Douchebag 2.0—an Elon Musk company

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This reply nails it:

https://twitter.com/Chase_Teel/status/1633858457878003719

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I have always been of the opinion that you can fire 50% of middle management without it impacting company performance. So doing silly stuff like that could actually work but just because so much of middle management is useless.

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This fits on multiple levels

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This is probably correct but in real life it’s actually not that easy to identify who the 50% of dead weight are that can just be fired. You need to spend money to identify them, spend money to fire them (at least in developed countries where you have to give them termination benefits, in USA #1 I assume you can fire them and charge them a $100 processing fee or something), then you will need to expend time and effort shuffling the responsibilities of the remaining managers who now have 2X the number of direct reports, and those direct reports are probably underdeveloped and in need of tons of help because they had previously been managed by the bad managers. So in exchange for cutting the fat, you have sunk in an initial investment and saddled your best managers with more work and probably damaged morale. For most companies it’s actually a better cost/benefit analysis to just carry on with superfluous middle managers.

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In the Emperor’s New Clothes, everyone could see that the emperor was naked and they were pretending he wasn’t for social reasons. In our case, everyone can see that Musk is objectively one of the most successful businessmen in history, they’re just choosing to believe he’s bad at business for other reasons.

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I see I’m rubbing off on you.

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Companies have been lapping up towns for decades, creating a place where they could establish a monopoly of power in an area for their wide-ranging companies and make a profit from their employees. The idea, in essence, sounds good

lol

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It’s good that your employer has the power both to fire you and make you homeless at the same time.

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They could pay people in twitbucks, only redeemable at the company store.

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This is beyond self-parody.

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Beyond self-parody, yes. aka “objectively true.”

He could be mostly lucky - and as such an outlier, it’s essentially impossible that he hasn’t been incredibly lucky - but the proven competence is only in building stock price and perhaps the most crucial skill there is being absolutely full of shit. Maybe AQ meant he is incompetent in helping the company produce a good product even while he suckers a lot of people into thinking he’s great.

There is tons of data to back this up too. He has utterly failed to compete aside from buying competitors.

I don’t think his name would be raised as best among any real CEO types.

He started a company at the exact right time. 90% pure luck.

One could argue being a billionaire is by definition mostly luck unless you honestly believe they are somehow “better at business” than all the millionaires.

It wasn’t a small community that thought the time for EVs was coming. The Prius had been very successful and came out 6 years before Tesla (which Musk did not start). There were several small companies making fast and/or luxurious EVs. There was a large community of people doing conversions and making some extremely fast cars. Maybe there just had to be one winner. Maybe Elon was just a lot better at raising money. And he did start with having a bunch of money. Seems pretty lucky that Zip2 got bought for $300M.

I was referring to Zuck but it holds for Musk too. :grinning:

I’d rate Zuck a million times higher than Elon on the scale of “did they actually earn their money, or just luckbox it”. Still nowhere close to Gates.

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Isn’t he the guy who did a simple website rating how hot college women are and then stole something from some weird twins and then grew that into a terrible website that inexplicably got lucky and benefited from network effects?

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