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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

> Musk is showing the world that he got lucky with his previous ventures.

1 dud

A few successes

It's really hard to tell to what extent it's luck versus skill. It'd be much easier to tell if we'd live for 10K years and he'd have started like 50 companies. If even 10 of those would've become wildly successful, whereas the mean baseline of other people who started 50 companies would be maybe 1 or 2 companies, then I'd argue that he didn't only get lucky. I'd argue there's also a skill component to it.

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SolarCity, Hyperloop, and Boring Company are obvious duds as well.

It's hard to say how many duds he had in the aughts, since they're probably well-buried at this point.

If I managed to do one Tesla or SpaceX in my entire lifetime, even 10k, I’d be extremely happy and very different from the entire population at large.

I don’t like Musk but I think the leftist vilification and dismissal bears all the sounds of people who have no idea how hard it is to build and maintain a successful company.

The whole discussion is about how much of those companies' success is attributable to Musk. I have no clue where the "leftist vilification" is coming from.

There has been a large cultural shift in how he is discussed in public. And the left has made him into an enemy, while the right has turned him into a hero… ish. He’s now part of the larger cultural wars, and as such it’s almost impossible not to have that creep into any discussion about him. And a big theme on the left is how he’s a fraud and only was able to achieve what he has because of his dads money. They don’t seem to realize that most startups that get lots of money still flop.

This discussion is not about cultural perceptions of Elon Musk. It is about how much of SpaceX and Tesla's success can be attributed to him. If you think cultural perceptions are why I categorized SolarCity, Boring Company, Hyperloop, and X.com as duds, please feel free to give specific criticism. Otherwise, the discussion is best helped by airing cultural grievances elsewhere.

What you’re stating is being discussed ad infinitum everywhere as part of the culture wars as one of the main talking points. You cannot separate it at this point. It’s like saying you’re trying to discuss whether Trump encouraged Jan 6 or not as some independent topic.

In a discussion about whether or not Trump built a wall at US's southern border one does not need to bring up Jan 6th at all.

These are in fact different tangential topics similar to how whether or not AOC likes Musk is tangential to whether or not Solar City was a dud of a company.

You need not like Bill Cosby to objectively state he had a long successful career.

This is hackernews not cable TV. You do not need to regurgitate "talking points".

> In a discussion about whether or not Trump built a wall at US's southern border one does not need to bring up Jan 6th at all.

That's not how that discussion would actually go. Need has nothing to do with it, and the same holds true with Musk. The detached attacks don't need to be brought up in regards to a discussion about Musk & SpaceX, and yet they are guaranteed to come up regardless.

There is no discussion today of any meaningful length that is going to happen on a major public forum (eg Reddit) regarding Trump's border wall where the events of January 6 do not come up as a prominent matter of discussion.

The reason this happens is because the target (Trump, Musk, whatever) triggers people to such an extreme emotional degree they can't control themselves properly, they can no longer think & express rationally. They have basically been trained into a hyper emotional response by the mob they participate with. It's some manner of one-upmanship, virtue signaling as competition: who can most greatly beat this target to death, using any means necessary.

In this context, the fact that he's had numerous dud companies does need to come up because it's actually very much on topic.

Let's reflect on how we got here.

1) xutopia is making the claim [1] (on a thread about how Twitter's rebrand could be a nightmare) that Musk's actions would've costed any other CEO their job.

2) mettamage countered with Musk has only had 1 dud company so far [2]

3) And that leads us to this oversized thread where yes Musk has had many dud companies and "only 1" isn't correct.

Whether or not Musk is correct on the Thai diver being a pedophile would not belong in this oversized thread though and as you may not have yet noticed; wasn't brought up. It is in fact possible to have a discussion on a forum (perhaps not major) without bringing up tangential points. Some people can control themselves and so far in this oversized thread they have; it's been very on point besides this meta discussion.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36861849

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36863091

Both Tesla and SpaceX are successful almost entirely in buying out the work of other people and exploiting government programs. If you already had a bunch of money (thanks to being in the right place at the right time w/r/t PayPal) you too could have done it if you didn't care about anything other than your own aggrandizement

If the only criteria is that you had money from a prior successful company (Paypal in Elon’s case) to create the preeminent electric car company in the world, then why didn’t many thousands of other people achieve it as well? Why was there not more competition? Why did so many attempts to market electric cars fail before Tesla? The reason is that it is hard, and it takes a combination of both skill and luck to accomplish.

The reason is that no one was in a position to exploit the EV credit system because it didn't exist yet. Right place, right time, only made possible by having a bunch of money and zero qualms about exploiting that program.

Yeah. Same reason no-one is emulating Gates or Jobs right now. Their oportunity was related to their historical moment. It has passed. People will be in the right time and place for _other_ opportunities (see Zuckerberg, Bezos)

The argument is that everything was already in place for it to become the preeminent electric car company in the world; Musk simply had to buy it at the right time, which he did.

Now, that may be a skill in and of itself, but that's not a skill for innovation, it's a skill for timing markets.

The Tesla model S was released before Elon arived. I don't doubt that his money helped but it seems fair to question whether that equates to Musk "creat[ing] the preeminent electric car company in the world"

That’s absolutely false. Your comment makes me strongly think you’ve never started a company or run one. Nothing is trivial no matter how much money you start with, ESPECIALLY if you’re doing something new.

I will give him credit in as much that he is an exceptional con man uniquely skilled at fleecing investors and moneyed nerds. Still, though, that hype machine couldn't have been built without his gobs of money and utter lack of scruples.

All the money in the world won’t get you relandable rockets or put EVs on the map unless you have talent.. to set direction/vision, make partnerships, find talent that wants to work with you, etc.

If money alone was enough we’d see more Teslas from places like Saudia Arabia. But we don’t.

I don't think other governments are stupid enough to let their taxpayers float poorly made cars that keep exploding because the guy in charge keeps talking about self-driving functionality that will never arrive

Haven't we learned at this point that Hyerloop was never supposed to be successful? That, technically, it's success was screwing over Californian's by delaying train projects?

Hyperloop did not move the needle on CAHSR’s success or failure, so even by that metric it was a dud.

If you are interested in what successful ratfucking psyops looks like, check out Caltrans’s recent obsession with hydrogen trains.

One thing to keep in mind is that Tesla and SpaceX were early successes and the rest are later failures. It is quite possible that he has lost his touch as he has gotten older and richer.

Or is suffering from a psychotic break. It is, I believe, pretty well know that he is a heavy user of ADHD medication. A business version of Paul Erdos.

I think you just have to look at the individual decisions he's made. For me, I keep going back to the time he made the Twitter employees literally print out their source code. (Not send a link to github repo, he made them physically print them out.) That is not something a competent leader would have asked for.

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