I don't think he had any talent, he just got lucky and companies insulated themselves from him. With Twitter we're seeing what happens when companies don't insulate themselves from him.
Several times?
Oscar Wilde wrote: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Something of the kind, with an opposite sign, could be said for repeated business success. And in this case it's more than 2 times, and not just some small successess either.
Isn't it more like "He's idiosyncratic and often erratic and/or has political views I don't like" that people translate to an absurd "he has no business talent"?
If anything it just shows he has enough money that it’s okay when some of his extremely ambitious projects fail. A less wealthy person couldn’t even attempt any of what he does much less fail as often and as publicly as he has. Elizabeth Holmes went to prison, for example.
One could say similar things for other well succesful businessmen:
Remember NeXT? Remember he got kicked out of Apple? Remember the G4 Cube? Remember MobileMe? Remember Ping?
You mean the basis for Mac OS X?
> Remember he got kicked out of Apple?
You mean by John Sculley, who basically nobody remembers as having been associated with Apple? And then how Steve Jobs came back to Apple and led it through most of its golden years?
> Remember the G4 Cube?
You mean the spiritual predecessor to not only the Mac Mini, but the Intel NUC and other small form factor computing platforms? A platform that only suffered from the failing of being before its time, rather than a fundamental design flaw?
> Remember MobileMe?
The service that eventually transmogrified into iCloud, which, if not a driving force, can hardly be considered a minor player on the Internet today, if for no other reason than the number of @icloud.com email addresses?
> Remember Ping?
No, I honestly don't, but hey, not every idea can be a winner. At least Steve Jobs' bad ideas failed quietly. Compare and contrast to some of Elongated Muskrat's more… questionable business decisions, like buying Twitter for $420.69 per share just for the lulz.
I mean the company and OS that failed to leave to Jobs expectations, company pivoted to sell the OS on PCs, failed on that too, and was only spared bunkruptcy because Apple was desperate for an OS and Jobs.
The rest is meaningless retorts in the same vain, when all of the above are failed projects associated with Jobs, just like Musk has his own, which was the point.
My point is that when you put Musk among the pantheon of Silicon Valley CEOs, he doesn’t especially stand out for anything except being lucky. Compare him to Bill Gates, who, for better or for worse, revolutionized computing? Or Larry Ellison, who has somehow despite the odds miraculously managed to keep Oracle afloat and somewhat relevant for decades—no mean feat indeed?
Elon seems to be little more than a charming, lucky idiot. Make no mistake, charm and luck will take you far, but only so far. Sooner or later, one or the other will run out, and for Elon, it seems like he has depleted both resources at this point.
This is selling him too short. He's also a sort of cult leader, one who keeps an eye out for who his next population of acolytes will be.
I'm not sure how one can consider Larry Ellison more savvy and impactful than Musk.
What was meant to be an affordable alternative to the Apple II, became under Job's supervision a method to take control of the Apple line of computers. He ended up making a less feature-rich Apple II, which rivaled it in price, killing the idea that the computer could compete with other cheaper computers on the market.
All to stroke his own ego.
$1,298 for the Apple II $2,495 for the Macintosh
It completely destroyed the progress they'd made. Jobs took this project opportunistically at a time when Steve Wozniak was recovering from a plane crash. If he'd approached the project more strategically, it could have positioned Apple to take a place in the market share of cheaper PC's of the time.
He got that very reliably. When that kind of work aligned with success, he was successful.
Wasn't that the computer that the first web browser and web server were developed for and on? And a bunch of famous video games were developed on it? It was never a consumer computer company, but for its niche it was pretty successful.
If somebody wrote the "first web browser" on BeOS it make it any less of a failure as a business venture.
Maybe if Tim Berners-Lee had, BeOS wouldn't have been a business failure. Or at least successful enough to be purchased for $400 million?
Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW, and wrote the first server and browser while working for CERN.
I think it's weird to compare failed products within a company (and minor products at that) to failed companies. I think you may have not even listed some of the more notable ones (The Apple LISA, the iPod HiFi). But he wasn't betting the company on the Cube, or MobileMe, or even Ping. These were low-stakes (and arguably low effort) bets taken within a company that was simultaneously having insane success in other departments. The G4 Cube came out between the iMac and the iPod (2 years after the iMac, 1 year before the iPod). That seems like a damn good product-line, and if you could choose any one to miss on, it'd be the niche prosumer device, not the two consumer devices.
