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Being smart in one field doesn't translate to being smart in another field. For example, Steve Jobs making medical decisions, doctors making investment decisions, bankers making tech decisions.

> Being smart in one field doesn't translate to being smart in another field.

Yes but the topic is "Is Elon Musk stupid?"

Stupid than the average person in making a purchasing decision

> Stupid than the average person in making a purchasing decision

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."

He's an investor- patron, who got extenely lucky in the dotcom boom. He pays people to build good businesses, and he (was) good at personal-brand marketing.

Honestly, why couldn't you achieve it? Your point is self-deprecating.

I couldn't because my goals and ethics do not align with the same outcome not because it's impossible.

No, it's because you weren't as smart. Sorry, but if you were, you'd be the richest person in the world, goals and ethics be damned.

Why would I want to be the richest person in the world? Sounds like a load of hassle which would compete with the things I value.

None of my family even know what my financial situation is! Nto even the kids.

Sure, dude. You're just as smart and capable as the world's most successful entrepreneur, but you're just a little too ethical to lower yourself to his level.

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.

Counterpoint: most people who are incredibly smart or incredibly hard working or even both, are not incredibly rich.

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.

> 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.

I know lots of highly successful charlatans in areas that require being smart but who are basically unethical fools. I'm talking about scientific researchers and engineers. People with 300 grange papers running a research institute who have never published an original thing in their lives.

> but who are basically unethical fools

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.

what do you mean "alleged wealthy upbringing" is this point contested somehow?

Absolutely. Plenty of people believe that Musk came from nothing.

Pretty much anybody writing on this site, is privileged(by world standards) by very definition.

Chances are you are the 'Elon Musk' for lots of other people out there.

What, they argue over whether I came from nothing? I doubt it.

If someone wins the lottery, does that mean "they're a genius at picking numbers?" 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?

Musk's success story is just anecdata, as almost all wealth stories are.

If someone wins the lottery repeatedly (Zip2, X.com/Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company) I'd entertain the possibility that they weren't just 'picking numbers'.

only Paypal & SpaceX though, the rest may fail, Neuralink & The Boring Company are merely hype at this point. Tesla will face a lot of competition in years to come and now it has no novelty factor.

> Tesla will face a lot of… in years to come

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.

Isn't the Chevy volt or the Prius the cars that went from essentially zero to mass production?

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)

> Isn't the Chevy volt or the Prius the cars that went from essentially zero to mass production?

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...

The tesla sales numbers also include their hybrid offerings?

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.

[1] https://www.ev-volumes.com

Without commenting on the others, the Wikipedia article for Neuralink seems to say it’s taken a ton of funding but failed to make any big improvements in the science or technology, and without even reaching initial human trials. The Boring Company built “a single-lane underground roadway less than a mile long, driven by conventional Tesla automobiles, constructed at a total cost of $48 million” (see the Wikipedia article for it).

I don’t see how either of those can be considered winning the lottery, to use your phrase.

Ok he only won the lottery four times in a row then. The chances of doing that is utterly minuscule.

Thanks for your contributions btw. I don't like Musk, but suggesting he is talentless or just lucky is asinine Reddit-level commenting and it's good to see it called out.

Neuralink is trying something that amazingly difficult and many medical companies, specially those working in something as complex as operating on the human brain are not expected to launch a product within a year or two.

> The Boring Company

The Boring company if sold today would likely make more money then most lottery winners get.

Maybe, but who is in the market for a parking lot?

Winning the lottery once increases your ability to win it in the future because you can (if you want) buy more tickets. Success creates conditions for more success in pretty mundane ways.

If someone wins the lottery 4 different times buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life, you better fucking believe something special is going on there.

>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.

> buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life

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.

> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.

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.

> Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No.

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.

> 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.

He can be entirely explained by random luck.

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.

> 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.

This is one of those 'gatcha' arguments.

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.