This is close to my attitude about it. A lot of successful business people are functionally supervillains, they are “good” at making money through a combination of anti-social behavior, capitalizing on externalities and government subsidies, and/or outright fraud, and we praise them as Great Men.
I mean say what you will about hilter, the bloke got a lot done.
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Mo money, mo gooder person!
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You’d think Elon would be all for the strike since he worked so hard to crush unionization efforts at Tesla but I guess if you’re anti-worker you’ve gotta stick to that.
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So maybe it’s just this:
Twitter’s verification policy temporarily removes verification from accounts that change profile pictures, which the UAW did in conjunction with the walkout.
But Musk is also strongly anti-union, which is one reason why you shouldn’t buy a Tesla (unless you hate auto unions).
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In the review of Ashlee Vance’s biography that @suzzer99 posted, one featured example of Elon’s exceptional business talent is
“He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator…
The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space.
I completely understand the desire to do it yourself, but nine months of an engineer’s effort is worth a little more than $3900. This was a single component on a rocket that flew five times, failed three times, and delivered one commercial payload to orbit. I don’t know jack about business, but I’m not seeing the genius here.
The book review is long but not bad overall. I have an alignment problem with parts of it. Like
he was one of the first people in the world to realize the risks from advanced AI
Come on. Asimov wrote the short story that included his laws of robotics in 1942, almost 30 years before Elon was born.
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Elon’s moved on to “the best part is no part” which led to the decision to have Starship stage using gravity which led to the IFT cartwheeling instead of actually staging.
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Which led to the introduction of a new part for IFT-2 to allow hot-staging.
I am pretty certain the way they calculate an impression isn’t very good. I had a very low traffic tweet open in a tab for awhile and refreshed the page. +1 view. Waited awhile, do it again. +1 view. Do that again! +1 view. Maybe I was just getting unique impressions from randos on a days old post… or maybe it’s just dumb.
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When the Matt Walsh anti-trans thing was making its rounds on twitter and he was bragging about it getting 290M views in a day, more than any documentary in history**, I think I saw something that said that any time the window player was playing and was at least 50% visible for at least one second, it counted as a view/impression.
** Some of these details might be off, but I think they’re right in spirit.
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Trump was definitely bragging about his interview having hundreds of millions of viewers
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Yea if you scroll past the tweet it’s a view
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I am confident that if there are safeguards in the contract then Mush would never in a million years consider violating them.
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A very high degree of vertical integration seems to be a core tenet of Elon Musk Business Thought. It makes sense that it’s not locally profit-maximizing, otherwise everyone would do it and it wouldn’t be distinctive. You can imagine lots of reasons why it might be beneficial to build stuff in-house (greater flexibility, develop expertise internally, some kind of emergent cost-saving synergy when you insource lots of stuff, good engineers just like doing this stuff so it helps you get top talent), but that’s all speculation.
Now you are coming around, even knowing his tremendous “success” and having the benefit of hindsight, Musk’s one unique business approach is pretty meh. Things that did obviously help him “succeed” were being a milkshake drinking conman degen on an all-time heater.
What unites the entire right with libertarians and former left of centre pundits is a general lack of empathy. This single character trait explains 90% of current US politics.
I’m not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean, but I respect the passion.
Inb4 strongly worded letter.