SpaceX and Tesla are both the type of company that needed a lot of money and a leader who has a "crazy" vision and is single minded about it. That is what Elon is (rich, "crazy" and single minded), thats why they were successful. They wouldn't have happened without that.

Twitter didn't need either money or a crazy single minded leader...

(Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)

This is true. Elon swings wildly in the public image from genius to idiot and from superhero to supervillain.

Very few opinions otherwise.

Polarized as anything else.

Musk is doing his best to polarize people against him all on his own.

His public image is a direct result of his actions. Stuff like blazing a blunt in a podcast was legit funny, him calling a rescue diver a pedo was fucked up, but nowadays he's showing open disdain for democracy and its freedoms - he's making a clownshow out of "freedom of speech" (just try tweeting a substack link), openly shitting on the freedom of press (by not having media teams at all, banning critical media like Tesla did in Germany a few months ago, or by firing Twitter's PR team and replacing it by a poo-emoji autoreply) and personally had a bunch of high-profile fascists unblocked while antifascist accounts got the boot on the suggestion of people like "Catturd" or Andy Ngo. Not to mention his various run-ins with the law such as him ignoring direct SEC orders (the one where he was supposed to have someone else sign-off on tweets with stock market impact) or the shady stuff surrounding the German Tesla factory.

He could have stayed in the public image selling expensive cars with weirdly sexual naming schemes (S-3-X-Y) and shooting rockets into orbit... but no, that amount of attention wasn't enough for him. It's all a direct result of his own actions.

Good points. I also wouldn’t characterize his actions at Twitter thus far as being “single minded.” Twitter is personal to him, and he can’t keep his ego from getting in the way of making rational business decisions.

> (Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)

funny that you need to put a "space man still bad" disclaimer in a neutral comment to not get buried by the hive mind

if true, i wonder, does spacex and tesla still need such a leader nowadays?

No, certainly not Tesla, and I think the over investment in self driving cars is a result of him not stepping back soon enough.

SpaceX is run incredible well by Gwynne Shotwell, she is responsible for the success of the Falcon launch business and Starlink. Without Elons mad visions and relentless need to keep moving Starship would not be happening, so maybe he is still important for that.

Twitter needed constant input from government money to run disinfo campaigns. Dropping $44 billion on it and using it to antagonize the main client that kept the whole company afloat was a bad idea. Now Elon is panicking because those $44 billions were dropped on a hole.

Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.

>SpaceX and Tesla work despite musk and not because of him

Statistically it's pretty much impossible for this to be true.

You're claiming that Elon effectively hit the business lottery twice, despite his success being less likely than average vs other leaders.

If anyone actually believes this, I have a poker game I'd love to invite you to...

Adding a large inheritance to your hand skews the odds somewhat...

Also, odds are not all of destiny. Some crappy things keep winning despite those odds.

>a large inheritance

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes."

This lie is very trendy, but YSK that Elon Musk did not receive a large inheritance.

Until the age of 16 he was raised middle class supported by an Engineer salary, and then years later his father invested (ie not an "inheritance") $28k out of a $200k Zip2 round.

If that size of 'large inheritance' really made such an enormous difference, then 50% of HN would be billionaires by now!

Clearly there must be more going on in Elon's case.

Thanks for the numbers.

While it's definitely going to skew the odds, and by a lot, the sparsity of similar successful startups in those areas before him suggests that neither SpaceX nor Telsa were the kind of things that you can build with what he had from combined inheritance and PayPal cash-out.

That said, I don't think there was much from those mines: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

Thanks for the link.

Yes -- randomness is a real thing in the universe. Elon reminds me of a "loose aggressive" poker player. They bet and raise and bluff a lot, and they can acquire massive chip stacks if they get lucky.

I have a theory that Musk has a quality that enables him to assemble an exceptional team of people who are capable of managing him. This means he's very capable when it comes to starting and growing companies, and those companies need him less as time goes on.

It also means that if he drops into a company and takes over it'll be with a team who can't manage him, and it'll be a bit of a slow motion train wreck.

I don't think there's enough evidence to show if I'm right yet though.

I think quite the opposite.

I’ve worked for rich and successful people. Usually on their subsequent projects. My conclusion has been that the super rich and successful often don’t understand why or how they got that way, and they struggle to replicate their success. They often don’t try a similar kind of thing subsequently either, but follow a vision quest borne of their riches.

I do think Elon set a crazy high product bar at SpaceX and Tesla and a team of people achieved it. That’s commendable. But, the stories of his bad management behavior even in those places is well documented.

He’s doing the hero thing at Twitter, and it turns out… he’s neither a principled person, nor can he lead a revenue-first transformation.

What’s the total pool of leaders? Seems a bit premature to write this off as statistically impossible without understanding the number of attempts.

