Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
wsj.com
wsj.com
If one company's de facto mission statement is "We want to grow our market by 8.2 per cent and give our bosses higher Christmas bonuses" and another one comes and says "Guys, we want to fly to fscking Mars!", chances are that people like Tom Mueller [0] or Gwynne Shotwell [1] will choose the latter.
I agree in spirit, unfortunately there is far more reasonable talent than reasonable places to look elsewhere.
There's 3 things that I judge an employer by
1) Sector the company is in (Space, electric cars - Yay)
2) Revenue/Growth of the company (pie grows, does your share?)
3) Company culture (that's catch-all, but if you want a negative see that "don't hire the hot girl" guy)
A lot of ways I care more about the sector, because that's the thing I cannot hope to influence, but the rest is actually open to improvement if you're high enough on the ladder.
I think the "bean counting led" is a failure on #3, but might be a win on #2.
I hypothesize that the _MBA type_ of bean counters optimize for their pie, not for the greater good or longer term growth.
Yes. There was a lot more than this tweet, but there are screenshots.
https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1333524631219822600 + https://twitter.com/silvestricodes/status/133354701095220838...
A lot of companies have stock holders who expect some return every year without risking too much.
As a society we sure would be better off if had more Elon Musk type company leaders, but for that too happen we would need more exceptional people like him (not going to happen) or more people willing to risk their savings investing in companies that are trying to achieve great things.
Along with the fact that most people don't even have the option to take risk with the massive increase of cost of housing.
Our society has been designed to squeeze out cash flow and it's smothering our creatives.
This just means people won't be taking risks in places like SF. There's plenty of cheap housing out there. Just not in places where the market is driven up by supply constraints and money printers. And before anyone says "hurr durr, nobody wants to live in BFE Alabama" I'm talking about places like Buffalo, Hartford and Atlanta.
It can just as easily (and in my case also sometimes has) prevented some bad traits from being stamped out. So I need to consciously go way overboard with “I could just as well be wrong” to balance out my natural stubbornness.
The traits that hurt me in school still hurt me today. Like not being afraid to voice a minority opinion. Or correcting the boss/professor. Or having a strong adherence to the rules/policies and holding people/institutions to their word. Thinking outside the box or being more independent.
1) American school education, and college education is amazing. ( if you can afford it). Talk to immigrant parents From other countries for a contra point. Crushing the soul of students isn’t fully installed in America, yet (which brings us to point 2)
2) It’s the economy. At some point, the American economy stopped working as well for blue collar roles as paths to middle class incomes.
The new path required white collar credibility. Humans naturally optimized for this. Which brings us to The fundamental conflict for American education, that gets distorted depending on how you enter the discussion.
3) the American liberal arts system, produced great intellectual output, for an economy where you could pursue both intellectual limits and get a decent paying job. The number of people entering were small, and you could lavish your attention on those pursuits.
It does not work for a majority of America customers/students who simply want credibility when it comes to entering paths to social mobility, and are not interested in a life of intellectual pursuit.
Look, colleges and schools have different problems, but for businesses, a degree has become the basic filter, where it was never meant to be.
Moocs simply don’t have the credibility to fill in the gap, and you can’t make a github or deviantart for roles which don’t have a standardized output.
Related to your second and third points, I think there is at least some case that the U.S. has moved away from the idea of liberal arts schooling towards being more vocationally minded. The intent, going back as far as the mid-1800s with the Morrill Act, was specifically intended to help serve a new growing economy.
If you ask, I bet more people look at college as a way to get a job than to learn to appreciate and contribute to culture
At first blush, I would guess we have a slightly less capitalistic society than, say 200 years ago, but a more industrialized, consumeristic society.
Ironically, in such societies, people will latch on to anything that provides stability. For example, vocational degree that signals high skills or petitioning for NIMBY laws.
The reason people latch on to these is simple. There is too much to lose. The crash is too deep. If one loses a job, they lose healthcare. Not because of shortages like 200 years ago, but because of the extreme capitalism taking over healthcare, incentivizing providers and insurance companies to lobby for shitty laws instead of true competition.
People have been making this argument since the 1800s, but it doesn't seem to have much solid evidence.
Maybe these things are related because the CEO too has the same concerns.
