lost, is not an unpopular opinion, but the ruling wisdom here and elsewhere. It's true, lots of people did fall for his Tony Stark act, but the past year has really opened people's eyes to the fact that it was all narcissism. The signs were there long before, but they were easy to ignore in light of the success of innovative companies like Tesla and SpaceX. But now people are wondering whether the success of those companies was really because of him, or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory.

meroes 3y ago
I became convinced when he said he was putting CPUs in the Tesla Wall batteries during the cpu shortage for mining. I knew there were signs (cybertruck, the robot gimmick possibly being earlier one) but that was it for me. This is separate from his personality which I disliked earlier.
mschuster91 3y ago
> or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory The "raising money" part is the inarguably most important part of any startup. Given enough money, you can ride through absolutely anything - and the kind of projects that Musk provided with money always need a crapton of them: Tesla to even have a tiny chance at surviving against the established behemoths, and SpaceX because (prior to them) spaceflight was something for rich developed nation states only.

monero-xmr 3y ago

Criticizing elon musk is very popular on HN…

drexlspivey 3y ago

[flagged]

prasadjoglekar 3y ago

Maybe; and yet Tesla still rolls off cars off the assembly line and SpaceX is still reliably launching and recovering rockets. He's playing with his own money, no different than Bezos losing money and 500K subs on the WaPo.

phone8675309 3y ago
Teslas notoriously has very shit QA before they're released to customers at this point, and is this the same SpaceX that destroyed their launch pad on the last launch? Real stellar performance.

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

okeuro49 3y ago

[flagged]

stormfather 3y ago
It's such a radioactive opinion on here that you got downvoted just for saying it exists and is unpopular. You didn't even endorse it. Wow. I noticed that Musk became unpopular here right after the media and social media turned on him. It's disappointing that even top-tier intelligent people don't usually think for themselves.
- okeuro49 3y ago
  Now not only downvoted, but also censored. Despite the issue being covered in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-twitter-files-should-disturb-liberal-critics-of-elon-musk-and-heres-why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-tw...

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

If you read the history, it sounds like many of his... dysfunctions... go back to the start of his business career, and the latest debacles look a lot like stuff that went down at PayPal/X.com over 20 years ago; where it sounds like he got evicted and Peter Thiel had to clean up the mess. And in fact this X.com renaming sounds like him dealing with personal baggage and vendettas from back then. Basically the opposite of the stoic and calculating personality one expects a giant of capitalism to be. So I actually just wonder if it's more than there was a 10 year period of Musk... getting lucky... by surrounding himself with some competence. That, and the investing world after 2008, with its intensely low interest rates and high tech-sector profits made it easy to "swim naked." The efforts of a narcissistic showman Dunning-Kruger personality like Musk... are a great place to dump your money as long as you're not the last one holding the bag when shit hits the fan (aka Twitter).

GhostVII 3y ago

I don't think he really had special talent for business, he had strong beliefs that happened to line up with what was profitable at the time. I don't think when he invested in Tesla or started SpaceX he was thinking about whether it made business sense - he just wanted to build futuristic technology, and he was one of the few people willing to spend a lot of money on a new company to actually make it happen. That doesn't really mean he is a genius at business, just that he is really good at pitching his vision and getting people excited about it.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> at least a decade ago by him surrounding himself with ego-stroking yes men It’s more recent. The Sacks-Chamatch-Calacanis axis didn’t go into gear until Covid. Somewhere between the election of Trump and lockdown, the rot set in. That suggests it’s still excusable.

Symmetry 3y ago

I can see why you think that, but I think you're wrong. Musk's success in Zip2 and X.com was mostly realizing there was a market opportunity and working long hours personally on the code to get the sites up and running. With SpaceX and Telsa mostly his value-add has been looking at things and saying "This isn't elegantly designed enough" sort of like Steve Jobs but for internals. And he seems to be right often enough to be successful. But he seems to think that he has this ability for software engineering and user interfaces too, but he doesn't. Which is why he was canned at PayPal and why he's making such a mess of Twitter. All people are composed of both strengths and weaknesses. The important part is finding a position which plays to your strenths. Sadly, I think critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess He absolutely does. We’ve seen it in his prior reversals, when fortunes at his firms were down and he changed course savvily. The sycophants he’s surrounded himself with, namely, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, do not. And that’s rubbing off on him.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The sycophants are one thing, but he's gone off the loon end himself for extremely personal stuff as well such as the names of his children with Grimes.
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    Grimes also wanted a weird name.
    - omnibrain 3y ago
      Yes, but she‘s an artist.
      - 3y ago

bipop5000 3y ago

Imagine being the world's richest man, even for a little bit. I would imagine that does some stuff to your ego.

rossjudson 3y ago

Do any of these "yes men" have names or positions? Do you have an example? A lot of these criticisms read like "extrapolations on an unsupported basis that aligns with my current over-simplification".

BrotherBisquick 3y ago

> It’s not a popular opinion on this site Oh come on.

goodbyesf 3y ago

> It’s not a popular opinion on this site, and I’m probably going to be savagely downvoted At best, it's hard to take someone seriously when they intentionally lie about the obvious. At worst, it makes it seem like you are part of a pr campaign. Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I genuinely interested. Maybe your experience on hn is different from everyone else's.

kergonath 3y ago
> Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I see more people complaining about hidden posts than hidden posts (which I do read every time, and I have seen once or twice a hidden post that should not have been). It’s difficult to take seriously people banging on about a down-voting cabal being after them because they’re so edgy and right.

Pxtl 3y ago

I tend to think it's more internet-poisoning than yes-men. When he was sleeping in his office and living and breathing his companies, he didn't have time to get corrupted by social media. Then he slowed down once his companies got big-enough and stable-enough to run themselves. His transphobia (combined with his hatred of the COVID policies that were hurting his bottom line) led him down the worst internet rabbit-holes and now he's off the deep end.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]