> Remember NeXT? > Remember he got kicked out of Apple?
These could be interpreted either way. It seems all part of the larger "Apple story arc", and more comparable to Tesla's shaky middle period, than as binary successes and failures void of any surrounding context. However, I do mean that it could go either way. I wouldn't fault someone as judging them as true failures separate from the later Apple success.
Your rebuttal doesn't really make sense. Only NeXT and getting ousted from Apple were personal events for Steve Jobs. MobileMe (now iCloud), the G4 Cube, and Ping were all initiatives of Apple as a company which was far more people than just Steve Jobs.
Just saying. Overall I certainly think Steve Jobs was anything but a failure.
You mean NeXT, the company he sold back to Apple for $400 million dollars?
I would argue that the majority of design flops from Apple in the past twenty years were more Jony Ive than Steve Jobs, based on history and design style. That said yeah not every idea the man had was rock solid, but comparing Steve Jobs to Elon Musk is laughable.
Elon was wealthier than 95% of the people in the United States, the second he was born. He's been playing with a stacked deck this whole time.
Whenever someone says "oh so-and-so is so successful" only two questions enter my mind:
1. where did they start? 2. how much help did they get along the way?
I would argue that in Elon's case he's been successful despite himself.
So like 16,595,000 other US citizens?
An idea, not a company
> Remember boring company?
Still a company.
> Remember solar city?
Acquired by Tesla, who remains a major supplier of residential solar panels.
Which is typical Musk conduct: he lies a lot, people believe him, and he somehow makes it through until the lies do not matter any more. See robotaxis, self driving, etc.
==Acquired by Tesla, who remains a major supplier of residential solar panels.==
Tesla bought Solar City for $2.6 billion in 2016. In 2019, they targeted 1,000 installations a week. In 7 years, Tesla has installed a total of 3,000 solar systems, getting to about 20 installations a week. Add in the fact that he purchased the company from his own cousins and the story looks worse. [1]
==Still a company.==
It is still an existing company, but that doesn't make it a success. Founded 7 years ago, has built one actively used tunnel. They also had to change the entire idea (it's actually just Teslas driving underground).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thud_(media_company)
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/tesla-has-installed-3000-sol...
GP was merely trying to dunk on Musk and didn't have a real argument.
I'm very aware of Musk's failures. Heck, they are the very things that define his companies and enable their successes. Every rocket explosion was a failure on the road to success. Every over-promise drives his people to work that much harder.
But you want to dunk on Musk a little more, fine, let's get this out of the way. (Not a comprehensive list.)
Bad:
- Twitter looks like a bad deal (so far), and is a public opinion disaster
- FSD did not deliver the promised value to its original customers (future remains to be seen)
- Boring has under-delivered and is not growing explosively (but they are still in business)
- His general skepticism of any COVID precautions (I think his entrepreneurial bias is behind this)
Worse:
- The handling of the cave rescue aftermath
Arguable:
- His political statements
- Twitter layoffs
- Personal life stuff (not really our business)
- Work-at-home policies (his track record says he knows what he is doing here)
There. Can we pin these somewhere so we don't have to keep hijacking every Elon post with these "revelations"?
If he’s lost his own money on stupid projects, that’s fine ? Hitting it for six once an over is still a good innings…
He can keep throwing darts at the board as long as he maintains his ability to rope other rich people into his delusional self-confidence. Twitter might just be what breaks the spell.
Failure is precisely how we learn. To be afraid to fail does not lead to success.
He's a talented motivational speaker, he can inspire as a leader, he can paint a vivid future of great accomplishments , not in the least bolstered by his extreme confidence of expertise and knowledge (often not actualized). Everything he talks about is at least about the entire planet, sometimes multiple planets, and with xAI even for understanding the entire Universe, and this helps him attract two key resources:
- Capital.
- Talent.
And then when he puts talent and capital together... yes he got lucky couple of times. But he's always been a terrible manager and this is visible not just with Twitter.
He IS? In what contexts? Because every time I see him speak, it's painful. His delivery is so stilted/awkward, that I think he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen.
So someone can be very effective and charismatic while turning off a non-trivial percentage of the people: I've seen this in company executives a whole lot. The people that dislike the CEO will bounce quick, and in the end you end up with a workforce that is very loyal, via self-selection.