We don't live in a society that favors innovation, we live in a society that's cutthroat.
Wall Street seems to be mostly interested by the current quarter's results, or the current year's at best. This may mismatch and undermine your long-term goals.
The financial markets have both very low risk investment options (e.g. government bonds) and very high risk investments (e.g. options), and both ends are attractive to a range of investors. I would agree that you can't pivot a company like Microsoft to a high-risk strategy with uncertain payoff; their existing shareholders would rebel. But if you have this strategy from the start then you only acquire shareholders who are fine with this kind of strategy, and I don't see why that shouldn't work out.
It's easy to say when you're coming after they've built it.
Maybe, but good ol' Elon would be dead and gone if the US Federal Government hadn't come through with a contract that bailed him out.
He was literally begging people like Bezos to lend him money because he couldn't make payroll.
Survivor bias is a thing.
The anti-MBA movement is really trying to redefine what an MBA means. Bad business decisions are "M.B.A.-ization". Good business decisions are... something else. Therefore, MBAs are bad.
There are plenty of bad MBAs running around, but it's no different than how we also have plenty of bad software developers out there despite having C.S. degrees. In both cases, the worst offenders are over-represented in the talent pool because they're more frequently pushed out of companies, while the best talent is locked up with high compensation.
The problem is in thinking of MBA cult itself. If I was an MBA without software engineering experience I would also not understand intricacies but would think I can manage it anyway.
It's not an MBA cult problem, but it is a management-academia problem. Universities provide classes about management and business without focussing on the actual business part of businesses. If you want to succeed, domain knowledge will almost always be the most important thing, and business and management schools basically brush this to the side as an afterthought.
"I have a masters in biology, I know whats wrong with this country's finances". The soft narcisism of credentialism.
A counter example would be to ask the question if AMD could have navigated it's resurgence if it had not been led by deeply technical CEO, Lisa Su
Michael Porter has been cautioning about mistaking a business model for a strategy for nearly 40 years, his ideas are taught in every business school, and the lesson still needs to be relearnt by every fresh set of senior managers.
This isn't a bad thing. Profit and price are, in most cases, still reasonable signals for what consumers want, and growing your market means you're serving real demand in the actual world. This is what creates employment and utility.
Flying to Mars and ignoring market share is nice but doesn't serve any actual point, other than Musks idiosyncratic desire for it. He can pursue it because in other areas the company actually does pay attention to growing their market and funding it.
But overall companies should pursue growing their market share because it means they're serving customers. I don't think the world would necessarily be better served if Walmart focussed on shooting rockets to the moon, rather than making it so the shelves are stocked and the products are cheap.
His goal was to increase the share price by x%. It was no secret one of the strategies was to cut jobs in high cost regions (US) and hire in low cost regions. You'd actually hear this in all hands meetings. It was shockingly shameless.
What exactly is wrong with that strategy? You would prefer to own stock in the company that employed people in a high cost region when they could hire someone with the same skill set in a low cost region?
This has happened to me before, the location I worked in shut down and the jobs were moved to a lower cost location. Many years later, they seem to be doing fine. If it was up to me, they would have kept the people in the high cost location but not hired replacements when people left while adding people in the low cost location, but they didn't see it that way.
Also, the longer I work in software development, the more I disagree with "People are not interchangeable parts", at least with respect to developing software. People come work on a code base for a while, they leave, other people get hired on, the code base lives on. If a code base can't be handed off from one group of developers to another group of developers without much trouble, something is wrong. And yes, I know that is an unpopular opinion and the role of a good development manager is to pretend like it isn't true, but there it is. In a well run software shop, you should ensure the people are interchangeable parts.
Low skilled people will slow things down, will destroy any quality and advantages you have in your code and then leave as they get better (or stay if they're really crappy)
It's worse if they stay as they have a tendency to multiply and get promoted to middle management and crap even more on things...
This will only be noticed via the occasional question "why does it take so long when competitors already did this" after a few years.
Also, by not keeping talent you lose their knowledge. All for what?, I doubt their wages factor too much in any product.
Alternative is to keep good people and pay them well, nurture a culture of excellency and kick out occasional bad hires.
That way you get great products and usually good costs as you tend to need fewer people to get things done (even if they cost more)
Note: I've seen both types of companies and some in between.
