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Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

Remember that he’s not actually that smart. Rob Beschizza has the best description of Musk:

“I love how childish and petty it is. There is no depth or human complexity to Musk whatsoever: he's just a rich kid who got lucky and now we marvel at his exertions day in, day out. The New York Times still casts Musk as a public intellectual, even now, because its editors live in a floating world of narrative imagination and are impervious to the facts of the matter. In return, he calls it ‘diarrhea.’ They completely deserve one another.”

https://boingboing.net/2023/04/02/petulant-musk-rants-about-...

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Well, that's alot of "luck" then. If only everyone could be as "lucky". I wonder how many CEOs have in-depth understanding of their products? My guess is it would be few.

You might get some mileage out of FoolEd By Randomness, by N. Taleb.

What brings it to mind here is there’s a thought experiment that considers a very large number of people playing a series of rounds of Russian roulette. At the end there are a handful of very lucky and very wealthy people (and a vast graveyard of th unlucky).

Taleb writes entertaining books, but fundamentally is a trader who made one good bet (against the housing bubble) and is going to milk it for the rest of his life (which is, amusingly, exactly what he accuses Elon of doing).

Erm showing a a bit bad faith here. Taleb got his big break in the 80s. I think it was Black Monday, when he held long and deeply out of the money puts and watched them bring him considerable return while other market actors went out of business. Maybe the commenter above you is kind of retrofitting Taleb's ideas, but fundamentally Taleb is a real thinker, and Elon is a real people manager/entrepreneur.

I don't understand why we think successful business people somehow have the same acumen, or equivalent inclinations as a philosopher or an artist. For sure there is some overlap, but at the end of the day I think it's more probable Elon's intelligence and aptitude are overrated by just about everyone while his people managing skills and luck are underrated by just about everyone.

The irony is very amusing on this.

He does not have in dept understanding of his product. He is massively charismatic, good at impressing people and very good at playing people. And most CEOs does not seem that bad compared to Musk.

He takes questions at Tesla earnings calls that other CEOs would delegate to lower level executives, and can talk about rocket science when prompted (see Tim Dodd's videos). That's not to say he's an expert on everything, one thing to note is he's also been working at those companies since the start. In my view, a big part of why his companies are successful is he actually does understand the product portfolio to a great depth that most CEOs who simply do management don't. I'm not talking to the level of "I can code this myself", I simply mean "I understand the software used to make this, how it talks with X and why we do Y instead of Z". It's easy to bash on people because you don't like them, but it doesn't make for a convincing argument with blanket statements like that.

Every single time he talked about something I understand, it was good sounding bs. He is good at pop science talk and at impressing people. But he is neither engineer nor scientist. Not even close.

> He takes questions at Tesla earnings calls that other CEOs would delegate to lower level executives

He can lie better and he is controlling micromanager.

We can agree to disagree, then. I’m interested to hear who you think does it better than Musk? So far, it seems he’s doing something right.

Tim Cook has certainly not taken 22Bn off the top of his legally compelled purchase lately.

(i’m very much not holding my breath for the vr/ar goggle thing, though)

> Well, that's alot of "luck" then.

Selection bias in action - we don't hear anything about the people who were less lucky than him.

One should never underestimate the importance of luck (and, if you are clever enough, you can even optimize for that).

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