A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)

A similar story that I love regarding the infamous Van Halen brown M&M contract rider:

“Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.”

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

The word quarantine originated from quarantining all people entering an area a certain number of days. Not just visibly sick people.

I kept thinking this when the 'cybertruck' was unveiled. Suddenly everyone around me was explaining in detail why this truck was going to be a complete fiasco and a danger to everyone else on the road. I'll happily acknowledge that Musk is off his rocker, but can people really think that he doesn't know how to make a car?

( I'll admit a soft spot for the thing after someone pointed out it looks like what happens when you let back end engineers design the front end )

... to the extent you consider one of the most influential and best-researched management books a "cliche and conspiracy."

I'll mention I didn't claim that a CEO rarely knows something a critic doesn't; just that things like the CEO's greater understanding of something like market dynamics are rarely the basis of what is externally perceived to be a "bad" decision by an armchair critic. The basis is usually political dynamics (which most armchair critics have far less insight into than the CEO -- the information gap is greater).

And as a shareholder, I can say I don't think my intelligence matters very much in this story. The amount of time and thought I can put into each company in my portfolio is what matters. That's both especially true because I have index funds, and why I have index funds.

As a footnote, if you'd like a more extreme take on this, Pfeffer's Power is a good read (but quite controversial -- the book basically makes the claim that CEOs are fundamentally psychopaths). Pfeffer is at Stanford.

Dictator's Handbook is considered hardly controversial at all. It's a game-theoretic argument, backed by pretty good data. The author is at New York University.

I'll also mention that simply insulting the poster of an argument ("just exists in the imagination of people whose involvement with business decisions consists of reading Dilbert cartoons") doesn't strengthen your point. You know nothing about my background. It just makes you look like you're either a jerk, or ran out of sound arguments.

I will fully admit that Musk knows how to make a car. He’s a car person and had a history of owning and enjoying sporty luxury cars before Tesla. But he’s not a truck person.