Holy shit are they dumb
idk only visually changing it and letting the server do the actual redirect is the way I’d do it if Elon forced me to do something like this. Better yet would just not care what people did and just not change the text, but that probably wasn’t allowed
So busy he claims to run on like 4 hours of sleep per day running 3 companies but he has free time to create burner Twitter accounts to call himself King of SpaceX and Mr. Tesla.
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I know this is old but I just read about it and it’s so perfect for this thread and forum I had to repost it
There’s a scene in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk that unintentionally captures the essence of the book:
[Max] Levchin was at a friend’s bachelor pad hanging out with Musk. Some people were playing a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table. “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” Levchin says. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said “Right, fine, I’m done.” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.
That would turn out to be a good strategy. (page 86)
He literally did the thing! Like I’ve used the analogy in this thread many times that he’s the whale with infinite bankroll who keeps shoving until he hits but he literally did that and his hagiographer wrote it up like a good thing.
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Seems doubtful he won his money back unless he was playing HU. Most likely he won a big pot and declared victory and left.
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Of course he didn’t but he “won” and noped out of there, and the money lost was meaningless to him as ever.
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I think he has much the same personality as Trump. Most people ponder decisions in various permutaions, see costs and benefits, and then finally act, or do not act, after considering all downsides. Of course, there is a known bias for “normal” people to avoid downside risk even when some action is +EV.
Musk, like Trump, makes decisions based on impulse with limited cost-benefit analysis (rename twitter to X, sell blue checkmarks, sue people on weak claims). However, god love him, like Trump, he acts on such decisions and then works to avoid the fairly obvious consequences while reaping the upsides of action. This kind of thought process is discernable in the “all in” poker bets, except there are immediate consequences at the end of the hand, so it’s a blatantly obvious poor strategy.
My basic point is that Elon (like Trump) often makes manifestly poor decisions, but (like Trump) he often reaps the rewards of such decisions because he acts on them. (And, with something like Tesla, you can make a ton of poor decisions when there is high latent demand for the unique product without much competition, as with EV’s in 2010-2021 (there is still strong demand, but now there is much more competition)).
If Elon has a genius (which will likely be his fatal flaw), it’s just making decisions and acting, even if the decisions are bad. He ultimately reminds me of a tournament poker player who has the biggest stack when there is 50% of the field remaining and then donks it all off before the final table.
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He’s not a talented businessman, he’s just skilled at finding market niches for unique products with high latent demand and not much competition and then executing with high velocity!
The No True Businessman genre never disappoints.
True businessman or not, the most important point is the Elon creates latent demand for more guillotines.
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My general sense of great business success is that it is mostly luck combined with will when one realizes one has struck a gusher. FB has been a brilliant success, but it was mostly just feeding demand no one could have anticipated. When Zuck has tried to do things based on this “rational” analysis of the world, he ends up burning through 10 bil or whatever on VR. Starbucks had a model and their business became a giant game of copy/paste franchises everywhere possible, because the world happened to be at a stage where there would be high demand for strong $5 flavored coffees.
Steve Jobs had more failed businesses than not and would have been a complete failure if he had died 10 years sooner. However, he launched the iPod when music started to become digitized, and then 100 technologies came together to make the smartphone possible.
Elon has had success because he has taken great risks that paid off. That doesn’t mean he’s smart or that he was right to take the risks. He has a bias toward action, and action is often enough rewarded. Still, if he continues to embrace bullshit of the type reflected in his current Twitter feed, the bias toward action may ultimately prove his undoing.
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Business is a gambling game with an element of skill?
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Sure, but my point is about outsized business success. I see more modest business success as more mundane and analytical. That’s generally not a good way to make billions, as there are plenty of mundane, analytical people around but very few people with the balls (or foolishness) to start an electric car or rocket company. Elon bet big and the world rewarded him, but I think he’s lost his feel for how the world works (if he ever had it, as one can make all the right decisions for all the wrong reasons).
I thought your point was that gamblers who overestimate how much their success relied on luck run the risk of getting smacked in the face by variance at some point.
bobman might praise the venture capitalist mindset of being willing to fail many times because you know your one hit will pay for that failure many times over, but are the people who hit while being appropriately cautious about their risk of ruin? Are they amassing the necessary bankroll to gamble through morally repugnant means?
How about a Gatlin Guillotine?
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I think it’s broadly socially beneficial that there’s a low bar for would-be entrepreneurs with potentially high-impact ideas to get a few million dollars to play around with them to see if they take off. 15-20 years ago, that was generally not the case though for hard-tech ideas like rockets or electric cars, though, it was only true for software companies. Partially because software is higher margin, so it’s easier to have a huge hit, and partially because you need a lot more money to ship a car than you do to ship a website.
That’s less true now than it used to be, which is good, and at least partially attributable to Elon’s success in the space (both as proof that you can make a lot of money from real engineering and as an incubator for potential founders). I think it’s true that Elon has a very unusual, arguably pathological, attitude toward risk, and it was a bad thing that the only way to launch a space startup was to start a software business, sell it, roll the proceeds into another software startup, sell that one, then use the proceeds to bootstrap the space company. Pre-Elon, space startups were all self-funded by people who got rich doing something else (Paul Allen, Bezos, Branson). More recently, you have people like Peter Beck being able to do space startups without the prerequisite of becoming fabulously wealthy from unrelated ventures, which is a very positive development.
Seems like you overselling the idea that musk is opening a lot of future doors for the mechanical engineering type stuff (vs software), seems TSLA entire inflated valuation was based on a now apparently false idea that you can value a mechanical endeavor like you do with software and seems that idea is just going to slowly rust away with TSLA market cap