Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[DGuller]

He took over less than a year after Tesla was founded. So all innovation happened with him at the helm and I doubt much of it was on any roadmap in 2003. Did he do the engineering legwork himself? Of course not. But did he have the vision for a game-changing product and presumably directed his teams in that direction? I guess so.

Did he have to give them direction? Presumably he could have just them get on with it.

I think the idea that anything remotely as revolutionary as Tesla can be developed by just letting people get on with it seems far removed from reality of innovation.  Even more so than the idea that all it takes to invent the first practical electric car is to put together a roadmap.

You don't come out with a practical electrical car by one day jumping out of the bath and going "Eureka!".  You do it by iterating over and over again, solving countless problems along the way, and having a very good intuition as to where you should go so that in the future you would have less practical problems to solve.  Innovation doesn't tend to happen on autopilot.

[crazy canuck]

@garbon @crazy Canuck
I have no sources or whatever to convince you. Maybe we can just leave it here disagreeing in his role in Tesla's success.

Fair enough

[The Brain]

I don't know enough about Musk's history to have a solid opinion on his intellect. On the one hand, everything I've heard or seen him say has been like stuff a somewhat slow 12 y/o would say. On the other hand he has become extremely rich. On the third hand Trump is the most successful politician on the planet, and he's dumber than most vertebrates. "You can't argue with success" is in many ways a valid point, but taken too far you end up worshipping Powerball winners for being genius businesspersons.

If you want to read through 300 or so pages ( ) Otto did a good job of debunking a lot of the musk myths about his engineering genius in this thread.

I have never read anything about stuff Musk is supposed to have engineered. As far as I know he hasn't done any engineering. If he is a genius (which I doubt) it's within the field of business. But being stupid and obnoxious got Trump into the White House, twice. It seems possible that it could have made Musk rich once.

[Valmy]

@garbon @crazy Canuck
I have no sources or whatever to convince you. Maybe we can just leave it here disagreeing in his role in Tesla's success.

Even whatever credit you want to give him for Tesla's status as a decently profitable company, granted one that seems to make its profits from selling carbon credits than selling cars, that isn't what got him rich.

The fact that his primary achievement, and the one he got 50 billion dollars for (for a company that gets about 10 billion in profits annually...), was inflating the stock price through his bravado, seems indisputable to me.

[grumbler]

The explanation that Musk just somehow coattailed onto success with Tesla need to explain SpaceX and Starlink. Did Musk just somehow stumble into their success as well?

We can recognize that Musk is a turd without re-writing history so that he never accomplished anything but selling snake oil that somehow made everyone involved rich.

Musk is the Greek stories about hubris brought to life.  Let's see if (and hope that) his story ends the way the original stories did.

[Valmy]

I don't know anything about SpaceX. And being a private company it is hard to get info.

But that doesn't mean the Tesla stuff is wrong.

[crazy canuck]

The explanation that Musk just somehow coattailed onto success with Tesla need to explain SpaceX and Starlink. Did Musk just somehow stumble into their success as well?

We can recognize that Musk is a turd without re-writing history so that he never accomplished anything but selling snake oil that somehow made everyone involved rich.

Musk is the Greek stories about hubris brought to life.  Let's see if (and hope that) his story ends the way the original stories did.

That proposition makes no logical sense. Are you really arguing that if he made contributions to two other companies he must have made meaningful contributions to Tesla?

Come on man you're better than that.

Now the question of whether he made meaningful contributions to SpaceX and Starlink beyond raising money for it is a debateable point but is a separate point from his contributions to Tesla.

[grumbler]

That proposition makes no logical sense. Are you really arguing that if he made contributions to two other companies he must have made meaningful contributions to Tesla?

Come on man you're better than that.

Now the question of whether he made meaningful contributions to SpaceX and Starlink beyond raising money for it is a debateable point but is a separate point from his contributions to Tesla.

You have zero evidence for the proposition that all Musk did for Tesla was raise money.  There's no real evidence either way. But he fact that he unquestionably did for SpaceX and Starlink what those able to view him dispassionately think he probably he did for Tesla is all that we have.  The lame argument that all he did for SpaceX and Starlink is what the most uncharitable are willing to concede he did for Tesla is unwothy of you.  Do better.

[grumbler]

I don't know anything about SpaceX. And being a private company it is hard to get info.

But that doesn't mean the Tesla stuff is wrong.

We don't know about any of the three companies.  But the idea that it's just coincidental that all three took unorthodox approaches to their industries, all were successful, and all were run by Musk is ridiculous. The SLC has spent far more than SpaceX with markedly less success. 

[crazy canuck]

That proposition makes no logical sense. Are you really arguing that if he made contributions to two other companies he must have made meaningful contributions to Tesla?

Come on man you're better than that.

Now the question of whether he made meaningful contributions to SpaceX and Starlink beyond raising money for it is a debateable point but is a separate point from his contributions to Tesla.

You have zero evidence for the proposition that all Musk did for Tesla was raise money.  There's no real evidence either way. But he fact that he unquestionably did for SpaceX and Starlink what those able to view him dispassionately think he probably he did for Tesla is all that we have.  The lame argument that all he did for SpaceX and Starlink is what the most uncharitable are willing to concede he did for Tesla is unwothy of you.  Do better.

You are now making a different argument.

And btw, repeating what you said about SpaceX, and adding the word "unquestionably" to bolster your assertion, does not make it more accurate.

[Admiral Yi]

I think you need to be an asshole to be a good entrepreneur to some extent, especially in high tech industries.

How many data points are you basing this observation on?

[DGuller]

You need a strong personality, but I don't think you need to be an asshole, it's just that no one will stop you from being one if you're successful.  Many people will eventually become assholes if you let them, especially ones that have strong personalities.

[Zoupa]

I think it is fair to call Musk a genius for what he achieved and I would also credit him personally with building very successful companies. One of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time and visionary on multiple technologies.

But he obviously went off the rails eventually and turned from entrepreneurial genius to crazy fascist. He seems to have been an asshole throughout.

I would agree fully with that characterization.  I think the desire to retroactively blackwash Musk's reputation as an engineer comes from the difficulty people increasingly have in seeing complexity in real human beings.

It's impossible to badmouth Musk's reputation as an engineer, simply because he is not an engineer. The dude has a bachelor of arts for fuck's sake.

[DGuller]

Why would a bachelor of arts preclude one from being an engineer?