He has flaws. It's fine to recognize that. We all have flaws though and it's unrealistic to expect perfect opinions from anyone. Who decides what perfect is anyway?

I absolutely think there is something to learn from his approach, though I think he has much in common with other highly successful people. My old boss actually had a similar attitude and she accomplished amazing things in her life. In the same way the person you replied to was describing, she would say she was going to do something and people would go "yeah sure." And then she would do them. It seemed like bullshit, then it was real.

First and foremost, it's not about money or opportunity, those are just amplifiers. Without the money it wouldn't be Mars, it would be a local bike co-op. The magic is in an attitude that is low on fear, high on hope, unconcerned what others will think, and always reaching for the most awesome outcome, right on the edge of what seems possible. My old boss had a moment where her son had just started working mall retail, then suddenly he was meeting the CEO and becoming a brand ambassador. She said "he's starting to realize he can do awesome shit," like she was Obi-wan teaching Luke about the force. Most people have set an artificial cap on their potential and accomplishments by believing that the world is a harsh and shit place and that something truly good happening is an impossibility. And then all the opportunities to change their world in big and small ways sail right on past them.

Put another way, I think it's about learning how to be a creator of new realities and not just living in other people's realities.

What a positive and uplifting comment, thank you! I love the idea of amplifiers... it's a great counter-argument to naysayers, that it just changes the scale.

What annoys me that I would want to be a fan of someone like him but I just find his personality and behavior repulsive. After Jobs and Musk many people will now think you have to be an asshole to be successful and will try emulate the bad parts too.

People are biased towards simple explanations of the world so they're biased towards either either Musk is amazing or Musk sucks. The reality is that he's a great enterpreneur but shitty human being.

To be an effective leader you have to be willing to take risks. Most of those risks are interpersonal in nature. You run the risk of offending people when you tell them they can do better than they currently are. You’re essentially calling them out for not working hard enough, or having wrong assumptions, or any of the other normal human failings that everyone is subject to. If a leader doesn’t call those things or then the whole team slips and backslides until all progress stops. Doing the right thing as a leader often earns you the title of asshole and you have to be ok with that. It isn’t carte blanche to be petty and cruel for no good reason though, your actions should reflect the needs of the project not your own whims.

I agree with the first part. But you can have high standards, call out incompetence and fire people without being an asshole (or without being perceived as one). A good example is Ray Dalio.

The thing is, Elon Musk is emotionally immature. He's extremely thin-skinned and narcissistic. He likes to take revenge. There's a difference between firing someone because it will help the project and doing it because you're angry and it will make you feel good.

Who is Ray Dalio?

The personality and behavior that you find repulsive is probably the most conducive to progress. I am not one of those (if I do say so myself). I don't like to step on other peoples' toes or piss people off. I value the happiness of certain other people over my own, mostly. I am unwilling to sacrifice certain things (family) for other goals that I might have.

These traits (some might say virtues) are limitations on what I can accomplish. People without these limitations are often perceived as assholes, but with the right combination of other traits/virtues, they can really do great things.

That's how I see it anyway. I'm not making excuses for myself, and I still intend to do something great, but I don't have expectations of changing the world or being the greatest.

I mostly disagree. Acting in a way that is optimal for the project doesn't require you to be narcissistic, thin-skinned, revengful, etc.

Empathy can be a hurdle in making the right decisions, for example firing a low performing employee. You could argue that someone who takes pleasure in the pain of others could be a better leader. Possibly. But first, I would still find them repulsive and second, I think you can be both decent and a good leader who makes the right decisions. Personally if I were in a leadership position I would try to "hack" my emotions and convince myself that e.g. firing someone who doesn't do a good job is a good thing overall.

I think about this all the time.

I love Miles Davis' music. Love it.

And by multiple accounts, Miles was probably a bad person.

Can I love his music while not loving the man? How do I reconcile that?

I still don't know.

I think people that become prominent, especially businesspeople, get accused of being bad people for the rest of their lives. Their lives are scrutinized, other prominent people that control newspapers have friction with them, they do something not too nice at some point and can never live it down. It is easy to call someone a shitty human being, but is he a better person than say, your neighbor down the street? Have you ever done or said anything that, if you were to become prominent tomorrow, people would call you a shitty person for? I think almost everyone on earth has.

