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Comment by cryptoegorophy | Hacker News Reader

Is it abuse of power or company success? Wouldn’t shareholders vote out any crazy successful ideas Elon had? Likely bankrupting companies at their early stages?

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That's why companies usually don't have a bunch of competing owners from the start. You do your big risky moves early on when you have the novel vision and a big blank check from a VC. Public stockholders aren't going to be as risk tolerant because the ROI is never going to be as high as what the early VC would get. Going public is growing up, you can't do the fun risky stuff you did when you were a young startup with more cash than sense. When you do want to do something fun as a public company, you have to do it carefully because you're dealing with other people's money now.

More and more, "abuse of power" and "company success" seem to be intertwined.

Meta would be an excellent example of that.

I just realized that dictatorship is in a way the same thing. Look at Singapore. It is super successful because of "right" dictatorship. Libya was somewhat a good example with their insane water infrastructure and social programs.

The thing is, you don't really need to have dictatorship to get those things.

You could just, I don't know, fund infrastructure and social programs without developing cults of personality around leaders or letting them torture opponents to death.

No one ever votes out the guy running the ring toss at the carnival either. What if your man only plays rigged games so he can resist anyone looking at the books or having a voice?

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