Really hard to imagine the richest and most accomplished dude on the planet not being able to secure funding. Somehow people still think he’s just a showman. At some point in time, accomplishments can’t be explained away
Musk has never admired to having made up the funding. He settled the dispute because it lead to problems with Tesla credit rating, banks didn't want an outstanding dispute with SEC.
He says he did have funding secured. He elaborated on the details in the recent TED talk.
Do you have any privileged information about the incident or are you just casually calling someone a liar based on third-hand news you read online?
So, no, informed people are not "casually" calling him a liar.
I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
>I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
GP is probably refering to this (in which case you are right, judge didn't use words like liar)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/judge-in-musk-tr...
"Judge in Musk trial will tell jury that “Funding secured” tweets were false"
and
"[T]hough 'jury instructions are often an ineffective remedy,' the Court finds that unlikely to be true for the instant case where the jury will be told that the Court has already found that the August 2018 tweets were false and made with the requisite scienter [knowledge of wrongdoing]," Chen wrote.
Those are words like liar.
Doesn't seem like the funding secured thing was an outright lie.
Therefore, "funding secured" was absolutely an outright lie, unless words don't have meaning anymore.
I still think what he’s done at SpaceX and Tesla is admirable, but after reading those emails I’m definitely a few percent less confident that there will still be a Tesla to service my Model 3 in the future.
And actually he's not a "businessman" at all. He's an engineer at heart. "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
He has not built anything.
Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" [0]
Selling a startup is not an engineering achievment but a business achievment.
> Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer"
Owning a company means you can give yourself whatever titles you want.
So your entire argument seems to boil down to "he wrote code for Zip2", which happened a quarter of a century ago.
EDIT: And they think they are Musk as well. Without the same ability to raise money that's incredible dangerous so.
Isn't that a little mean, and elitist?
No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong.
If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the most engineering-minded.
I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies.
When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all.
Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.
> "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
This exact nonsense is why the autistic community was so displeased when he made a big show of having "asperger's" (which in the US under DSM-V is just autism, btw). Can we please stop justifying toxic and reckless behavior with "oh but they're autistic" as if we're talking about naive children not grown adults?
Autistics tend to struggle with ambiguity and social cues, yes, but many of us are even more sensitive to social cues than allistics because we literally had to learn to pick up on this shit to survive. A lot of autistics report actually being hyper-empathetic to the point where it can be debilitating because it's hard to filter out the noise and determine which cues you're supposed to pick up on and which ones you're supposed to ignore.
Elon Musk is a dickhead AND autistic. He's not a dickhead because he's autistic. He's naive because he got extremely lucky (like all billionaires do, even if it's only winning the lottery of being born into wealthy families with ample of business opportunities) and overestimates his own intelligence (which isn't helped by his massive fanbase thinking he's the best thing since sliced bread because he bought and funded some companies developing tech he thought was cool), not because he's autistic.
There's no such thing as "the autistic community" (though I won't deny some people may self-proclaim themselves as part of some non-existent community) and I'm not justifying anything by what I said. It's just how he thinks.
And I, as an autist, am telling you that this is a farcical caricature that is routinely used to excuse shitty behavior and at the same time deny us autonomy.
You just called the most successful businessman in the world an 'utterly inept businessman'.
Literally the wealthiest person in the world and all achieved through business success!
Defined and successfully delivering on multiple new markets, with a string of serial successes.
And in all the successful cases he had massive contributions by others. He provided the money, which is huge in itself. The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so, and that his fanboys believe every single of his claims, truely makes him the Steve Jobs of 2020s we deserve.
This is not true. He often mentions and emphasizes that the success is the work of his great teams. He also publicly acknowledged that he failed to do so in the past, but he is certainly doing it now.
Yes and yes
>The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so,
Give me one instance where Musk denies the work of his friends and colleagues at SpaceX and Tesla please, because this post reek of bad sentiment and an awful take.
Because if you had ever watched a full, unedited interview with him you’d be too embarrassed to post what you just did. He’s a pretty humble guy.
One of the best interviews with him was the one he did with the Babylon Bee - you should watch it; it’s up on Youtube.