Edison was an asshole too. And Franklin.

Examples of assholes abound, sure.

Einstein was, by all accounts I've seen, a pretty nice fellow. Being an asshole isn't a required characteristic.

Einstein's breakthroughs happened alone, in a tiny window of highly productive years in his twenties. The rest of his life contained little of note and he never needed to build a huge/excellent team to accomplish what he's famous for. The "asshole" aspects of famous business leaders occur because they need to drive enormous groups of people beyond what they thought they were capable of.

May I be as unsuccessful as Einstein someday.

Sub in Tony Hsieh, or Costco's CEO, if you prefer. Both are known for being particularly protective of their employees' well being.

>Einstein was, by all accounts I've seen, a pretty nice fellow.

Except to his wife.

If we're setting "never had a failed relationship" as the bar, virtually everyone's an asshole.

>And more importantly, how do we make more Elon Musks?

You take rich families from apartheid states that made their wealth of gems trade & slavery, get the kids excited about space, and give them a world-class education and a huge supply of slaves mining cobalt in africa.

Is this irony? Or are you serious?

Not him, but I seriously want to know how rich Elon Musk's family is. He never worked a day at a conventional job in his life - this is a huge luxury.

It is, but there's way over a million families in america with a net worth over $10 million.

Bezos is rich. He started a rocket company. Blue Origin has done nowhere near what spacex has done, and that difference isn't down to just throwing money at a problem.

Don't get me wrong, throwing money at the problem is important, but it's just one ingredient.

There are some rich people who have made a difference -- Bill Gates comes to mind as someone that put money and effort in. Chuck Feeney on the "throw money at a problem" side.

But for every Bill Gates there's a Larry Elison, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergy Brin, and dozens more that don't seem to do much.

When it comes to the next generation down, it's even rarer to find kids who are driven to make such a success.

If Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk can be trusted, he worked different jobs as ancillary worker doing things like selling fruits, cleaning grain silos or even ovens in a factory.

As student he is said to have hosted parties for students in a house he and a fellow student had rented to pay for the rent (same source).

Not trolling, but the second point casts doubt on it all, given that I have a hard time imagining Musk hosting parties, let alone getting people to pay for them. This is also pre-hair, pre-money Elon Musk we are talking about.

I won't be looking up the page in the book for you but here is a search result instead:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/09/elon-musk-ran-a-nightclub-ou...

No, I believe you, I am questioning the book itself. Either way, thanks for the link.

Absolutely no irony. That's how Elon Musk happened. If you want more Elon Musk that's how you can get them I guess.

Soon you'll have an army of geniuses building that cool space utopia for billionaires while the rest of us can stay in the dying world they left us. Our NeuraLink(tm) units will get us through the day, rewarding mining enough rare earth metals with dopamine hits and pain suppression! (That, that was irony. I hope it'll still be funny in 50 years).

Stop parroting debunked allegations.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/iivbk5/elon_m...

We should tell the kids mining cobalt in congo that Elon Musk's family wealth is in fact, not from an emerald mine and that Elon is a good guy after all!

I wonder why his family got out of South Africa as soon as the apartheid ended and hasn't got back since at least once tho.

I wonder if your family would've stayed

> And more importantly, how do we make more Elon Musks?

Cloning. Which he's probably already working on.

I think most people get into business to make money, but that he makes money because he needs it to accomplish a goal. Every decision he makes is to accomplish that goal. For most rich philanthropist types, they only come up with those goals after they make money. I think that plays a big role.

Also the guy is methodical about it. He starts with first principles. That also plays a big part.

And he takes risks. Not just risks with his money, but risks with everything he has going on. And calculated risks.

You don't make more people like him, you can't. People like that make themselves.

What has Elon Musk done for humanity? He got extremely wealthy from a payment processing website. Now he runs a company that makes luxury cars and another one that is or aims to be a global military arms logistical network [0].

