The man has successfully ensured he was a major player in e-commerce, batteries, spaceflight, and the auto industry. He’s an order of magnitude richer than he started and has gone from a nobody to exerting significant influence on a global level.
You will not find many peers that are that successful even among the rich. What is your definition of being good at business?
And who else bought into and became the face of those industries right before they blew up? It’s just dumb luck he happened to invest in those 4 companies right? He had no clue or insight and him and randomly just happened to buy some of the most influential companies of the modern era before anyone had a clue.
I swear to God with your people. If you didn’t invent it then you had nothing to do with it 🤦♀️.
Name 5 people who have been more successful in the modern era in gaining money and influence through capitalism. Feel free to pick from any of the billionaires who have had all those advantages. You can’t because as much as you hate him, he’s objectively more successful than his peers.
Are you serious? Does anything you’re seeing in the world today indicate that there is some kind of meritocracy in place?
Enron was super successful - they were seen as the smartest guys in the room. I don’t even have the time to list the number of major financial companies that have bankrupted themselves after decades of profits. Then there’s companies like Theranos.
But it’s not even really about people who are stupid, con artists, or both getting into power. It’s probability.
If you were to flip a fair coin ten times and it came up heads every time, you’d think you were pretty lucky (or that I was losing about it being a fair coin). However, the chance of that happening just at random is about 1/1000. If everyone in your town were to do the experiment, many people would throw ten heads in a row, depending on the size of your town. If we do it at the state or country level, some people will get 25 or more heads in a row. It doesn’t mean they’re luckier or better at coin flipping.
So what do we see in the case of Elon? First, he started out with table stakes. That’s rare enough. Then he got involved with a dot-com at the exact same time that everyone was doing that. Like with the coin flips, most of them failed and some were successful. But let’s recognize that the “success” was an acquisition and that he was fired shortly after his ideas were shown to be detrimental to the success of the company. When he was fired, he still had an enormous gain which again we can find several causal factors that have nothing to do with Musk being smarter than a chimpanzee.
But there’s a second dimension we need to account for. Under capitalism, success gets reinforced because actual statistics is hard enough for most people that they just go on re-enforcement of individual successes. The system is literally built on foundations that the rich will tend to get richer, mostly because they’re the ones weitong the rules of the game.
In Twitter, we see what Elon as an individual actually brings to the table, other than pockets full of cash. He took a $44B company and in a year turned it into an estimated $4B company. Jack Dorsey, $44B. Elon musk, $4B and falling.
When the bill comes due, when the cybertruck continues to not ship and is crap when it does, when the 18 wheelers continue to underperform minimal expectations and get plowed under by the rest of the industry, when they finally realize that FSD will never happen given Tesla’s limitations on the tech, it will start to fall apart. It’s a con game disguised as meritocracy.
I think you didn’t follow my argument at all. It’s not talent. It’s luck and feedback loops.
There’s some really accessible books on statistics right now, including one written by Nate Silver, that consider questions on topics like why the Mona Lisa is considered by some the world’s best and possibly most valuable painting.
I’ve had drinks with several senior engineers and managers at Tesla. The gull wing doors that keep breaking? Elon’s idea. They initially pushed back, he insisted, then when they relented he didn’t like the design and so lent a hand and made it worse after not having participated in any of the design meetings leading up to it. Stainless steel cybertruck? Same deal. Killing off all of the brand equity associated with “Twitter?” Same.
In fact, Twitter gives us a view on the purest Elon, because he literally fires everyone who disagrees with him. Twitter shows us what Elon looks like when allowed to do whatever he wants.
But look: just start learning more about statistics, base rates, positive reinforcement loops, and such.
I’ve heard from an insider that SpaceX has an Elon wrangler whose job it is to keep him away from anything important when he’s on-site. You can point this stuff out to the man’s admirers, but you can’t logic somebody out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
It is dumb luck. Once you have that much money you fail upwards. It doesn’t matter if 20 other projects fail if one makes billions.
If you didn’t invent it you didn’t have anything to do with it. If you funded it you still didn’t have anything to do with it, you just enabled someone else to do it.
Grasping at straws? He made his first billions getting bought out of contracts because his business partners were afraid he was going to ruin their companies.
Thats all he can do. Buy titles, buy stakes in companies, and get forced into golden parachutes to shut him up while real workers kick him out before he ruins more companies.
Its not successful business, its a little loser using his fathers money to buy his way into rooms he doesnt belong in and then getting paid to go away after he breaks things because thats easier than upsetting his father.
Seriously, read anything about his business history. Any time he actually puts in work? It fails. Any time he has a success? It was him giving someone a bag of daddies money to let him take credit.
He’s good at bullshitting people into listening to his crazy ideas. Kind of like a Trump. Occasionally one of his crazy plans works out, more or less. But mostly due to the hard work of more intelligent people.
That can be considered business success but it hardly warrants respect.
