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Comment by aubanel | Hacker News Reader

I'd advise you take a look at some of Musk's companies: - Tesla is the top seller of EVs in the US, beating century-old companies. - SpaceX has left public institutions like NASA and ESA in the dust despite their vastly bigger budgets - Although it joined late, xAI is now firmly in the top 4 of AI companies worldwide (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI)

What's the common element between these successes?

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> What's the common element between these successes?

Financial engineering.

Yeah the anti-Elon sentiment on HN seems unique to this platform and maybe reddit. If you go onto any college campus, you'll see a variety of students wearing Tesla or SpaceX merch. Neuralink has a 7 or 8 stage, highly competitive interview process, and most of his companies are internationally recognized and careers with them are highly sought after.

I suspect a lot of people are just upset they got rejected

The common element is Master Elon. Master Elon finds the talent, or perhaps the talent finds Master Elon. And then the talent runs a part of the show.

Master Elon understands space is a big unifying hope. Is that not obvious to everybody? And then Master made it happen!

Master Elon may be stupid, a dog may be smart. For a dog knows how to make several other Masters happy, is that not a vast form of intelligence?

Thank you Master Aubanel for your wise words!

That Elon Musk let the competent people do their job and didn't meddle too much? Did you know that Cybertruck, Starship and Twitter are the projects where Musk has let his competence "shine" the most?

It's been long-since established that the only reason early Musk companies survived was employees learning how to manage up and manipulate Musk into doing the right things early on...

> xAI is now firmly in the top 4 of AI companies worldwide

Lolol literally no one thinks this

I'm not OP but that seems like a pretty reasonable assumption. LLM dominance is basically a US thing (Europe is handicapped by the EU and China is handicapped by hardware), and there are only a few companies that are actually competitive in LLM's (OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, Meta, Anthropic). I think top 5 is a safer bet but top four isn't an unreasonable thing to say confidently

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xAI has the largest GPU cluster for AI training in the world, and they regularly produce top-ranking models. Companies like mistral produce clever models but they’re functionally just not on the level of things like Grok

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