And benefited from the ridiculously lax antitrust enforcement of the last twenty years.
That’s him.
Teslas have plenty of problems - run over people - fit and finish is reportedly terrible - but, they seem to be pretty kick ass cars generally and investing a lot in the charging stations was a really good move. Facebook just has always sucked ass in every way. The only thing it’s ever had going for it is how many people use it and I dare anyone to try to explain that as the result of Facebook being a good product.
And even if you grant that he was “successful” at launching earlier companies, it’s well within the realm of possibility that he is not and never would have been good at running Twitter. Michael Jordan was the best basketball player of his era and a poor AA baseball player. Musk is giving off plenty of “poor AA Twitter CEO” vibes. It’s also entirely possibly that he used to be a good CEO and now he is not. There is plenty of evidence that his wealth and power has activated and amplified his worst interpersonal attributes. People can change for the worse, and being handed the impunity of billionaire wealth and surrounding yourself with Yes Men is a damned good way to get that to happen.
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yes, but he built all of it, had to scale it, etc. As opposed to Elon who just has leveraged the massive amounts of money given to him and built basically nothing himself. Zuck underrated IMO
Facebook is a great product. You don’t like it, but there’s a damn good reason why they are one of the biggest companies in the world, and it’s not because the product sucks. Users just don’t appear out of nowhere.
I think saying he “stole something” is going too far to diminish what he did. The Winklevoss twins basically just had a general idea that Zuck took and ran with and built Facebook. Regardless of what you think about Facebook, he pretty much did all the work to build it.
Seems like it was always a shitty product to me. I’ve ~never used it myself, but I’ve had to do plenty of “tech” support for the older and less technical people in my family because the interface was terrible.
Well, up to a point and a point probably well before any of us knew about it.
And it’s not a technically difficult thing - at least until you start dealing with scaling and security. Also, not the first of its kind in any way.
I have no idea why it took off. Forbes says it was mastery of public relations. Ok, most bullshit.
I was in one of the first waves of signups for FB as a freshman in college in 2004. It was a clear improvement over the existing social platforms at the time. Mostly because of the clean, simple interface - which of course is the complete opposite of what it eventually became.
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Is it though? If there is a ~100% chance it’s fake (per Trolly, which I tend to agree with), then I doubt Elon cares.
Roadster, Model S, and Model 3 where all excellent products when they came out. Others at Tesla did most of the work there but it’s complete hindsight to discount Tesla’s success. Plenty of others had ample opportunity and better position to do what Elon did with Tesla but Tesla was the company that pulled it off.
The FSD feature gets a lot of hate on this board but I think Tesla pushing the envelope in this area also sped up innovation in the rest of the industry. It’s not like the electric nature of their cars was Tesla’s only difference from the rest of industry.
Elon is a narcissist who got really lucky and then got overly high on his own supply, but he’s not as dumb as Trump, nor a complete bystander to his companies’ successes.
May well have been. I wasn’t exposed to it until my wife had to ask me every time a picture had to be uploaded, which was probably just a few years later, but it may well have changed a lot.
Musk was not a founder of Tesla and was not CEO/product architect until after the Model S was largely developed. (though he did take a lead in the Roadster - which of course was largely designed by Lotus)
He is literally going to be the corrupt rich mayor that inhabits so many b movies.
Isn’t musk the one who asked a bunch of mid level managers who their best employee was, then fired the manager and promoted the recommended employee?
Halp
He was already Chairman and largest investor even if not CEO by 2004. The idea that others were driving the company without any of his input seems impossible. He was able to pitch the vision to investors as they moved through financing rounds.
I remember many people thought it was basically impossible to build a new auto company from scratch in the mid 2000’s because the established players had so much manufacturing expertise and economies of scale but here we are. Even when Model S was succeeding many said they were never going to be able to make a mass market car and were only going to be a niche car that competes at the top of the market. They had production issues with Model 3 but overcame them.
There is a lot of luck in any business success story but he idea that it was all dumb luck is just wrong. If Roadster was going to be such a success, why didn’t Lotus bring it to market or another established car company or other silicon valley startup buy and produce it? Why did no one else successfully build a new car company that can compete with the established incumbents in decades?
As dumb as Elon was with Twitter, he did things with Tesla that almost few others would have been able to do. Perhaps his narcissism and hype man skills were assets rather than liabilities in that scenario.
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It’s obviously a ton of luck. No one here imagines that the winner of the WSOP ME didn’t have a ton of luck, even if they are good at poker.
But all you’re saying is that he’s good at picking what to invest in and doing bullshit PR. Who’s contesting that? Maybe that does make someone a good CEO in that you might want to pick their stocks to invest in. If he was right about Tesla being able to build a company from scratch he was more right than most, but hardly unique. The reason he got rich was because a lot of people agreed with him. It was precisely hordes of people agreeing with him that made it happen. And, it doesn’t mean he’s not truly horrible at administering a company and that anyone should be surprised by the idiotic things he’s doing at Twitter.
Lotta people were bullish on electric cars. How many fancy fast electric car companies was there room for? Was it going to be Fisker? Or Karma? Was there room for two? Musk had a ton of money before buying into Tesla and he personally got famous and brought in a lot of investment. Sounds like Trump. Fisker probably should have had a big idiot front man.
It absolutely means he’s not an dumber than Trump which is the claim someone made earlier that started this whole discussion.
if he was truly horrible at administering a company Tesla could not have succeeded, they would have never overcome the manufacturing challenges with model 3. If he was as dumb as Trump he would not have been able to successfully pitch the company to other investors in the financing rounds. I There wasn’t the same idiotic venture capital climate in 2006 and 2007 as in 2018-2019 when any stupid idea was getting billions from Softbank. He is truly horrible at administering Twitter but I don’t think you can extrapolate that he was horrible in his past companies when both Tesla and SpaceX were able to achieve success in unlikely conditions.
Trump became the most powerful person on the planet and may well return to that spot.