I heard that musk complained about programmers not willing to put in overtime for Zip2. All his companies after PayPal are based on motivating workers with some goal people can get behind (Environment, Mars colonization).
The term for this process is 'The Elves are leaving Middle Earth'.
Coined by Steve Blank in 2009 about when the coffee and sodas aren't free anymore in the break room. When the bean counters look at the line item that is free coffee and soda, they see a big old number to cut. But it causes the staff to have to run over to the coffee shops to grab the joe, taking a lot longer time than the break room commute. Meaning that management isn't really thinking hard anymore. The talent notices this and starts to quietly put out the CV again, as they know that the company is going to go into stasis or downhill altogether without intelligent bosses.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Caveat: I have a MBA and my focus was not on finance.
Core to their point is that managers have basically become a caste. They define managerialism as "what occurs when a special group, called management, ensconces itself systemically in an organization and deprives owners and employees of their decision-making power (including the distribution of emoluments) and justifies that takeover on the grounds of the managing group's education and exclusive possession of the codified bodies of knowledge and know-how necessary to the efficient running of the organization."
It had a lot of resonance for me because engineers think of optimization fundamentally differently than MBAs do. When I want to make something better, I tend to optimize for increasing value and/or lowering cost. MBAs tend tend to optimize for profit and things that drive profit. Which you would think wouldn't be all that different, but it becomes really obvious when you look at how private equity can destroy a company over time. E.g., Simmons Mattress: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...
I wonder if what's missing here is a deeper dive into what MBA's actually learn in business school, if anything. Sure, they learn something. There are certain kinds of data gathering or processing tasks that I would assign to an MBA. But I've known several people who have gotten MBA's after getting advanced degrees in the sciences or engineering. They all expressed that the work was time consuming, but not intellectually demanding for someone who is basically literate and comfortable with arithmetic. Their MBA "capstone" projects were nowhere near as meaty as their MS or PhD theses. A perusal of the flagship Harvard Business Review supports this notion.
Supporting your idea, I've noted in the past (probably here in HN) that the people who value the MBA degree the most are other MBA's. The "problem" with the MBA might have nothing to do with the actual content of the degree, but the formation of an insular tribe that develops a shared language and culture with a life of its own. People of real intellectual distinction may be a minority within that tribe, thus its effect may be as simple as a dumbing down of management.
If I've noticed one intellectual trait held in common by the MBA's, it's the ability to speak in a language that avoids any mention of the human impact of their actions. A sort of learned sociopathy if you will.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
A friend with an aerospace engineering degree said there was only one thing in his MBA program that he couldn't have figured out with a little thought. That was the principle of comparative advantage. He said what made it worth it was the great network that he built.
Maybe a good description for Ivy League MBA degrees? :)
Institutionalized management rewards a set of skills that are not the ones that create growth, which is sort of the point. They find growth and then "manage," it on behalf of other people who "manage" money. It's the classic principal-agent problem, where managers as a class have enriched themselves at the expense of owners like pensioners, savers, entrepreneurs, and taxpayers.
IMO, the whole managerial problem is caused by a mix of high and complex tax regimes, and low interest rates. The former is a make work policy for a clerical worker class, and the latter means banks become the cultural and political centre of everything. It causes the economic shift from making things people want, to doing things nobody wants.
1 - https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2020 2 - https://electrek.co/2020/10/30/tesla-tsla-market-share-globa...
Lack of early, large and decisive investment in EV shows a stunning lack of foresight from all ICE car CEOs. Suicide by inaction.
18% is more market share than the biggest ICE car companies (VW and Toyota have ~10% market share).
This shows that Musk handily outperforms all ICE car makers in his sub-market (EV cars). It's not like Tesla lacks competition in EV market (NIO, BYD, XPeng, Nissan, GM, Hunday, Renault, Rivian, Lucid...)
Now, considering Tesla doesn't pay dividends ... what's really the "cash flow" for investors?
This is why it's mostly a theory...human beings don't behave like Excel spreadsheets.
VW's offerings are obviously more affordable, but they don't seem to offer the same range per buck that Tesla does?
With consistently better performance. The Taycan is a sports car:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcKz1OGZ7_I
> but they don't seem to offer the same range per buck that Tesla does?
