(personal opinion: remote work is the future except on the factory floor or Dojo datacenter in Tesla's case, Elon's belief systems are...erratic)
Maybe in your echo bubble, but that is factually quite incorrect.
Elon has made some questionable choices over the years and while I not a fan of many of them, I think he generally at least tries to use his capital for the betterment of the world. I think his "mission" is in fact the reason he uses to justify harsh behavior like described in this article.
What rock do you live under? He has a huge fanatic cult following and they won't ever shut up about sucking his dick.
All billionaires suck, but Musk sucks the least so get on the fanboi bandwagon?
Please.
None of these tech billionaires deserve to be treated as anything but the robber barons they are.
Musk? He's at best an unhinged narcissist. And that's being kind. The fact that he's bought into his own fan fiction and thinks of himself as a noble futurist doesn't matter much to his overworked employees, the people Musk has defamed on Twitter, or the shareholders he's defrauded through blatant market manipulation.
yeah, this is false.
> or the shareholders he's defrauded through blatant market manipulation.
this is also false.
i mean, if you're going to do a flame bait comment, at least do it well.
It can't be false, it's a value judgement.
Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences.
That's... not how the rich access their wealth.
Musk himself has taken out massive margin loans collateralized by his Tesla stock. This allows him to live a very lavish lifestyle without actually having to liquidate his positions or pay any kind of income or capital gains taxes.
In fact, this is how most extremely rich individuals operate: their wealth is locked up in equity and then they take out tax advantaged loans to fund their lifestyles.
So yeah, if I had a painting worth a few billion dollars, and a bank offered me a 500M loan collateralized by that painting, yeah, sure, of course I'd take that deal.
Though ironically, Musk has also recently sold billions of dollars worth of shares, first back in the fall, and again in advance of his purchase of Twitter. So I'm actually not sure how your hypothetical applies to Musk.
Back to my point, if you had the hypothetical painting you could take out a collateralized loan but you still couldn't give away your money to reduce your net worth or else you'd default on your loan - so the point still stands, you'd be a billionaire and I would argue there's nothing wrong with you being a billionaire....as to whether musk can liquidate and reduce his networth - why? Did anything meaningful change in the world when he liquidated 10 billion? To that point he did it so that he could become the individual who paid the most taxes in history and that changed basically nothing with the federal balance...in fact if you used 100% of every billionaires net worth in the US and put that towards taxes you wouldn't be able to even run the federal government for a full year on that budget - much closer to 6 months.
To clarify once more - I'm saying being a billionaire doesn't mean you suck. You absolutely don't have to do anything evil to become a billionaire. The system which allows for the creation of billionaires is broken, I'm sure we agree, but it isn't musks fault that wallstreet has been allowed to create complex abstract financial devices that seemingly have done nothing but created more wealth inequality. Musk certainly benefited from these financial instruments, but you can't default to suggesting he did anything evil just because he benefited from it. In the same way that someone can value your painting at 1 billion without your input, many people have valued his company at many billions of dollars without his input. He did nothing but create a valuable company, which is the opposite of evil.
The alleged sexual assaults on his private jets, among many other things, would suggest otherwise.
But maybe we have a different definition of "lavish". Speaking for myself, I don't have personal masseuses on my private jets.
> He did nothing but create a valuable company, which is the opposite of evil.
And exploit a non-unionized labor force. And engage in illegal market manipulation and stock trading on multiple occasions, including in just the last month. And defame people on twitter because they didn't like his insane ideas. And lie about his stock sales last year (which were part of a prearranged filing way before he hosted his little PR gimmick disguised as a twitter poll). And there's the whole masseuse thing...
But you're right, he's otherwise totally cool. Definitely not a narcissistic megalomaniac that's utterly obsessed with his personal image.
He reportedly works 120h/wk regularly. Do you spend that many hours working? I certainly don't and I would never describe someone who did as "living a lavish lifestyle".
As for the allegations, I don't know how that pertains to him living a lavish lifestyle as literally anyone at any income bracket can both commit crimes and/or have crimes alleged against them and seems to only serve as your point of trying to defame musk for whatever reason.
