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Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

Or getting into stupid fights on Twitter.

On a more serious note: we never knew how good we had it with the likes of Gates of Buffet. Or even Rockefeller.

Musk may be an incredible prick on Twitter and be a terrible boss to get orders from, his vision gave us Tesla and Space X, both ground breaking and needed developments. He is a man of vision, not a manager or people person. And his vision is limited to technology, not economics or politics. But if you're that rich, you can come to think that you know it all.

You mean he had the vision to buy an electric car company and a rocket company, both of which existed before he got there?

That is poor use of rhetorics.

Because he didn't start it doesn't mean he didn't contribute to the development of the company.

Also, no one can claim that success would have been at the doors without his input.

Note: I'm not defending Musk here as much as I am opposing the rationale of the argument.

Pretty sure Elon founded SpaceX himself. If you have a good source for the claim that it existed before he came along, you should take the matter up with Wikipedia.

SpaceX existed before he got there? Citation needed.

While Tesla existed before Musk joined it, it also had zero sales — Musk was part of the series A funding in 2004, their first public prototype was 2006, Eberhard was asked to step down in 2007 and did so Jan 2008, the first actual delivery Feb 2008 — and also electric cars were a joke at the point Musk invested in Tesla (the hype was hydrogen and ethanol to be the green fuels of the future). As 99.7% of the market cap gain happened since 2010, and therefore under Musk’s leadership, I definitely count Musk as more relevant than Eberhard (although even then, organisation and salesmanship is not enough by itself, but I’m not going to get sidetracked here into means of production).

SpaceX, however, I believe was literally founded by Musk.

If 90s Gates had Twitter, that would have been a sight to see…

People think he’s just a nice guy philanthropist now and forget he got there by being an absolutely ruthless, cutthroat monopolist.

Rockefeller literally had a camp of union organizers machine gunned and hired thugs to set fire to his competitors shipments so maybe he’s not the best example, either.

He is also kind of awful for the medical research world, he has no qualifications to be a massive force in it (with his non-profit) and yet he basically distorts the whole field into having to agree to his terms because it is so difficult to advance in the field if the gates foundation shuns you.

Billionaires getting into stupid Twitter fights is very far from the worst things they do (or can do).

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