The VW ID.3 has similar WLTP range figures to the Tesla Model 3 and the ID.3 is cheaper.
That video is comparing the Turbo S (the $185k version of the Taycan) to the $92k version of the Model S. The $140k version is significantly faster, let alone the 2021 Roadster.
The ID.3 seems to have a stated range of ~200 miles?
> The ID.3 seems to have a stated range of ~200 miles?
There are 3 usable battery sizes for 3 different range figures: 48kWh (205 miles WLTP), 58kWh (261 miles), and 77kWh (342 miles).
EDIT: Also, WLTP vs. EPA range isn't apples to apples, EPA is something like 10-20% more conservative, and that's what Tesla quotes, at least on their US site. I can't seem to find EPA range results for ID.3, maybe because it's not available in the US yet? And to be clear, I'm really happy that VW appears to be pushing into EVs in a bigger way than most of the big car companies. I wish they all would. But I think they're a ways from taking the limelight.
340 miles.
> that's what Tesla quotes, at least on their US site
Tesla quotes WLTP ranges on their European sites.
> But I think they're a ways from taking the limelight.
Renault and VW BEVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The limelight has nothing to do with it. It's just business.
All I've seen are 1/4 mile drag races that show that yes, indeed, the Taycann has a 2 speed gearbox. There isn't really a big advantage outside of that.
Any track:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/5207/this-video-reminds-us-tha...
Here's a Model S being beaten by a Nissan Leaf:
https://insideevs.com/news/359903/video-nissan-leaf-beats-te...
I don't know if it can be considered "fast" when Daimler copies the Model S vertical touchscreen after 8 years and puts it in the S class. They seem to be slow followers in an industry that wasn't moving fast for decades and has now picked up a pace.
EVs are still only a small percentage of the overall car market. The world's biggest car companies won't stop being the world's biggest car companies. They'll just start selling more EVs.
Spot on! I've described the difference as "creating vs scaling value."
> Many business-school leaders shot back, saying that Mr. Musk’s comments don’t match the reality of what is taught in M.B.A. programs and that more students than ever who are pursuing the graduate degree are interested in entrepreneurship and tech rather than Wall Street.
That last part seems perfectly tone deaf. "What do you mean, too much time focused on financials? We took jobs outside the finance industry! Isn't that enough?"
Yup, that's exactly the problem
Ignoring the people who are going to business school for a two year vacation, which a lot of M.B.A.s do, there's a growing contingent of people who are going in with technical skills and experience. I think business schools deserve some credit for that.
There are still plenty of people from non-technical backgrounds hoping to be your traditional M.B.A.s, but the culture is shifting in the right (IMO) direction.
Side note: I've rarely met a top b-school grad who could say they valued much taught during their MBA (aside from statistics). The consensus is usually that it's a great networking opportunity.
MBAs are for optimizing stable firms. They're walking death for startups, I personally have seen it happen.
Some MBAs are pretty good, although I suspect it’s mostly selection bias (the people would’ve been great even without attending b school).
It's like they want to turn every business into an automotive business completely missing the point that car design is practically unchanged in the last 50 years. You can see just how terrible these companies are at adopting change by their pathetic attempts at getting EVs up and running.
Tech requires constant change and innovation to be successful. Companies who primarily deal in tech NEED R&D to survive. They can't just establish dominance and stick around for 100 years. (Generally. There are obvious exceptions).
This is why you see these major old tech companies struggling. IBM, HP, Cray. They all got taken over by MBAs who tried to "toyota" the companies into further success.
Organizational management is important, hard, and has decades of study behind it.
Finance is also important. My former employer has never made a profit in the seven years since IPO, and clever financing means that it is still a going concern.
This is what happens when highly credentialed operators are brought in as decision makers, but they were not there from the beginning and have no idea how irreplaceable the specific furniture and its arrangement over the years actually is.
They didn't go through the building process. They might not even be builders at all, even if given more than enough resources.
And it doesn't matter to them fundamentally since their personal best oportunities will be with a different future organization anyway. Even if they stay, the organization will be different before they are done. More like the average company you could read about in business school, and more understandable for students, with much less focus on the unique things that brought that particular company as far as it had beforehand.
If a company has reached a lofty place and the decision making changes that significantly for some reason, it is most likely that there will be some sinking to a significantly less lofty position. And in some unfamiliar direction downward.