If I had to pick amongst the exorbitantly wealth, without any serious research I'd say we need more people like Bill Gates.

0. https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-building-military-rocke...

Wait, did that "payment processing website" not do something for humanity already? Maybe you are a young person without an appreciation for how that "website" changed the world and enabled new worlds of human activity stifled by the previously available payment options.

https://fin.plaid.com/articles/the-past-present-and-future-o...

"A company that makes luxury cars" alright I'm going to ask you an honest question, 20 years ago would you have been on a website such as this, had it existed, talking about how we need electric cars? Or about how the US car industry is a cartel and we need new innovators to break into the industry?

Its easy to call them luxury cars now, in hindsight, now that Elon Musk started the tech revolution that brought us full electric cars and a disrupted auto industry.

That's not to point out that "a payment processing website" made the lives of millions of people easier, as will global wireless high speed internet and cheap, civilian access to space.

I think you have an axe to grind, and it is clouding your ability to think rationally. There's a rule on this site that you're supposed to add to the discussion. I kindly request that you follow it.

I guess you missed the decades before Bill went big on philanthropy and was much reviled as an anti-social workaholic, tyrannical CEO, and rabid monopolist.

And Elon Musk is not much of a philanthropist that I am aware of but is a guy who claims to care about the future of humanity so he builds luxury cars & rockets instead of doing things for humans alive today with difficult lives. Gates wasn’t always the Gates of today but whats good about Musk outside of the people who fantasize about living his life? The degree to which he’s any better for humanity than literally any other rich businessman seems dependent on buying into his marketing uncritically.

I think you're strawmaning Musk's popularity. People aren't fantasizing about living his life, they're adoring him for building the future that a lot of people want to live to see. Honestly, philanthropy should not be the main concern of billionaires. They should put their money and expertise to work running and funding businesses that have a direct impact on people's lives. Throwing money at problems is an incredibly inefficient and wasteful way to solve them since it more often than not gets vacuumed up by intermediaries and managerial bloat. If you really want to fix something you need to do the work yourself. Gates is actually quite good at this because he's very hands on, he personally researches (as in actually learns the science behind things) and visits the companies and orgs that he donates to. Guess what, that's also Musk's approach. The only difference is that Gates is retired with little interest in starting new companies, Musk is still young enough that he's in the thick of it managing his existing companies and occasionally starting a new one. That's what people with the means to should be doing, rolling up their sleeves and grappling with the problems themselves not throwing bags of money over a wall and hoping it lands on someone competent.

This is such a bizarre take on Elon.

The man has no wealth outside the companies he has built. There’s no cash just sitting in an account that he’s withholding from the poor cowering masses.

He’s put every penny of his net worth into building companies which he believes will tremendously benefit humanity. From sustainable personal transportation, to clean energy, to space exploration, to human augmentation.

If you think other things would be good for humanity, I encourage you to devote every waking hour of your life to pushing technological progress in those areas which you feel would be beneficial.

If he never created SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, Neurolink, and just called it quits after PayPal he would have $180 million, let’s say he donates $160mm and funds the Red Cross for ~2 weeks. How is this better?

In the meantime he’s parlayed $180mm into over $150 billion of value by significantly advancing technological progress in several major areas of global human concern.

Fully agree and I think it is important to point out, that while he created $150 billion of value for himself, at the same time he created even more value for a lot of people, like any Tesla shareholder. Most of the value of Tesla is not owned by Elon, but by shareholders, often holding only small amount of stock and gaining directly.

Also, of course those companies pay salaries and other companies. A lot of wealth was created for society.

Not to mention the beneficial effects of the operations. Teslas have started as luxury cars, but they have clearly paved the way for electric cars for everyone. And while electric cars by themselves won't save the climate, without them, we could not save the climate.

Very soon a lot of people are going to enjoy fast internet across the globe, that is a very tangible benefit for every single customer and a lot of economic growth will be enabled by that, especially in countries which are currently lacking communications infrastructure.

You’re absolutely right, it’s not turning $180mm into $150 billion, it’s turning $180mm into $1 trillion of total value created, most of it not for himself.