Boeing probably has more and better engineers than SpaceX. Same with Toyota/Volkswagen compared to Tesla. Yet these companies simply cannot innovate. Talent (ability to do good work) is pointless without good leadership.
> the fact the Musk fails to properly say so
This is a lie.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15170727534756003...
> The failures are mine, the successes belong to others
It is a different kind of innovation so, only considering "disruptuon" as innovation is quite short sighted so. Espiecially since Christensen himself differentiates between disruptive and sustaining (?) innovation.
GM had a pretty good EV in the 80’s - then killed it. Literally - never sold them, only leased them and forced owners to cough them back up and destroyed them.
I have zero interest in owning a Tesla - their stance on right to repair and their customer service sucks, but without them there wouldn’t be near the activity around EVs as there is now. Like him or not, Elon pretty much single handedly embarrassed the rest of the auto industry to have to take EVs seriously by proving that yes, EVs can be not only useful but cool.
And VW and others would care about EVs because of the general awareness about climate change.
Success is measured using market share not market cap or net worth of the CEO.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world during 2021.
Stock price, net worth and number of synchopants getting on their knees are like a voting machine, market share is a weighting machine.
When you use the right metric it becomes crystal clear who are te guys setting records at the weighting machine.
It's the usual quiet ones: Buffett, Gates, Brin&Page, Tim Cook.
Not to mention the GOAT. Rockefeller left Standard Oil at #1 in market share and here we are in 2022 the companies which were under the umbrella of Standard Oil are still at #1.
Your measure of market share is a reasonable one, as are the two I proposed being profit and creating and succeeding in entirely new markets.
They are new markets too, it's not rockets, it's reusable rockets at incredibly lower cost to orbit and new capacities to previous ones, it's space based communication networks that are again a serious generational leap ahead of whatever was before, it's the emergence of a serious replacement for ICE vehicles. In all these markets, his companies are the only market share! He owns these markets, because he created them, and is multiple years ahead of the rest of the world's highly motivated competitors.
I'm not detracting from the successes of the other guys you mentioned. But Musk can very reasonably be called the world's most successful businessman at the moment on multiple metrics.
It might be a competition between Musk and others, but it's the opposite utterly inept, which was the point - trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the OP per HN guidelines, while also keeping the discussion grounded in rational sanity.
All the stuff you mentioned brings zero benefits to the consumer. The consumer wants a steady improvement in their quality of life in the next 3 months or less, and then you go from there hopefully adding one more bit in the next 3 months and so on.
There is a reason why Musk BS doesn't find fertile ground in NYC and his cult is largely based in California. Quartely (4 * 3 = 12) reports were adopted because people want to have a clear understanding of how a public company is improving the American consumer's quality of life, and they want it every 3 months.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world in 2021, these are rich people toys we are talking about. 1.3% in 20 years.
> He owns these markets, because he created them
Cars are cars, EV, hybrid, gasoline, diesel...whatever. If you are in the business of making cars the relevance of your company should be judged based on what's you market share in car manufacturing compared against everybody who are also in the business of making cars.
Mr. Musk took 20 years to get to 1.3%. That's 80 Quarters. 1.3% / 80 = 0.01625% per quarter. What are we even talking about...
By this time around the govt. was already threatning Gates and Rockefeller to put them in jail because they had 95% market share of Operative Systems and oil respectively.
You can just compare the current situation.
This time, he got letters from people with money saying he can have it, and on what basis. Now that we see it, isn't it obvious that is what "funding secured" means, even if we don't all know exactly how high finance works?
"Funding secured" wasn't a half-truth, it was an outright lie that sounded a little like a half truth. Very Trumpian.
Also, it's recently been reported that a judge declared the question of whether "funding secured" was a knowing lie closed, in the sense that the jury in related ongoing litigation will be told that it's not up to them to decide that point.
Even though there's a bunch of people (including Carmack) that claim that he's a great engineer, it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this. Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
> it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw?t=122
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zlnbs-NBUI
This is how Musk actually talks.
> Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
He doesn't spend a lot of time working on the boring company to be frank. It's a small side project. He's doing it to see if it's possible.
