Or -- he's stupid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33552827.
Stupid people with money can look like they are clever because the layer of people immediately underneath them actually wields the clue stick.
Stupid people with no money look stupid because they can't afford the layer of clever people underneath them.
Clever people are either abstracting the liability via stupid person in the layer above them or don't need that kind of shit in their lives and are just getting on with designing and building products with the other clever people around them.
Edit: I'd just like to note that I am recognising the work that Tesla and SpaceX engineers and staff do which the PR baboon up the top somehow gets credit for every time.
"Oh that billionaire did something that seems odd/crazy to me? Well he must know something I don't else how would be be a billionaire!" - Yeah, that's not how things work. What's the line? "Past performance is not indicative of future results", paraphrasing it: "Past advantages are not indicative of future results". Very, very few "self-made million/billionaires" are anything of the sort. I'm not saying their lives have never been hard or that they have never worked hard at something but I think you'd find that, at scale, most people would succeed if put into that position (from birth, which is why this is near-impossible to prove).
Incidentally he was a failed asshole. All his staff deserted him and watched his business burn to the ground. Perhaps ironically a big fan of Musk too.
I don't know. There are also many more failed nice people than successful nice people. We don't have hard stats, so the success/failure ratio for assholes could actually be higher.
It's actually very easy to disprove. There are 22 million millionaires in the US. There are 720 billionaires. That gives you a 0.003% chance of going from millionaire tier to billionaire.
Those numbers don't indicate your chance of going from millionaire to billionaire. How many of those millionaires became millionaires later in life instead of being born one? How many of those billionaires started as millionaires? You'd need instead a study of hundreds of billionaires that started as millionaires then compare them the the number of "peer millionaires" that were born around the same time. Even so it's the "experiment" I'm proposing. Maybe I should have left millionaires out of it completely because even though we throw around things like "millionaires/billionaire" they are very different. You can be a millionaire from your 401K, your 401K will never make you a billionaire (unless inflation really gets out of hand).
For myself it's very easy to look at all the advantages I've had in life and see how they led to the "success" I have today. I have/have had friends/coworkers who I perceive as being just as hard working, just as smart, etc as me who aren't doing as well due to not having the same advantages, I see the opposite as well.
Fun fact: Peter Thiel's IRA made him a billionaire.
Reality can be hallucinated in either direction.
What it actually "is" here, is unknown. But the mind seems to abhor a vacuum so secretly fills it with simulated data. Presumably this had some historic evolutionary benefit, but whether it is still a benefit in 2022 seems questionable.
A similar but more charitable theory is that Elon is very good at leading a company to build actual hardware that has to solve hard physics problems. At twitter the primary challenge is managing people, and he is autistic and has no idea how to do this. He has no idea how normal people experience or use twitter, no idea how his tweets are felt by people, no idea how his employees feel about him etc.
all of these are things that don't matter when building a rocket or a car, while understanding people and politics is the ONLY thing that matters at twitter.
Colonise Mars? It's never going to happen. But you'll win defence and commercial contracts on the way as a side effect.
Saving the future with electric cars? It's never going to happen. But you'll sell a lot of luxury cars as a side effect.
Saving free speech with Twitter? It's never going to happen. But you'll pacify the SEC dogs snarling at your door after you fucked up.
His pitch is changing the world. His reality is not really improving it measurably.
People who have a hard time understanding and empathising with other people tend to make extraordinarily bad marketers, actually.
If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. I'm not talking about in layman's terms, I'm talking about the actual science that goes into it. Same deal with car design. I'll give Elon props for having a vision and pushing it forward but let's not say ridiculous things like "lead rocket designer at spaceX". That's like thinking Tim Cook could write a line of Swift if his life depended on it or that Zuck knows more than a surface level of how FB's tech works. I don't exactly begrudge them for that (I won't get into profit sharing, or the lack there of at most companies) but let's not pretend that Elon is himself coming up with revolutionary ideas. Putting his money behind this is laudable, at some level, but he didn't invent these things any more than Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone.
