Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[celedhring]

When I was studying in the US in the 2000s, as a foreigner under an F-1 it was possible to apply to temporarily drop your courses and spend a year doing practical training (as in doing paid work) before completing your degree. But that employment had to be related to the degree you were pursuing, and the whole thing would have left a paper trail (the school had to approve it, USCIS had to approve it, and you were issued a bunch of stuff and had to provide proof of employment every - I think - 60 days?).

I would more generally observe that there are a lot, A LOT, of people who immigrate to the US, end up staying here nominally legally, who at some point in the process was likely technically supposed to have left while something was sorted out or resolved.

That part, at least, is pretty much a non-issue for me. Who fucking cares? Of all the not-strictly legal immigrants working in the US, we should care that Elon Musk might not have been entirely legal at some point in the distant past?

Oh, I really DGAF if Musk stayed in the US illegally for a time, I have friends that did the same. Just wanted to point out there's a plausible alternative.

[Berkut]

When I was studying in the US in the 2000s, as a foreigner under an F-1 it was possible to apply to temporarily drop your courses and spend a year doing practical training (as in doing paid work) before completing your degree. But that employment had to be related to the degree you were pursuing, and the whole thing would have left a paper trail (the school had to approve it, USCIS had to approve it, and you were issued a bunch of stuff and had to provide proof of employment every - I think - 60 days?).

I would more generally observe that there are a lot, A LOT, of people who immigrate to the US, end up staying here nominally legally, who at some point in the process was likely technically supposed to have left while something was sorted out or resolved.

That part, at least, is pretty much a non-issue for me. Who fucking cares? Of all the not-strictly legal immigrants working in the US, we should care that Elon Musk might not have been entirely legal at some point in the distant past?

Oh, I really DGAF if Musk stayed in the US illegally for a time, I have friends that did the same. Just wanted to point out there's a plausible alternative.

Yeah, my experience with US immigration, from both the standpoint of someone who knows a lot of people who have experienced it themselves, and as an employer is that if you can get to a permanent immigration status without ever once being out of compliance, that is a pretty amazing accomplishment!

[alfred russel]

I haven't invested in any venture musk is a part of, but I think part of the appeal of him as a CEO is that he is rather uniquely outside the corporate drone mindset. If there are a dozen or twenty major automakers in the world, Tesla is the only one with a CEO that is going on Joe Rogan and getting high. The appeal is that zigging when everyone else zags can be the smart choice even if the odds are that zagging is more likely to pay off.

In that sense, Musk going out and making "bold" statements is brand building in a way that might actually be destructive for most other corporate leaders.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I suspect that if this is exactly as "damning" as you imagine it might be....it's still pretty not very damning.

The extent that any particular person is going to be SHOCKED, SHOCKED I SAY at such perfidy is, I think, exactly and precisely aligned with how much they despised Musk before they found out he might have been in the country "illegally" or dropped out of college without getting his degree and then fudged about that later.

I don't think the immigration part of it is that big of a deal--the lies about his degree are also not a tremendously big deal aside from a narrow context in that there have been a number of CEOs forced out of publicly traded companies for lying about their degrees--it is seen as a form of public shareholder deception, but even that would be muted by the fact by all accounts the one publicly traded company Musk runs has returned exorbitantly for shareholders. The level of offense that resume inflation is deemed to be for a CEO tends to correlate to how well they are otherwise doing as CEO, i.e. it's a sin that is forgiven for a highly performing one and often not if someone is more middling.

But the Twitter thread, and also the original post I responded to setting this off, gets to the "meat of it." The reason it is important to note that Musk doesn't have a degree in any kind of STEM field is because Musk really cares about people believing he is an "engineer." Now, not every engineer has to be a PE, although in many fields it is seen as an important step in one's career. But I don't know any "real" field of engineering where it is considered appropriate to call yourself an engineer when you don't even have an engineering degree. Note I put "real" in quotes, this is because there has been some "title inflation" in the world, thus we have things like "sales engineers" and things like that, but Musk clearly doesn't use the word that way. When he was on Rogan he specifically talked about being an engineer, in the context of working with SpaceX's engineering team, I can assure you Musk and the managers of SpaceX aren't hiring people who dropped out of a physics program and later finished an undergraduate business degree to design their rockets--and for damn good reason.

