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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

The book The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, details Musk's time at Paypal and pretty much describes him as an eventual hindrance rather than a help. He was eventually ousted from the company. Peter Thiel was the one that was able to nurse the company to success.

He was vital to get the company started but eventually, he was difficult to work with. Looks to me that history repeats itself. He's a great visionary but that does not translate to a great CEO.

He needs to get a new CEO at Tesla and focus on another company where I'm sure he'll make a great impact. He truly has great vision but the everyday minutia of running a company probably irritates and bores him.

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I can only think of Elon as the only person to create THREE multi billion dollar companies in wildly different industries.

Elon is a fantastic CEO AND visionary. I personally know people who could be making double specifically work at spacex because they believe in his vision. Elon is able to get Supreme talent and productivity for pennies on the dollar. He’s able to market Tesla and spaceX to billions with such a positive favoriability unlike anything we’ve ever seen. SpaceX and Tesla don’t have a marketing budget because of Elon. Car companies spend billions marketing, Elon tweets saving billions for Tesla which he reinvests in r&d.

The entire world will lose if Elon is forced out. He’s the biggest fighter for climate change and space travel in modern history, greater than Al Gore in marketing and execution, greater than Buzz Aldrin, Tyson, and cosmos. I’d much rather have an honest relatable Elon Musk than a suit. I’d rather have creativity than suffocating structure.

Elon is a great CEO. I would pick him over almost anyone alive.

Wayne Huizenga - Blockbuster, AutoNation, Waste Management.

Thanks, just read his Wikipedia page. Can’t believe I didn’t know he was

Howard Hughes: RKO, TWA, Las Vegas

The numbers are smaller, due to inflation. But any of these successes in today’s money would be a billion dollar venture.

Wow interesting Wikipedia read on him too, you’re right that’s probabaly a billion in today’s dollars tooo.

He seems smart, but toxic. These "revolutionary" companies run by "brilliant" CEOs tend to chew people up and spit them out because they're less important than the company mission.

Hard pass.

This should be the top comment. I absolutely feel the same about Elon. We need him in this world to save us from ourselves.

>"We need him in this world to save us from ourselves."

He can't even save himself from his own bad impulses. This whole fiasco being a case in point among many. What an absurd statement to make. Speak for yourself.

No one is perfect. Perhaps we should look past flaws like this when more important problems are handled with skill.

>"No one is perfect. Perhaps we should look past flaws like this..."

Exactly, which to say he's just a regular person not some savior who is capable of "saving us all" as the OP stated.

To be fair, Musk created neither Tesla nor Paypal.

Well he turned Tesla into a multi billion dollar behemoth in a short time and revolutionized the electric car industry. He didn’t create Tesla but he did “create” Tesla the billion dollar company.

PayPal is more complicated agreed. Elon’s portion of it might be a billion due to inflation? But regardless he set the basis for it.

It's not so black and white.

The biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance goes into more detail for those curious. It's based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Elon and those close to him — including family, friends, co-workers, etc. And Elon wasn't allowed to read it until it was published.

If I give you a 3 billion dollar investment, it's not hard to create a billion dollar company with that.

That's the whole problems isn't it. Nobody gives you $3 billion to do anything.

You generally have to earn that from $0.

Unless you have investors.

Unless you have personal wealth already - which was the case with both SpaceX and Tesla.

Unless you have worked with Musk you shouldn't be making these claims. I personally haven't but I know people who have and they tell me its mixed bag. Very passionate but if he gets a bad idea then you are screwed. Many of his various blunders include the way he insisted Tesla self driving stack should look like and how entire factory should be human-free. Both of those decisions have cost in range of 100s of millions of dollars. This is not to say he hasn't made decisions that has brought in billions of dollars.

It might be somewhat important for morale that he remains CEO. So many people are rooting for the very idea of Elon Musk that it's probably what holds spacex and tesla together.

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