It’s a wildly unpopular thing to say but it’s true, yeah he was rich but there were a lot of people richer then him when he started out and now there aren’t any. Why has he been so successful?
There’s a couple of options;
He might not be as dumb as he acts.
He might be incredibly lucky.
He could be dumb in many ways but smart in important ones
He might have a negative trait that happens to make him successful in business.
I actually suspect the last one, I think narcissism and a lack of self awareness / shame have caused him to present himself in a way that investors can’t resist, newspapers can’t stop writing about and regular people obsessively talk about.
I think he has the similar skill as Alex Jones, total self belief and absolutely no shame about saying whatever will play well in the current situation.
I pretty much agree. If folks wanted to have that conversation (24 hours and 50 angry little comments later you are the only reasonable person here) about the nuance there I’d be mostly on the same page as you.
My ask was actually five earlier but go ahead you can point out who ever you have in mind. I’m sure you have two or three lined up now.
My point, 12 hours later is that you are only going to have a short list. If you take just a subset of 100m+ to billionaires, you’ll find Elon has performed, at worst in the upper 10%.
Elon musk has lost the most amount of money ever. Name one person who’s lost more money than Elon musk. You can’t.
Buy Twitter for 44 billion. Turns Twitter into X worth 19 billion in 2 years that is the fastest anyone has ever burned that many billions in that short of a time.
Elon musk lost it. There is no one who has lost more money than Elon musk that puts him in the bottom 1%. Literally the worst. You cannot find anyone who is lost more money than him.
The man has successfully ensured he was a major player in e-commerce, batteries, spaceflight, and the auto industry. He’s an order of magnitude richer than he started and has gone from a nobody to exerting significant influence on a global level.
You will not find many peers that are that successful even among the rich. What is your definition of being good at business?
He successfully bought his way into those industries. His most successful companies were not started by him, and tend to flourish once he’s gone.
Once you have enough money it’s pretty much impossible to do anything but fail upwards
And who else bought into and became the face of those industries right before they blew up? It’s just dumb luck he happened to invest in those 4 companies right? He had no clue or insight and him and randomly just happened to buy some of the most influential companies of the modern era before anyone had a clue.
I swear to God with your people. If you didn’t invent it then you had nothing to do with it 🤦♀️.
Name 5 people who have been more successful in the modern era in gaining money and influence through capitalism. Feel free to pick from any of the billionaires who have had all those advantages. You can’t because as much as you hate him, he’s objectively more successful than his peers.
There’s this book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success. You should read it.
You should check out the “If Books Could Kill” episode on Outliers
And while you’re at it, listen to the whole If Books Could Kill catalog!
Are you serious? Does anything you’re seeing in the world today indicate that there is some kind of meritocracy in place?
Enron was super successful - they were seen as the smartest guys in the room. I don’t even have the time to list the number of major financial companies that have bankrupted themselves after decades of profits. Then there’s companies like Theranos.
But it’s not even really about people who are stupid, con artists, or both getting into power. It’s probability.
If you were to flip a fair coin ten times and it came up heads every time, you’d think you were pretty lucky (or that I was losing about it being a fair coin). However, the chance of that happening just at random is about 1/1000. If everyone in your town were to do the experiment, many people would throw ten heads in a row, depending on the size of your town. If we do it at the state or country level, some people will get 25 or more heads in a row. It doesn’t mean they’re luckier or better at coin flipping.
So what do we see in the case of Elon? First, he started out with table stakes. That’s rare enough. Then he got involved with a dot-com at the exact same time that everyone was doing that. Like with the coin flips, most of them failed and some were successful. But let’s recognize that the “success” was an acquisition and that he was fired shortly after his ideas were shown to be detrimental to the success of the company. When he was fired, he still had an enormous gain which again we can find several causal factors that have nothing to do with Musk being smarter than a chimpanzee.
But there’s a second dimension we need to account for. Under capitalism, success gets reinforced because actual statistics is hard enough for most people that they just go on re-enforcement of individual successes. The system is literally built on foundations that the rich will tend to get richer, mostly because they’re the ones weitong the rules of the game.
In Twitter, we see what Elon as an individual actually brings to the table, other than pockets full of cash. He took a $44B company and in a year turned it into an estimated $4B company. Jack Dorsey, $44B. Elon musk, $4B and falling.
When the bill comes due, when the cybertruck continues to not ship and is crap when it does, when the 18 wheelers continue to underperform minimal expectations and get plowed under by the rest of the industry, when they finally realize that FSD will never happen given Tesla’s limitations on the tech, it will start to fall apart. It’s a con game disguised as meritocracy.
None of those guys went from millionaires to richest billionaire in the world. I guess Elon must be more talented or richer than them?
I think you didn’t follow my argument at all. It’s not talent. It’s luck and feedback loops.
