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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

> now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined

A guy who has managed to lead multiple startup companies to huge companies for literally decades threw multiple economic crisis. He is one of the longest running CEO in the auto industry.

Its just amazing to me how people focus so much on 'omg look at how he manages social media' compared to 'simple looking at the actual record of the companies he leads'.

People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company. And yet neither SpaceX nor Tesla have suffered.

That said, I'm against it too. I just think that the idea that this will collapse Tesla is not realistic.

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He uses one company to bail out another, in a major conflict of interest (see SolarCity and SpaceX's use of NASA funding to buy junky bonds, then Tesla purchase with song and dance of fake solar shingles that couldn't economically work as designed).

There is so much complete nonsense in those to lines that untangling it is actually impossible.

Yes, Tesla bought SolarCity, the rest is just a bunch of nonsense. One can argue that, this sale didn't work out as well expected.

But if that is really the worst think you can come of with, it pretty sad.

The SpaceX part really happened: https://electrek.co/2016/03/22/elon-musk-spacex-solar-bonds-...

You mean, before Tesla? Like PayPal?

Musk got rich off of PayPal. But lets be clear, he "lead" it for less than four months before being fired as the CEO for gross incompetence.

Same old bad take I see.

He was fired because he wanted to keep it and had a very aggressive growth plan.

The other people just wanted to cash out.

He was not fired about incompetence, he was fired because of disagreements about strategy.

Seems like Elon cashed out quite nicely, and meanwhile PayPal grew quite aggressively.

So maybe it was more about Elon.

PayPal was sold to Ebay and was under different managers after.

And if you invest your money into Musk companies you would now be far, far, far, far richer then anything you would have invested into any of the other PayPal founders companies (or Ebay or PayPal).

>> People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company

And both failed.

I don't think they did fail just yet, but even if they did Tesla is still well and alive. It's actually doing better than ever I think. The point was that this is not the beginning of the end for Tesla or SpaceX, just like it wasn't when he started doing those other projects too.

If you standard for successful moonshot entrepreneurs is "no failures", it's probably hard to find any.

Risky businesses are risky.

This person is just making up his own facts. They didn't fail.

How has Neurolink failed? They've successfully implanted within a chimp, allowing the animal to control a game (pong) via its brain. They're now moving onto human trials before the end of the year.

How has Boring Company failed? They've successfully opened the Vegas loop, have a pitch to open a similar project in (I believe) Miami? And now they're looking at building a Hyperloop 'in the coming years'.

Why are people who hate Elon Musk so insistent on just making up facts.

Like who are you convincing with this nonsense?

It literally takes 5s of googling to show that you are totally full of shit.

Boring Company just raised 600$+ million $. And is hiring lots of new engineers. They have multiple projects in the pipeline.

Oh, I am one of those people that don't see raising money as anythng else than success in raising money. Which is success, but doesn't mean that the company is successful, yet.

Raising half a billion dollars is a massive vote of confidence from investors who have poured through the projections in fine detail.

Well ok.

So we have a company that is growing and has costumers in the pipeline. Their first costumer is so happy that they want to extend the system considerably.

But that I guess is not enough either?

What more do you want other then happy costumers, new costumers and the ability to raise money on the bases of those things?

This is a company that builds actual machines. They make their own tunnel boring equipment. That is a capital intensive businesses not a software startup. They need to raise money to expand production.

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