Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

He is an "idea guy." At this point most companies shove the founder off to be Chief Innovation Officer or something and let them keep coming up with ideas, but bring in an adult to run things day-to-day.

SpaceX has been wildly successful despite Elon because of that adult leadership, with actual rocket engineers and doers in management. Additionally SpaceX has military contracts that bring with them actual real enforcement of penalties, like 5 years in prison just for making a single false statement.

View on HN

Passing off Musk as an idea guy doesn't quite hit the mark. Jobs was an idea guy who could make things happen by synthesizing good ideas from talented people. Musk is dot-com wealth who was able to convince other tech wealth to invest in him and they've been pretending success is around the corner since he took charge.

He's an engineer who actively participates in the design of several wildly successful products AND he runs several extremely successful companies AND has successfully founded, ran and sold companies in the past, e.g. PayPal.

We need more people like him in charge.

I personally feel like we need more people like him to bring ideas and advice to people in charge. However, I would like the people that are actually in charge to be more careful and responsible.

As long as it doesn't jeopardize public safety, which shoddy self-driving vehicles could, I would not like more cautious leadership. The gains bold leadership makes - say in bringing forward Mars colonization, mass-accessible high-speed satellite internet, and reusable rockets by 30 years - will have recurring benefits that could significantly increase life expectancy and quality of life all over the world.

Sure but arguably he also single-handedly forced the hand of all auto manufacturers in a stagnant auto-oil industrial complex to actually start shifting to EV; seriously, how many lives will be saved in total due to the lessened pollution?

With his time machine? The Nissan Leaf and BYD E6 launched in 2010, the Renault Zoe and Tesla Model S in 2012. The electric car changeover is happening due to battery price dynamics; it's fairly simple. Until the mid to late noughties, lithium ions were simply too expensive (and early electric cars using other chemistries simply didn't have acceptable range).

I’ve never heard a leaf come up in conversation. I know a handful of people with Tesla’s, and have had my dad ask me about them.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent smartphones but he made them cool. Tesla is mainstream cool in the way the iPhone was a decade ago.

Exactly. Existing ICE companies didn’t have the vision to completely reimagine what an EV shins be. Rethink everything from the ground up, don’t just slap batteries in existing platforms.

The Renault Zoe outsells all Tesla models in Europe these days, wasn't built on an existing platform, and came out the same time as the Model S. I believe for the whole of the last decade except for a year around when the Model 3 came out, either the Zoe or the rather similar Nissan Leaf outsold Tesla in Europe.

Tesla's main success story seems to have been the US, presumably due to very lackluster competition. The US isn't a huge market for electric cars, tho.

On that line of argument, you should use the roadster, not the model s.

The Model T wasn't the first car, but it was the first widely accessible and usable one for the masses. Tesla's innovation is more comparable to that.

That said, Elon should have never been in charge of a public company. He's good at challenging the status quo and should keep doing that in new markets. He's a terrible person to be in charge of an established company (which tesla very much is now!)

Eh:

> Tesla's cumulative production of the Roadster reached 1,000 cars in January 2010

So about the same time as the Nissan Leaf, a rather more masses-friendly car...

The Nissan Leaf and BYD E6 were exactly why the electric car was going nowhere fast. Nobody is ever trading in their 5-series BMW or S-Class benz for a leaf, period.

The Tesla options are all extremely high performance cars. They're luxury oriented but the interiors left a bit to be desired. Either way the overlap between the market Tesla capture and the leaf captured are almost non-existent.

He ran PayPal for 6 months and then got the boot.

Wowee, if that's true that a 6 month contribution got him equity resulting in a $180 million payday when eBay bought Paypal - then his value/pay/contribution was equal to roughly $1 million per day; your shallow minimizing of an argument is a weak one.

Are you arguing that, because he's rich, he must've done a good job? Because that doesn't follow in general; I think we can all think of a few dozen counter-examples.

Are you arguing that, because he's rich, he must not have done a good job ? Because that doesn't follow in general either. I think we can all think of a few dozen counter-examples where people got rich while actually putting in a lot of work and risk.

Especially Elon put all his money on the line a few times. And he is definitely not just an idea guy.

I have not seen any real engineers too overwhelmed with his apparent knowledge. Things like claiming that the new Roadster will have pressurized air thrusters that will allow it to hover a few feet off the ground for a few seconds comes to mind.

Would you put any of Spacex's launch services in those widely successful projects?

We need more people like him in charge

Hard pass.

He also argues that we need regulation on AI (I agree that it is at least something that is lacking attention) and is simultaneously working on devices intended to allow people to hook their brains directly up to computers. Likely computers running unregulated AI.

This is a terrible idea. I hope it doesn't get anywhere beyond being a research project.

Musk didn't found Tesla, which your comment implied. He basically bought the "founder" title.

That's a bit of an academic argument. He was the first major investor and became chairman after making that investment (about 6 months after founding).

I've always heard of defense contractors being notorious for cost overruns and going beyond schedule. What military contacts bearing jail time are you referring to?

Government doesn't care so much about cost, but they care a great deal about being lied to. There is a far more unlimited stream of money to attack those who defraud government contracts.

He is more like Edison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com