Also you’re not figuring in the odds that success went to his head.

More than twice. PayPal too.

Musk got booted from PayPal, apparently for trying to do things that would screw it up. Seems a bit full-circle-ish.

You shouldn't be downvoted, Elon's history with PayPal has been written about and verified many times. He smooth-talked his way in, started acting erratically, and got kicked out, but not before securing an enormous amount of money.

It's not that hard for a good investor.

Paul Graham, the person whose tweet started this thread (and also the founder of the site you're posting on, BTW) hit the business lottery with Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, DropBox, Coinbase, Substack, Instacart, DoorDash, and many smaller or enterprise-focused companies. He just doesn't put his name on companies he funds as "founder", even though in some cases (eg. Reddit) he actually did come up with the idea for the company.

Elon Musk has a habit of finding a good business idea, investing in people who are already working on it, and then taking over the company from them.

I wonder if his over companies had a collective sigh of relief when he bought twitter knowing his attention would be on his new toy.

Eventually he’ll get tired of losing money and hand over the reins and/or go bankrupt. Then someone smarter than him will move Twitter back towards its previous strategy, which was not perfect but at least made it a stable and workable place to have conversations. Then he can go back to Tesla and force them to build something even dumber than the Cybertruck.

But they haven't built any cybertrucks

that doesn't mean he can't force them to build something dumber.

Cybertruck looks like it will be a great off-road truck and it took lots of manufacturing innovation to make it so cheap.

I think people underestimate the degree to which people change with age, generally, and the really specific ways that people with WAY too much money and power change.

He’s different person now. He’s always been fundamentally a bullshit artist but there were forces keeping that in check. That mattered.

so which way are you predicting he is going to go? personally, i cannot see him getting MORE demented. oh well, perhaps i can.

in 20 years time, i look forward to see a remake of citizen kane featuring musk. trouble is, no obvious orson welles on the horizon.

Perhaps the presence of Musk keeps protects the despite-Musk people at SpaceX and Tesla. I generally am not a huge fan of middle management so I can respect the terror.

I've never really paid much attention to him, frankly. I was aware of SpaceX and Tesla. I was impressed watching the SpaceX launch over the pandemic. But I'm going to be quite clear about one thing: I had been considering a Tesla after recently moving to a place that has a lot of them and that also has a lot of charging infrastructure. But after seeing Musk's management of Twitter and finding out some of the things going on a Tesla regarding safety that sound like they are similar to Musk's management of Twitter, I will never, ever buy a Tesla or anything I find out Musk is involved with. That's just how it is. I don't see him or his stupid Twitter antics providing any value to me whatsoever.

There are stories about how SpaceX and Tesla have a team of people working around the clock to manage Elon. They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence. This would involve placing people in the office to act like he wants them to, instructing people to react in certain ways, and convincing him that he came up with the ideas these companies end up implementing.

At first I thought this was just a silly internet meme hating on Musk, but now that he reigns over Twitter without a Musk-management team in place, I'm starting to think there may be some truth to that.

>They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence.

This "explanation" doesn't pass the smell test, because the chronology of cause-and-effect is inconsistent.

Elon's companies get successful, which makes him famous... which explains how his companies were successful before he got famous?

https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/origin-stories/elon-musk is an essential read about Musk's first company Zip2, whose $307 million payday in 1999 set off his ability to be one of the first funders (and only retroactively a founder) of X.com which would become Paypal.

His work at Zip2 was incredibly consistent with his pattern: a person with visionary ideas, an effective prototyper, an incredible ability to sell with smoke and mirrors... but only successful in business to the extent his companies are protected from him:

> ...in early 1996 the firm Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company, on the condition that Musk hand over most of his shares and cede operational control to a seasoned tech executive named Rich Sorkin. Musk was demoted to Chief Technology Officer, and not surprisingly, he hated to see someone else run his own business. But he needed the money to take Zip2 to the next level, so he took the deal.

> The new programmers found that they needed to rewrite most of the software, to make it more efficient. Musk’s DIY approach to coding didn’t include chunking, so he inadvertently created a “hairball”: a tangled mess of code that’s nearly impossible to unravel if anything goes wrong.

> Often he would re-write his programmers’ code after they left work at the end of the day, without telling them of the changes. He was also prone to micro-managing and rudely criticizing his team. Needless to say, they found him difficult to work with.

But Zip2 became vital to the online transition for traditional newspapers and other media. Right place, right time, Musk being actively managed from the very beginning. But he's incapable of recognizing now that he needs that support system.

He also has a nose for identifying business ideas where there's an actual market, and for sniffing out talent that's already working on those problems effectively.

