With all this, I'm 100% convinced that SpaceX and Tesla work despite musk and not because of him. Twitter isn't that lucky.
At first I thought this was just a silly internet meme hating on Musk, but now that he reigns over Twitter without a Musk-management team in place, I'm starting to think there may be some truth to that.
So it's always going to be given that this fact is true, then that story is more likely to be true. Or given that this one thing is more likely to be true, then that story is more likely to be true.
Saying something is true/false based on news stories is really silly since you can almost never verify the truth of that story. Always going to be more/less likely given this/that.
This "explanation" doesn't pass the smell test, because the chronology of cause-and-effect is inconsistent.
Elon's companies get successful, which makes him famous... which explains how his companies were successful before he got famous?
Musk didn't found PayPal - he founded X.com, a competitor of Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin), and then Peter Thiel convinced him to merge to reduce competition in the space. His "contributions" to PayPal post-merger were largely limited to trying to convince them to switch from Linux to Windows servers, and bad ideas about software architecture. You can read about this in Levchin's entry in "Founders at Work" [1]
Musk didn't found Tesla. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did. Musk came in as one of the first investors and then forced the founders out, then got his role rewritten into a "founder" title with a lawsuit.
Musk did found SpaceX. However, his role was basically that of a talent scout. Early hires like Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller were critical, and he basically poached them from Boeing & TRW.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
Your smell test also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.
So while I agree there's likely not a walking Elon cleanup crew, the popularity of Elon matches a random momentum that coalesces in American capitalism.
I'll be sure to remind people of this (and cite this comment) whenever anyone criticizes Elon Musk for something Tesla/SpaceX does. ;)
Just semantics but I am curious: what business titles do you consider "head" titles?
>also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.
Not really. To explain multiple enormous successes merely by random chance (and what's worse, claiming his odds are lower than average, ie "in spite of him") so vanishingly unlikely that it's a statistical impossibility.
Elon founded SpaceX. That fact is totally uncontroversial, even among critics.
His work at Zip2 was incredibly consistent with his pattern: a person with visionary ideas, an effective prototyper, an incredible ability to sell with smoke and mirrors... but only successful in business to the extent his companies are protected from him:
> ...in early 1996 the firm Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company, on the condition that Musk hand over most of his shares and cede operational control to a seasoned tech executive named Rich Sorkin. Musk was demoted to Chief Technology Officer, and not surprisingly, he hated to see someone else run his own business. But he needed the money to take Zip2 to the next level, so he took the deal.
> The new programmers found that they needed to rewrite most of the software, to make it more efficient. Musk’s DIY approach to coding didn’t include chunking, so he inadvertently created a “hairball”: a tangled mess of code that’s nearly impossible to unravel if anything goes wrong.
> Often he would re-write his programmers’ code after they left work at the end of the day, without telling them of the changes. He was also prone to micro-managing and rudely criticizing his team. Needless to say, they found him difficult to work with.
But Zip2 became vital to the online transition for traditional newspapers and other media. Right place, right time, Musk being actively managed from the very beginning. But he's incapable of recognizing now that he needs that support system.
Twitter didn't need either money or a crazy single minded leader...
(Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)
SpaceX is run incredible well by Gwynne Shotwell, she is responsible for the success of the Falcon launch business and Starlink. Without Elons mad visions and relentless need to keep moving Starship would not be happening, so maybe he is still important for that.
Very few opinions otherwise.
Polarized as anything else.
His public image is a direct result of his actions. Stuff like blazing a blunt in a podcast was legit funny, him calling a rescue diver a pedo was fucked up, but nowadays he's showing open disdain for democracy and its freedoms - he's making a clownshow out of "freedom of speech" (just try tweeting a substack link), openly shitting on the freedom of press (by not having media teams at all, banning critical media like Tesla did in Germany a few months ago, or by firing Twitter's PR team and replacing it by a poo-emoji autoreply) and personally had a bunch of high-profile fascists unblocked while antifascist accounts got the boot on the suggestion of people like "Catturd" or Andy Ngo. Not to mention his various run-ins with the law such as him ignoring direct SEC orders (the one where he was supposed to have someone else sign-off on tweets with stock market impact) or the shady stuff surrounding the German Tesla factory.