So is he a talented speaker? Just by by how many people react well to him, the answer is yes, regardless of how well he might convince you or me.
We're ready to forgive a lot if we suspect behind the awkwardness hides a genius. The trope of the distracted professor, the autistic savant is at least centuries old. He leans into every such trope, and he's very careful in cultivating an image of a "founder", of an "inventor" of an "engineer". Most people by now know he hasn't founded Tesla, or PayPal (was fired from it in fact), he hasn't engineered the SpaceX rockets (although he had a hand in those that blew up), and he in fact has no engineering degree despite claiming otherwise.
So I'd say all this means he's building this image very intentionally, and he's trying to turn his weaknesses into strengths. The more he stutters and repeats, the less we notice how much of what he says is kinda... vapid. Trump has some similar patterns by the way, you can ask him a specific question and he'll say he has great ways of answering that, some of the best people told him he has the best answers, his history of a businessman speaks about long experience providing great answers to all kinds of questions... and he won't answer your question in the end.
Trump and Musk are very different in some ways, but very similar in others.
Exactly. A significant number of people want to see "Iron Man" in him or that he is playing 5D chess and they will fill the gaps to rationalize that image they have made of him.
From that point on we have a choice. Accept increasing chaos and corruption, or build up the missing guardrails we thought were there. However, from what I see, things aren't going strongly in the right direction as I see it, so far...
A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
"I alone can fix it"
I’m wondering if my experience was only my experience, was Elon Musk surrounded by good marketers who made sure the right things were said 10 years ago but he somehow lost them along the way? Because he is definitely not the man with the mystique he used to have for me.
It's a bit like how in Big Brother and other reality shows people first try to show their best side, to show restraint. But over time, and with stress, despite all the cameras, despite the knowledge the world watches, you slowly revert to being yourself.
Hah, I'd never have considered the parallels between Big Brother and Twitter before but you're spot on here - even more so when you consider the existence of Celebrity Big Brother showing that celebrities are - of course - people who act like people do. Musk isn't the only famous person who's been unable to stop revealing who they are on Twitter, but he's certainly the one who's taken it the farthest.
I don't know if Musk's success is down to luck or not, but to answer your implied question of "Do you really think it could be luck to succeed on several different occasions?" the answer is yes. To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old "it's been heads 9 times in a row, it must be tails next" gambler's fallacy. Someone could succeed in building billion dollar companies largely on luck many of times in a row. It's very unlikely, but it's not impossible, at least as far as any company's success is down to the luck of the founders.
I don't think you understand how this fallacy (and logic ) works. This is only a fallacy because the coin toss events are trivially expected (and assumed) to be independent chance events in the first place.
Business success are not supposed to be independent like that, unless you take for granted what you're supposed to prove.
And to do that, you'd have to ignore some pretty big factors different to coin tosses, like the continuity of an agent making business decisions, their promotional and organizational skills, their connections, their reputation with VCs and the press, past performance as part of their image, their experience, and several other factors besides, which makes repeated business successes nothing like independent coin tosses.
I don't think you understand how similes work.
There's no way to really know what extent luck is involved when a business succeeds, but it's probably not zero. It's entirely reasonable to suggest Musk has been lucky many times over. That doesn't mean he'll be lucky again, nor does it mean the lucky events he's had so far have been trivial. Believing that Musk will (or won't if you're not a fan) be lucky again in his next business because things will fall in Musk's favor again is the gambler's fallacy - the belief that past events influence future events. No doubt the things Musk can influence will go his way, but there will be things outside of his control that he might not be so lucky with. Even big, important things. Nothing about the gambler's fallacy says anything about how trivial or otherwise the lucky events are.
Get one coin flip right => get 10 flips for free.
There's no fallacy here either, the implication is he was repeatedly successful due to his business skills, not luck, which he can be reasonably expected to apply to his future ventures.
To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old HN 'but technically' fallacy.
With such a large population, we expect some people to just be stupidly lucky many times in a row, right? Especially since they aren't really independent events - if you get a lucky break, it keeps you in the game longer, making your second break more likely.
And it would make sense that the lucky outliers would be some of the wealthiest, right?
No, that's not how business work. This is not coin-tossing, the "being lucky" includes attracting VCs and investments, building a good image, picking a good niche, delivering, getting buyers, and several other things besides.