We here on HN should know better than most how "worthless" an idea is on it's own. It's about execution. And Elon gets props for his execution (in this case hiring people who did the real work) but he shouldn't get all the credit for the work of the actual engineers.
Bon appétit!
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
My hat is old and pretty gross though so instead I hope you'll accept a donation to the EFF: https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY
The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own.
My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asked their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.
I do and I've consistently voiced that opinion no matter the CEO/company. I don't think they think it is stupid, I know they have their reasons. I disagree with their reasons, I think there is more at play than only logical thinking on this point (real estate, asses in chair, etc), and I think it's shortsighted. WFH is an amazing perk and while I get not everyone wants it there are a large number of people who do and to cut off that entire group is incredibly short-sighted.
It's fine though, I'll never work for any of those companies, I have zero desire to do so, I much prefer smaller companies that understand WFH. Though I'd make 1 exception I think, for Apple, to gut and replace App Store Connect/The Developer Portal or at least have better feedback/errors/displaying the current state (which is a common complaint I have with Apple when their software needs to talk to server, the feedback is always lackluster or non-existent). Those websites look broken and/or are confusing/vague way too often. At least the Google Play dev console is so busy and incoherent that you'd not notice most issues. Though props to the Google Play devs for making apk/aab upload/release errors as confusing as possible in most cases :chefs-kiss:
It seems optimistic to think that Musk made a careful decision based on nuanced factors that just happened to have exactly the same outcome as every other company he owns.
The man loves proving a point, and "covid is stupid" is one of them
So, very ambiguous whether this is a reasoned move or or something more emotional and ego driven
People expect intelligence to lead to good judgement but I'm more and more convinced that (assuming a decent baseline of intelligence) they're fairly separate and unconnected things.
To answer your point though, Zubrin does not and never has worked for any of Musk's companies. Watson did work at SpaceX 8 years ago, but works somewhere else now so he has nothing to lose or gain from Musk.
And here is an account of a top NASA engineering official's interactions with Musk who also has never worked for Musk.
> He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting.
Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking.
Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build.
Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had.
“I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
In an era where online manipulation is becoming ubiquitous, when talking about someone who has a clear ego issue and the desperate need to be seen as awesome (to the point he has several cases of acting against his best interest just to protect his ego, across several companies), and in the context of that person acquiring one the platform most forward in the whole social media space that pushed those issues forward... I find that interesting.
I am not accusing you of anything, I'm merely saying your messages have the opposite result on me than the one you intend.
Elon as a person certainty has lots of flaws, but he is also quite clearly really good at a lot of things people who try to downplay that and claim its all 'luck' or 'failing upwards' usually just don't like his personality.
That's not true. I invite you to read my messages again and note that I've made 5 comments, all of them timestamped before yours, and only in 2 of them have I referenced quotes.
> about how great and smart Elon is
That's not exactly accurate and seems tinged with your interpretation of my intentions.
I've supplied quotes to show that Elon is well versed in rocket science.
> add essentially nothing beside quote without context
A commenter claimed that Musk did not understand rocketry. I replied with quotes from industry experts declaring the exact opposite. What more context do you need?
I'm not a fanboy and have anything invested in proving how great he is. Personally, I think he can be a big jerk at times and at others brilliant. The issue I'm trying to address that I see over and over again are the false claims that Musk has no idea what he is doing technically and steals credit from the engineers he hires.
When I see a ubiquitous false claim that is easy disproven in 3 minutes with a Google search and copy and paste, then why not? I believe HN is a place where truth and reason are valued and misinformation corrected, so I think my comments and references have been valuable in that respect and apparently so do the 30+ people that have upvoted my first comment with the quotes even though they are "without context."
> your messages have the opposite result on me than the one you intend
My intention has been to present information to counter misinformation about Musk's technical skills. If you still believe he doesn't have technical skills, that's your prerogative of course. I'm just supplying information that looks authentic to me and leave it up to the reader to decide.
I don't believe he is solving any substantial technical problems at SpaceX or "designing rockets" himself.
Do you think this describes Zubrin, Watson, Sarsfield or the other experts in the reddit post I referenced?