If you look at the story about how Musk starting his very first company, GlobalLink, and then was savvy enough to find an investor to buy him out for $3m that gets to the heart of Musk's real talent--generating investor capital. This is not a talent to be ashamed of, in fact many businessmen make their entire careers proudly on their ability to do exactly that. But Musk clearly is not proud of it, or he wouldn't spend so much time denying he is a "CEO or business" type and saying he's really an engineer. Musk wants to be thought of as Nikola Tesla or some similar figure.

The reality is of course Nikola Tesla died in poverty. For some reason Musk doesn't want to be seen in the same vein as guys like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, or to reference older tycoons Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller etc--guys who primarily made their fortunes by ruthlessly undermining competitors and often aggressively screwing over their own business partners. But something those guys all share in common with Musk is they didn't end up like the real Tesla--i.e. poor, they died or will die very rich.

[Berkut]

Meh. I have people who work for me as software engineers who don't have degrees in software engineering. They are still engineers though, because that is the work they are doing, even if their expertise in that work was aquired through some means other then getting a degree.

If Musk does engineering work, he is an engineer, regardless of whether or not he has an engineering degree (a physics degree, btw, is NOT an engineering degree anyway).

This is much ado about very, very little substance. There are reasons to admire Musk, and reasons to find him contemptible. Whether or not he got a degree or not is completely trivial in either of those reasons.

I think the fact the he lied about it (if he did lie about it) is a bit more relevant to the "Musk is an asshole" claim, but saying "I am an engineer" is not evidence that you lied about getting a degree. You can be an engineer without a degree.

[Barrister]

On the topic of billionaires wanting to spread their genes to "win" at evolution: I remember some years ago reading an article about a Japanese billionaire who wanted to have a hundred kids. He was, apparently, pursuing it primarily via offering Thai women something like ~$1 million to have his kid. IIRC he was well on his way.

On the flipside of that, there was a story on Humans of New York about a dude who'd gotten the inside track as sperm donor to lesbian couples. He wasn't racking up numbers like this Japanese billionaire, but he was competitive with Musk - clocking in around 20 or so IIRC (and he hasn't stopped yet either).

Is this the super religious Jewish guy who said he was aiming for 18 or something as its a holy number and after that it would be 36?

I must admit in the past I've often been tempted by this. It does seem a good thing all round. I doubt my gf would approve however.

I looked into donating sperm before I had my vasectomy.  AT that point I had three healthy sons so I knew my swimmers were good.

Turns out there are no sperm banks in Canada.  It's illegal to pay for "reproductive material", privacy concerns make it complicated, so they just find it is easier to import american or european sperm.

If a woman or couple wanting donated sperm has a donor she already knows they can accommodate that.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Meh. I have people who work for me as software engineers who don't have degrees in software engineering. They are still engineers though, because that is the work they are doing, even if their expertise in that work was aquired through some means other then getting a degree.

If Musk does engineering work, he is an engineer, regardless of whether or not he has an engineering degree (a physics degree, btw, is NOT an engineering degree anyway).

This is much ado about very, very little substance. There are reasons to admire Musk, and reasons to find him contemptible. Whether or not he got a degree or not is completely trivial in either of those reasons.

I think the fact the he lied about it (if he did lie about it) is a bit more relevant to the "Musk is an asshole" claim, but saying "I am an engineer" is not evidence that you lied about getting a degree. You can be an engineer without a degree.

Yeah, but you're also obscuring reality--software engineering has long struggled in a bit of a nebulous area. The first generation of people to do this work, were largely working without formal degree programs in specifically what they were interested in. Many of the first generation were Electrical Engineers by training, but some had taken Math, and some didn't have degrees at all. As time has passed that profession has worked towards greater standardization and credentialing like the other more "traditional" engineering disciplines. But it still isn't quite there. That being said in the modern job market it is valuable if you're trying to break into those positions to have either a Computer Science degree (which tend to have a variety of names at different colleges), and at a number of colleges CS degrees or similar are actually offered as part of the engineering college. But again, you're talking about a technical field that is still in flux, I assume when electrification was first starting there was a similar dearth of "trained electrical engineers", because it didn't exist as a formal degree-granting thing, it was something you had to learn on the job.