The fundamental point of boring company is to reduce the cost of underground boring. Shoving cars through tunnels is a means to an end of reducing the cost of underground boring. It's about finding a path to make some kind, any kind, of money off of boring in order to make the product development costs self-feeding. This is why the idea of cars driving through the tunnels was done rather than the original idea of putting cars on platforms through the tunnels. Cheaper and faster to market.
Musk started boring company with the idea that transportation needs to be 3 dimensional, and not just adding another single layer of transport under the ground (trains/subways), but having a whole ton of layers going deeper and deeper into the ground. Now they've done their first iteration of tunnel, which is quite bad, rinse and repeat until it gets cheaper.
BTW, Musk has never come out against subways, his point was just that in the US, people drive into cities in cars, so if they're using cars, then the transport system in the city needs to handle cars in a three dimensional way.
Moving transportation underground is such revolutionary idea that it exists for a century by now.
1. He wants to move roads to 3d just like computer chips are 3d. This should increase bandwidth.
2. He wants to packet switch the system instead of batch. This should lower latency.
3. For the first two to work, you need to greatly reduce the cost/speed to construct them. Think Moore's law.
4. One way to do this is to speed up the boring machines.
5. Another way is to lower the additional necessary equipment. Tunnels carrying internal combustion cars need air circulation lest people die from carbon monoxide poisoning/ lack of oxygen. EVs don't need that.
6. Smaller tunnels are much faster to construct so constructing one for a subway would be much slower than one for EVs.
Arguments against this can either attack the premise that cities are necessary (remote work), that bigger cities are necessary (why not have smaller cities), that existing or other transportation can handle it better, or one or more of the above chains of thought are flawed.
This line of thinking is also found in his latest factories where the line is just a line of cars moved by carriers that aren't physically anchored to the floor). He makes an analogy of factories as computer chips.
At most there are memory chips with just a few layers
Maybe not as much, but you’re still gonna need air circulation
You ignored the essential part of his well written and detailed explanation - its not about the fact that its underground, but the cost of creating underground pathways, for cars or whatever. It saddens me that bad posts like yours infect HN.
Or his proven track record of creating groundbreaking companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, which has made him the worlds richest man and why we are talking about him right now? Jeez
Who knows how we'll solve transport in the future? Maybe we'll all be in personal cars underground and any massive investments in rail will be for nothing?
It's a variant of the general idea of pushing things like elevated monorails that you know are so expensive they won't be built in the near future. Or, indeed, very low pressure tube transportation systems.
Car companies have done this type of lobbying work since forever. Just as the oil companies when they push for more production, but since all oil will be biofuel in the future, in the end it will be a net positive for the environment.
You don’t have to imagine. It literally already happened once when he claimed he had funding secured to take Tesla private. As such, if you can’t imagine him not having funding secured this time, you’re severely lacking in imagination.
This time the plan seems to have better foundations.
I don't think he's lying.
This is what Elon is saying and it sounds like a perfectly plausible scenario, under which you'd rather avoid the conflict and just shut up and sign and pay the fine.
Musk has also said he is going to launch legal action on this. Because that's almost exactly what happened, and it is unfair. So you are correct, and this saga probably still has more to go.
What's funny is almost anyone on the planet couldn't go up against someone like the SEC, which is why they can get away with this. Good on Musk for doing it.
That's how this discussion started: The SEC blackmailed Musk into signing a settlement or otherwise the SEC would block Tesla's accounts. Well, it's either that or Musk, in fact, did lie about the funding to take Tesla private. reasonable people believe the latter, other prefer option one. And then people still wonder were Tesla's evaluation comes from.
It's about financing of Tesla's debt. That's something that banks do, and banks could deny funding (even of a bank overdraft) for almost any reason really, like an SEC lawsuit.
No-one ever talked about any bank account being blocked. But in a world of debt, where debt is provided by institutions, if you can control who gets loans, you can control a lot.
Citing from like three levels of comment up-stream.
It is hard to look at the SEC’s most public actions in the last few years and not believe Musk here.
The banks didn't want a liability. The SEC disagreement was going to take too much time to resolve legitimately. If he didn't please the banks they wouldn't give him funding.
Calling him a showman and conman is great way to posture superiority over the guy shooting rockets into space and hiring 100k+ people
We tolerate the characteristics because of the perceived value, but it would also be nice to highlight genuinely good people with significant accomplishments for being successful as well as kind.
