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Don't think calling Elon a con artist is fair - he built two of the most important companies of the 21st century.
by borissk 3y ago
Don't think calling Elon a con artist is fair - he built two of the most important companies of the 21st century.
- htk 3y agoI would say three, if you count StarLink separately from SpaceX.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- randomdata 3y agoIf we are willing to count 'built' as companies already going before he arrived, then we can also throw in Tesla, Paypal, and Twitter as well.
- treyfitty 3y ago4, if you count his early influence and, I believe, founding of OpenAI. Albeit, he was not instrumental in the OpenAI as we know it today, but he set it in motion by hiring Sam Altman as the CEO, among other things.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- randomdata 3y agoYou have to count OpenAI. It is the only other company he has built alongside SpaceX (unless you count the unimportant ones like The Boring Company; the original comment implies we are not counting them). He has certainly helped maintain Twitter, Tesla, and PayPal at different points, but they were already built before he arrived.
- cal5k 3y agoTesla was already built before he arrived? You don't know what you're talking about.
- randomdata 3y agoYes, Tesla, the company, was already built. Tesla, the car, was not, but we are clearly talking about companies, not cars. Is it that you are unaware of the difference between companies and cars?
- snovv_crash 3y agoDumping a bunch of 18650s and an electric motor into a Lotus as a one-off demo is less than what the Cybertruck team did in 90 days. I'm not very impressed with the initial team to be honest. How big do you think it was exactly when he joined? And at what level of product maturity?
- randomdata 3y ago> And at what level of product maturity? 1%. It is at 2% now. Which isn't a knock on what Tesla is doing today, but to tell how it pales in comparison to what the company will be doing 1,000 years from now. We are still in very early days. If that is how you want to measure it, Tesla hasn't been built yet. It is still under construction. No matter how you slice it, it is impossible for Musk to have built Tesla.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- scarab92 3y agoThat’s dishonest. Building a company isn’t about who filed the paperwork, it’s about defining the product, the path to profitability and executing on that vision. You might not like the guy, but he clearly built Tesla.
- randomdata 3y agoIf that were what it means to build a company, an operating company can never be built. There is no end to defining the product, the path to profitability and executing on that vision. You would always be building, never reaching a point where it can be spoken of in the past tense. That's fine if we want to hold that definition, but then your insistence that Musk built Tesla does not logically follow.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoI don't think those two things have to be independent of one another.
- borissk 3y agoThan you can call anyone a con artist.
- wavefunction 3y agoYou can but the reason it sticks with Musk is that he is a con-artist and engages in con-artistry, the most important indicator.
- izzydata 3y agoBelieving he built two of the most important companies of the 21st century is part of the con. The first being that they are the most important and that he built them.
- CamperBob2 3y agoYou have to be pretty dimwitted to think that either SpaceX or Tesla 1) are unimportant, or 2) would have reached anything close to their current level of success without Musk behind them. Which makes his descent into erratic flimflammery all the more tragic.
- randomdata 3y ago> SpaceX or Tesla Tesla was already built before Musk came along. He has helped maintain it, granted. The second important company he built is OpenAI.
- woooooo 3y agoTesla didn't even have a car before Musk came along, let alone a path to profitability. Whatever Musk's faults, it's really interesting to see people rewrite history.
- randomdata 3y agoThe cars produced by Tesla were not already built before his time, but the company Tesla was. You do realize that companies and cars are different things, right?
- woooooo 3y agoI can file an LLC by end of next week if I want. A sustainable, profitable automobile manufacturer would be slightly more difficult.
- 3y ago
- randomdata 3y agoHe got ousted out of one of the two (OpenAI), though. Perhaps because the partners recognized his con?
- snovv_crash 3y agoYou mean the nonprofit that was founded to produce open source AI products?