Musk FWIW is presenting himself as the sort of engineer who designs cars and rockets, which he isn't--and those engineering fields have been rigorously credentialed for over 75 years.

You can say it doesn't matter, but I'm not the one who seems to think it is important--Musk is. If Musk didn't continually refer to himself as an engineer it would occasion no comment what his educational backgrounds are. There is virtually no evidence that has ever been presented that Musk is personally engaged in real engineering work.

I think a lot of you Muskies in this thread just lack good conman detection, which isn't surprising--most people are susceptible to conmen because they like the stories conmen sell. You think Musk is "cool" and are willing to overlook a lot because of it--that isn't accidental, that's by his design. Conmen tell con stories for specific reasons, none of them are accidental or incidental. Musk thinks his overall schemes are advanced by pretending to be an engineer when he isn't, you should probably defer to his judgment that it is an important part of his con--he's the one who makes billions off of his ability to deceive and hype.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Also I'll note your bullshit point about how you have software engineers working for you without degrees--I bet for sure none of them applied for the job and lied and claimed they did have a degree, there are still plenty of people working as computer programmers / developers / SWEs who were don't have degrees and plenty of companies hire them. But most would not hire someone they found out claimed to have a degree they did not actually have.

[Admiral Yi]

This thread has drastically altered my impression of Musk, especially the education part.  I thought he had a physics degree and he just figured everything else out, like rocket science and coding, because they were so easy after learning physics.

And Tesla stock continues its nosedive.

[Berkut]

Also I'll note your bullshit point about how you have software engineers working for you without degrees--I bet for sure none of them applied for the job and lied and claimed they did have a degree, there are still plenty of people working as computer programmers / developers / SWEs who were don't have degrees and plenty of companies hire them. But most would not hire someone they found out claimed to have a degree they did not actually have.

No bullshit - I was simply stating that someone who does engineering work is an engineer, and I have people who work for me who are software engineers who do not have software engineering degrees. 

My point is simply that someone's job is not dependent on the degree they got, and like I said, a physics degree is not an engineering degree anyway - so how he doesn't have a physics degree seems quite irrelevant. So calling that "bullshit" seems rather obviously personal and misguided. Why?



"I am an engineer" is not the same claim as "I have a degree in engineering". You can be an engineer without having an engineering degree, just like you can be an accountant without having an accounting degree. It's a job, not a credential. There are very, very few jobs were the title implies the certainty of a degree, and the insanely broad category of "engineer" is not one of them.

I rather carefully noted that him *lying* about the degree was a different thing entirely. It's odd that you kind of missed that part of my post entirely. Almost like you are just looking at things that confirm your bias, and ignoring the rest...

[Josquius]

Didn't Musk start his career as a developer? Or are you suggesting here hired devs for all his early projects too?

Incidently it's curious how when starting a new role they always want references from recent employers but I can't recall being asked for my degree papers in any nomral job.

[Berkut]

This thread has drastically altered my impression of Musk, especially the education part.  I thought he had a physics degree and he just figured everything else out, like rocket science and coding, because they were so easy after learning physics.

[Berkut]

Didn't Musk start his career as a developer? Or are you suggesting here hired devs for all his early projects too?

Incidently it's curious how when starting a new role they always want references from recent employers but I can't recall being asked for my degree papers in any nomral job.

I've never once asked for proof of a degree. 

Apparently Musk has never done any coding, or anything like engineering, and his entire skill set is simply that he is good at conning other incredibly smart people into giving him billions and billions of dollars.

[DGuller]

I think your degree is checked during background check, which is contracted out to background check companies.

[alfred russel]

My grandfather was an engineer and never went to college. He just studied for the engineering exams through correspondence courses and passed them in an era you didn't a college degree to sit for them. He worked for the Florida road department for a time as an engineer on bridges around the state (he retired leading the safety division).