What he has done that is bad and why people hate him:
- Called somebody something bad on twitter once.
- Twits dumb memes with dumb humor sometimes
- Twitted about cryptocurrencies. People claim this is market manipulation to enrich himself without any evidence.
- Twitter 'Funding secured'. People believe this is made up, however it was conclusively settled. And even if it was not fully secured, there is little question he could have found the money. So not sure why people are so angry about that.
That seems to be most of the criticism I read. If that is the worst thing, I don't know what people are so worked up about.
Some leftists are angry he doesn't support unions, but of course almost no rich person (and many non rich people don't either).
I assume you're talking about the time he called a diver (and actual hero) a pedophile. It went a bit further than that - he hired a private investigator who tried (and failed) to dig up dirt on the man.
He created a false narrative about what Musk and his team of engineers (literal rocket engineers) were doing. Musk and his engineers had coordinated with the actual rescue team and the Mini-Sub they build was according to specification from the diving team who suggested they were not sure if the youngest and smallest child could be rescued with the conventional method they were planning.
The media of course presented this as Musk comes in and advocates for his own method of saving everybody and the 'hero' was a guy who pushed himself into the cheap sensationalist media by attacking Musk. The sensationalist media of course simply ran with that and were just to happy to publish anything negative about Musk.
That was of course during a time when Tesla was having challenges scaling and the 'Musk is a total idiot' storyline was getting lots of clicks.
In all, sure, Musk did something stupid but he didn't start it. He had never said anything bad about either this guy or the diving team. He had in fact done the opposite and expressed that it was good that their alternative solution in the end wasn't required.
But I guess anybody who pushes himself into the media who to insult Musk must be a hero.
If you don't want to consider a man who was instrumental in saving the lives of 12 boys a hero that's fine, there are lots of other adjectives that I'm sure you can find and they're all far more flattering than the one Musk made of himself in that saga.
Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
> instrumental
There was a professional diving team that saved the children he was not himself doing it.
And even if he was pushing yourself into the media and making headlines by insulting somebody who tried to help is not really a good look. Specially because it was not constitutive (or respectful) critism. It was simply a guy who wanted attention and got it.
> Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
I'm not defending what Musk said. It was clearly a stupid thing to say.
But if the main critism of a guy who lead 2 important technology companies for decades is 'he got too angry at somebody who insulted him in the media' then that is a pretty lame reason to hate him so much.
Your defences and explanations are all irrelevant and rely on minimising it as "saying something bad" and "on Twitter". That isn't adding anything to the conversation.
It's his job as a diver, is it not?
Divers dive, saving people is something a (probably very small) subset of divers do.
That being said, it was never Elons job to help, nor was it his job to develop a non-working submarine for the task. Or to be insulted when someone stated so. He did it for the PR and the fame, when he got neither was pissed and started insulting and harassing people.
This is exactly what Musk himself had said, can you please provide any sources for many paragraphs of unsubstantiated claims you just made? :)
"We love green businesses, wouldn't it be great if we had more electric cars and could kill oil?"
"We love science, especially rocket scientists!"
"Twitter can ban anyone they like, 1st amendment only applies to government, get your own Twitter if you don't like it!"
Waaaaait, not like thaaaaat!
Stop the hypocrisy.
If we can get a massively successful revolutionary business like SpaceX without someone like Steve Jobs I'd love it. But so far the sample size is small and there aren't any countering examples. History has thus far shown that you need people with strong personality and drive with some amount of lack of empathy in order to create massive shifts in the course of humanity.
Also, SpaceX isn't done.
As someone else pointed out, TWTR isn't a great purchase, either. Its ad revenue isn't great, so if he defaults on the loan, the lender is stuck with an asset they don't want.
I'm really not what you'd call a believer in Tesla - although had my first ever ride in a one (a model 3) recently, quite an eye-opening experience.
It's not as thought Tesla is the only company where the current valuation doesn't appear to make much sense looking at the numbers...
How so? I've had rides in Model S's before and it was totally... fine? What made the Model 3 experience so much better than a conventional car?
