Elon also supposedly believes that humanity is doomed because of AI and yet he’s marching along trying to make that happen (not just the Tesla, but he’s funded a research group to compete with openAI). If anyone is going to get a dollar out of it, he might as well be the one.
Genius.
Allegedly. And I think it will work out about as well as one might expect.
The whole needing a .edu email to register thing was genius because it restricted the userbase to the people most active on social media and made it so that you were kind of a digital loser if you were still slumming it on MySpace.
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Yup - I remember how excited I was when they added my school and I could hang with all the cool kids.
It also was far better than MySpace.
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That’s a good point but I still think you need to have more intelligence to win over silicon valley investors than you do to win over Trump’s voter base. For example, I doubt Elon could throw out the sort of word salad we saw in Trump’s campaign speeches during his series B financing pitches.
once they opened it up to the public and my parents tried adding me it was ruined and I stopped using it.
What is even happening here? Is the argument genuinely that Musk was lucky rather than skillful, as evidenced by the fact that he started out with lots of money that he got from founding and selling another business?
Yes.
“I’m doing a start-up. I hope I get lucky and Compaq buys it for an insane amount of money!”
“No. No. No. That can’t be luck!!!”
Compaq bought Zip2 for over $300M to help it’s product AltaVista, which was sold a few years later for $140M. Zip2’s technology sure helped create a lot of value there!
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There was a ton of luck involved in being one of the start-ups that the dinosaur hardware companies threw money at.
Take a genuinely smart guy like Steve Wozniak. He was tremendously lucky that he was buddies with a full of shit guy like Steve Jobs. He could easily have ended up being like Ken Thompson and still working for the man in his 70s.
Musk is the full of shit guy. Great at self promotion, like Trump. Works well for raising capital and selling your company to Compaq.
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This is correct. Heck, Sorkind pretty much shit all over Zuck in The Social Network and even he admitted that Zuck didn’t steal a single line of the Winklevoss’ code.
…which is ironic given the previous post, because Gates (and Jobs) have both long been accused of basically lifting their whole concepts of GUIs straight from Xerox.
I’m not sure what kind of evidence of business skill you would find convincing. Starting a company and selling it? Lucky to find a buyer! End up as a huge public company? Everyone knows that just requires being absolutely full of shit! Hugely successful private company? Lol VC valuations!
Probably looking for evidence that isn’t results-oriented.
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Depends on what you mean by “business skill”. One important aspect is being a big idiot self-promoter. Obviously he’s great at that. Another might be picking what to invest in. Great at that. Another might be coming up with something original - no. Another might be being good at administering a company - obviously he sucks at that.
You want to just scoreboard the money and that’s about as good as scoreboarding election results and saying Trump was a great President. Well, he was obviously good at something having to do with becoming POTUS.
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I was in the same programming classes in college as the kid that built Napster, I didn’t know him well, and he wasn’t there very long. I was telling my kid about Napster last night* and how he made money but it was never a huge company, but that the idea eventually morphed into Spotify (not a direct line of course). It’s a lesson that you have to have a good idea, but it also has to be the right time.
*We got on the topic because I told her how the band Guster recorded all of the songs on one of their albums, but sung Meow for all of the lyrics, then put that version of the song out on Kazaa to make it more difficult to pirate the actual songs.
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Isn’t the Napster guy a billionaire now because of his early stake in Facebook?
Yes he was great at tapping into racism and the ugly thoughts Republicans were dog whistling but afraid to say. Trump’s superpower is a complete lack capacity for feeling shame. Musk’s is probably some sort of techno futurism perspective plus an unwarranted self confidence and risk appetite.
Back to the poker analogies if a player had both won the main event and had partnered with and been staked by other known successful players that is better evidence that they are actually good and not just on a heater than someone who just won the main event after playing cash games with their dad’s money for a few years.
The thing a poker player should understand is that it’s always incredibly lucky to win a big tournament, even if you are a really really good poker player.