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Comment by leesec | Hacker News Reader

The amount Elon has delivered so far this year alone at Tesla and SpaceX is tremendous then you see a headline where he landed a 50+ million tunneling deal on the side because why not. Staggering.

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His companies delivered, not him alone. Take nothing away from the man though, he works insane hours.

Yeh but you got to hire a good team and he really does that

Then he fires them constantly or frustrates the hell out of them until they quit. Elon is a bad boss.

Only those who just can’t handle him.

Plenty of people does not mind working for him.

See this survey

https://insideevs.com/tesla-spacex-employees-confident-elon-...

I'd much rather have a shitty boss with great vision than a great boss with shitty mission (e.g. advertising or something).

Then how come the team does good work? "Firing constantly" sounds exactly like weeding out unproductive members (of course I now nothing about the workers' feelings, though).

No, a lot of very good folks are shed by Elon's companies all the time. He's just not an effective manager, Tesla is in great measure successful despite Elon, not because of him, and his limitations as a manager are becoming more and more of an obstacle. I have first hand knowledge of that.

But he's the one coordinating it all. Which is impressive. It's often difficult to run a single small business let alone a single large project/company. It's quite outstanding to be able to run multiple of them simultaneously.

He's not exactly coordinating it all himself. I doubt SpaceX would be doing anywhere near as well without people like Gwynne Shotwell.

Gwynne Shotwell is absolutely under-appreciated, perhaps because she's less public. I'd absolutely like hearing more from her.

Totally agree he's not the only person doing great work at his companies. Also really weird to me when people are confident he's not the genius one man band he appears to be, and then immediately point the credit towards another Singular person like Gwynne Shotwell. If we can say it wouldn't be doing great without Gwynne Shotwell, it should also be clear it wouldn't be doing great/even exist without Elon.

You're either shifting the goalposts or are misunderstanding what's being said. No one at all said that Gwynne is "a singular person" who is doing all the work. Instead Gwynne was being used as a counter example to show that Elon isn't the only one working at the company or doing all the organization.

The only issue being discussed was the original assertion that "he's the one coordinating it all", and pointing to a person doing coordinating seems like a great way to prove that wrong.

If we could plot effort vs size of enterprise for the top few roles, I wonder how that looks?

I'm willing to bet the average small enterprise requires a lot more effort on behalf of the owners and managers than any of the C-suite roles at large enterprises.

The small business owner often has to perform many roles themselves, and probably still not be able to afford a cleaner / household help / assistant(s) / tutors / nannies.

He sets the vision and drives the team.

Reminds me of a recent story about the most recent rocket engines from SpaceX. Elon pushed his team for scaling up an efficient design of rockets, which till then was only done with lower powered engines. Elon took a look at the tech, came to a decision that scaling up is a reasonable risk/reward trade-off and demanded his team go ahead with it. His team balked, but made it happen.

I remember the leader of the team specifically thanking Elon, saying that without his push, they would not have done it.

It takes a lot of guts, knowledge and confidence in yourself and your team to make such decisions. edit : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153953

he's also a trendsetter. What's with Boeing and Blue Origin getting in on the commercial space race. Also he create the market for electric cars with new players like Rivian and old ones like Volvo, and load others I'm sure. Even some big players like Virgin Group jumped in on the Hyperloop thing, although I dont care about this as much.

Other players may create supply, but Elon can create demand. He's in such a unique position, imo.

for sure:

- closed stores

- no profit

- lied about FSD

- stock down 30%

- long-term investors exit

the tunnel is a joke. we were promised something, but as always with musk, we get something completely different. i'm giving the tunnel deal 3 to 6 months before imploding.

About 4 months ago the narrative on HN was that Tesla will go bankrupt right about this time because they'd be unable to repay a loan. Read news recently that they paid it in cash.

Been seeing highly upvoted doomsday comments since many years about Tesla, like Model 3 was literally supposed to be DoA, it just feels so weird to me.

And those comments are understandable for a number of reasons. From an outsiders / non-economist's point of view, these things should not be possible. There's also an army of trolls hired by short sellers who would benefit from Tesla's stock losing value - at one point, Tesla was the most shorted stock out there.

I agree; it always makes me put my tinfoil hat on, and wonder how much of this comes from news planted either by competing car companies, or more likely the hedge funds who will profit if Tesla does fail.

- lowering prices for EV

- human rated space craft to ISS

- massively extend the lead in terms of EV charging networks

But yeah we should really focus on the closes show rooms, that's really whats important ...

- prices for EVs are coming down irrespective of tesla

- tesla doesn’t build spacecraft. that’s spacex.

- the tesla ev charging network is expanding. but can i charge another ev at one of their stations?

all the things that i mentioned are signs that the company isn’t doing well.

Small nobodies are typically negative about those pushing the envelope.

wow, what a hateful and crude reply. how is musk pushing the envelope? isn’t the whole industry getting there anyway, tesla be damned?

also, toyota.

I mean we are celebrating the next massive milestone of electrification of cars. Things like stock price and investors seems irrelevant

love it or hate it, the stock price and investor sentiment is crucial to a listed company. tsla can actually go under.

I'm surprised I haven't read any talk of, or even speculation about the idea of the Boring Company getting involved with the tunneling required for CA's high-speed rail project (for the Pacheco Pass and Tehachapi Mountains segments).

My guess is that perhaps very different tunneling technology is required given the geology or something. Or maybe it's just that Elon Musk hates trains and loves cars way too much.

TBC makes small tunnels, enough for an SUV, likely not big enough for a long distance train.

TBC's "innovation" was to make smaller tunnels, which is useful for things that can be done in smaller tunnels but is useless for any mass transit activity because they're simply not large enough.

(TBC's boring machines were previously used to bore utility and sewer tunnels.)

Which tunneling deal are you referring to?

Las Vegas.

Have they obtained all necessary rights-of-way? I'm having trouble picturing a route that doesn't transit protected desert areas.

Its just a underground tunnel that connects some exhibition halls with people movers. I think Elon's company got the lowest bid to do the work.

Sorry, in seeing "Vegas" I assumed that it would be traveling from Vegas to somewhere else, like L.A.

Knowing Elon Musk it is probably best they start on a small project given he is likely to over-commit to things.

Which makes the Tesla bear cabal so disappointing.

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