Lastly, you didn't even address the main point, which is that being a billionaire does not make you "suck".
How many people living below the poverty line do you know who happen to live in a friend's lavish waterfront mansion in Austin, Texas?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-he-lives-in-a-50...
It's very easy to sell off your 7 luxury mansions including your family mansion in Bel Air when you can just live in any luxury mansion without your name on it.
The only people who fell for the spartan shtick are gullible fans who want to believe a myth and the IRS.
Your article is paywalled but I don't know anyone who is making the claim that musk refuses to do luxurious things - only that it's evidently not his priority to have a life of luxury.
How many hours a week do you work?
> The business mogul [Elon Musk] was seen with Australian actress Natasha Bassett, enjoying a meal together at a very expensive hotel, where rooms cost upwards of $1,300 (£1,030) – wow.
source: https://metro.co.uk/2022/05/31/elon-musk-seen-for-first-time...
In terms of social impact I would say starlink alone will have more impact than any advancements amazon has made. There's no telling how many decades may have passed before people took terraforming mars seriously without someone like Musk - and that appears to have serious potential to save our species some day.
I think that's hard to compare to AWS that effectively just enables better monetization of the internet through various bloated digital service industries.
Granted I understand everything I'm comparing is extremely subjective, so I wouldn't say you're wrong by any means. My perspective is just very different than your own.
AWS owns a chip company (Annapurna) producing cutting edge networking, virtualization, and server chips. AWS has a leading industrial IoT / computing at edge platform.
AWS played a huge role in the development of Alexa, especially in regard to network latency. Even 15+ years later, S3’s new sharding algo and use of formal methods and proof based testing are as cutting edge is it comes.
Maybe the <$1MM lobbying tesla does? (compared to the ~$15MM amazon does in an arguably much less regulated space)
The only thing I see with Musk becoming the richest man alive doing is putting a target on his back for unjustified attacks. He is the better of the billionaires and the world would have progressed technologically many decades farther if all billionaires behaved as he does. Not that I would claim that is "better" for humanity (as that is a very hard metric to define), but I don't think it's hard to imagine that being more optimal.
https://www.rgj.com/story/life/food/2018/10/17/how-tesla-fee... : 2018 article about the food at Gigafactory in Reno
[..]The remote location all but demands on-site dining options for employees (a necessary convenience that also keeps folks close to work).
A single food truck fed the Gigafactory when it opened in July 2016.
Today, the culinary program has grown to encompass 20 trucks (with 12 to 15 on any given day), nine markets run by Rounds Bakery of Reno, an outpost of Roundabout Catering of Sparks, cafés from Sakana Sushi and Bangkok Cuisine of Reno, and a main cafeteria that stretches to 19,000 square feet.[..]
Remote works best only when they already have a shared context and trusting relationships. That's why it worked pretty well in the early stages of the pandemic. Now that employees have churned, I am noticing a huge drop in productivity of teams simply because a vast majority of employees are new, have no shared context and have very shallow relationships with each other.
Work that has low ambiguity and needs execution - awesome for remote work.
Work that requires trust and deep collaboration - very difficult remotely. It doesn't it mean it can't be done but the communication fidelity is MUCH lower over Zoom and this cost has to be paid somewhere.
And, yes, employee churn makes all of this worse.
I've been of the opinion that the rush to remote work is unavoidable but the industry will regret letting it get out of hand.
Which I still think is the case. I think we are reaching the point where we see the big limits in WFH show, we see generally lower engagement, more difficulty doing big difficult projects, etc.
I think it's something with not knowing where people look, and the unnatural feeling of not actually seeing someone in the eyes even if I'm looking at that person and they are looking straight into the camera.
I frequently just look away from the screen, out the window instead, when meeting with teammates. Some may interpret this as disinterest, but 1-3 hours of staring into the screen on meeting is really hard on physical and mental terms.
That said, no problem at all IRL. I'm mostly quite social.
Super disappointed in the human he’s turned out to be.