I think a large part of the problem is that a lot of people seem to have trouble consolidating that someone can have both positive and negative qualities at the same time.

People are disconcerted by the fact that Musk is just a human like them who happens to wield huge resources. They prefer to think of the elite class as their betters, a separate category, hence the convention for the “ruling class” to have decorum, present curated image, and so on.

He doesn't meet the standards of behavior of any class that I would associate with.

It is unfortunate that the left doesn't want to talk to anyone any more. However, IRL I bet you would be bowing and shaking his hand if you had the op.

Hilarious comment, I would be glad to reach my hand out so I can squeeze his baby flesh.

While I think that's at play, I also think it's entirely fair to hold those with more power to higher standards.

Standards are set by those with power. A bit of a tautology.

It is entirely fair to do so. And I'm not a huge fan of a lot of things Elon has written on Twitter. I don't really care about him buying it too much, but that's at least partially because I don't use it and never did.

Anyway, what really gets me is people denying that Elon has some real chops when it comes to engineering and business management.

A lot of people even take it one step further and pretend like Tesla isn't a capable EV producer, because Elon once wrote something on twitter that upset them.

The problem there isn't that they're upset with Elon, that's totally fine, he frequently earns that. But being unable to recognize that he had also done some good work that is completely unrelated to those silly remarks on twitter, that is the problem.

This phenomenon should not be confused with criticizing actual flaws in any work Elon has done, which is of course great, but that's very often not what's happening in "discussions" about his companies.

> with all his flaws removed

Most CEOs do not spend $44 billion USD to broadcast their most abhorrent thoughts to the world. Everyone is flawed, but nobody likes a loud boor.

True, but they _do_ broadcast their abhorrent thoughts to the world -- its just more subtle, filtered, and through different channels. Its the whole reason people are warned to never meet their heroes -- because they are usually assholes outside of whatever persona they have crafted for themselves publicly. Musk just doesn't care about crafting that persona in the first place.

Look at sports, where even at the "mere" multi-million dollar level, people get changed. The music industry and Hollywood are also famous for people being revealed to be mere human.

its his money.

Some of it is his money. Some was borrowed.

The lenders knew what he meant to do.

Literally just responding to this:

> its his money.

But that some of the money is borrowed can't mean that he can't say the things he does, especially when the lenders knew who he was to begin with.

I am not saying he can't say whatever he wants. My initial response was to the notion that any other person as CEO of SpaceX (or Tesla) would also be flawed. Which, obviously. But it is simply not the case that most CEOs are as loud about broadcasting their whims to the world.

Tesla is 12th largest public company by market cap, between Broadcom and Novo Nordisk. Those companies have CEOs, but those CEOs do not habitually make controversial statements on Internet fora. It is possible for a person to be flawed, but not to spend effort ensuring wide distribution of those flaws.

> Most CEOs do not spend $44 billion USD to broadcast their most abhorrent thoughts to the world

Zero CEOs do that.

I assumed that Musk wanted Twitter so he could have a built-out userbase for his everything-app idea, not because he wanted to have a particularly large bullhorn.

> think the alternative is someone just like him but with all his flaws removed

Or just some other person, successful or not.

It's far from a dichotomy. There are plenty of successful companies and CEOs out there.

"In a fast-moving and competitive satellite communication industry, we, who cannot move nearly as fast and are therefore no longer competitive, hope that this will somehow make us look like we're still relevant."

OK, that's a very cynical take. But Starlink is revolutionizing the business, and historically, merging is what the dinosaur companies often do after the revolution hits. Think of the mergers between Unix workstation vendors as the PC was revolutionizing computing.

Merging lets you get bigger. But in a revolutionary environment, faster wins, bigger doesn't. Merging is therefore a useless response. (In fact, it's worse than useless, because it slows you down.)

Yes, now they both get to begin an 18 month "Synergy Period" where both companies focus on navel-gazing to instead of the clients who are cancelling contracts and buying starlink.

Revolutions are much easier to spot afterwards. Maybe Starlink will be a revolution, but maybe more and more people will get better wired access (so new subscriptions will slow). I don't think it's that evident now how it will go overall.

What alternative would you propose to merging? If the market re-stabilizes in a different position merging could be successful. If a revolution happens, it will probably not, but still better than doing nothing.

> What alternative would you propose to merging? If the market re-stabilizes in a different position merging could be successful. If a revolution happens, it will probably not, but still better than doing nothing.

Copying. Copying the revolutionary competitor(s). Just don't have qualms. Start small to see that you can do it, then raise all the capital you need to go big.

I'm dead serious. When an innovator/disruptor comes along, if you the reigning champ does not out-innovate them quick, then the reigning champ will have to hand their crown to the newcomer. It's really hard for established players to out-innovate up-and-coming competitors because often the established player wants to milk their current customers, but to out-innovate the newbies requires lowering prices, which requires lowering costs, which requires lowering revenue (and earnings) in the short term in order to enable a brighter future. Reducing revenue and earnings on purpose is culturally really hard for established companies to do.

There are companies that have done this well at times. I'm thinking of Microsoft. It can be done.

Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink are all revolutions currently underway. Neuralink is a potential revolution that's currently hard to spot.

> What alternative would you propose to merging?

I don't know.

> but still better than doing nothing.

Maybe not. Maybe it takes away management attention from figuring out how to actually be competitive in the new environment.

"We have to do something; this is something; therefore we have to do this" is rarely the right thing to do. It's often just a mask for "we don't know what to do".

On the other hand, "we can't figure out what to do, but we're dead if we don't do something, so we're going to do something and hope that it randomly turns out to be useful" may have a higher expectation value than doing nothing.

I view these mergers as the executives cashing out of their failing company.

With Tesla the comparison wasn’t nobody it was the original founders continuing to operate the company. Which may have been less successful, but the first Roadster was delivered in February 2008 while he became CEO in 2008. So the EV revolution would have almost certainly started with or without him.

SpaceX was a high risk venture that paid off, props.