You can get lucky with one of those, but not all of those, and several independent times.
Else skill doesn't mean anything, and you could make the same argument for any human venture.
Which is to say, don't think in terms of inviolable rules - that's useful for engineering the system, but can sabotage your ability to understand the system - and think instead in terms of what is possible and at what rate you expect it to happen. Then try multiplying that by 8 billion.
> Else skill doesn't mean anything
Skill matters, it just isn't the only factor.
> You could make the same argument for any human venture.
Luck profoundly effects every aspect of our lives, yeah.
Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
Notice that the above have nothing to with statistics. It's just handwaving based on the "with 8 billion people trying, anything is possible".
>Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
That has already shifted the goalposts, to "luck among the best players" as opposed to "he just got lucky".
I was suggesting a thought experiment. I thought the way you were approaching this was rigid, I was encouraging you to see this as more of a scientific phenomenon than something rote.
It was just a suggestion, it's your business if you don't wanna take it.
> That has already shifted the goalposts...
Just trying to give you an example where both luck and skill matter. No goalposts were moved. I was responding to your objection, wherein the goalpost was, "does the existence of luck imply the nonimportance of skill?"
The point that you are missing is that these are not only not independent times, but in fact extremely highly correlated. Especially for someone who already comes from an extremely wealthy background and has social connections to other wealthy elites.
It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people.
To employ, no, but to get a stream of important innovations out of them, that might actually be harder than rocket science.
The vast majority of smart people around the world are stuck in mediocre jobs. Hotspots of technical productivity like Bell Labs or SpaceX or NASA of the 1960s are pretty rare and rarely last for more than approximately a generation.
How to get smart people to be actually scientifically productive is a major question of history.
An example: 100 years ago, several very important innovators like von Neumann were Hungarians; nowadays, Hungary is a scientific backwater. (With the exception of Katalin Karikó, the mRNA lady.)
This is a ridiculous statement if you've ever run a company. "Just hire smart people and your company will be successful!"
Great, glad you cracked the code.
HN is trully a trove of business wisdom!
Oh, but it is based on how hard it is for corporate America to even accept such a notion without going for 'egghead' in their internal vocabulary.
I think I disagree.
Still takes some skill, I don't doubt that. But the main ingredient is risk.
This hypothesis is somewhat testable statistically.
There are approximately 25 thousand people worth 100 million dollars+ in the world, with more than a third of that number residing in the US. [0] I think we can safely say that people worth 100 million and more are rich.
If it is easy to get lucky several times with a rich family, you would expect some nontrivial share of Musk equivalents among them or their kids. Say, two hundred?
Not observed. Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those, or it is not that easy.
[0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us...
Maybe? The thing about having a rich family is... you're already rich.
That removes one of the prime motivations to take serious risks, of the sort that paid off for Musk; namely, to become rich.
I'm sure you get a lot of people who invest, or toss some money into this or that.
But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor.
AFAIK Musk was a relative nobody in the millionaire world when he poured a majority of his wealth into SpaceX (2002). They were very close to bankruptcy during the Falcon 1 experiments and if the fourth launch failed, they would have joined a fairly extensive graveyard of defunct space startups, together with Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and a few hundred others.
Then $100M went to found SpaceX.
But that does seem like a very large bet that millionaires don't often make.
Smart people, who are cutthroat, and who are driven/motivated have a much higher chance of success if they start out rich than those who don’t.
I get the argument and it has certain logic in it, but surely they all cannot be 100 per cent lazy. And if the non-lazy ones have it relatively easy to succeed, we should see a lot of successes from that cohort, even if they are in a minority compared to their lazy peers.
I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Because of the rarity of multi-billion dollar companies it makes more sense to flip the question - what are the demographics of those who found those companies?
If the odds of doing something are 1:100 who is going to have better odds at succeeding - the person who gets 1 throw or 10 throws? Neither are guaranteed to succeed, but they both have a chance and one is much more likely than the other. That's what's at play here.
Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Well, this is why we have to look at the numbers. And it depends on the odds. If it's one in a billion and the rich get ten million throws and the poor get 1 each then the fact there are a lot of non-rich people isn't as impactful.
> Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Yes, like having cash to throw around and a safety net to rely on so that those shots can be taken as well as easier access to potentially important connections and resources.
