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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

>the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people... I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario.

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has done a pretty good job of demonstrating that the market can reward autistic technical leaders who piss everyone off.

Recent viral video of Andrej Karpathy describing Elon's management style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM

Obviously Elon's character flaws are well-documented. I don't think anyone should venerate him. I'm just skeptical that conventional management practices are over-determined by incentives.

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Well, assuming I agree with your premise (I'm not sure I do), what percentage of all the companies in the world does Elon run?

I can also assure you that Julii exist at e.g. Tesla, which employees over 100000 people.

I don't want to start an Elon flame war, but from what I've read I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen (which is not to deny that SpaceX builds very cool and impressive rockets, or that the businesses he own employ very smart and motivated people).

> I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen

If you don't mind elaborating, what would you attribute his success to?

As I said, I'd rather not start a flame war ;)

I understand your reservations. Just to clarify, I wasn't trying to bait you -- I was genuinely curious. But I absolutely get why you'd rather not have this conversation. :-)

Read Liftoff by Eric Berger about SpaceX. Musk is not an rocket engineer, but he was great at hiring engineers, motivating them, and willing to take risks in an field allergic to risk (for good reason, people die when planes and rockets crash.) most interesting to me was Musk’s management of their suppliers: he really streamlined the procurement process, which sped up development enormously. He was smart enough to understand what the engineers were doing and make decisions when they deadlocked, but he wasn’t the technical genius behind everything. Nothing wrong with that. In this day of specialization, he wouldn’t be human if he was doing all the technical work.

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