Do you think he fooled Jim Cantrell?
> He is by far the single smartest person that I have ever worked with ... period.
> I found out later that he was talking to a bunch of other people about rocket designs and collaborating on some spreadsheet level systems designs for launchers. Once our dealings with the Russians fell apart, he decided to build his own rocket and this was the genesis of SpaceX.
> I don't believe he is solving any substantial technical problems at SpaceX or "designing rockets" himself.
Thanks for sharing your belief. What would be interesting and potentially more educational is if you shared the basis for your belief.
They claimed the people I referenced were Musk's employees and therefore said those things to kiss his ass get to get on his good side and avoid being fired.
This so blatantly false and easy to disapprove. Most of them weren't ever employees and none of them are current employees of Musk. When someone grasps at falsehoods like this in an attempt to discredit others, it naturally raises suspicions about their motives.
This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me. Like, I don’t know anything about rockets, but we all know a bit about CPU design here, right? If someone said that Tim Cook really knew his stuff and wanted answers about the M1 that got down the the fundamental laws of physics, we’d probably say — well, that’s pretty stupid, right?
You’d have to talk about thing like pipeline stages, decoder width, memory bandwidth, branch prediction — obviously these parts have to follow the fundamental laws of physics but that isn’t really the interesting part. Fundamental physical limits aren’t the bottleneck yet.
Maybe rockets science is just much easier but that seems surprising to me, given the expression.
Classic NASA. Read Gene Kranz's "Failure is not an option".
In rocketry you're usually up against physical limits. You need materials near the limits of physical strength and temperature resistance. You need fuels near the limits of energy density. And still you're launching with a payload to destination that's maybe 5% of the mass, if you're lucky. Which is why rocketry has to obsess on weight reduction.
If fuels were 2x as powerful, or gravity was 1/2 as much, this would be easy. A spacecraft would have the weight budget and safety margins of an airliner.
If earth's gravity were somewhat greater, you'd never make it to orbit with chemical fuels.
This is the tyranny of the rocket equation.
I'm not a huge Musk fan, but he does seem to get the physics of rocketry.
Before Telsa, nobody thoughts electric cars were ready for road. Before SpaceX, I don't think anyone tried reusable rocket thingy. The thing is when you come up with a radically new idea, you have to know enough about it to convince others to work on it.
Steve Jobs knew enough about computer(and general idea of programming) to sell it, and Bill Gates was once a good programmer. Intel, nVidia founder were also chip engineers.
As you state, that is not the case for CPU design.
How about in 2016 where he built an home control AI and iPhone app with voice recognition for it using Facebook tech?
"I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play."
"As the CEO of Facebook, I don't get much time to write code in our internal environment. I've never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive. My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework or iOS development. The open source Nuclide packages we've built to work with GitHub's Atom make development much easier. The Buck build system we've developed to build large projects quickly also saved me a lot of time. Our open source FastText AI text classification tool is also a good one to check out, and if you're interested in AI development, the whole Facebook Research GitHub repo is worth taking a look at."
https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis...
(You can argue that's still "surface level because he didn't build those things" but it won't be a very interesting argument)
I get it, some people hate Elon’s guts and equally hate Elon fans. I also think that it’s pretty well established that he has a range of character flaws that really hurt him and threaten his future success. However, anyone who insinuates that Elon is stupid needs to establish how a genuinely stupid person could found two successful dot coms and then hire all the brilliant engineers that have made his subsequent companies so successful against such odds and become the world’s richest person. Luck and debatable opinions about his alleged wealthy upbringing cannot explain this. Even assuming all the highly debatable opinions about his technical contributions any reasonable observer must admit he is at least a genius at hiring the right people to achieve his vision and then avoiding getting in their way enough to make enormous inroads and sell it all brilliantly. I am far from an Elon fan but I couldn’t hope to achieve 5% of what he has.
I couldn't because my goals and ethics do not align with the same outcome not because it's impossible.
None of my family even know what my financial situation is! Nto even the kids.
