Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

> I think there’s actual reason for people to be afraid of Peter Thiel.

> That said, it’s not productive to be afraid.

Chalk this one up to clickbait to sell a book I guess?

Personally I feel like the false aura around wealthy people like Peter Thiel works to their favor and advantage. We all think they are these powerful scary incredibly smart people when they are actually slightly above average people who got lucky, and sometimes only got lucky once.

Peter Thiel would be a nobody if PayPal or Facebook failed, and there was always a high chance for those things to happen. He could just be the nobody guy who seeded $500,000 into Friendster instead of Facebook.

He earned $55 million from the PayPal sale and $1 billion from his Facebook sale. If you stick your money in an index fund it will double in value every 7 years (before adjusting for inflation). Do that for $55 million at the PayPal sale and you get $880 million, do that for his Facebook stock in 2012 and you end up with $4 billion.

So around $5 billion of his net worth can be attributed to hypothetical passive investment of his original windfalls, attributed to being at the right place at the right time with just two companies, and he would not have been able to invest in the second on without winning the lottery at the first. In other words, with 100% disposable income that could be gambled on moonshots (unlike our 401ks), he only beat the market by 15% per year.

Any idiot with a wealth manager and tolerance for risk can do that.

And we, the people, have lots of power over people like this if we exert it.

I agree with your premise but not conclusion.

I think there are people who take big unlikely risks. Statistically some of them succeed. Now they are big risk takers with survivorship bias and illusions of self importance, AND lots power/money. And that can be scary.

Survivorship bias would be a good explanation for Musk's success, if he succeeded at one thing. But it doesn't explain having a string of successes.

The jury is still out if Tesla is is still a success, losing 50% of sales each year for the few next years could clearly go toward bankruptcy.

SpaceX and, for a time, Tesla. PayPal was already a success when he conned his way in. What other successes has he had? Twitter imploded when he took over, Boring company was never real, FSD at Tesla will never be real. And SpaceX is succeeding because they have a team dedicated to keeping him away from decision making.

What he's had is an army of internet bots pumping up his supposed credentials (visible even in the voting patterns here on YN)

It does if those successes aren’t based on you at all, which they’re not.

In every instance, a lot of other people did all the work. Musk provided funds, which a machine could do.

And, he did fail. A lot. But the more money you have, the more you can fail.

It’s easy to take unlikely risks when you already have a “never need to work again” windfall.

I can’t risk my retirement nest egg.

If Peter Thiel ended PayPal with $55 million that means he could set aside ~$5-10 to live the rest of his life and risk the rest.

So really I would argue that having a risk-adjacent personality isn’t related to skill. Thiel was willing to throw half a million dollars at random tech startups done by college dropouts and he also had a social network of his own thanks to doing the same with PayPal.

So it’s about networking, capital, and timing more than skill.

Thiel would be a nobody if he was born 10 years later. Where is the PayPal-like opportunity in today’s tech landscape? The modern startup is wildly capital heavy and loses money for possibly decades (e.g., Lyft just made its first profit EVER in 2024).

> Peter Thiel would be a nobody if PayPal failed.

Maybe for Peter (I don't know) but not for Musk. He did X/PayPal, but then blew everyone away with Tesla, crushed it with SpaceX, succeeds with Starlink...

Some people really do have something that is more than just getting lucky once.

There is something to it. As someone, who shorted Tesla based on fundamentals ( it was back when I foolishly thought fundamentals matter more than emotion ), I can't help but wonder if he was less of who is and how he operates, under any other CEO, this would have been a clear case of Tesla going into bankruptcy. There is luck and there is this weird mix of skills that keep you going all the time.

He's smart enough to fool the masses that he's a genius scientist, but, as a scientist myself, he looks to me like a gifted manager and maybe a genius at hiring.

He didn't start Tesla, he joined as an investor.

He would not have the money to do so if PayPal failed.

Musk has gotten wildly lucky many times, like when he was "gifted" a factory by the federal government in the wake of the 2008 automotive crisis. If the 2008 financial crisis never happened Tesla would not be a mass market manufacturer today. In an alternate timeline GM/Toyota would still be building the Pontiac Vibe and Corolla Matrix in Fremont.