The best possible person to run a particular company will be using company-specific approaches and drawing on talents that very few MBAs possess.
For those MBAs who do have such rare natural talent, it has been a characteristic since before university anyway so the degree is definitely not necessary.
Contrast that to AMD which has an engineer with a PHD in engineering from MIT as there CEO.
Look whos eating whos lunch now.
You need somebody in charge who understands the technology, product and customers well. Getting an outsider who only know how to look at spreadsheets and go to fancy dinners isn’t a receipt for success.
Elon is right. MBA doesn’t teach that. You have to learn it the hard way.
Not so few engineers have embraced the "big business" cargo cult as well.
One many things which completely offput me from "big tech" was seeing tech heads having to satisfy the earning for seeing people speak big, and mean little. A price for acceptance in that world of big business.
At that point, I had worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years and had several successful product developments under my belt. Yet I couldn’t understand a word of what the MBAs were saying. Their words would stream out and there was no content or substance whatsoever to anything they were saying. I left with the impression that very few had any idea what technology development was or how to bring a technology product to market.
When I mentioned that I was from the engineering school, few wanted to continue the conversation.
And their degree is telling them to suggest that Tech companies laser-focus on a small portion of the market. I keep hearing it. There's excellent theory behind that reasoning: it's hard to execute and compete. Here's the reality: people are sick and tired of having 100 apps to check that all do one little thing.
I passionately disagree with Musk on many things, but I strongly agree with him here. Innovation is hard. If MBAs were really trying too innovate (I am sure there are some who do!), they would be figuring out how to broadly compete despite the challenges involved. Instead it's formulaic anti-innovation. It's possible, just look at Amazon.
I've worked with managers and executives that I thought were great, but the folks who sort of step into a role seemingly because they have an MBA, it just seems like a recipe for just another layer of bureaucracy / hurdle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA
I assume that I've had bad luck to some extent, but otherwise I'm really lost at what value an MBA should provide.
However, often times the reason the MBA is dropped into that situation is the resident domain expertise owners inability to communicate effectively with senior managment via financial metrics/KPIs etc.
Asking anyone this question who pursues the degree or has pursued the degree or insists on its value, often gives a non-answer. Like the following:
* it helps with networking.
* it helps with promotion.
* it helps with advancement in career.
* it helps with your resume.
Boiling it down, “I can show off better and tout an imaginary quality”.
If I was a person who was self employed or running my own company, how will an mba HELP ME SPECIFICALLY? No one can give me an answer.
I concluded to that it can’t help. It is like a dark personality trait. One that helps you relative to the people around you but doesn’t help the company, in the long run.
As an engineer, I think we need something else. Masters in engineering administration. Teaching engineers how to deal with bs that takes 5 years of career to figure out.
Observation doesn’t speak loads?
Where an MBA will help you is if you do not have a business background, but want to either run a company that will one day be medium-large or work directly at a medium-large company. If that's you, a decent MBA program will teach you how large businesses actually operate - how they're structured, how they measure performance, how they interact with shareholders, how they make financial decisions, how they choose which market strategies to pursue, etc. - and how you can talk with and interact with other executives without being a naïve "engineering is the only thing that matters" idiot. Additionally, if a large company career path is for you, the network and credentials that come with a high-tier MBA tend to pay for themselves because outside of tech, hiring and job hopping don't depend on github profiles and whiteboard coding to get $250K+/year jobs.
I say education is an answer to a question. Figure out the question and the knowledge becomes easy to acquire.
Your answer lets me realize I may already know at least 60% of what is taught. The other 40% will be explored on a daily basis.
The "Executive MBA" is trying to fill this void, I believe.
I'm a mid-career corp finance exec that has painstakingly resisted the inertial forces that want me to obtain an MBA. I do not see the value from an investment or knowledge perspective (I went to bschool for undergrad). At this point, my experience and existing network far outweighs what a MBA on my resume would provide however I am intrigued by the EMBA. My hesitation is pulling focus away from what's working for me.
It's quite funny (or sad, depending on your point of view) that at the same time large companies are desperate to find technical leaders, yet the middle-management layer is filled with MBAs that prevent engineering managers from even existing. There's definitely a glass ceiling there.
