Today’s CEOs are essentially carnival barkers (2021)
prospect.org
prospect.org
"cut the daily latte habit, cancel your Netflix is the key to prosperity"
Favoritism, luck (which includes having rich and generous parents), and connections plays such a huge, largely uncredited role for success, especially in businesses. Even Bill Gates, as smart as he is, benefited from lots of luck.
The business racket is not much different from the pundit racket. It's the same insularity and being out of tough with reality.
But almost every person with even greater levels of privilege manages to do so much less than them. Which proves that one can't rightly attribute their great success to privilege alone. If one wants to be correct (and not just feel good) one has to admit that they did some amazing things based in large part on merit.
And that's the rub. Merit alone is often not enough. Privilege alone is often not enough. And luck always plays a role in determining the magnitude of anyone's success.
It takes extraordinary merit to be a John Carmack, Palmer Luckey, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs. People who had no privilege (in the traditional sense) and yet their merit (and luck) was so great that they did big things despite the fact.
Many people use the privilege argument to try to dismiss what people like Elon Musk have done. As if they could have done just as well had they been privileged. Envy is clearly clouding their thinking and confusing them. It's totally understandable for people to feel this way but ultimately and obviously incorrect in most cases.
A goal for modern societies should be to give everyone the kinds of opportunities that only the privileged historically had. But this won't prevent some people from doing much more with new opportunities than others. Merit will come to dominate outcomes instead of privilege. This will make the world much richer but won't solve everything.
https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=W....
It's true that wealth begets wealth. Zuckerberg's kids are billionaires without having to do anything. Bill Gates would've been rich even if he had not started Microsoft, just through inheritance.
But Steve Jobs led the creation of the most valuable company on the planet. There was no blocker to him being richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Larry Ellison is among the richest people on the planet. John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have generational wealth.
Creating a massive company is what makes someone as rich as an Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They had more opportunity to create a massive company than a person from a lower class, but it's got nothing to do with network effects. The main driver of these people's massive fortunes is technology that scales globally.
[1] https://www.biography.com/video/bill-gates-help-from-mom-208...
I think to your point: all the luck in the world won't fix a bad execution. It could still be commendable when a person who gets lucky is able to turn that luck into success.
Knowing how to keep yourself out of situations where unlucky events may happen is just as important a skill in racing as driving fast.
Not everyone will have the opportunity to slay a dragon. But in my opinion those who have the opportunity, and succeed, are deserving of recognition.
Luck ... read as rich parents.
Bill Gates had parents who had connections with extremely important people in multi-national companies.
Bill Gates had access to a computer as a child (via his expensive private academy) back when computers were ferociously expensive.
Bill Gates had parents who could cut a check for $50,000 (in the 1970s) on the whim of their child.
Bill Gates had the ability to drop out of Harvard knowing that he could always go back or to somewhere else because his parents could pay for it.
The child of a steelworker, for example, has no ability to take any of these chances because if they fail there is no recovery. If you get into Harvard, you will go the full four years. Even if your business idea is great, your parents will not cut a $50K check as that would pay for your college (and a house and a car and college for your siblings and still have about $25K left over) at the time. Even including the adults around you, none of the people around you have access to those expensive "computers". And your parents certainly don't have access to the senior executives of US Steel, for example.
The "leeway to fail" is a big deal in allowing you to roll the dice to make "luck".
Many research protocols that interface with the brains of animals call for euthanasia. Non-invasive study simply isn't adequate, and most of what we know about the brain comes from dissection and vivisection.
In fact, much of animal-based biological research imparts permanent physical trauma on the animals in order to study some disease pathway. They may even be born (or cloned) with immune systems that give them cancer and certain death.
Live animal protocols are designed to be as humane and ethical as possible. Lab researchers are taught how to painlessly euthanize rodents, for instance, and there is a lot of reporting and accountability involved.
Biological research seeks to make our lives better and to put an end to debilitating diseases and disorders, including ultimately death itself.
Another way to look at this is to consider other perspectives: (I mean this in a gentle way and please don't read if you're easily triggered by strong visceral imagery) lions are eating gazelle on the savannah while they are still alive, certain wasp larva eat their hosts from the inside out, orcas play with their food and torture it for hours, primates turn to cannibalism and infanticide, our ancestors had to eat animals and quite possibly cousins, and our sun will eventually boil all of our oceans before the universe itself goes dark.
Nature is brutal when it comes to capturing and transforming energy, and physics even more so. These lab protocols, though they may seem macabre, are seeking to extend our knowledge and end suffering in a humane way.
Edison's stunt was marketing. Elon's company is attempting to fix broken bodies.
...but they are monopolizing the expectations and setting a bar for the perception thereof.
Opinions are always fair to have: everybody has them, and even bad ones. But you have to wonder how much of history is really just garbage takes like this. This to me is a large argument in favor of more sites having blog comments and not censoring opinions, even if 99% of the takes are usually garbage. When the journalists and historians of the future are writing about this time period, it would be horrific if the only sources available were equally garbage takes like this with no commentary available in rebuttal.
Edit: come on guys, you're going to criticize the author for not having been a CEO? If you haven't been one either, what's the basis for the criticism? It makes no logical sense.
Edit 2: Regardless of whether the author is right or wrong, "You can't judge because you were never a CEO" is a silly comment to make. Maybe, the author is wrong, but in any case it's not because he's never been a CEO. Almost nobody has been a CEO. Does that mean they are immune from criticism by the rest of us? I just really felt the need to point out the sloppy thinking there. I'm clearly right about this. It seems as though pointing out obvious logical mistakes is now justification for downvotes and taking personal offence?
Successful non-CEO people also benefit from luck and other factors. The world is fundamentally unfair. I don't think anyone owes anyone anything, but its my personal philosophy that its up to me to make sure I'm given a fair shake by others - to the extent that I can influence things.
