The last thing Elon engineered was a website about 30 some years ago and when he hired developers, they rewrote everything he did.
He's always been pretty bad a managing a business, too. This is why he doesn't actually run any of them. You'll notice SpaceX and Tesla both have adults in charge.
It's always surprising to me when people think he's amazing when really, he has a lot of money and people get paid to manage him_ inside of his companies. Twitter just showed what it looks like when Musk tries to manage things himself.
>It's always surprising to me when people think he's amazing when really, he has a lot of money
He started out after college with negative net worth and from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry. I find it amazing people can look at that and say he's just a rich idiot.
> He started out after college with negative net worth
He did not. Maybe "on paper" in a very specific way you could say that, but that ignores everything else like how he had very, very rich parents and connections. His very first company, Zip2, had his father as the first investor like come on.
He would have had to try NOT to fall into money.
> from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry
Tesla existed before Musk. He provided investor money then a couple of years later lead the charge to unseat the founder as CEO which eventually led him to becoming CEO. Up until about 2016, Tesla would have gone bankrupt without government assistance, and they have an entire management team that deals with the day-to-day as well as managing Musk.
For SpaceX Musk did found the company but it was essentially engineered by the CTO down. Musk isn't out here making rockets himself.
Now that him and his yes men are running twitter, you're seeing his true management style in action. This kind of stuff has been said / reported about him for decades. I knew multiple people who worked at Tesla and all of them quit without a year and just talked about how terrible it was (especially the multiple times when they found out they were delivering things they had never discussed and hearing it first from Musk when he said it in public / social media).
So I've watched the Eberhard interview [1] and the Musk counter-interview [2] and I'm still not decided on this. Did Eberhard do a bunch of useful early-day heavy-lifting only to get elbowed out by Musk once things were ticking along and it was time to take credit? Or was he incompetent and un-invested, forcing Musk to reluctantly take back the reins? I'd love to hear an insider opinion, but I don't know where to look next and I've already spent far too much time today litigating other peoples' bullshit founder drama, lol.
He’s running all of his other companies like Twitter. Total disregard for any risk management, firing people who aren’t yes man and lying about his products and intentions.
With Twitter you get to see how sausage is made. It doesn’t scare you, that same chaos is used to build machines that can kill people?
What has he engineered? Why did he have to claim to be a founder of Tesla when he never was? If you go back his shenanigans are actually quite well documented. The fascination with this guy has always been peculiar to me.
>The fascination with this guy has always been peculiar to me.
But he's building reusable rockets and cars that do 0-60 in 2.2 seconds, and trying to build sci-fi stuff like AI and cities on Mars. As a tech geek I find it hard to see how that isn't interesting.
I find the hatred many people have for him odd. I mean yeah he's done some bad stuff but no more than most. Like he insulted a guy 'pedo' who insulted him first 'stick his sub up his wotsit' and the haters are all like that's the end, he's evil, like they never insulted someone who insulted them.
Hatred? It's not hatred, I said peculiar. Everything you listed is great and interesting. That makes me interested in the companies making that possible though, not in Elon Musk, who is just the CEO/Investor.
Don't have much of an opnion on him being good at the engineering stuff or not, and not saying I would bet on it, but I could see the logic in shorting TSLA either way, he's distracted, it seems possible that Tesla's customers overlap with twitter users/left-leaning people enough to cause trouble, him getting involved in the first place could be a sign that his judgement has got worse for some reason.
He isn’t, Musk is a lucky grifter. No need to short Tesla he is destroying his own net worth AND Tesla all in his own. Sit back, relax & enjoy the fire.
and he seems to explain things pretty well and have some input in the design. You've got to admit the rockets etc. work pretty well although of course they are a team effort.
It's ironic that linking to him on youtube might get me banned on Twitter.
Yes, and there are other interviews where basic engineering/physics knowledge comes across as well. Many technical people saw it as some kind of shibboleth, and while I think that's a bit silly -- many CEOs are technical, especially in this day and age -- I also think there is a good reason why he became the posterchild for "first principle thinking" and "best part is no part." He didn't just give those concepts lip service, he lived them, and that is special.
Corporate structure pushes every executive and manager sharply against these concepts no matter what their technical background. Being wrong (or effectively wrong) about first-principles will get you fired, but nobody gets fired for chasing comps like a second-rate real estate salesman. Being wrong about "best part is no part" will get you fired, but nobody gets fired for kitchen-sink hedging. Large companies are risk averse to a fault and it's no secret why: the optimal career strategy for management is always to favor non-attributable failure over the possibility of outsized success.
Every technical person who has seen these problems in action secretly dreams of becoming "benevolent dictator" for a day and defying the ossified risk aversion. It's why many of us are on ycombinator, because startups are a path for this kind of play. Musk was crazy enough and lucky enough to win the startup lottery, double-down all-in on two technical dream plays, and win both of them. Who among us wouldn't want that?
Unfortunately, it would seem that being crazy enough to live this dream also made him crazy enough to try... whatever he thinks he is doing with Twitter.
After that famous level of Tesla quality? I think he is stealing the fame of the real SpaceX engineers just because he has a much bigger influence in the media.
I think he's good at the engineering stuff. It's just social media is not really his forte.
I wouldn't go for the TSLA short myself.