This is pure faerie-dust self-aggrandizement. If you want to make these assertions, you can prove them. No one else is stopping you, after all.
Musk is clearly an intelligent person in so far as your average person is not really interested in rocket science, or capable of running a business, but I hesitate to attribute his becoming the richest man on earth to his incredible intelligence. I think it should be evident that success in capitalism relies on a huge combination of factors.
I’ll be happy with the discussion if a single Elon hater admits that regardless of anything else Elon is not actually stupid. You cannot be actually stupid and do what he has done it is totally beyond any reasonable interpretation.
Putting aside that these "unethical fools" would have to be at least really good grifters, politicians, and other synonyms...to make the analogy more accurate I'd wager these alleged charlatans didn't serially found multiple research institutes, run them concurrently in some cases, that are producing ground-breaking real-world results some of which their contemporaries said was essentially impossible (e.g. landing an orbital booster). Elon is either a genius in some manner, be it the greatest grifter in history or something, or Zeus is rigging the wheel of fortune in his favor for some reason. I'm not a big fan of the Zeus theory.
Musk's success story is just anecdata, as almost all wealth stories are.
Every hitherto successful enterprise might fail due to future conditions but Tesla getting us from essentially zero to a competitive mass produced electric car market is already a historic achievement.
Curious about this claim, Tesla introduced the model S and in 2012 it was roughly 25% of the EV market (22k of about 90). For the next two years, EV sales doubled while tesla sales grew by 50%. The next year tesla and overall ev growth by went up by about 50%
Source: https://backlinko.com/tesla-stats and googling "how many EVs sold in year X"
Is going from 70k ev to 90k the same as going from zero to mass production? It was for tesla (very much so), but not the overall EV market. Then selling 30k put of 180k the ne xt year, seems like the scaling up is not complet6due to tesla. Though tesla recently is pushing about 2/3 of EV sales and recently was at 75% (source => googled: percent EVs sold in 2022 by brand)
The idea single handedly brought about the EV industry seems not to be supported by this data. Namely the growth in EV sales outpaced the growth of Tesla sales and in this early days Tesla was not an overwhelming percentage of the market (though recently it is).
My inference here is Musk had good timing for market fit, he made a lot more people aware of EVs (cultural change), and he scaled up production to a high mark recently achieved. All of which is commendable. Though the comment of "zero to nothing" applies (from what I see) only to Tesla itself and not the broader EV market (which is still quite an achievement, and the actual broader impacts are as well)
The Chevy volt never got up to mass production territory as they never broke 25000 per year [1] whereas >100,000 model 3 and model y are each being produced per quarter. [2] That's a respectable mass production volume if not record breaking amongst all cars. The Prius is a hybrid car so it's not in the same category.
> Tesla introduced the model S and in 2012 it was roughly 25% of the EV market (22k of about 90)
The Model S and X are not mass-production models.
> Is going from 70k ev to 90k the same as going from zero to mass production?
They increased the number of EVs produced to truly mass-production volume. The difficulty going from a few thousand per quarter sold at a high price to >100,000s sold at an affordable price is a huge leap.
1. https://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chevrolet/volt/chevrolet-vol... 2. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/02/tesla-quarterly-sales-c...
I suppose it is a matter of opinion whether 25k constitutes "mass production" or not.
Seemingly Tesla did not break that threshold for 5 years. The OP I took to imply that tesla drove production of _all_ EVs from roughly zero to large scale. The data I'm seeing still does not support that claim. Within Tesla, yes, but globally, no.
Eg: While significant, tesla was not more than 20% of global EVs sold (in recent years) [1].
Tesla's are still expensive too? 2023 models look to start at $70k to $110k
It's not clear to me where our apples are turning into oranges since the different delivery numbers do not line up (perhaps hybrid vs not, perhaps pre-order and sold vs built - not sure)
Regardless, the [2] citation says of the response above states: "Clearly, the production and sales ramp in the second half of 2018 is the first big, noticeable bump in Tesla’s output."
The time frame is very significant as it alludes to whether Tesla was the reason for EV growth from zero, or if they are a significant (but not sole) part of a larger trend.