Musk has been hitching his businesses to government money ever since (SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Starlink) and I say that's a direct result of his astonishing success in getting cheap/free money for Tesla.

And you don't convince the government to buy your products so easily unless you have a success story like Tesla's government investment under your belt.

When you think about it this way his infiltration into the executive branch is a logical conclusion of his "genius" strategy. Now he can just tell the government to buy his products. It's the exact kind of thing that a middling manager with mediocre products would do rather than compete on quality and value.

> He didn't start Tesla, he joined as an investor.

Yeah, and then he took it over, and transformed it from a fledgling garage based company with near 0 market penetration into a serious competitor in the international automobile market, defying all the odds, keeping it alive when it should have gone bankrupt many times. I don't think a typical person who happens to have money is going to take on Ford, GM, Toyota and win the early EV game.

I don't doubt that he has gotten wildly lucky many times, but I do doubt that there isn't something special there. I could get lucky many times...I'm not taking over industries beating Toyota, beating NASA, no matter how lucky I am. I don't have the vision, I don't have the drive, I don't have the obsessive focus that is sometimes necessary, I don't have the capital allocation skill, etc.

My point here is that the limiting factor wasn’t who was in charge, it was whether the company could acquire a large scale factory and have enough capital to start scaling. Tesla didn’t make any particular moves that required complexity of foresight or spectacular management wisdom.

If the US government didn’t enable Tesla in the way it did, it would still be a garage company regardless of how good of a manager Elon was.

I think it should also be explained why Elon is suddenly an objectively horrendous manager by the metrics of his own quarterly reports. Did he get hit in the head sometime recently? Does he have long covid? Why are Tesla sales declining by double digits when other brands and the EV market as a whole is growing rapidly? Why is Twitter’s advertising revenue and active user count (allegedly, it’s a private company) in rapid decline when neither was true before it was taken private? Has the Boring company delivered any successful projects? Why is xAI behind all of its competitors? Why is Starlink losing its 100 million dollar contract with Canada? Why did Elon invite 100% tariffs on his vehicles to Canada? If I were an investor I would be furious. The questions are piling up.

My hypothesis is that his companies are not doing so well as of late because he was never a particularly gifted leader, and he’s letting his own hubris cloud his judgment.

A most basically informed manager who just graduated with an MBA from a low-tier public university would know not to take public political stances that alienate their main customer base. Imagine if the CEO of Ford was walking around telling the press that people who buy big lifted trucks have small penises. That’s exactly what Elon has been doing with his electric vehicle brand.

LeBron James isn’t the greatest basketball player of all time because he was good for a few years. He’s the greatest player of all time because he’s consistently good. If you had to pick one draft pick that you were stuck with for the next 10+ years he would be the unanimous pick.

If Elon was only good at managing companies for ~10 years that just doesn’t establish much of a trend, and points directly to my hypothesis that he got a lucky break and was successful in spite of his own poor instincts and judgment.

> If the US government didn’t enable Tesla in the way it did, it would still be a garage company

And if GM didn't receive a massive 50+ billion dollar bailout in 2008 it wouldn't exist now (new legal entity or not). Plenty of companies get government assistance. I don't think it diminishes Elon compared to say, the multiple GM CEOs around the time of the crash.

> I think it should also be explained why Elon is suddenly an objectively horrendous manager ... why ... why ... why

His priorities seem to have shifted from company to politics. I think he's letting his own hubris cloud his judgment as well. And he is into something else now. He definitely doesn't seem to be as focused on company performance anymore.

> Imagine if the CEO of Ford was walking around telling the press that people who buy big lifted trucks have small penises. That’s exactly what Elon has been doing with his electric vehicle brand.

That's a pretty direct insult to the primary customer base. What exactly are you talking about here? Did Elon say Teslas are not green and that people who buy Teslas are virtue signalling sycophants?

> If Elon was only good at managing companies for ~10 years that just doesn’t establish much of a trend, and points directly to my hypothesis that he got a lucky break and was successful in spite of his own poor instincts and judgment.

We're talking 15 years since he took Tesla public and it took him over a year to get it there. It peaked late last year. And isn't Grok 3 competitive against GPT-4.5? Anyway, I don't think you get lucky for 15 years across multiple industries. I think what's more likely is maybe you start to go through something and it hurts your performance. Elon seems to have lost his way. But if he were to decide to take on some other industry and seems really motivated (and steps away from politics), I wouldn't bet against him.

All your GM example proves is that mediocre and below-average leadership gets propped up all the time, which reinforces my point rather than detracts from it. The hard part for Musk wasn’t to be innovative or be a great manager, the hard part was getting money from the government the first time. And that wasn’t anywhere near difficult in 2008 when the US government was throwing cash at automotive startups left and right via the ATVM program.

While ATVM was known for other automotive startup failures it also led to the Nissan Leaf thanks to the battery plant in Tennessee, and it led to Ford’s EV and hybrid programs along with a turnaround. Most of the more established recipients of funding came out with positive results, and that includes Tesla, which was much further along than other smaller startups who received the loans. They got to develop the Model S on the cheap.

I disagree that success in multiple industries is meaningful. My 401k is successful in every industry. Big whoop. Again, Elon’s companies with few exceptions all have a commonality of government contracts/assistance which all stems from Tesla’s unexpected success giving him a positive relationship with the government. Networking and capital, not strength of management. Survivorship bias, not excellence in management.

He has never proved himself at turning around struggling companies like so many storied managers that I read about in business school, e.g., Steve Jobs. His most recent “turnaround story” is Twitter, buying a company and making it smaller while building the conditions for competitors to pick up marketshare (Threads, BlueSky, Reddit’s IPO and traffic explosion, and up next is Digg).

Grok isn’t competitive with OpenAI because their revenue and customer list is a fraction of the size. They are squarely behind Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.

Read up on your history, X* failed miserably, it was so bad he was basically ousted from his own company. Later success came in spite of him. Same story for his previous and first venture, Zip2.

He did not found Tesla, and arguably the company took a downturn since his takeover. Cars became unreliable and ugly (cybertruck...), and now that people are starting to associate the brand with Musk's terrible public image, sales are going down fast. The only positive was this irrationally inflated stock due to his cult following in the investor class.

SpaceX is cool but received a lot of money from tax payers in the form of government contracts. And let's not mention The Boring Company, Hyperloop, Neuralink...

That's the odd things with odds, with this many people on Earth, one of them was bound to get to the very top. And you don't get to the very top by working 100000x more, you get there by starting a millionaire and taking insane risks, then getting insanely lucky many times.

* The first one, not Twitter. Although there's a story here too.

You might be missing the point. They can be all of those things you say (and I very much agree with you) but they can still be very dangerous. In fact, perhaps their banality is a key part of what makes them so dangerous.

Curious keyword, "banality".. Hannah Arendt wrote a whole book about a banal man, which probably has lessons for the current times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

Indeed she did.

Maybe he hadn't been as known, but I'd assume, he had started another venture had PayPal failed.

If.

They are not necessarily smart, but they are powerful and most likely sociopathic. They are dangerous.

The most annoying thing is society's (especially American society) admiration for Billionaires and the belief that their IQ is in the four digits or some crap like that. More than intelligence, it takes ruthlessness, narcissism and questionable ethics (or no ethics at all) to amass hundreds of billions of dollars in a couple of decades.

I feel sorry for anyone who worships people like Musk or Theil. Sure Theil was supposedly a talented chess player in his youth, did well in school etc. But so do millions of other kids. These dudes don't have so much money because they are intelligent, they have so much money because they are willing to do damn near anything to get it - including trampling over people that helped them in the first place

> false aura around wealthy people like Peter Thiel

I assumed he was a fairly clever libertarian/contrarian, who'd made it big. I then read this https://www.ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583... (his op ed in the FT)

Where I realised he's just a dipshit. He's obviously reads about history, but the reek of 4chan level "media conspiracy" overpowers it. The constant littering of references to vaguely related historical words is pointless, and I'm not sure who its meant to impress.

This drowns out some of the big points he's trying to get across in the piece.

The biggest red herring is the assumption that "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex" is a thing separate from society, run by shadowy cabals.

Its really not, its just society. That's how humans organise. You have a shared narrative and so long as you're within a certain percentage of it, you'll not get ostracised.

Its cute that he still appears to think, with all his business experience that a shadowy cabal can be that well organised, effective and powerful without leaking. Just look at white house now, the exec is leaking like a fucking sieve.

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