Some companies have come up with a partial solution to this antagonistic need, they invented the "Product Manager" position (or "PM"), which is a kind of not-so-technical engineering position (who does not and cannot really "manage" anything)... and then filled those positions with technically inept MBAs.
Unfortunately, an MBA is a degree in nothing of substance (See Mintzberg), so technical acumen cannot come from the MBA per se.
However, I think a low-regulation, high-capital environment ends up favoring the "MBA-ization", because investors gain a lot of sway, without many backstops. For example, when unions are strong, they can drive employers to invest more in their workforces. If your employees are expensive, you're more inclined to spend money to improve their productivity. This happens when the minimum wage is increased as well. But without those incentives, companies instead spend their surplus on buybacks to keep investors happy. I think that low regulation on private equity may be another factor here. So it's not that just that MBAs have a particular way of viewing things that creates problems. It's that the economy is structured in a way that gives the stereotypical MBA point of view a lot of power.
If you hire non-MBAs they will be tasked to do the same thing and you will have the same result.
Change your capital structure, stay private, take as little money from investors as possible and you'll no longer need MBAs to make every single quarter look like a success. However you may not grow as fast as you like.
If you need large capital inflows on a regular basis, you have to satisfy the people that gave it to you.
This is a serious problem. Starting up an efficient, high-quality manufacturing plant is hard. Look how much trouble Musk had doing it.
Perhaps the original claim would've been better phrased as "not enough real/useful/impactful work".
Of course, one could always create their own work by looking for opportunities to create value for their employer, but IMO it's rarely incentivized.
Musk is correct that it also vacuumed up creativity and reduced total entrepreneurship as a result, Stanford Business School professor opinions notwithstanding.
This is a big impact. It is much easier to get a highly technical job at one of dozens of entrepreneurial companies that are bouncing along. The appeal of those jobs makes it less urgent to go do your passion project and succeed.
Is this situation definitely bad today? Does it point to a bad future?
When I got my MBA there was a case study(it's like a lesson chapter) I read about a top performer who didn't get along with a team. We never got to that one and it probably wasn't a favorite of the professor. But we did do a lot of cases about reallocating assets across a conglomerate or relaunching a fifty year old product or what have you. In retrospect, any insight in how to handle that troublesome high performer would have been really helpful, particularly at the start of my career.
Managing people is hard and it’s unlikely you will learn how to manage people from an MBA. Managing people is an experience thing.
If you’re bad at managing people, my advice is that you hire people who are good a managing people and have those people report to you. At the same time, you probably want to minimize your number of directs.
You might even consider keeping your org small and have a VP of Engineering report into someone else on the C-Staff for all things execution related.
This will allow you to focus on your strengths which hopefully are technology roadmap/vision and selling that vision to customers.
Managing people is more of a craft. Approach it the way you would learn to build furniture as a hobby. Gradually over time through practice and experimentation acquiring tools for your shop along the way.
Is it your first time? If so, you would probably have similar growing pains MBA or not. Being a business conversant technical CTO is the kind of thing you only get good at by doing it.
I found that I was spending most of my time carrying other students rather than actually learning something beyond what I could read in a book or already knew, at least at the conceptual level.
And believe me when I say I’m not smart in an academic sense.
Family issues came up and with a waning interest I dropped out while getting enough points for a Grad Cert.
Fast forward a decade later and I’ve filed a patent pending in AI and another one in video messaging.
The MBA was for the most part a waste of time, money and energy.
I really didn’t learn much, except to recognise getting an MBA is more to do with ones ability to persevere through an incredibly dry and uninteresting range of subjects for many years at a time.
Save your money, and spend it on something more useful. $40k gets you a lot of azure/aws/gcp credits plus lifetime accounts of Lynda.com training and pretty much any other online course aggregator you care to imagine.
His companies have successfully deployed plenty of MBA-style strategies and their "creative" financing/PR indicates this. I'm not disagreeing with the premise of his argument (I actually agree to an extent) but using his public voice to downplay the expertise of a large group of people is... odd. Fundamentally, his businesses have plenty of weak spots and maybe criticizing the credentials of those who criticize his businesses is a valid strategy?
How much of that is because of regulatory creep, and how much is because California has brought in even-more-valuable industries that have cranked up the cost structure, in turn pushing out manufacturing industry?