There’s some really accessible books on statistics right now, including one written by Nate Silver, that consider questions on topics like why the Mona Lisa is considered by some the world’s best and possibly most valuable painting.
I’ve had drinks with several senior engineers and managers at Tesla. The gull wing doors that keep breaking? Elon’s idea. They initially pushed back, he insisted, then when they relented he didn’t like the design and so lent a hand and made it worse after not having participated in any of the design meetings leading up to it. Stainless steel cybertruck? Same deal. Killing off all of the brand equity associated with “Twitter?” Same.
In fact, Twitter gives us a view on the purest Elon, because he literally fires everyone who disagrees with him. Twitter shows us what Elon looks like when allowed to do whatever he wants.
But look: just start learning more about statistics, base rates, positive reinforcement loops, and such.
I’ve heard from an insider that SpaceX has an Elon wrangler whose job it is to keep him away from anything important when he’s on-site. You can point this stuff out to the man’s admirers, but you can’t logic somebody out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
Would you like to suck his dick any more?
It is dumb luck. Once you have that much money you fail upwards. It doesn’t matter if 20 other projects fail if one makes billions.
If you didn’t invent it you didn’t have anything to do with it. If you funded it you still didn’t have anything to do with it, you just enabled someone else to do it.
Not even one
Yeah. Good evidence capitalism is broken in the context of modern society.
I’m not sure what that even means.
We can tell
SLUUUURP.
How do Elon’s balls taste?
He bought his way into those positions with his fathers blood emerald money.
He literally did not actually found paypal, he bought the rights to call himself founder from the actual founders.
What part of good business involves turning a $44b household name company into a $19b name confused mess?
What does the title have to do with it? You are grasping at straws so badly here.
Regardless of whatever title he has bought it and made his first billion. That’s a successful business transaction.
Grasping at straws? He made his first billions getting bought out of contracts because his business partners were afraid he was going to ruin their companies.
Thats all he can do. Buy titles, buy stakes in companies, and get forced into golden parachutes to shut him up while real workers kick him out before he ruins more companies.
Its not successful business, its a little loser using his fathers money to buy his way into rooms he doesnt belong in and then getting paid to go away after he breaks things because thats easier than upsetting his father.
Seriously, read anything about his business history. Any time he actually puts in work? It fails. Any time he has a success? It was him giving someone a bag of daddies money to let him take credit.
He’s good at bullshitting people into listening to his crazy ideas. Kind of like a Trump. Occasionally one of his crazy plans works out, more or less. But mostly due to the hard work of more intelligent people.
That can be considered business success but it hardly warrants respect.
It’s a wildly unpopular thing to say but it’s true, yeah he was rich but there were a lot of people richer then him when he started out and now there aren’t any. Why has he been so successful?
There’s a couple of options;
He might not be as dumb as he acts.
He might be incredibly lucky.
He could be dumb in many ways but smart in important ones
He might have a negative trait that happens to make him successful in business.
I actually suspect the last one, I think narcissism and a lack of self awareness / shame have caused him to present himself in a way that investors can’t resist, newspapers can’t stop writing about and regular people obsessively talk about.
I think he has the similar skill as Alex Jones, total self belief and absolutely no shame about saying whatever will play well in the current situation.
I pretty much agree. If folks wanted to have that conversation (24 hours and 50 angry little comments later you are the only reasonable person here) about the nuance there I’d be mostly on the same page as you.
You’re the one incorrectly equating “good at business” with “good at making money”, they’re two separate things and no one is denying the latter.
Holy shit how do so many people fall for such obvious rage bait
Bait, my actual opinion, I guess it’s the same here 🤷♂️
Y’all just get pissed when anyone says anything remotely against the fuck corporate hive mind.
No. 🤣 Elon musk is an idiot and a terrible businessman.
For me at least it has nothing to do with fuck corporate.
Still can’t name anyone who has gained more wealth or influence over the last 20 years, can you 🤣🤣🤣
Me ? I didn’t know.
So I just have to name someone who’s gained more wealth than Elon musk?
And/or
Naming someone who has more influence than Elon musk?
That’s a trivial task Just want to make sure I got it right before I commit least a brain cell to it 🤣
My ask was actually five earlier but go ahead you can point out who ever you have in mind. I’m sure you have two or three lined up now.
My point, 12 hours later is that you are only going to have a short list. If you take just a subset of 100m+ to billionaires, you’ll find Elon has performed, at worst in the upper 10%.
Elon musk has lost the most amount of money ever. Name one person who’s lost more money than Elon musk. You can’t.
Buy Twitter for 44 billion. Turns Twitter into X worth 19 billion in 2 years that is the fastest anyone has ever burned that many billions in that short of a time.
Elon musk lost it. There is no one who has lost more money than Elon musk that puts him in the bottom 1%. Literally the worst. You cannot find anyone who is lost more money than him.
Yes he’s lost that after gaining it. By my count he’s still up since 180 billion dollars.