Musk didn't found PayPal - he founded X.com, a competitor of Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin), and then Peter Thiel convinced him to merge to reduce competition in the space. His "contributions" to PayPal post-merger were largely limited to trying to convince them to switch from Linux to Windows servers, and bad ideas about software architecture. You can read about this in Levchin's entry in "Founders at Work" [1]

Musk didn't found Tesla. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did. Musk came in as one of the first investors and then forced the founders out, then got his role rewritten into a "founder" title with a lawsuit.

Musk did found SpaceX. However, his role was basically that of a talent scout. Early hires like Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller were critical, and he basically poached them from Boeing & TRW.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...

There are many who believe that Paypal was a success in spite of Musk and not because of him, and that was his only pre-fame company.

He also founded Zip2, although if you're going "Huh? What's that?" it kinda proves the point.

He was never a head of any of his companies.

Your smell test also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.

So while I agree there's likely not a walking Elon cleanup crew, the popularity of Elon matches a random momentum that coalesces in American capitalism.

>He was never a head of any of his companies.

I'll be sure to remind people of this (and cite this comment) whenever anyone criticizes Elon Musk for something Tesla/SpaceX does. ;)

Just semantics but I am curious: what business titles do you consider "head" titles?

>also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.

Not really. To explain multiple enormous successes merely by random chance (and what's worse, claiming his odds are lower than average, ie "in spite of him") so vanishingly unlikely that it's a statistical impossibility.

Well, once you’ve had that first big success, the subsequent ones become much more likely; you now have access to networks of people and money, a measure of notoriety, and chunk of cash that allows you to take numerous risks that others would not.

He started none of those companies.

I asked about head-ing, not start-ing. What corporate titles does someone need to "head" a company?

Elon founded SpaceX. That fact is totally uncontroversial, even among critics.

There are stories about short sellers having teams who constantly post on social media and message boards negative stories about Elon Musk in hopes that it will make their investments in undermining the companies associated with him pay off. But hey, it must be true, as all stories about controversial people are when it reinforces one's need to see that person in a certain light for bias confirmation.

There is no possible way to verify the story unless they come out and admit it and publish reams of evidence along with it.

So it's always going to be given that this fact is true, then that story is more likely to be true. Or given that this one thing is more likely to be true, then that story is more likely to be true.

Saying something is true/false based on news stories is really silly since you can almost never verify the truth of that story. Always going to be more/less likely given this/that.

See any links?

This is in “I want to believe” territory for people that don’t like Musk. You, me and everyone in this thread knows this but Musk doesn’t?

wow, if this is true, then elon seems to be a rowdy and greatest panothi to be ever lived on the Earth.

How could Elon be unaware this is going on, and not let go of all of these people? Or is this how he wants to engage with his companies? The latter certainly is not a far-fetched idea, a decent proportion of leaders have an ego.

I don't have any specific insight into Elon's posse, but isn't the point of surrounding yourself with yes men to manage your perception of reality?

Over the past couple of months, I have developed a slightly generous take on twitter and Elon:

- Being forced into buying twitter has pushed the company / him into absolute survival mode

- Instinctive paranoia kicks in when you are in that mode to keep you on your toes

- When you have seen outsized success and have a sycophant army, but no deep friendship, the paranoia brings in a me against the world mindset

- All the people you alienate as a result of your paranoid action gang up, further affirming your paranoia.

- The vicious cycle continues

This lens explains most of his actions and has softened my view of Elon as a CEO trying his very best to keep the company afloat.

Paranoia or not, there is absolutely no justification for amplifying people like Kanye "I see good things about Hitler" West.

Absolutely not. It's just a lens that I found recently and thought it was interesting enough to share in this context. Not trying to justify or soften the actions or consequences.

I have always thought he considered twitter as UI for Starlink. Once the network is pervasive subscribe to twitter and your on the Starlink network and all it services. The way the purchase happened I think looks like one realized the timing wasn't right for the V2 satellites and tried to manage the cashflow.

That's a super interesting take.

Some would say slightly naive take, really.

- He wasn't forced into buying Twitter. He said he would, signed a contract that said he would, collected the money and said he would, then when attempting to back down while lying about just as well as a middle schooler justifying why he hasn't done his homework, was made to hold to his contract.

- He put himself in that situation.

- His sycophant army is his own doing. He has never, ever tolerated dissent, neither in his companies or in public. See: calling people pedophiles when told a sub is a shit idea, or his behavior known throughout Tesla, SpaceX and others. When the only way to stay in his companies is to be a yes man, don't be surprised when all you have are bootlickers.

- It's not as a result of paranoid action, it's as a result of Musk being a downright cunt.

This lens fails to see that Musk is doing so for a single reason: for the first time in his life of a billionaire, he's being held accountable and can't weasel his way out of trouble or into a cofounder position. Ain't life a bitch.