Quick google has 3M EVs sold in 2019, compared to tesla selling 10% of that. The rest of the car industry was not dormant.
I do agree though that going from 1k's to 100k's is a big leap. The fact it is in the same general ballpark as F150s is remarkable. The rub though is that happened over 10 years, mostly over the last 5 and during a period where absent tesla there was still very strong YoY sales growth of EVs
In sum, is Tesla the birth of EVs? No, but it is nonetheless a significant and remarkable part.
I don’t see how either of those can be considered winning the lottery, to use your phrase.
> The Boring Company
The Boring company if sold today would likely make more money then most lottery winners get.
>How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?
Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.
> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.
The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.
Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
More or less yes. Read up on how close spacex and Tesla came to imploding at the same time.
> Without tesla there is no spacex.
You’re confused about the timelines there.
> These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.
Again, you think it was just PayPal doubled down to Tesla, which then somehow turned into a war chest for SpaceX or whatever. Tesla and SpaceX happened in parallel, spacex didn’t get help from Tesla, and both ran out of money from PayPal.
So because he once made 23 million. Making 23 billion $ is not impressive?
> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.
Tesla had his money but not his leadership and was run straight into the ground. Musk took over and now its making almost the same amount of money as Toyota.
> Without tesla there is no spacex.
What? This isn't accurate.
> And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him.
There is a long history of rocket startup before and after him. And non are SpaceX. Most failed. Beal Aerospace being a good example. There was a company called Rocketplane Kistler that could have been SpaceX but failed.
So yes, we do have quite a bit of evidence that starting a successful space company is incredibly hard even with quite a bit of money behind it.
> Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.
And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.
I said none of these things you're reading in to my argument.
Yes but the topic is "Is Elon Musk stupid?"
I would wager that anybody widely regarded as a genius has a decent sized rap sheet of stupid crap they pulled. So "made stupid impulsive buying decision" is great evidence for impulsivity and hubris, not "stupid."
If you're got enough moron CEOs spouting enough random crap, one of them will get lucky often enough.
His only real skill is taking credit for things other people do.
I feel like a lot of people don't know that Musk didn't actually found Tesla, despite his made-up "founder" title.
He was about to found an electric car company. He then got information that there were 2 guys in the Valley trying to build an electric car company. They had only minimal investment (personal, family) and their fund-raising was hitting a wall, nobody was investing and the company was basically dead men walking. Tesla was basically 2 guys with business plan, and the business plan was a pretty vague idea about building an electric street car.
Instead of just ignoring that, putting his money in his own company and essentially 100% dooming Tesla, he got together with them, funded them and brought incredibly important people like J.B. with him.
People now use this as a negative, but seems to me not just ignoring them, and dooming them to bankruptcy and starting his own company was a pretty nice. Its not like Tesla was far enough in development that their technology was a must have. Tesla was founded based on a lot of false assumptions.
He even allowed one of them to lead the company for the next couple of years until Tesla had been run straight into the ground, only then replacing the CEO.
Ok later he insisted the he and J.B. were founders as well and that what people don't like. But the reality is without him and J.B. Tesla was doomed and for the history of Tesla Musk and J.B. are far more relevant then the original founders.
Chances are you are the 'Elon Musk' for lots of other people out there.
If you really can't see the evidence in front of your eyes, here's John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
It’s okay to be like, “oh, now after seeing that my preconceived notions of him based on Twitter hot takes were wrong, I retract my statement.”
He let emotion laden political nonsense lead him into making an extraordinarily bad deal. OK. Fine. Not what prudent businessmen would have done, but now he's where he is with the Twitter deal.
So at this point it's all about leading from where you are, and sometimes where you are is in a place where there are zero good options. Every option is terrible, and probably won't work to extricate you from your situation.
But here's the thing, you have to take one of the options because you cannot stay where you are. The one thing you know is that where you are leads to certain death. Go left. Go right. But you can't stay here. That's the situation Elon is in.
Given his priors and the fact that he doesn't understand social media, free speech, moderation or advertising, the only question is if he can control his ego long enough to find someone to run the place before he burns it to the ground, and whether anyone who could save it would trust him enough to take the gig.
