Then Tesla and SpaceX happened and I was like, “hmm, maybe he was wrong” and then Twitter happened and I’m thinking, “no, I get it now”.
From that viewpoint, it makes sense as to how he could be successful in some venture and not so in others. The hypothesis would mean that he's very good at organizing, dealing with bureaucracy, doing PR etc. Not so much at actually building things, designing, engineering, or basically building consumer business.
Musk has no political sense whatsoever, he’s far too impulsive. But the impulsiveness does make headlines which people mistake as media savvy.
That’s how he got himself into this mess in the first place. Musk impulsively decided to offer to buy Twitter with no due diligence, then sensibly tried to back out when he came to his senses (helped a bit by the Fed), but was forced to purchase it anyway. Of course it’s a disaster. He bought it on a whim and has no idea how to run a social media company.
When Elon gets in trouble it’s for something that nobody supports (like calling that guy a pedo), and his supporters just sort of feel bad about.
Also he didn't design the SpaceX rocket. He had a hand in the first prototype, which crash and burned. Literally. That's his contribution in terms of engineering.
His overall contribution is PR and attracting capital. That's really it. I'd say sits closer to a politician.
Politicians have to answer to their constituents, engineers have to answer to the laws of physics, and entrepreneurs have to answer to the laws of economics.
Celebrities are beholden to nothing but marketing, and until recently, Musk (or someone on his team) has been doing a pretty good job of selling his image.
I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.
So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.
>We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were really competitive — we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com [Musk] became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix.
And eventually to stop Musk breaking the thing by rewriting it for windows at a time they were very busy fighting fraud on the network, Peter Thiel kicked him out as CEO.
>...I was like,"You gotta go,man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.