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Comment by ryzvonusef | Hacker News Reader

Those are weasel words and you know it.

Ford and GM have more and better engineers than Tesla, but can't achieve what he did.

Rivian and Lucid are full of Ex-Tesla employees, again, aren't at the same level of profitability and production levels Tesla had when it was their age.

(same for space, Boeing with engineers, Blue Origin with Billionaire money. Etc etc)

The difference is him. Recognize it and account for it.

you don't have to like him or his products, you just have to admit he's the lego piece that made that makes the toy work

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Ford still outsells Tesla by a lot. Mercedes is eating Tesla lunch on the luxury segment and cheaper cars are arriving while Elon is distracted with Twitter. Electric hype is slowing down and resale prices are plummeting.

Count me skeptical about a 46B pay package to a part time employee thats constant bad PR.

What did he do though? Bet on electric vehicles taking off? Okay. Right place, right time. That’s not very magical.

But he didn't "bet". He worked to make it happen. He didn't just invest money, he invested his time.

No magic, just hard work and sheer pigheadedness.

You don't have to like him, but we can't pretend the last 15 years didn't happen. It happened, and happened because of him.

This isn't reddit, we need to accept reality here.

You think he was the only smart guy in the room? He was the money man who happened to be smart. But to pull off Tesla requires a ton of smart people not just Elon. So no. This isn’t Reddit but this isn’t also X.com. Reality exists here.

Nah he was kept on because he became larger than life and gave Tesla huge marketing reach for basically free. What other car brand didn’t need to advertise but yet grew mindshare?

Those smart people require direction and orders, and are paid as such.

Should they build permanent magnet motors or induction motors?

Should they use aluminum or steel? so on and so forth.

And these decision rest with the C-Suite and ultimately the CEO, and if they make the right calls, the company succeeds, sales increase and the share prices rises, making shareholders happy. If not...

And making the right call depends on the skills of the CEO, in this case both the business and engineering (yes, specifically that) skills of Elon Musk.

He used them, made some bad calls, made some good calls, but over they years made enough right calls to that he was kept on as CEO for multiple years in a row, and he made everyone rich.

Employees were paid, Board members were paid, he should be paid too.

Don't like him? Pay his dues and fire him.

Pay him his dues? He’s fully vested. He has enough equity. More equity isn’t going to make him focus on Tesla more it’s just going to pay for Twitter.

Those aren't weasel words, they're the honest truth.

In fact if you want weasel words, follow Musk (although that's more a rabid weasel ... or perhaps a hyena).

If Twitter's decline is anything to go by, one might assume that Tesla succeeded despite Musk ... just a right product at the right time ... and he got lucky.

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