How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
He gave Elon the ideas, initial team, govt connections, contracts, etc.. Elon was the company jester.
Rocket landing work was taken from the DC-X
Yes thats why you hire people...to not do all the work. Im pretty sure Elon is aware of this.
A decent amount of people on this site are absurd and detached from reality.
Their rejection of his idea is what inspired the pivot to build rockets instead.
One of the most valuable parts of Musk is his personal brand. He can raise money and hire talent in large part because he's a household name. Everything he does, from naming his child X Æ A-12 to producing a house track, is to proliferate the public perception that he is an eccentric genius, a modern-day polymath like the Da Vincis and Franklins of old.
It may not seem like "real" work, but if Elon Musk and I both started different companies on the same day, who do you think is going to attract funding and top talent more quickly?
Musk can be great when he does his homework and first principles analysis. It is obvious he hasn't done it here.
Having advertisers take a huge step back because they seek minimal uncertainty and you spend the entire week maximizing uncertainty is bad (& shows incompetence).
Having advertisers drop campaigns literally in the middle of the call to sell next year's baseline because you aren't even close to prepared for the questions is deeply arrogant incompetence [0].
Threatening "thermonuclear name and shame" on your advertisers [1] — your primary customers — is unnecessarily showing the entire world that you've lost it.
Same goes for starting the week with the now-infamous claim that "a bunch of activists" are chasing away the revenue (would Musk accept that kind of excuse from any exec reporting to him?)[2], then having it explained WHY they are actually pausing by one of the people in the meeting [3], then blocking the guy you just spoke with the day before...
I cannot begin to see how any of this is remotely good for Musk's brand. He's showing the world in real-time that he's in over his head, has no idea what is the business model and the key elements, and just thrashing about blaming everyone else, when literally he is entirely to blame for the chaos.
Oh, and I've yet to read the other HN Pg1 headline [5] that Musk/Twitter is already asking some of the people it fired yesterday to return!
If you can actually explain how any of this is remotely good for Musk, Twitter, or anyone, I'd be interested to hear it... Because it looks like he's trying really hard to sink Twitter faster than Digg sunk. (There's actually a good argument that his initial intent was to sink Twitter when he first made the comment and offer, to maximize uncertainty and tank their '23 sales, but then he was forced to buy it b/c he was too foolish to even have a proper excape clause in the contract, and here we are)
[0] https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696157794242560
[1] https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1588718759098851328
[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880
[3] https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921
I just do not see how any of his actions actually help enhance that even with even an idealized version of such a customer, and does not alienate even that customer.
How does it establish any credibility with anyone to 1) be so unprepared for a critical advertiser's (your customers) presentation that customers literally cut their spend during the meeting; 2) publicly make excuses trying to blame for your failures on some "activist groups" who actually had no influence on advertisers' (your customers) decision to cut spending; 3) destroying verification and turning it into a anyone-can-pay-$8-to-say-they-are-anyone-and-get-greater-reach; 4) come into a $44B deal making a lot of noise and failing to articulate a plan, any plan that gets anyone on board?; etc., etc., etc.
I wish Elon all the success in the world, but he is seriously flailing here, and creating confidence in no one. I expect that he has a good chance of sorting it out once he understands the issues, but he's clearly done no homework up front, so is figuring it out in real time.
I do not see how this helps him, even with his ideal customer. Of course, as usual his comments have plenty of fanbois claiming whatever he does must be 4-D Chess, but seriously, how does this much public flailing, thrashing, and excuses give anyone confidence?
Can you point to any specific action that would actually give such a customer more confidence? From what I've read, the RW people are also really pissed at him because they expected to be able to rush right in and raise hell, and that's not yet happening either...
It seems safe to say that you need to dovetail at least dozens of people to have successful rocket launching, well, startup?
But Mike probably was #1 reason for SpaceX success.
You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge. 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other.
Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256 people think you got two in a row correct. You send 128 of them one prediction, etc. etc. etc.
When you're down to 1 person, maybe they'll pay you for the next prediction.
A track record of success is not sufficient evidence, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades and especially when even the first random success (selling Zip2 to an over-eager AltaVista) paid off so well.
Boring company is also not yet a failure, and has recently built several tunnels. Neuralink is an early stage research company and is still humming along. It may fail some day, but it certainly hasn't failed yet. As for Hyperloop, he specifically said he wasn't going to build it, and several companies are still working on it, including in China:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-maglev-vactrain-hyperloo...
None of these things are "failures". They may become failures one day. It'd be crazy if some of them didn't. But you can't count a research project as a failure just because it doesn't have a product yet.
None of those companies have any real success to show for themselves. They haven’t met the hype that Musk has put on them or shown any real progress in reaching that hype.
I can at least understand you saying it might be too early on something like Neuralink, but I don’t understand calling Solar City a success. Musk had to bail it out with his other company in a deal shady enough to trigger lawsuits.
Throwing money at people and saying “I want these charts to be customizable” vs “let’s land a rocket booster, it’s ok if a few blow up, we can test it live” will get VERY different levels of passion/expertise
Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing. He has created a cult of personality, claimed his efforts are for the good of humanity (yet to be seen, especially with the way he treats his labor force, i.e. horribly). It's not a shock that Tesla stock is a _meme stock_. It is because of Elon's marketing.
Let's not even get into his market manipulation.