So all your news is filtered mostly by the rich, hence the success of union busting in the minds of most Americans.
The stock price isn't seen as a KPI anymore, back in the days businessmen would make sure the company would sell quality products and services in the real world and then the stock price going up was just a mere consequence of that.
Nowdays it's all about transforming the company into a mission, a political movement or an outright cult. The stock is seen as a something to sell and if you can do so without any product sold in the real world then it's so much better because as a CEO you managed to efficiently skip a very labor-intensive and capital-intensive process to get to what you really want: Market Cap glory.
It used to be that corporate America had a certain arrogance of being superior to politics, religion and cults. People who resorted to that were singled out as desperate and it was the hint that their company was about to go under.
Nowadays it's the opposite: CEOs and companies which don't shitpost, don't talk politics and don't try to recruit people in their cults are left behind.
It's "fake it till' you make it" on an unprecedented level out there. And the worst offender is the one is worshipped the most on here, irony because game should recognize game.
I think if we coldly examine the moves like in a chess game, he's doing all the right things to be successful in this environment.
As I said when the population consumes culture at an unprecedented rate, you gotta become culture to be relevant. Hate the game, not the player.
Having recently read one of those “Top 2021 CEO Compensation” reports for my metro, I think they’re doing just fine.
Investors are looking under the hood to ensure the company is real, has something that can scale, and that the team can legit do the work.
Anything else is a dated view of how to grow a business. If a CEO wants to be an influencer then run the marketing department and let a real CEO run the company.
Jeff Bezos used to send packages in the early days of Amazon.
Musk is working like a dog, splitting his time between SpaceX and Tesla.
But sure, they are just influencers, self-promoters and politicians.
folks just can’t cope with others doing well
it sucks to not live up to one’s own dreams but that’s the human condition
For a guy who is working like a dog , he has plenty of time to tweet nonsense to the masses. And now he owns the asylum.
But I think he's doing all the right things to be successful in this environment.
As I said when the population consumes culture at an unprecedented rate, you gotta become culture to be relevant. Hate the game, not the player.
Paraphrasing Tony Montana:
"In America first you get the attention, then you get the power, then you get the money, then you get the women"
I wouldn't be especially surprised to see Elon Musk bankrupt by the end of the decade.
It was completely different social landscape, people participate in culture at a much higher rate today.
The time people devote to catch up with latest social trends, celebrity news, rivalries etc. is unprecedented.
Say if a culture icon like the Beatles were in their prime today they'd have something like 1.2B instagram followers.
That being said, I would be surprised if anyone knew the name of the CEO of Walmart which makes about 4.5x the revenue of Amazon. (They are different businesses with different models - so it's an apples to cement blocks comparison). I do think there are totally dodgy CEOs out there that do nothing for a company's stock price except soak up money that should go to shareholders. But they're more managerial nothings that keep the ship afloat.
But to look at a-holes like Bezos, Musk, etc. and think that P&G, Walmart, Target, Boeing, Ford, General Motors, Union Pacific, or any of the S&P500 CEOs are falling over themselves to shitpost is ludicrous.
At the end of the day the CEO is supposed to do three things, publicly. The first is cheerlead for the company - meaning to put the best spin on the news to protect the interests of shareholders. Second is to be the top sales person and go gaga over the company's products. Finally, to make sure that everyone believes the company is run by sane, sober, and focused people who want to make sustainable and real gains in profitability.
It's the unprecendented amount of time that Americans devote to following pop-culture and Musk wants to become pop-culture squared.
China is approaching this thing differently, they make it very clear if you want to become a pop-culture icon you should sing or act. It's not allowing businessmen to become influencers or politicians, nor to put their nose into public health or education.
According to them the roles should be clearly separated, so his style and twitter purchase won't work there (or would work there for different reasons such as China using it as a trojan horse in the AMerican society)
But I say those words with a sense that I might be eating them, if something horrible comes out and we all say "gee - should have seen those red flags".
But I wholeheartadly agree with the above message.
As you said new elements could come in to make you re-evaluate your admiration
By the same token new elements could come in for me to re-evaluate my stance and if we are indeed at the dawn of an era where CEOs become even more politcians, showmen, pop-culture icons then I'd have no problem tipping my hat to Musk as a pioneer of such new powerful trend.
Similarly I'd also tip my hat if "creative accounting" becomes the norm and also embracing the concept of manifestation and "self-fulfilling prophecy" concerning the stock price which has to be pumped at all costs to make sure that there is always enough air flowing on the wings to keep the company in air.
How he/she does it is up to them. It's not up to you or I to judge if they are doing the right things. Just check if they are accomplishing their goal.
The goal should be marketshare. That's the true measure of future profitability because it means that you have a huge moat.
Tesla is a 20 year old company and in this timeframe it managed to gather 1.3% share of all the cars sold in 2021.
There is a reason why Porsches and Ferraris are just as common as Teslas on the road. Porsche and Ferraris might be slightly more expensive but they have been doing it for longer so it balances itself out
Tesla was founded in 2002. That's 20 years ago. During the same timeframe Microsoft managed 95% share of Computer OS, Google 90% share of search, Standard Oil 85% of oil production.
Hell, even Escobar managed to get 80% of the global cocaine market.
But again, market share is another interesting signal (just like a CEOs behavior) that one might use to assess if they think the company will have a long term ability to generate more $. But the goal is always to generate more $s in the future.
Apple's shrinking market share of the smartphone market doesn't matter, because they are achieving their goal of profit generation. Blockbuster died maintaining a great market share of the video store rental market that disappeared. Netflix lost all DVD rental market share and pivoted the whole company to a streaming service. All of them the goal remains generate profits.