81–90 of 97 posts
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Except he was also doing a phenomenal job early in his career too. It's not all smoke and mirrors or connections.
But certainly you accept that now it's just about the brand ?
You buy or found them and make yourself CEO. The real question is whether someone can be CEO of 5 companies and do a good job. Personally, I think Musk is much better at being a brand than a CEO. But you can hide a lot behind smoke and mirrors if you're the richest person in the world and other rich people will throw money at you just to be your friend.
John Carmack considers him a true engineer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE I think Carmack would call him out (Elon) if he thought less of him. Carmack seems honest to a fault. I don't think "smoke and mirrors" is justified.
Cool. Then he should be an engineer.
But he's not. He's a CEO. Ostensibly.
And--and I really shouldn't have to say this--those are not the same job. So even if I buy that Musk is a "true engineer" (which I don't, by the way), that doesn't make him de facto a good CEO. In fact, it could just as easily be a liability.
Musk is a figurehead at both Tesla and SpaceX. He is too far out of the salt mines (or too impatient) to reconcile his wildly optimistic release estimates with actual engineeering reality. Where is the Hyperloop? Where is the Cybertruck? Where's full self driving? Every single one of these is years behind the CEO's own formally stated launch dates. So who's really in charge? It's not at all surprising that he'd insta…
Also, try buying solar panels or batteries from Tesla these days. There is a reason Enphase's stock is on a tear. Sure, the technology is great, but Power Wall sales are Tesla's "deals to lose", and their sales team is aggressively losing them. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENPH
Me thinks Musk is stacking up companies the same way the stripper in "The big short" was stacking houses. In both cases there is tons of leverage involved. The stripper levered up using home equity to buy new apartments, whereas Musk is using political climate. The functional companies are relying on political climate as leverage. Tesla= Political will to do something about climate change SpaceX= Political will to do…
Musk is a figurehead at both Tesla and SpaceX. He is too far out of the salt mines (or too impatient) to reconcile his wildly optimistic release estimates with actual engineeering reality. Where is the Hyperloop? Where is the Cybertruck? Where's full self driving? Every single one of these is years behind the CEO's own formally stated launch dates. So who's really in charge? It's not at all surprising that he'd insta…
There has been this kind of rhetoric around Elon things a lot. "Wheres the reusuable booster?" "Where is the model 3?" "Haha the model 3 is in a tent". Meanwhile the model 3 and Y dominate world EV sales, and the reusable boosters have become a boring part of weekly life. I'm not sure I would interpret Elons aspirational predictions as lack of involvement. It isn't unusual to publicly push for the impossible in the h…
They are the top two models, but they don’t dominate the market: BYD sells more EVs (mix of PHEVs and BEVs) than Tesla, but makes mamy more models. Tesla’s models “dominate” the EV market no more than Apple’s have historically “dominated” the desktop PC market.
Execution falls on other executives and their orgs. If the exec team is good, it's not a hands on job unless shit hits the fan at a huge level.
You buy or found them and make yourself CEO. The real question is whether someone can be CEO of 5 companies and do a good job. Personally, I think Musk is much better at being a brand than a CEO. But you can hide a lot behind smoke and mirrors if you're the richest person in the world and other rich people will throw money at you just to be your friend.
John Carmack considers him a true engineer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE I think Carmack would call him out (Elon) if he thought less of him. Carmack seems honest to a fault. I don't think "smoke and mirrors" is justified.
When it comes to Carmack's comments on large scale businesses he says a number of things nowadays that one might consider one step away from PR talk (or business diplomacy). Such statements from him might not come from a place of dishonesty, but he certainly is not "honest to a fault" either nowadays. [1]
[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1348691869971185667
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Like when they had to force him out of PayPal before he destroyed the company with his “rewrite the entire backend for Windows Server” mandate?
Because successful people never make mistakes? I'm not sure what your point is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except he was also doing a phenomenal job early in his career too. It's not all smoke and mirrors or connections.
Everyone downvoting me did worse in their career. It's easy to be a critic. But like him or hate him, you can't argue with the results that man achieved. None of us have done as much.
Most of us could "achieve" a whole lot if we were born the heirs to a massive fortune, with all the connections that implies.
Even for a developer, various people can be wildly differing in productivity, by order or more of magnitude.
When you become high level manager it is some of your key decisions that will decide how successful you (your company) are.
Those decisions do require preparatory work, but here people can really be on completely different levels. If you do it well, you can get the information fast, ask questions fast, make decisions fast, delegate the work and set up systems to get notified if something isn't working smoothly. Finding trusted people to delegate to is paramount.
It is not like Elon Musk is doing all this job himself. He decides what he wants to do himself, what is important at the moment and what can be delegated. If you are able to find trusted people to delegate stuff to and you can devour knowledge (as Musk is known to be able to do) I think there is not a huge issue in being CEO of multiple companies other than shareholders being a bit concerned that if stuff will blow up he may not be able to put multiple fires at the same time.