I didn't actually say "better", but it was certainly a novel experience since I'd never been in an EV of any kind! The lack of engine noise coupled with the acceleration, somewhat mind-blowing.
I'm not convinced that any current EV - never mind any Tesla - is yet a good fit for a family such as ours, but I look forward to the day when there is such a choice of vehicle.
Didn't he sell quite a lot of stock last year? Bear in mind he just keeps getting more of it as part of his compensation...
"Elon Musk unleashed a torrent of stock sales, options exercises, tax payment sales and gifted shares last year totaling nearly $22 billion.
Yet even after unloading so much Tesla stock, he still owns a larger share of the company than when he started, thanks to his compensation package.
Musk owns 172.6 million Tesla shares, or a 17% stake, which makes him its single largest individual shareholder."[0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/elon-musk-unloaded-billions-...
I do agree that the stock is way over-valued when looking only at the economic fundamentals, but when one balances out the “the Chinese have all this battery thing all figured out!” vs “we only have Tesla on our side!” then things are different (and, yes, I know that the “Tesla batteries” are not 100% made by Tesla right now).
How so ? It's a car company, there are dozen of them making equally good, if not better, cars. Autopilot is useless and electric cars are already there. You can credit them for the democratisation of EV but that's about it
The likes of Mercedes and VW are orders of magnitude behind, both when it comes to batteries and especially when it comes to software
Nothing about Tesla is strategic. SpaceX is different, sure. But with the exception of a yet-to-come lunar mission and astronaut trabsportation to the ISS the "West" got needed stuff into orbit just fine.
Well, that the "sleakness2 of software is a thing now when it comes to cars might make an Apple car difficult, the "sleek software" crowd is covered already. And there I was build quality, ride comfort and maintenance costs were also important when it comes to cars... Stupid me. But then I'm German, not sure if me driving French and old British cars offsets my ingrained sense of superiority of German car brands.
But yes, I agree Tesla is on its own in tremendously over selling its self driving tech.
Nobody cares about the software besides HN type people and the average user puts something like 40 miles per day on their car.
A far cry from "strategic asset" for the west, but you sure can program the car to make fart noises when you honk...
Certainly packaging Panasonic rolls into 2170s gives them a nice edge but it isn't exactly rocket science.
The Giga press is made by the Italian Idra Group. They have bought them out at the moment but anybody can start nabbing them for themselves if they got a spare $30m laying around.
Tesla is certainly "good at engineering", but their advantage is not really in original IP so much as organizational agility. Perhaps the incumbents are too bureaucratic to adapt but I wouldn't count them out just yet.
As for software, give me a break.
P.S. - I am actually a fan just not a fanboy.
> o much as organizational agility
That's why I insisted on the "better software" part, that's where much of their advantage comes from.
Maybe the Germans and the French can also source their batteries from the Chinese but they just haven't been able to put them to good use the way Tesla did (and does). For example right now Renault is selling a 20,000 euro EV (produced in China, of course) [1] which has atrocious autonomy, to say nothing of the fact that it feels very small. And that is supposed to be one of their main vehicles when it comes to targeting the EV mass-market, from one of the biggest car makers in the world. It's a complete joke.
Here is Doug Demuro reviewing the Volkswagen ID Buzz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4JraQ6KrVM
tl;dr: It is fine.
Here he is reviewing the Rivian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYrunRy8hmw
tl;dr: It is excellent. In fact he says "coolest pickup truck ever made". People who were excited about the cyber truck and know cars would rather get this one.
> Maybe the Germans and the French can also source their batteries from the Chinese but they just haven't been able to put them to good use the way Tesla did (and does).
Well.. I don't know about the French. ;)
But Volkswagen will make you an electrified Golf just fine. And that is the best selling car in Europe. Toyota will make you a Yaris and a boring beige Prius.
The bz4x is out now and getting good reviews: https://www.toyota.co.uk/new-cars/bz4x
It is just fine, and slightly cheaper, and so longer term it is unclear how it will all play out.
Based on teardowns Tesla is innovating here but even if they have an edge it is a tiny one (single digit percentage) because of diminishing returns.
I remember WeWork being a software company, not a commercial landlord.
That said, I agree that Tesla's software is significantly better than every competitor, but Autopilot is behind the other self-driving players, and I'd rather have dials than a touchscreen, anyway.