> I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Well yeah. But he got there partly because he had some money to invest in the first place, and partly because he had useful connexions.
With enough people in the world, someone will eventually get lucky in several improbable ways and may look like a genius thanks to survivorship bias.
I'm not saying Musk is that, but maybe his primary talent is risk-taking and fundraising rather than product innovation.
Yes ? Not only there is no reason for it not to be the case ( it's not like rolling 6 two times in a row is impossible... ) but anyway once you've achieved your first success it's easier to buy the next ones.
Say there are million people with 1 million to invest.
Then 1/100 chance to get lucky. Do it 3 times (1/100)^3?
Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
It’s easier to do when you can be bailed out by friends and family after the first failure, compared to people who end up sleeping on the street. Considering that even succeeding once is a rare event, it is not that surprising that the final population is heavily skewed.
> Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
There is certainly a bit of that. And to be fair, it is the best strategy: a single human has only so much bandwidth them handling all the aspects of a large-ish company is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention, a single point of failure, so the company’s dead the moment anything happens to them. It’s been the same with Jobs, one of his talents was to hire the right people.
Yes. @notacoward had a perfect comment about this a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
The argument was that Musk was just a lucky incompetent person, not that he was skilled but "only" among a "limited" ten million plus people in the US alone starting at the same wealth levels...
Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth starting points had the chance to throw their darts, and Musk just happened by chance to hit bullseye on a major company sale/exit/buildup 4 or more times in a row, including turning out the richest man in the world by mere lucky darting?
That wasn't the argument. The argument was about luck, not competence
> Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth
You're assuming all those wealthy Americans decided to throw darts, or threw the same amount of darts. They did not.
If you follow his successes, you can see a repeated cycle: "invested millions or billions of his own money, kept the company afloat for years". You don't get to do that on competence alone.
All of his companies were on the verge of bankrupcy at one point. And lookey lookey, on "competence alone" NASA awards SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar contract after a single successful launch (after three failed attempts).
As an aside, "Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors".
Same for Tesla. It existed for 7 years before it delivered its first car. And even by then it was at least 70 million of Musk's own money. And then a huge infusion of government money.
SolarCity. Failed, and bought with Tesla's money.
Neuralink. No idea if it's a failure yet, exists due to Musk's money.
BoringCompany. A non-entity that existed only because of Musk's money, and then due to unlimited investor money (what the US mistakes for "innovation"). It really exists only due to anti-public-transportation lobbying.
And so on.
He exemplifies the quote I posted.
People that are wealthy very very very very often, fail upwards.
Yes. Capital tends to make it easier on each iteration.
People can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone can be simultaneously a genius and an idiot. In the real world this is very common.
I like to put it this way: how many musicians do you like who are geniuses at composition, drums, guitar, vocals, or some other musical skill but are absolutely intolerable assholes and/or complete lunatics in the rest of their lives? Can you still enjoy their music? Does their music cease to be good when you learn about their personality flaws?
IMHO much of Elon's success can be attributed to two things:
(1) He is at least a good enough engineer or has good enough "engineers' intuition" to hire people who know what they are talking about and get them working on the right things. He seems much stronger in physical areas like rockets can cars though, not software.
(2) He doesn't listen to pessimists and nihilists who say things are impossible if, when reasoning from first principles, they can be shown to be quite possible. Example: ignoring people who said you can't land a rocket or that an EV could never do well in the market. Ignoring pessimism can be a superpower.
I do think Elon shows signs of chronic burnout at this point. The far-right / conspiranoid brain worm infection he's developed is IMHO a symptom. Opportunistic infections take hold when the immune system is weak.
He has a talent: self-promotion.
[1] Company with $15 million revenue in 2008 gets $465 million "loan" in 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla Of course, Ford got $5.9 billion bailout, because capitalism is the lie profiteers tell to the wage slaves as they privatize profits while socializing losses.
[1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Icon:_Alan_Mulally_...
That's the joke in the end: there are no companies (and there is no government), just a bunch of chaebols [2], at least South Koreans don't lie to themselves.
[1] "Ford previously took out a $5.9 billion loan under the program in 2009. That loan was fully repaid as of last year (2022), according to the DoE. [3]", https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/22/business/ford-department-...
There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI
[2] "How Did PPP Scammers Steal $100+ Billion", https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud