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Comment by pkasting | Hacker News Reader

> selection bias for lucky risk-takers explains a lot of bad leaders

For example, it explains Elon Musk entirely.

No, Musk has not just been lucky. He founded three companies which came to be valued over a billion dollars, each in a different industry; this is more than luck.

Which three? Cause Tesla wasn't founded by him, neither was Twitter.

I’d argue that he did found the Tesla as it exists now, but if you want to discount that, you could choose XAI, SolarCity, or OpenAI.

Musk did not found SolarCity; that was Peter and Lyndon Rive.

I don't know what "found the Tesla as it exists now" means. Founding and leading are distinct. Musk has been a key leader at Tesla; he was not a founder of it or any merged or acquired company.

Founding is not the same as incorporating or being the first to work on. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were not the first people to live in the thirteen colonies, and many of them were only involved with some part of the origination of the country.

I have to imagine you know that isn't what anyone else means by "founding a startup" and that the original 13 colonies weren't the United States (that's why they had to "join or die," they viewed themselves as separate and independent states, even in competition with one another). You've invented a new definition to suit your rhetorical purpose. I think you can make your argument without this frankly dishonest tactic. I've seen people make the same point here on HN many times.

I think Musk is a grifter but even I think those picks are unfair to him. Respectively that's a company with no significant accomplishments yet (it's only two years old so I don't think that's even a knock against it), a company he didn't found but purchased under shady circumstances and has had a lot of scandals, and a company he "founded" a lot like he "founded" Tesla.

If you want to showcase a company he unambiguously founded which is unambiguously successful, why wouldn't you pick SpaceX?

Pedantry, this counterfactual idea that tesla or EVs would be as big as it is in America without Musk is just absurd. The company was bought when it had like 3 people and a 250k concept car which was completely redesigned and rebuilt under Musk. The real reason why tesla is important is because it was the first one to execute big on charging networks, no other manufacturer had the balls to even conceive of a nation wide network.

> Pedantry

You took a lot of words to agree that Musk didn't found Tesla. That other stuff would better be argued with someone else who is disputing it, because the person you replied to was talking about founding companies.

I believe the pedantry label was sufficient acknowledgment of fact, while also pointing out that in the context of the larger conversation we are really talking about whether his leadership decisions led to success.

I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion.

As far as I can determine, Musk is the sole founder of only two companies -- SpaceX and The Boring Company. The former is clearly valued at >$1B; the latter is not.

He is also the cofounder, with many other cofounders, of a variety of other companies: Zip2, X.com, OpenAI, Neuralink. OpenAI is clearly valued at >$1B; Musk was one of eleven cofounders. My assumption is that your third company is X.com; Musk was one of four cofounders, and the company then merged with Confinity (also multiple cofounders), then took the name PayPal (which had been a Confinity product). PayPal is clearly worth >$1B today. I would find it misleading to say Musk "founded OpenAI and PayPal" given the above, but up to the reader.

Whether this is "more than luck" -- in particular, whether it's actually due to Musk's good leadership -- is far from proven. OpenAI, for example, had $1B in capital pledged at founding, suggesting it was already valued at over $1B at creation time. And the skill sets required to found a later-successful company versus to lead one are distinct. Musk might well be a great founder but bad leader.

(Of course, the obvious intent of my original post was to be a snarky dig at someone I view to be an atrociously terrible leader whose success has been due to a combination of others succeeding despite his influence and simply going all-in with huge amounts of capital every time. If you're not already inclined to view Musk that way, and you believe he's actually a successful businessman who is brilliant if eccentric, then a joke post on HackerNews won't change your mind.)

Your 'snarky' intent was not obvious to me, and would be in clear violation of the HN Guidelines:

>"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

Thing is, snarky often gets the votes. So the unofficial guideline is the opposite of the official one.

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