> My point was Elon has an incredible track record of success which follows a formula of overhype, delays, and eventual achievement if not overachievement.
His biggest success is the rocket industry. Let's examine top competitors - corrupt ULA which flies rockets on 50 year old engines and does cost+ contracts, his other competitor was Russia, a corrupt kleptocracy that stopped innovating when USSR fell apart. Russia would sell engines physically made in USSR to ULA.
This market literally had no competition and no innovation for like 40 years.
So yes, his great achievement is that he could march finance into an industry that no-one would consider for investment. But results in other industries were not so great.
Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive. His leadership was not good enough to take advantage of the head start he had and extremely high level of finance that he had.
Where is cybertruck? Other automakers are already selling electric trucks. VW and even Chinese automakers are eating Tesla's lunch.
Elon's boring company is an abject failure, as is hyperloop.
“ Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive.”
Is there any other car company in the world selling electric vehicles at a profit besides Tesla? Everyone else is losing money on their EVs most are losing a lot of money. Not only is Tesla profitable but they have better margins than many companies have on their gas cars.
If that's the case, why Tesla easily beats any other opponent overseas as well? Here, in Australia, they do not get any subsidies. Model 3 and Y sales are leaving all others, including Ioniq, far behind.
Other manufacturers haven’t had time to scale up production. Also the direct you consumer model has been a real winner in preventing dealer price gouging due to shortages
If someone built a dozen companies, and like a third of them succeeded and made him one of (if not the) richest man in the world, I think you could say that that person "has an incredible track record of success"
and I don't even like this guy, but this is just dishonest from you
Parent might be including PayPal too. Though it's not clear what Musk's involvement in their success was.
By the way, if you or I owned either one of the companies you mentioned it would be considered a great success. Your question itself is putting Musk in a league of his own. I don't care that he's an asshole. If someone asked the three of us to eject into space a car that we built, only he could comply.
I would say that PayPal was a success because of the mafia (which mostly consists of Thiel and Levchin's team by the way). I would argue that Musk actually hampered PayPal in many ways (pushing Windows as the dev environment, as one example, when the rest of the team wanted Linux).
That being said, SpaceX and Tesla are successful, even if they took government subsidies to get started. There are many more companies which took a lot of government money yet managed to return nothing except fat bonuses for their executives. Or the number of large companies which have stopped innovating now (IBM and Intel for instance).
Is Tesla and SpaceX not enough of a track record? Seriously, if that is not a track record of success, what is a track record of success by your measure?
Although I do think Tesla did take advantage of their head start. But it’s clear that the pandemic and issues with China and supply chains are hampering them globally.
And sure, Tesla launched successful Electric cars and woke the market up when they realised consumers actually really would switch.
But it’s not like other manufacturers couldn’t do it, they just chose not to.
The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!
In a market where companies stopped selling sedans in favour of SUVs, Teslas came along with the model 3 and then model Y, and showed people will choose electric tech over SUV form factor.
People weren’t buying ICE sedans because they were largely garbage!
I used to be a fan, then he showed up to the cave rescue operation with half a submarine, and in responce to crtiticism he called rescue divers pedoes.
So I started wondering, can he be a good leader when he can't take criticism? How does he retain best pepple if his ego is this fragile?
I am quite happy to see more people reassess him as he demonstrates capricious and callous behavioir, for exanple the Twitter aquisition whoch he first wanted then tried to get out of.
I think you will come around when he targets something yoi carw about.
No, I won't, because I don't think he's a faultless person. In fact, I think he's quite an asshole, but I can rationally separate who he is from his long list of accomplishments.
Just because you want him to be a failure or a con-artist or whatever doesn't mean he actually is.
Elon's biggest accomplishment is how he optimizes for capital growth by any means necessary and is willing to throw norms to the wind and think very big. Elon never had to be a good people person to succeed here. It is why successful companies allow brilliant jerks... they are so brilliant it makes up for their asshole nature. Elon is this, as much as it pains me to say it.
Why do people make semantic arguments disguised as philosophy instead of making a concrete point and furthering the discussion? Seems like a cop out to me. It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say.
It's not remotely philosophical. What's the point of emphasizing what is rational, when the likely answer is within a much smaller subset (what is reasonable). You overemphasize rationality to the point you aren't reasonable. You sit here and talk about what is rational, but you aren't reasonable and therefore it's not a good argument. We aren't dealing in the abstract world of mathematics, we are dealing with human relationships.
"It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say."
There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.
Happy?
It's not reasonable to pretend like Tesla/spacex is not a smashing success story.
You're not dealing with human relationships. What are you talking about. The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
Well Tesla has significantly devalued as of late, is facing tremendous regulatory scrutiny, just recently suffered a massive recall, and is likely never going to deliver on its key promise of achieving practicable self-driving car, and by all estimates from anyone else in the industry, is being completely unreasonable in going about it predominantly via computer-vision.
so as an initial, I don't think your argument is reasonable at all. it goes against so of the most basic and recent facts about tesla. I can understand feeling different because you like him and he makes you feel fuzzy or something like that. but hard to say you are being reasonable - when you don't offer reasons!
> The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
This is absolutely the boundaries of human relationships and is not better defined in the space of mathematics or physics, or even game theory, to the point you boil things down to being rational/un-rational. rational is basically the lowest boundary here, it means possible, it doesn't mean likely.
>There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.
I guess it depends on what you think accomplished is. I certainly think he's achieved a certain kind of status in society, I'm not sure if it's an accomplishment, but the amount of money that belongs to him is certainly very large and something anyone else would like to have.
His biggest success is the rocket industry. Let's examine top competitors - corrupt ULA which flies rockets on 50 year old engines and does cost+ contracts, his other competitor was Russia, a corrupt kleptocracy that stopped innovating when USSR fell apart. Russia would sell engines physically made in USSR to ULA. This market literally had no competition and no innovation for like 40 years.
So yes, his great achievement is that he could march finance into an industry that no-one would consider for investment. But results in other industries were not so great.
Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive. His leadership was not good enough to take advantage of the head start he had and extremely high level of finance that he had.
Where is cybertruck? Other automakers are already selling electric trucks. VW and even Chinese automakers are eating Tesla's lunch.
Elon's boring company is an abject failure, as is hyperloop.