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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

So far it has exposed the real business acumen of Elon Musk. The only company he runs by himself, arguably the easiest to run, is losing him a staggering amount of money in one year.

I wonder how he rates his own perfomance.

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Looking into it.

Twitter was doing that before Elon bought them

They had just recently become profitable before the Elon takeover.

The 2020 was in negative, 2021 was also in negative. That's not "becoming profitable"

Data?

The way I see it, it more-so shows that his strength is in companies that are heavy on complex engineering problems.

Twitter on the other hand, is a company dealing with sociological/societal challenges, being that it's a social network. That takes an entirely different kind of skill set to do well as a CEO for.

I don't buy it. Internal reports from SpaceX and Tesla detail Musk's chaotic, capricious management style that they have to spend resources to actively manage. SpaceX is better at it I guess, because he's seemed to have caused far more problems at Tesla with his antics.

Either way, he's essentially abdicated his CEO role at both companies, and his chaotic management style is on full display now, which confirms the Tesla and SpaceX reports. But why did Tesla and SpaceX thrive where Twitter is failing? Because the former companies grew up to create processes that contain Musk; whereas Twitter was bought outright, so his blast radius is unlimited there. Twitter has no Musk immune response.

At SpaceX when Musk suggests X, where X is... I dunno, an really dumb idea that no one would ever want, the people at SpaceX know how to redirect Musk until he drops it, or they know how to shape it into a good idea. At Twitter, they have no idea how to do this, and so Musk always gets his way, every time. All the people with the skills to turn bad ideas into good ones have left, all the people who tried to manage Musk were fired, so now he's left to his whims. And it shows.

If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.

> If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.

Also, he can't be effective at 3 of the companies since he's not physically in the office at each. It's impossible to do a good job while remote, as we all know.

I would also add on to the context of Tesla and SpaceX. Now part of this is speculation on my part. But I would also like to propose that the problem domains of Tesla and SpaceX also attract people who have vested interest in the problem domain. Engineers and researches at both of those companies are passionate about the problems that those two companies are trying to solve. With Twitter and social media, maybe there exists some people who are passionate, but I imagine the biggest attraction of Facebook and Twitter are the pay and the resume item. But at Tesla or SpaceX, your willing to eat more shit because your working on something your probably really passionate about and not to mention badass. I don't like Musk, but I would worked for him at SpaceX just because rockets are badass and I like space.

> If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.

I think the thing about CEO is that you can delegate not just the things you probably shouldn't personally be doing, but also the things you should.

I'd believe that some CEOs have a real job, but it's pretty clear that a lot have delegated it away to nearly nothing.

Isn’t the Cybertruck a really dumb idea that no one would ever want?

It is still vaporware. One potent delay tactic is to arrange a splashy prerelease, and then drag feet to production. But delay tactics only work for ideas that aren't strongly seated yet; if he keeps coming back to it, delay will eventually fail. That's how you get bad movie and terrible ideas on store shelves. He is the boss after all.

I would want it.

Why would you want it when the F150 Lightning already exists?

or a cheap single speed bicycle from the nearest sport shop

I can't carry plywood on a bicycle. That's why I'm on the waiting list for the F150 EV.

I think that his strength is with companies that had a strong and effective engineering culture in place when he bought them. Companies that require the building or rebuilding of an engineering culture aren't playing to Musk's strengths.

From an outside perspective, his strength seems to be in companies that arbitrage government subsidies into sales at scale.

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