Except it isn't true. Other companies still make rockets in SoCal. For example Areojet Rocketdyne is still headquartered in El Segundo (next to LAX). They made the main engine for the Space Shuttle and are currently still making it for the upcoming SLS.
So much modern aerospace technology historically comes from SoCal, and yet CA as a state doesn't seem to care about hanging on to world-changing industries like it.
Your example about Aerojet Rocketdyne is telling. They are contracting - I believe the Aerojet facilities in Sacramento are being divested if that's not already done. Boeing is divesting most of its Huntington Beach campus, and Rockwell in Downey is long-gone. A lot of Space Shuttle Main Engine/RS-25 work is done at their Stennis facilities or in Huntsville.
Aerospace in CA is not healthy.
The pork of the SLS program and the RS-25 program has been well document.
How you deal with this fact will determine your sanity growing up :)
So maybe not just MBAs, but who knows maybe MBAs came up with that plan.
Thus amongst FAANG its only N which is not 'run' by an MBA. Sarantos, who runs content, is a college dropout. Yes, Hastings does have a MSCS from Stanford- but he was also a liberal arts undergrad (Bowdoin) and a Peace Corps volunteer. Of all of them, he's got the most interesting story to me.
This isn't to say MBA's haven't screwed things up- of course they have. But so have engineers. Apparently the idea of engineers building cool tech with no use case has never occurred to anyone else here.
Universities just so happened to be a practically convenient location for medical doctors and professional engineers to get their education. But universities were never supposed to be general vocational learning institutions.
Business schools are just one department in a long line who wanted to push the notion that people need to jump through their hoops to learn a particular discipline well enough to perform a role professionally. Nothing could be further from the truth and in pushing this myth, they've helped contribute to systemic fault lines that could ultimately undermine western society and democracy itself. They've heavily indebted learning that people were traditionally paid to do via apprenticeship. They have invented credentials for disciplines which don't need them and offer no financial path to ever provide a return on the learning investment. They've promoted the idea that useful learning can only happen within their walls and under their syllabus.
But I'm off on a tangent. Business schools specifically have essentially been cosplaying as something they are not: schools teaching a rigourous applied science. As Medical School is to Biology, Math and Chemistry, Business School is to Economics. But economics as a social science had just not advanced far enough along to provide meaningful insight. So business schools did the next best thing which was to create the illusion of an advanced science by helping backfill, promote, and apply bullshit economic theory. This went hand-in-hand with a conscious effort to create prestige like the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.
But the illusion is starting to all fall apart under the scrutiny of disastrous political policies, gutted zombie corporations, and a broken social contract, all under their direct sphere of influence. The irony is that in aspiring to have the same prestige as doctors and engineers, business schools have actually done far more damage to society, the environment, and our future than they could have hoped to imagine if they went back to their traditional proprietary school roots.
Business schools are very worried that society will realize that being a smart autodidact is a better recipe for success in business than paying six figures to earn an M.B.A..
If this rant resonated with you, here's an interview with the author of book, called Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/10/04/author-discus...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik
Is our ultimate goal to do things or to move money around? For the past ~50 years we've been optimizing for moving money around as the most important activity.
> “I have nothing but the utmost respect for Elon, but he’s wrong to focus the blame on M.B.A.s,” said [guy who mints MBAs]"
>“The individual apps serve as expressions of Workspace capabilities... but they also need to be individually awesome,” Soltero says.
Which to me looks like a failed endeavour, because it obviously lost individuality and just seem to enforce the idea of the umbrella that Google Workspace encompasses, and he now leads.
>“This is the moment in which we break free from defining the structure and the role of our offerings in terms that were invented by somebody else in a very different era,” says Javier Soltero, Google’s vice president and general manager of G Suite and now Workspace
And that's how you say that it "changed because I arrived and yes, I'm asserting dominance."
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/22/google-picks-up-microsoft-... [1] https://fastcompany.com/90560175/gmail-new-logo-g-suite-goog...
Pioneer teams don't need MBAs.
Musk is managing his companies as pure hype-machines. This can only successfully work for a couple companies that operates as cult.
If there is one thing that made Tesla successful, is the charismatic leader personality of Musk. Tesla is only a success on the stock market. They are not profitable, and the coming years will be the turning point for EVs. I don't see them coming out ahead.
