Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Admiral Yi]

What's your point Beeb?  Mismatching clothes doesn't make one an asshole.

[Jacob]

Purdue Pharma - transformational but in all the wrong ways.

Yup.

Inditex - don't downplay it because it's fashion.  Being able to get new clothing lines into stores within days was huge as I understand it.

Fast fashion completely changed how we manufacture, distribute, market, and buy clothes. It also has a massive environmental impact. I supsect (but don't know) it contributed significantly to the rise of a number of Asian economies, with fast fashion manufacturing being the first profitable step up the "modernize the economy" ladder for many places.

Dorsey - I don't think Twitter is transformational.

It gave us Trump, influencers, and the like/ share economy. Pretty transformational IMO. Maybe it's wrong to give them the credit for the social media space all up, but I think they got there before instagram, youtube, and facebook did.

That's the argument, though I can see reasonable counterarguments existing.

Sam Walton - hey if we're bringing u Carnegie or Ford, he counts.  But I don't really know much about him.

As I understand it, he pioneered the big box grocery/ everything store that led to the hollowing out of "Main Street", changed the way most producers do business (the famous big box squeeze, where the retailer takes control of vast bulk of the cash flow and profit margin previously accrued to the producers, while the producers carry most of the risk - eating losses for returns and unsold goods). Pretty transformational IMO (and frequently seen as assholish by the folks whose profit margin and cashflows he took over).

[Barrister]

What's your point Beeb?  Mismatching clothes doesn't make one an asshole.

It was a cheap point, but being arrested can make one an asshole.

But more seriously, the kind of anti-competitive behaviour shown by MS back in the 80s-90s was pretty serious.

Also the womanizing.  He was friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

[Jacob]

It was a cheap point, but being arrested can make one an asshole.

Well then we need to stop arresting people! 

[grumbler]

I think the opioid crisis is pretty transformational... but I guess I can accept it as being arguable, depending on how your define transformational.

Personally I think fast fashion was absolutely an industry transformation, which is why I put Inditex down. If someone  else did fast fashion before that, then I credited it wrongly to Inditex though.

I may be wrong - it's not my area of expertise - but I believe Bloomberg significantly changed how (especially the speed) our financial markets work, which I'd rate as transformational.

Apple are, IMO, responsible for ubiquotous personal device touch screens and the app-economy. Much as I'm not a fan of Apple, I find it hard to argue that's not transformational.

That said... I guess it comes down what we mean by "transformational". What criteria do we use?

I don't think that the opioid crisis transformed any industry.

Fast fashion has not transformed the clothing industry.  Inditex has a capitalization along the lines of $100 billion, which makes it the largest (barely) ,but minuscule compared to the industry as a whole.  Inditex is innovative, but not transformational

I don't see Bloomberg transforming the financial markets.  He provides an information service that is widely used, but that's it. 

Apple I will grant you.  I was thinking more in computer terms, but their personal devices certainly transformed (or maybe even created) that industry sector.

An industry-transformational company is one that changes the way an entire industry approaches the economic problem.  Tesla did that with electric cars (everyone else scrambling to catch up) and SpaceX did it with launch systems.  Fox "News" is probably the one that impacts the most ordinary people.

[Jacob]

I don't think that the opioid crisis transformed any industry.

Fair. It transformed society.

Fast fashion has not transformed the clothing industry.  Inditex has a capitalization along the lines of $100 billion, which makes it the largest (barely) ,but minuscule compared to the industry as a whole.  Inditex is innovative, but not transformational

I see your point, though Inditex was copied by H&M, Uniqlo, NEXT and others which makes up a larger chunk of the industry. But maybe that's not enough.

I don't see Bloomberg transforming the financial markets.  He provides an information service that is widely used, but that's it.

I thought - but could be incorrect - that Bloomberg essentially created the capacity for high frequency and algorithmic trading. But maybe even if true, that may be insufficient.

An industry-transformational company is one that changes the way an entire industry approaches the economic problem.  Tesla did that with electric cars (everyone else scrambling to catch up) and SpaceX did it with launch systems.  Fox "News" is probably the one that impacts the most ordinary people.

Reasonable definition. Your assessments make sense using it.

[crazy canuck]

I don't think that the opioid crisis transformed any industry.

You are ignoring the cause of the opioid crisis - the transformation in the way which drugs were marketed.

[grumbler]

I don't think that the opioid crisis transformed any industry.

You are ignoring the cause of the opioid crisis - the transformation in the way which drugs were marketed.

