So not every project the had planned was done? After 6 years they have no achieved all your goals. Did you also consider SpaceX to have failed after the first 6 years because they didn't revolutionize space flight cost?
I don't know about you, but making a company that can pull off a major infrastructure project that a costumer paid like 50 million $ for is impressive. Its one more company then I ever created.
> But his behavior, from the outside anyway, is exceedingly erratic and unfocused.
That is really only the case if you are very selective. In reality his behavior is highly consistent. He is the longest serving CEO in both automotive and spaceflight. He has been consistently perusing the topics of EV, spaceflight and AI for over 20 years.
> His constant hype about FSD where he’s at best skirting materially lying to investors.
I agree but that not really what we were discussing and not what I was responding to.
> His hype about HyperLoop which turned out to be harder than he likely anticipated.
He literally said 'I'm not gone do this, its just an idea'. He said this right from the beginning, even before the Blue Paper was realized. I was the pro-Musk and anti-Musk media that made this a bigger deal then it actually was.
> His hype with Boring Company which also appears to have turned out to be harder than anticipated.
And EV and Spaceflight also turned out to be harder then anticipated. He even said about all those companies that they might fail. But he is trying anyway and Boring Company will continue to try to improve tunnel boring. They might eventually only make marginal improvement or non, but not sure what people problem is. Never starting any company that tries to improve an established industry is somehow a virtue now? I don't get it.
He also didn't give timelines, he never said tunneling cost will be X in 3 years. He just said that its conservative industry and that with various improvements like electrification tunneling can be made more efficient.
I think the Loop project isn't a great idea, and not sure if Boring company will turn out to be worth all the effort.
But calling it a failure is ridiculous in my eyes. Again, if somebody made a company valued at 50-100 million $, since when do we consider that a failure in tech culture?
> His hype with Twitter and since it’s a private company hard to say how his takeover has impacted their earnings but certainly I think it’s turned out harder than he anticipated.
Again, success and failure by Musk own predictions is a different thing then calling somebody successful or not.
I would say Twitter so far is a big failure as its nowhere near worth 44 billion anymore. So I'm on board with calling that a failure.
But we should also judge that after 5 years, evaluating a company shortly after takeover is tough. Tesla looked like a steaming pile of shit when Musk took over as CEO.
> The reason for those ventures though are clearly strategic.
Its funny how in one paragraph he is totally erratic and unfocused and in the next paragraph he is a strategist who has for 20 years planned and strategically assembled a business empire to take over the earth and Mars. Do you not see the contradiction there?
In regards to Twitter, Musk is doing nothing in terms of shaping the narrative that he couldn't have done without owning Twitter, he did much the same thing before he owned it just as or more effectively.
> with how he fired the marketing department at Tesla
I think you are referring to the PR department. And I think he fired them because he believed they didn't really add much value. Responding to 100s of media reports about battery fires and such. And some of the people of those teams were just moved. The company still puts out lots of things traditionally considered 'PR', like impact reports and so on. The main thing the stopped doing is interacting with media companies and car journalists.
After all these years, its hard to say that this hurt Tesla overly much.
And if this was about shaping narrative, having a bigger PR team would make sense. He is the CEO, he can tell the PR team exactly what to write and what not to write. If anything firing lots of PR people makes it less likely you can control the narrative.