Self-landing rockets
Underground tunnel systems
Brain-computer interfaces
OpenAI leading AI research
PayPal
Accomplished? Meh!
EVs are over a century old. SpaceX was recreating NASA research. Subways have been a thing for over a century; literally millions of people use them every day. Paypal's tech stack used Thiel's startup's technology; they jettisoned everything from Musk's stack and moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
> EVs are over a century old.
But not an economic success and there was (and still is to be frank) no successful EV industry besides Tesla. A lot of fanfare with little results.
> SpaceX was recreating NASA research.
NASA and competitors dismissed any idea of landing rockets or even reusability in the first place. It was deemed a failed idea. This is why the SLS has been created by NASA as reusability was deemed a failure.
On the other items besides PayPal, they aren't successes yet so I'll reserve judgement.
On the whole "jettisoned" stuff there's a lot of conflicting reports on that and he wasn't fired.
Reading such an absurd and idiotic reductionist take on HN just makes me sad. I mostly speaks to you having absolutely zero knowlage about space technology and rocketry.
> moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
They fired him because he had a 10 year business plan to replace banks and become the main monetary system for all payments. A combination of being a bank, an online payment provider and Apple pay.
The other founders wanted to sell the company and make quick cash.
> Subways have been a thing for over a century;
Yeah such an asshole wanting to improve tunneling technology. Only assholes try to improve technology. We should just shoot anybody in the head who tries to improve on technology that is more then 10 years old.
I didn't say Elon Musk invented electric cars.
I'm saying he accomplished something in these fields.
If you want to pull him down among the rest of us, why don't you just point out that he's inhaling and exhaling in exactly the same way as everyone else?
In other news: honeybee tongue hairs repel water
Pssh, oil repelled water way before honey bees, they're not that special!
Definitely not a fan of his but hiring smart people and enabling them is an accomplishment.
As wealthy as he is, he didn’t inherit all of what he has today. He’s definitely done more than many people who come from wealth.
Not to sound “attacky” but that seems extremely naive.
Truthfully, he comes from wealth, but not close to the wealth he has today; his father owned half of an emerald mine for example.
He is quoted as saying (about his youth): "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe"
But yes, he absolutely comes from wealth. Just like most of them do.
If we were to translate 5% of the 2020 U.S. GDP today, that would be 5% of $20.807 trillion. Or about $1.404 trillion. So Bezos, with his $182.2 billion and Musk with his $264.6 billion, have A LONG way to go to catch up with Rockefeller.
Musk's companies have already revolutionized at least two hard-to-crack industries, aerospace and automotive, and are attempting more.
Your exercise in false equivalence is, well, an exercise in false equivalence.
Lines like that work better on a site where most of the people don't appreciate just how damned hard it is to build a business.
I am entirely skeptical he designed anything and considering the duds he's pretending are revolutionary (Boring, Hyperloop, Mars nonsense, Cybertruck, etc) but instead are failures it seems unlikely he could be so right about one thing and so wrong on others.
Trump is rich also
Even if you want to go with the idiotic 'he is not an engineer'-storyline to make yourself feel good, as a business man his credentials are literally unassailable.
To downplay business success as 'hired some smart people' is just ridiculous and utterly sad and depressing to read on a page that is hosted on 'ycombinator'. Get a grip and think before you write something.
Ever tried to count all the failed businesses that did the same?
The attrition rate of technological startups that match your description is insane. How many space startups from the early 2000s do even exist today?
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/tesla-s-mai...
"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Heartland America, you have just subsidized a bunch of millionaires living in California's most expensive coastal ZIP codes to the tune of $10,197 per car. I'm sure they are sending you a thank-you card."
It would be hilarious if it turns out that the government is interested in a private Twitter for "enhanced" data collection and analysis.
Mr and Mrs Heartland America should be more concerned about the subsidies for oil companies; what are those meant to accomplish exactly?
No, just the most famous braggart. Other people, i.e. actual experts and professionals, did all the actual work that he likes to lay claim to accomplishing.
“Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This breaks a lot of people's pattern-matching, in both directions.”
[1](https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1358760338724974594...)