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Comment by chubbyrabbit | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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