I rather doubt that will happen, but maybe. Assuming he hasn't already done too much damage - I'm not sure where that line is, but it seems like we're approaching it rapidly.
I do think hard times are coming for Musk. As well as burning billions on Twitter, Tesla is no longer the vangard of the EV market, Boring seems to be a dead end, and I haven't heard anything about the solar enterprise for years. Space X seems to be still innovating, and I hope Musk isn't completely cleaned out so his Mars aspirations still bear fruit.
just think, the board would have accepted $50 per share, but he went with something that included 420, costing himself an additional 8% on the purchase price.
Stupid sounds about right.
Can a person really become the richest person on earth being stupid? Maybe, but I think it strains credulity a bit.
I’m not saying that “marketing” alone made Tesla successful. I am saying that it made the stock valuable.
The Tesla stock really only went up when they had proved they had cracked mass production of the Model 3 and were making an electric vehicle at industry leading margins.
One can argue Tesla stock is still to high, but its certainty not 'objective'. Good annalists disagree and you can reach almost any valuation depending on your future assumptions.
[1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some applies to blood-thirsty CEOs.
I wouldn’t want to work for Twitter w/o remote work, but I don’t think he’s stupid.
...and a decent inheritance.
Effort? I have yet to see any data indicating one can raise their intelligence^1 by effort. What I personally believe is that effort, hard work, tenacity, etc. are all just metaphorical raffle tickets in a metaphorical "success" raffle. Effort is required to play the game, but it at best can only increase your chances of winning. After all, it is by no means a guarantee. More effort = more tickets/chances. Good upbringing? Generational wealth? All more tickets. But, you hardly put in any effort, have a poor upbringing, and still win, but the odds are stacked against you.
[1] At least intelligence in how it's defined and measured by psychology. I do not necessarily agree with psychology and its tools of measurement, but that is irrelevant.
All of my enemies are 8 foot tall, einsteinian, gigachad supermen.
So you have to actually see where they have a fragile ego, E.g stupid, bad with money, poor, or they have no class.
Musk may be cleverer than average, but he's also come to own twitter by virtue of being successful at building paypal, followed by being able to successfully deploy capital at impactful problems at SpaceX and Tesla. While impressive achievements, these achievements do not imply that Musk will be successful at Twitter. He's known for demanding people to do their best and hardest work by pointing them at seamingly impossible but impactful problems.
Will rescuing a failing social network motivate people in the same way? I don't think so. I'd probably be willing to work 60+ hours a week for average pay to solve global warming (TSLA) or colonize Mars (SpaceX) - I wouldn't be willing to make that sacrifice for Twitter.
Well, they imply it a lot more than a person with success in zero businesses up to this point
Maybe he's just never sleeps. Maybe the real work is being done by others (cough Shotwell cough) and he's just takes the credit (cough Tesla founder cough). Or maybe, just maybe, CEO just isn't that hard of a job?
> being successful at building paypal
Musk never worked for a company called PayPal. The predecessor companies that merged to become PayPal forced Musk out around the time of the merger. Later the company changed its name to PayPal and when it went public, Musk had a big payday.
I think of Elon Musk as being that guy who goes on a winning streak playing "double or nothing" coin flips. Enough people are doing it in Silicon Valley that one of them was going to hit a run of several heads, and get rich.
Given what happened to eBay afterwards seems to me PayPal working by itself would have been far better for them in the long term.
There was a shit-ton of money to be made, providing card terminals, cars, direct accounts and so so on.
PayPal could have done a lot of things later done by things like ApplePay.
By invading Ukraine, Putin has achieved the exact opposite he wanted to achieve. The West is now more united than ever and more Russia border countries are going to join NATO. On top of that he has destroyed Russian economy. Tell me how that's not stupid?
I don't even have to go into Musk's actions. He massively overpaid for Twitter and to service the loan he has to pay $1bn a year. Even if he'd cut all his staff and millions would subscribe to Twitter blue - that wouldn't be enough to service the loan. Plus tons of advertisers left the platform because he's a loose canon spewing conspiracy theories. How is this not stupid?
