The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration. I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard.
I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.
I mean he's clearly doing something right. But the people at the top are most definitely not staying around.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executives-who-report-...
I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)
Give someone a massive retention bonus (in this case structured as an RSU) to get them to stay doesn't seem like unique genius to me
Going to Tesla a few years ago was a hard choice, they paid below market (substantially) but offered pretty generous stock grants.
The stock hadn't really appreciated in-line with the companies growth because of the enormous risk of the Model 3 project. This represented massive risk overhang that until cleared didn't allow the stock to really take off.
2020 (over?) corrected for that however so now the employees that have put in the years are sitting on massive unrealized gains.
He has retained (and attracted away from places like Apple) really high quality talent for over a decade.
You are saying Elon hired a bunch of dumb people to be executives for his companies.
Not sure that's what you want to imply.
Ok, so by that very definition, what does that make Elon Musk as a Chief EXECUTIVE Officer...
I’m still a fan because he seems about 90% right on his opinions and he’s doing amazing work.
However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.
If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad?
I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.
But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.
For a single person, this is still a significant contribution (if we presume that Tesla would not have survivied without him), which just happened to also make him wealthy.
Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.
In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)
The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.
There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.
The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).
It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.
I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.
I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.
Edit: speaking of EVs:
I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.
I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.
No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.
I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.
Edit: Just kind of seems in contradiction to the previous stories of him where it focused on his intelligence/de facto technocratic authority to save the world. It wasn't so much his courage, but his moral rectitude combined with capital resources -- "he is going to save the world! Take us to mars!"
Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly. Would they have been willing to, considering it almost certainly involves failing in explosive ways multiple times? That may be a risk they aren't willing to take.
McDonnell Douglas is part of Boeing and (before they were part of Boeing) did the DC-X prototype.
One failure ended the program, but it was transfered from McDonnell to NASA at that point I think and funding was shifted towards the reusable VentureStar. But it did demonstrate reuse and went through a partial failure of a hydrogen explosion and recovery:
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_McDonnell_Douglas_DC-...
Which, if Musk has value, is where it comes in.
That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.
The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.
This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.
Even if you say that someone like him simply enjoys work, it seems clear that he's often working an uncomfortable amount, in order to achieve his two stated objectives, which at least in his perspective are altruistic (and are objectively not the best ways for him to get richer.)
I say this while having an appreciation for the existence of Tesla and SpaceX, but let's not pretend he supresses unionisation at his factories because he cares too much.
They are working on interesting problems though, far more interesting to me than most companies (including Tesla)
I'd say it's the most important company on the planet seeing as it's the only one that's truly carving a path for us to one day become a spacefaring civilization and doing so at a seemingly 10x faster pace than competitors
The average stellar density around our sun is about 0.004 per cubic light year, so definitely don't get your hopes up on some Star Trek scenario for the next few hundred years at least.
What is SpaceX's value again? P.S. Musk himself admits that SpaceX wouldn't be a thing if it hadn't been saved by a phone call from NASA. You know, the government, the same entity that Musk worshipers seem to dismiss as the lesser party when it comes to ingenuity and forward-progression.
Whether it was saved by a phone call from NASA doesn't detract from its merits
I believe you, but when I tell other people that they don't believe me. Do you have something I can show them.
Reusable rockets are about satellites and maybe the space station. But until we see something use the cheap launches to improve life on earth, it's meaningless.
That said, I'd invest in SpaceX for the Starlink potential if it was public.
Because if all we're going to do is launch a few probes every few years, than the cost of the launches is a minor improvement.
But the main point is the side comment: I’m having fun coding whenever I want to, but I strictly do non-payed hobby projects, as I don’t want to get into commitments ever again.
One of the only (if not the only) state where that happens.
The main reason not to own in CA is the insane purchase price, not the taxes.
Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that.
Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.
He can be both smart and evil. It happens often (not all the time, but most of the time).
As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.
I work under the default assumption that most CEOs of successful companies, when taking actions on their company's behalf, are sociopathic assholes.
It's certainly true that Tesla wouldn't have been able to raise as much money from equities markets if Elon had been quieter.
Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them.
I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?
+1 agreed on the rest. It's an interesting thought problem. Capital was less formal during the late 19th century monopoly era in the US, but it makes me wonder if there were schemes where Morgan or Rockefeller publicly circulated market moves.