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> he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire There's a survivorship bias occurring too. You see the same selection
by robocat 1y ago
> he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire
There's a survivorship bias occurring too.
You see the same selection going on with huge commercial real estate winners: they keep doubling down and the majority eventually fail out. You see only the winner, not the failures. “Keep rolling till you crit-fail.”
Lots of successful businesses like Nvidia or Standard Oil have a similar story too: https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/how-rockefeller-and-his-partners https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/how-rockefeller-and-his-...
- dotnet00 1y agoI don't know much about Tesla's history, but with SpaceX, that definitely plays a role. While their success can be attributed to their engineering practices, their existence can be attributed to managing to get Falcon 1 to orbit on the last launch that the company could afford at the time, while many other companies, both before and after, have failed due to missing that "keyhole".
- robocat 1y agoWhat wierds me out personally is how much of human progress depends on statistically unlikely outliers... Maybe that is because I'm biased towards individual stories: statistical distributions and selection effects are hard to notice.