Purdue Pharma didn't innovate in the way drugs are marketed.  What they did was lie about the effects of the products they offered, and that wasn't taken up by the rest of the industry.

[crazy canuck]

You might want to read a bit more about the tactics they used which are harmful even if a drug company is not blatantly lying.

Here is a good start

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45345199

[grumbler]

You might want to read a bit more about the tactics they used which are harmful even if a drug company is not blatantly lying.

Here is a good start

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45345199

You might want to read a bit more about how the tactics Purdue Pharma used were widely used throughout the industry.  Here's a non-paywalled source: from the Pew Center

In any case, the founders of Purdue Pharma have been dead for almost 100 years.

[crazy canuck]

You might want to read a bit more about the tactics they used which are harmful even if a drug company is not blatantly lying.

Here is a good start

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45345199

You might want to read a bit more about how the tactics Purdue Pharma used were widely used throughout the industry.  Here's a non-paywalled source: from the Pew Center

In any case, the founders of Purdue Pharma have been dead for almost 100 years.

You know that the opioid Purdue pushed was not developed when the company was founded right?

Neither was the type of marketing they used.  But you comment has a grain of truth in it.  The regulatory environment in the US has been dismantled to the point it resembles that of 100 years ago

[The Brain]

My Purdue knowledge is 99% from the TV show Dopesick, but my impression from that is that corruption in the FDA made the Oxy epidemic possible. Of course AFAIK the FDA isn't the creation of a single individual, so not really comparable to Musk.

[Berkut]

It's not an either/or proposition, both of them can be terrible people. 

But that's the question - do you more-or-less have to be a 'terrible person' in order to start a disruptive and innovative company and see it grow to be worth billions of dollars?

I don't think so - I think Musks actual assholeness detracts from his success, it doesn't add to it.

My point is simply that his success is (or ought to be) undeniable. He is an insanely successful asshole.

And in the overall scheme of things, I am more then happy to chuckle at his douchebaggery while appreciating that he has accomplished more for the human race then 99.999% of humans, and wish we had more people like him.

Obviously, if we could have more people with his vision and accomplishments absent the being a grade-A asshole, that would be even better.

But the idea that the interesting narrative about Musk is his twitter posting and how many kids he has rather then what he has done betrays more about the people who find that so compelling then it does about Musk. The asshole part of him is, to me, entirely uninteresting. There are a billion assholes out in the world, and I spend very little of my emotional or intellectual energy thinking about them.

I find it amusing that other people obsess over Musk's assholeness, since it is the thing about him that is entirely unexceptional. Which suggests that it isn't really what those who bag on him all the time actually find objectionable about him.

[Sheilbh]

My Purdue knowledge is 99% from the TV show Dopesick, but my impression from that is that corruption in the FDA made the Oxy epidemic possible. Of course AFAIK the FDA isn't the creation of a single individual, so not really comparable to Musk.

The number of issues/stories I've seen in the last few years that seem to go back to the FDA and some mix of incompetence/inability to flex from bureaucratic norms is really startling. I don't get why it's not under investigation with serious reform from covid vaccine stuff, monkeypox vaccine, the opioid crisis - even the formula milk issue.

It seems, from a distance, like a regulator that has been entirely captured by industry and frankly by monopolistic tendencies in industry and that is having consequences both from a cost perspective but also on people's lives/health.

Incidentally if we're quibbling on transformative. I'd push back on Uber. It's a minicab firm with an app that subsidises its users with investor cash and saving money by not following the law.

[grumbler]

The number of issues/stories I've seen in the last few years that seem to go back to the FDA and some mix of incompetence/inability to flex from bureaucratic norms is really startling. I don't get why it's not under investigation with serious reform from covid vaccine stuff, monkeypox vaccine, the opioid crisis - even the formula milk issue.

It seems, from a distance, like a regulator that has been entirely captured by industry and frankly by monopolistic tendencies in industry and that is having consequences both from a cost perspective but also on people's lives/health.

Incidentally if we're quibbling on transformative. I'd push back on Uber. It's a minicab firm with an app that subsidises its users with investor cash and saving money by not following the law.

Yes, the FDA has been captured by industry and has such a rigid set of rules that it can fairly easily be "gamed." I encountered a prescription medicine that had lost its patent on the 100mg dose but, because the maker reformulated the exact same medicine in a 110mg dose, the latter was still under patent, even though it was the exact same medicine.

Not sure what you are "pushing back" on regarding Uber.  Are you arguing that it is not transformative?