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Comment by rand_r | Hacker News Reader

Creating a profitable car company is a crazy high bar though. Hasn’t been done for over a hundred years in the USA, and that too, with a new kind of engine and single-handedly making EVs viable through its supercharger network (all other options are literally ass in terms of reliability). So I can give him a break for some panel issues.

When you include SpaceX and Starlink, it’s pretty obvious he is successful beyond anything we’ve witnessed before, but people take his accomplishments for granted somehow.

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> but people take his accomplishments for granted somehow.

Because his primary accomplishments are marketing. (To his credit, he has managed to market quite well not just to consumers but also investors and engineers.) He doesn't build the cars. He doesn't really design the cars, with the notable exception of the one that seems to find a new way every month to draw negative press for being dangerous. He didn't even start the company!

A worrying trend is that the more directly involved Elon is with a product, the worse the product seems to get.

SpaceX and Starlink are the true wins for Elon. My perception is because he is not too deeply involved and Engineers take safety, quality and reliability quite seriously.

Tesla definitely is daring and trying new things. Although the bar for quality and reliability is not the same as Rockets.

Twitter is just a joke. Little ROI for $44B. Seems like he bought it to stroke his ego.

He could have spent this on a standalone robotics company like SpaceX and would have been a better win.

But it's not my money and being a critic is a lot easier than being in the field. Elon is in the field.

Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs.

On paper [Elon|Steve] is quite successful. People attribute this success to luck and say [Elon|Steve] isn't doing anything of value. Some people worship him, while others devalue everything he does.

Nobody gets lucky this many times in a row.

Except people who worked with Jobs closely tend to have many fond recollections of the man, his taste, and his intelligence. He hand-selected and inspired some of the best engineers and designers in the industry, and you could clearly see that he knew what he was talking about when he spoke in public or about his products.

> Nobody gets lucky this many times in a row.

If you have enough money and hubris, a whole lot of things will work out for you.

They only had those fond recollections many years after their experiences, after working on products that were ultimately very successful.

I don't know that much about Musk, but I could imagine that some of his employees will look back at their time at Tesla/SpaceX fondly (provided that both ventures work out in the long-term)

> It is true, however, that Jobs was hot tempered, could easily start shouting at his employees and calling their work shit, and reduce them to tears. But he was not just cruel and brutal: he could also be a total charmer and make his colleagues feel like geniuses (this is how he hired most of them actually). While at NeXT, his employees dubbed this swift change of attitude "Steve's hero/shithead roller-coaster", a nice metaphor for the binary view with which Jobs described the world, and how he treated his fellow staff

https://allaboutstevejobs.com/persona/steve_at_work#:~:text=....

Doesn’t sound like everyone had fond recollections.

I certainly did not mean to imply that everyone had good experiences with Jobs. Just that the Apple old guard seems to have more fond recollections of the man than not.

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