Nor is he a great businessman. Didn’t found Tesla, and it’s spent $22B and lost $6.5B. None of his companies are consistently profitable.
Nobody gets a perfect score at anything, but on balance Musk is quite an engineer.
As for business: I consider success to be measured as product of value created and profit. Casinos and herbal quack MLM companies are highly and consistently profitable.
It's that he's not careful with language.
The point of the tweet - that family gatherings with the elderly is problematic, is probably valid.
But his wording 'children are immune' is really bad.
They are not immune. The will get Coronavirus. They just get it less often and are less likely to show symptoms and very unlikely to die from it.
So they are not 'immune', rather they are 'immune to dying from it', which is a big difference.
Elon speaks off the cuff, with sensitive things, you have to be careful about how you word stuff.
This is why we have communications people.
Like declaring that the death rate to be reported deaths / reported cases without a single acknowledgement of the drove of cases that go unreported, or declaring that we should completely shut down for five weeks like this is Ebola and the virus will just disappear and won't go on another tear after the five weeks are over.
To be clear, I support the partial shutdown and taking measures to slow the spread. I'm just annoyed by those who think we can stop the virus from spreading completely if we just try hard enough. It's unrealistic.
It may be no more deadly than the flu with appropriate care, but many more people seem to require that care than the flu. This is probably because it goes after the respiratory system, causing issues that require costly and labor intensive intervention. The flu might make you feel like total shit but it generally does not mess with respiration much, allowing many more patients to just wait it out in bed.
Italy has more hospital beds per capita than the US. Check out their condition.
You have to look at whole systems and the long game. Quarantine is about keeping the medical system up until we have drugs and hopefully vaccines not only developed but in production.
Elon is great at whole systems analysis. Not sure why he can't see this.
Like I said earlier, I support slowing it down. But there is a balance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
The assumption that expertise is transferrable is probably one of the biggest fallacies in the public discourse.
Jobs displayed a similar blind spot around medicine, likely killing himself by attempting to treat severe cancer with alt-med crackpottery. Then of course there are all the celebrities that gave us all that nonsense plus the anti-vax movement. Medicine seems to be a popular area for this. For whatever reason when a person gets rich or famous they seem to develop the need to play amateur doctor with zero training and zero willingness to actually undertake the requisite study. Maybe you know you've arrived when you develop a strong desire to be a medical crank.