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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but I have a hard time praising a writer for throwing shade at the most prolific maker in our lifetime.

Keep in mind a lot of makers, inventors, etc. are not very good at the CEO job.

It's probably unlikely that Jony Ive (a truly brilliant designer) would have any business trying to run Apple.

James Dyson, a great maker, isn't the CEO of Dyson (and hasn't been since 2001). He's the chief engineer. (see the nice article below that he wrote describing how he had to bring in outside operators once they hit scale [1])

Neither Nikola Tesla nor Edison demonstrated good skill at running businesses. Musk is not a greater maker than those two.

You don't want John Carmack running id Software's day to day operations, nor do you want Shigeru Miyamoto running Nintendo. At that level, you want to aggressively focus on what you're best at.

Even Henry Ford, who was a decently skilled business operator, was still not the best available option for running the day to day operations of his own company at scale. It's crazy hard to run an extremely large business well, and the level of skill it demands is every bit as rare as the maker-type talent.

I happen to agree with this Bloomberg article. What Musk needs is Alan Mulally or the equivalent (a Gwynne Shotwell if you will; an extremely difficult challenge, given the requirement that the person be compatible with Musk):

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-23/how-elon-...

[1] https://www.inc.com/magazine/201203/burt-helm/how-i-did-it-j...

Elon has a pretty good track record of CEOing SpaceX (12 years) and Tesla (15 years), two of the most impressive and impactful companies of our generation.

Tesla has never had a profitable year, yet the company's voting structure requires almost 90% of shareholders outside of Musk to vote to ever oust him. He has even more control of SpaceX, having majority ownership and a super-majority of voting shares. It's virtually impossible to unseat him as CEO, so pointing out that he's CEO doesn't really establish anything about his quality at holding that position.

That seems like an odd way to evaluate a CEO. I would evaluate more on what the company is able to achieve (yes, I understand Tesla's lack of profitability).

That's a non-sequitur answer. He's refuting your claim that you can evaluate Musk's ability from his tenure at those two companies, because both are structured such that he can retain control regardless of his performance. He's not providing you with a rubric for evaluating CEOs, but rather pointing out how your own rubric is flawed.

I don't understand. How is his retaining control based on the structure of voting rights related to his job performance?

Good question. You're the one that implied he must be a good CEO because he had been one for so long, which is silly if he can't be fired.

"Elon has a pretty good track record of CEOing SpaceX (12 years) and Tesla (15 years)"

I'm saying he's a good CEO because has been a fantastic one for 15+ years at 2 world-changing companies. He's made shareholders 10s of billions of $$ so obviously would not be fired.

His prolificity as a maker is orthogonal to the practicality of his proposal and the legality of his statements, the things Matt Levine talks about

But an optimist and a pessimist would come to opposite conclusion based on same evidence. But pessimism generates more clicks.

For sure, we should be careful of biased reporting and also evaluate Matt's arguments critically. But you seemed to be suggesting that Musk's prolificity somehow means we shouldn't take any criticism against him seriously

What "clicks"? It's Matt Levine. You can't even click on his stuff easily anymore; you have to subscribe to it.

Don't you find that out _after_ you click?

The writer has an obligation to critique Musk and his company because it is publicly owned and needs to be held accountable.

Your criticism might have been valid if Tesla were a private organization. But it isn't. So it's not.

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