He could have stayed in the public image selling expensive cars with weirdly sexual naming schemes (S-3-X-Y) and shooting rockets into orbit... but no, that amount of attention wasn't enough for him. It's all a direct result of his own actions.
Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.
I've never really paid much attention to him, frankly. I was aware of SpaceX and Tesla. I was impressed watching the SpaceX launch over the pandemic. But I'm going to be quite clear about one thing: I had been considering a Tesla after recently moving to a place that has a lot of them and that also has a lot of charging infrastructure. But after seeing Musk's management of Twitter and finding out some of the things going on a Tesla regarding safety that sound like they are similar to Musk's management of Twitter, I will never, ever buy a Tesla or anything I find out Musk is involved with. That's just how it is. I don't see him or his stupid Twitter antics providing any value to me whatsoever.
- Being forced into buying twitter has pushed the company / him into absolute survival mode
- Instinctive paranoia kicks in when you are in that mode to keep you on your toes
- When you have seen outsized success and have a sycophant army, but no deep friendship, the paranoia brings in a me against the world mindset
- All the people you alienate as a result of your paranoid action gang up, further affirming your paranoia.
- The vicious cycle continues
This lens explains most of his actions and has softened my view of Elon as a CEO trying his very best to keep the company afloat.
- He wasn't forced into buying Twitter. He said he would, signed a contract that said he would, collected the money and said he would, then when attempting to back down while lying about just as well as a middle schooler justifying why he hasn't done his homework, was made to hold to his contract.
- He put himself in that situation.
- His sycophant army is his own doing. He has never, ever tolerated dissent, neither in his companies or in public. See: calling people pedophiles when told a sub is a shit idea, or his behavior known throughout Tesla, SpaceX and others. When the only way to stay in his companies is to be a yes man, don't be surprised when all you have are bootlickers.
- It's not as a result of paranoid action, it's as a result of Musk being a downright cunt.
This lens fails to see that Musk is doing so for a single reason: for the first time in his life of a billionaire, he's being held accountable and can't weasel his way out of trouble or into a cofounder position. Ain't life a bitch.
Statistically it's pretty much impossible for this to be true.
You're claiming that Elon effectively hit the business lottery twice, despite his success being less likely than average vs other leaders.
Also, odds are not all of destiny. Some crappy things keep winning despite those odds.
[Edit: thanks for informative and interesting replies!]
"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes."
This lie is very trendy, but YSK that Elon Musk did not receive a large inheritance.
Until the age of 16 he was raised middle class supported by an Engineer salary, and then years later his father invested (ie not an "inheritance") $28k out of a $200k Zip2 round.
If that size of 'large inheritance' really made such an enormous difference, then 50% of HN would be billionaires by now!
Clearly there must be more going on in Elon's case.
That said, I don't think there was much from those mines: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
It also means that if he drops into a company and takes over it'll be with a team who can't manage him, and it'll be a bit of a slow motion train wreck.
I don't think there's enough evidence to show if I'm right yet though.
I’ve worked for rich and successful people. Usually on their subsequent projects. My conclusion has been that the super rich and successful often don’t understand why or how they got that way, and they struggle to replicate their success. They often don’t try a similar kind of thing subsequently either, but follow a vision quest borne of their riches.
I do think Elon set a crazy high product bar at SpaceX and Tesla and a team of people achieved it. That’s commendable. But, the stories of his bad management behavior even in those places is well documented.
He’s doing the hero thing at Twitter, and it turns out… he’s neither a principled person, nor can he lead a revenue-first transformation.
Also you’re not figuring in the odds that success went to his head.
Paul Graham, the person whose tweet started this thread (and also the founder of the site you're posting on, BTW) hit the business lottery with Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, DropBox, Coinbase, Substack, Instacart, DoorDash, and many smaller or enterprise-focused companies. He just doesn't put his name on companies he funds as "founder", even though in some cases (eg. Reddit) he actually did come up with the idea for the company.
Elon Musk has a habit of finding a good business idea, investing in people who are already working on it, and then taking over the company from them.
He’s different person now. He’s always been fundamentally a bullshit artist but there were forces keeping that in check. That mattered.
in 20 years time, i look forward to see a remake of citizen kane featuring musk. trouble is, no obvious orson welles on the horizon.