Tesla has had 5 straight quarters of profitability.
How is that a 'hype machine'?
I am sure Mr. Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs can succeed without having MBAs but I would believe that they heavily rely on MBAs to actually run the financial matters of their respective Companies.
But alas, who am I to differ Elon Musk - he is the Thomas Edison + Henry Ford of our era.
Of course there are innovative people in a research program but far fewer than an undergrad program in my opinion. A PhD only gives you the opportunity to innovate on a broader scale, which is why there is more visibility when you succeed.
The last thing I’ll say is that it is challenging to be truly innovative in academia due to the peer review process. Especially in certain fields today, reviewers resort to certain heuristics right pattern match for credibility rather than take time to assess the inventiveness of the idea. It is a very noisy process and truly innovative papers don’t get published that easily.
So is the lesson here to be born rich rather than try to get an education? Or just that when you are born rich education is optional? It is notable that the other founders in companies he'd later buy actually had to get an education, he just used wealth to stand on their shoulders.
> In Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk, it is claimed that the Musks' father, Errol Musk, provided them with US$28,000 during this time, but Elon Musk later denied this. He later clarified that his dad provided around 10% of US$200,000 as part of a later funding round.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-sells-the-family...
[1] https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/errol-musk-elon-f...
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5513787/Billionaire...
Please stop just regurgitating crap you read on Twitter.
If you have a credible plan to create a $600B company, I'm happy to personally write you a $200k check.
If musk isn't self made then neither is the guy who was born into welfare and dies the owner of a successful independent used car lot. Climbing the ladder is climbing the ladder regardless of where you start.
This is an article/thread discussing his anti-education take, when he himself (in spite of having a first class education) doesn't feel like he gained from it, and suggesting others don't either (or even that education is harmful).
His wealth and privilege is absolutely topical because he was able to bypass certain checks due to his family is.
I’m not really a fan of credentialism, especially when it can be expensive and painful as hell to obtain them, but I don’t put much stock into most “anti education” type stuff.
with a mediocre education, you aint competing with that.
His first success was x.com. This was bought by confinity; this led to the creation of Paypal. Who did Musk buy x.com from?
When Musk "bought his way into" Tesla, he used his X.com/PayPal money, not the emerald money (which he received little of). Musk also founded SpaceX using his X.com/PayPal. Who do you think Musk bought SpaceX from?
* How wealthy was Elon before starting his own products ?
* How much of this investment in various companies was non-bootstrapped / not momentum from a past sale ?
________
I feel that many people born rich do not wider idea behind Henry Ford's famous quote:
" don't ask me how I made my first million. "
It highlights the inbuilt privilege that those born rich/stable have, and the luck/shady-ness required to reach that 1st point. Would Musk have been able to do any of the things he does if zip2 wasn't such a huge success. Would have been able to start anything if he didn't have the financial stability due to being born rich or the access granted by a network at UPenn.
I'd say the goalpost has been moved to the point of FIRE. A silicon valley employee won't be able to take any of the risks/efforts needed to summon lady luck. If you're spending 60 hrs/week at work, have family to support or simply a bad visa situation, then good luck taking your 1st leap.
"The 1st million don't pop out of thin air."
His father was made money from being an engineer. With that money he bought a small stake in a mine, making it out that they were some billionair mine owners is total nonsesne. However Elon had very bad relationship with his father and his father did not want him to go to Canada/US and refused to pay for his education there.
So if you want to call everybody that is not born into abject poverty 'not self made' that is of course simply a expression of your (appallingly bad) politics, but its not how the rest of the world uses that phrase.
PayPal was merger between two companies doing the same thing.
Tesla was not a 'growing company', Tesla was 2 guys who had a business plan written on a piece of paper and nothing else, they were certainty not growing. Elon and JB both wanted to found a company and somebody told them that these two were also working on the same thing. So Elon agree to get together with them rather then start a separate company.
Elon financed Tesla basically by himself, without him Tesla would have never existed and it would certainty not be nearly what it is now. There is a reason that all 5, were officially named founders, and not just the 2 guys who came up with the name Tesla.
SpaceX, Boring Company, Neurolink and Zip2 were all created by Musk.