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Comment by DoesntMatter22 | Hacker News Reader

Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO. Started 7 billion dollar companies, all of which are an order of magnitude harder to manage than Facebook which is a cash cow. Especially Space X which is incredible in what it's been able to do and actually has a positive impact on humanity

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Which are those 7 companies?

What companies did Elon Musk start? [0]

[0] https://kagi.com/search?q=What+companies+did+Elon+Musk+start...

Unsurprisingly the AI agent is wrong. For one, Musk did not start Tesla.

Okay... When he joined it was what 7 months old, had no product at all, they didn't even own the name and now it's the 9th most valuable company on earth. By the same token, if I start a company, you join the very next day, I don't do anything and you do all the work and provide all the money, you are not a founder.

If that's your definition then technically he's not a founder.

Tesla, Space X, Boring Company, XAI, Neuralink, Paypal, SolarCity. Also funded and did recruiting for OpenAI.

>Musk has performed an order of magnitude better IMO

Criteria is founder/CEO - I was specific in order to avoid the bikeshedding about Musk. The only impressive company Musk has founded with any longevity is SpaceX, and while an amazing company, it cannot be put in the same tier as Facebook.

You must be kidding. Telsa isn't impressive? The first real EV manufacturer? Going from nothing to the best selling car on the planet in 20 years? Not impressive. One of only 11 companies in the world. With a trillion dollar valuation. More than tripling revenue from 2020 to 2024?

Not impressive... You have some pretty astronomical standards.

I do agree about Facebook and Facebook not being in the same tier. Space X was a far harder company to build.

__FOUNDER__/CEO. Musk is not the founder of Tesla. He invested in 2004, then became CEO in 2008.

He is listed as a founder and was the CEO before they took in any actual money and it's now the 9th largest company in the world.

1. I've never denied any of the accomplishments of tesla, so I don't know why you keep re-iterating them. Do you work for Tesla's marketing dept?

2. The first Roadster was shipped (to Musk, funny enough), 8 months before Elon became CEO. Let's be reasonable - I don't know how you can apply the founder/ceo label to a guy who was not ceo when their first product had already shipped.

There are plenty of stories (especially pre-Zuckerberg), or people starting companies, then being replaced by the board by a "real CEO" once they raised real money. These people are not founder/ceos. Google has a near identical path to Tesla; after Google's first real venture round, they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO, but Eric Schmidt is not the "founder" of Google.

I understand Elon has tied his public image to being the "founder" of Tesla; to the point that there was a lawsuit involved. However let's talk in plain terms here, he is not a founder of Tesla in binary terms.

Again, if it makes you feel better - you can read through my comments and note that I have never said anything qualitative about Tesla. I've said nothing about their growth, market cap, or Elon sleeping on production floors. I've simply said Elon was not a founder at Tesla, and therefore is not the group of people I think of as exceptional founder/ceos.

If you really wanted to steelman your argument, you'd be using SpaceX, which he did start, and was involved with before Tesla.

We can just agree to disagree. He was there from essentially what was the beginning of Tesla. Whether he qualifies as a founder CEO is up for debate

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