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Comment by oskarkk | Hacker News Reader

> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.

Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.

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By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and likely at least flight 16 before anything orbital, likely into the upper 20s before reliable refueling and non-Starlink payloads. Most other rich people haven't done much besides minimally funding small startups or dead end joyrides.

Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).

Yeah, I agree with what you said about Elon's tolerance for risk and continuously betting the company on ever larger projects. I just dislike the common characterization of "billionaire space race", when one of the billionaires is a billionaire because of that "race", while for the other it's just a small side project (relatively to his wealth). But I root for Blue Origin too. Thanks to Bezos' commitment and the real work they have done, they will be flying frequently at some point, and that's good. Everything that keeps up the space boom that SpaceX started is good, from my space nerd perspective. And it wouldn't be good if SpaceX became a monopoly (if we don't consider it a monopoly already).

> he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire

There's a survivorship bias occurring too.

You see the same selection going on with huge commercial real estate winners: they keep doubling down and the majority eventually fail out. You see only the winner, not the failures. “Keep rolling till you crit-fail.”

Lots of successful businesses like Nvidia or Standard Oil have a similar story too: https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/how-rockefeller-and-his-...

I don't know much about Tesla's history, but with SpaceX, that definitely plays a role. While their success can be attributed to their engineering practices, their existence can be attributed to managing to get Falcon 1 to orbit on the last launch that the company could afford at the time, while many other companies, both before and after, have failed due to missing that "keyhole".

What wierds me out personally is how much of human progress depends on statistically unlikely outliers...

Maybe that is because I'm biased towards individual stories: statistical distributions and selection effects are hard to notice.

He didn't start Tesla, he was their lead Series A investor and gradually took over.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/12/29/how-much-equit...

At that point Tesla was 3 guys with an idea and no money. They got $7.5M of investment, of which $6.5M was Musk's money (and he became chairman). I count that as "starting Tesla", as without his money nothing would happen (first big money from other investors came 2 years later).

Those people also had the cash to invest.

They had more cash than Musk put in.

They didn't even have the right to the name. Had to buy it from some Euro company

They surely had some cash, but I think it was a small contribution compared to Musk's. Given that Musk was $6.5M out of $7.5M series A, and something like $9-10M out of $13M series B, I think it's not possible they contributed more than Musk, unless they put big money into it right at the start (unlikely). I count find any concrete information about how much money the two actual founders contributed (which I consider as evidence that it wasn't much). Do you have some sources on how much they invested?

I'm not saying they put in more cash. I'm saying they had more cash but left it in the bank rather than investing

Ah, okay. So it was 3 guys that didn't want to put much of their money into Tesla, and Musk who did.

Yup.

That's the skin in the game that matters.

Even more than giving up productive effort elsewhere

This is a super tired, wrong talking point. Tesla was basically nothing when Elon bought it. He effectively just bought the name. It's also a tired talking point because even if there was some meaningfully well-developed product he was buying at the time, he still grew the company from basically non-existent to one of the best car manufacturers in the world, which is 99.9% of what matters.

If we're going to criticize people I wish we'd stick to real things to criticize, because there are plenty with Elon. Making stuff up like this just makes anti-Elon people look ridiculous.

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