He has obviously been highly successful at marketing. But his "real success" has been in delivering products like useful electric cars and reusable rockets that didn't previously exist. His marketing skills help with that, but all the marketing in the world isn't going to sell a product that doesn't exist (except in crypto).
Undeniably Elon’s success is his tremendous wealth, the basis of which are two very valuable companies that the cofounded and has as CEO marketed brilliantly, if not always honestly.
He obviously knows a lot about what people to work with.
It is highly unlikely he knows how to build or design almost anything Spacex or Tesla makes. He knows a lot about everything they make of course, and can get more detailed briefings and information on it that anyone, but he didn’t make it.
So the wealth and the successful companies are his success sure, but his greatest personal accomplishments are obviously his marketing skills.
These were very difficult industries, industries that were extremely contrarian to bet on when he did. Making the financial bet alone would be a great accomplishment for any normal person. Peter Thiel is a famous investor for making far less contrarian and far less successful bets without operating anything except Paypal.
Musk's bets were far more concentrated, and he chose the personnel, operated the companies, made the strategic decisions, and yes, also marketed them brilliantly. But he only got to flex those marketing muscles because he spent a decade assembling, managing, and financing the teams that built the product in the first place.
Perhaps it’s just that his wealth got the better of him.
But yes, there's indeed the thousand of engineers and technicians doing the work. He even credits them for making his dream possible!
I don't know why people think he's not doing the work. Have they actually read interviews and books? The books I read does not paint him in a very flattering light people-wise.
It's also possible to be simultaneously an egoistic asshole, genius, having actual skills, being a money man and visionary leader, People act as if a person who's a jackass can't have positive traits or vice versa.
That's even more damning for his detractors since they could have been doing the same but instead sneer from the sidelines.
Which again is FINE. Personally, I just wanna do cool stuff and have a great work/life balance. I don’t want to (and don’t have the expertise to) land a rocket booster.
I guess… not everyone’s problem domains are interesting enough to lure a team like space-x etc. again, I don’t like him, but credit to Elon for at least trying to solve these tough problems. Just admit FSD isn’t a year away!
Throw in that your odds get better the more you’re successful, and it’s classic survivorship bias.
Companies don’t have to be profitable to be successful. A charismatic leader + lofty goals (FSD, rockets, flame throwers) and you’ll get a ton of money even if you never turn a profit.
Let’s not forget the tunnels I’m Vegas btw. They aren’t all winners.
That does not hold for Twitter. There is no magic clump of overqualified, underutilized people to tap into without throwing LOTS of money around. On top of that, Twitter mostly isn't that interesting.
At the moment there is a magic clump of such people, large language model experts from big tech who have left because they got sick of not being able to apply the technology.
They are currently floating around in various startups, but we are entering a tough market for VC funding. Twitter can offer hardware, data and a culture of shipping.
is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences?
Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
There are lots of people that have those things and are still not a tiny fraction as successful. Most people could be given all of those things and they'd quickly waste them all in a spectacular fashion. Often the people that are the loudest on this issue don't even have their own absolutely trivial finances in order.
Doing that with this level of success in these domains is extremely rare and even more important. In most cases, the investors are far more important than the workers.
To me it seems, his success comes from being an engineer himself and wanting to get shit done and kick people until shit gets done in a working way. And yes that includes throwing money at smart engineers, but to do this, you have to be smart and have domain knowledge to do so.
The problem started, when he got too much success and lost touch with the ground of reality.
The twitter chat logs are quite interesting.
https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#3
In general they show that it was indeed a bit more than a high idea, to which it was reduced around many places.
Still, a funny quote from Elon:
"Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems."
I think he means it. But of course it is BS, when he is in fact the boss of so many people and making them burn out for productivity in various ways.
You know who runs the website we're on, right?
I’d actually argue he was the darling of the tech world for a while and his awful personality has eroded that over the last handful of years.
1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market or government sources to fund development;
3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more risk-conscious competitors.
In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's also terrible at complex challenges, where the path isn't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick the process, or where cutting corners is going to be disfavored by the market or by regulators.
Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder), but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity, which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames, whatever, and with Musk catering to his followers (who he seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So unless he's willing to act more like a normal social media mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the personality volume on public communications, and suck up to the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I don't expect Twitter to get more successful.
This meme is on fire but I did not expect it here on HN where people can understand what he is talking about. There are many videos like this [1] and interviews (e.g. with Munro regarding Tesla) where the guy shows deep technical knowledge.
Besides, try making a startup throwing money and smart engineers. Just money will not even get you the really good ones. People who have a choice don't work for morons.
I mean, sure, there's plenty to hate (there was much more to hate about say Columbus, Gandhi or Ford), but if we were dismissing achievements of people who give others good reasons to hate them we wouldn't have calculus.
Let's try to let people stand out without gaslighting them if they are doing some great things. There are many people who smell real bad, are a*holes, have really weird opinions on some topics and were necessary for us to be able to write these comments here.
You can talk about multiple dimensions of these people, I'm trying to show something between "did something worthy" and "was really not a great guy" axes, and you seem to have a problem that they are not even close on "historical figure" axis, I'm guessing. Their hair could also be way different.
There are many good things one might say about Musk, but don't pretend there aren't any bad things.
I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work.
Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like the media/everyday people hate him for no reason is just dishonest.