But he likely saw the alternative as Ukraine in NATO, colour revolutions spreading to Russia, and ending up like Gadaffi (whose gruesome death he was said to have watched on video over and over again).
Probably he regrets not doing it sooner, when the Ukranian military was in much worse shape.
From where he stands, democracy is a threat. The fact that we disagree won't change it.
But I find Bill Browder’s explanation more plausible. Essentially Putin is like a Mafia boss and his organisation has been stealing from the Russian for years and years. To keep up his regime and organisation he needs to create conflicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Browder
Also watch the documentary by Navalny that exposed Putin… one reason why he is now in prison.
However, when you have narcissistic personality disorder, as Putin does, doing the above just isn't an option.
Every dictators seems to have the need to sink with their governments and take the country together for a ride.
This is nonsense. Specially after 2014.
> colour revolutions spreading to Russia
Revolutions are not successful unless driving by elites of that country.
Winning at what? Oppressing and exploiting ppl for his own gain and being responsible for thousands and thousands of civilians being murdered?
Not something I’d admire if I were you.
Plus, if you look at the way Musk got played recently to spread Russian talking points about Ukraine in order to protect his precious Starlink from weapons Russia probably doesn't even have, it becomes somewhat more obvious how the comparison breaks down.
Do you think Russia will be in a better place than it was before this war?
Nonsense. Temporary disruption and disagreement over energy politics will not lead to a long term break in the fundamental political alignment of Poland and Hungary and will certainty not break the EU.
> Plus, if you look at the way Musk got played recently to spread Russian talking points about Ukraine in order to protect his precious Starlink from weapons Russia probably doesn't even have, it becomes somewhat more obvious how the comparison breaks down.
You seem to love to make lots of assumptions without evidence.
First of all, not everybody who doesn't support war until all parts of Ukraine are recovered is a Russian tool. Most wars end on compromise and both sides usually try to shoot down anybody who suggest a compromise.
And if you really think he did this to protect Starlink you have a series lack of understanding of space politics and relative capability.
So Russia has all the natural resources you could wish for, economy the size of Italy's, economic crisis, most corruption in human history, and is currently loosing a war fighting a smaller country with weapons made 60 years ago.
Please remind me where is the genius I am missing?
The comparison doesn't really make sense.
People calling him a genious should be able to point to some great success he has achieved in all this time, in any activity whatsoever, that an average person could not.
Some perspective is needed - tremendous economic growth is common when you're an incredibly poor country. China - after decades of growth - still has a lower GDP per capita than post-soviet Russia.
People calling him a genious should be able to point to some great success he has achieved in all this time, in any activity whatsoever, that an average person could not.
I don't see anyone calling him a genius. I'd imagine he's probably fairly smart, like most world leaders. Calling someone an idiot/crazy for starting a war isn't a very useful thing to do, if you're interested in the prevention of war.
Okay, how about Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary - they have all eclipsed Russia in % growth and nominal value.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
> I'd imagine he's probably fairly smart
Why do you imagine that? What is the logical basis?
> Calling someone an idiot/crazy... isn't a very useful thing to do, if you're interested in the prevention of war.
So now we are no longer interested in having an honest assesment in case he gets offended?
If you watched Russian media, he has clearly gotten worse over the last 10 years or so.
Assuming our enemies are just insane is a cop out. It diverts a lot of attention away from how horribly unprepared the west was to deter a military invasion of Ukraine, which is something no one wants to talk about.
For example, look at Putin and the state of Russia and their invasion of Ukraine. I think everyone would agree it has been one of the biggest military and geopolitical blunders ever. As far as Elons acquisition of Twitter, time will tell if it was 'stupid' decision or not.
The US assessment was that Russia would overwhelm Ukraine in less than a week. Winning the war was not an American plan.
A quick check of my resume and bank balance quickly demonstrates my superior intellect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/ywa5f2/musk_shut_...
There was no need to cross into that zone of stupidity.