My theory is that getting smart people to make twitter vs landing reusable rocket boosters… will yield VERY different levels of passion/interest.

Which again is FINE. Personally, I just wanna do cool stuff and have a great work/life balance. I don’t want to (and don’t have the expertise to) land a rocket booster.

I guess… not everyone’s problem domains are interesting enough to lure a team like space-x etc. again, I don’t like him, but credit to Elon for at least trying to solve these tough problems. Just admit FSD isn’t a year away!

Because it is hard to trust those you hand your money to and not get in the way by checking in too often. Also, not every passionate engineer should be trusted that much. Being able to spot those that are passionate about what you want done, while simultaneously being both competent and trustworthy is a skill that will make you very wealthy, and almost no one has it consistently. A success or three may show that he is one of those people. Or that he is survivorship bias waiting for a reality check. I don't know how to tell, or I would be quite wealthy as well.

> paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same?

is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences?

Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.

Aerospace had a lot of overqualified, underutilized engineers that were spectacularly easy to tap into with a little bit of extra money and a very interesting project.

That does not hold for Twitter. There is no magic clump of overqualified, underutilized people to tap into without throwing LOTS of money around. On top of that, Twitter mostly isn't that interesting.

It might have something to do with the paying bit.

I don’t agree with them, but this counter argument doesn’t quite work. In a system with x% chance of success, we’d expect most people to fail for small x. But some few will still succeed multiple times.

Throw in that your odds get better the more you’re successful, and it’s classic survivorship bias.

Because success at that scale eventually requires you to exploit some percentage of your employees and most people are not ok with that.