Why Is Elon Musk So F'ing Successful? And how do we do more of it?

Elon bought himself a media company that he is using to help his preferred presidential candidate get elected. If Elon/Trump are successful, I imagine that Elon himself will impute a lot "value" to the Twitter purchase

Hard to accurately value a "kingmaker" like Twitter in traditional finance terms, but Elon (and his backers who will get Tesla stock) do understand what is at stake.

jrflowers2• 2 years ago

Rather than correcting this poster on HN you may want to email the relevant people at Fidelity with your thoughts, as the actual owners of Twitter have marked down the _value_ by 72%

dangus7• 2 years ago

A billionaire using vast snowballed wealth to buy up a legitimate business and transform it into a mafia-like propaganda scheme for sale to the highest bidder may be profitable, but it isn't moral, admirable, or something we should be desiring more of.

And Trump's creative campaign finance tactics should be illegal.

allears• 2 years ago

Tesla's not doing so well either. SpaceX is very good at launching (and catching) rockets, but that's mostly Gwynne Shotwell.

hollerith• 2 years ago

Tesla's market cap is 692.15 billion, which is about 692 billion higher than it was when Elon started his involvement with it.

h0l0cube4• 2 years ago

Elon is 'successful' when he marshals resources to opening up new wealth markets (e.g., space, electric vehicles), but leaves those resources alone enough to actually get the job done.

SpaceX is full of brilliant minds well attuned to their domain enough that Elon can't really interfere with technical operations. What he often does, is what most other CEOs don't, is entertains more ambitious and risky ideas, and he knows just enough to make worthwhile bets. On the other side of the spectrum is Twitter, where he knows just enough to interfere with everything. Tesla sits in the middle.

greatpostman• 2 years ago

I can’t stand people that won’t accept that Elon is exceptional

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 years ago

Point number 4 made smile, in particular because the phrasing is that he does not give his brands "boring" names. Wait till the author hears about The Boring Company!

dangus7• 2 years ago

Isn't the Boring Company his least successful currently operating company?

h0l0cube4• 2 years ago

Surely that's Twitter. Social media is already at saturation point, has established competitors, and Elon has managed to run it into the ground in terms of revenue and engagement. At least with The Boring Company, there's still value in making tunnels.

dangus7• 2 years ago

I've seen low-quality, low-effort Musk stan content before and this one joins some of the worst, low-information, low-effort that I've seen.

Elon Musk may be a hustler but he's not an honest one. He's not the type of person we should have more of.

He's successful in the same way that other privileged kids are successful: through financial structures that make it impossible to fail, especially at a unique time in history when Internet technology was exploding in a way that made it so that even the most mediocre startups were worth purchasing for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Musk's secret to success is being an early shareholder. That's it.

Let's not forget that there are numerous reports of employees at his companies saying that they work better when he's not around.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-employees-denounce...

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-f...

Gud• 2 years ago

So how come none of the other people who were in the right place at the right time ended up transforming two technologically challenging industries?

I do understand he is an exceptionally hard working man who has no doubt the risks he are taking will pay off.

I don’t think he’s a fascist, as many people claim.

dangus7• 2 years ago

All people who vote for Trump and especially those who go out and campaign for him and donate money to super PACs that aid his election are fascists, even if they don't believe they are or you don't believe they are.

Trump is factually a fascist. His stated beliefs and factual actions line up almost perfectly with all 16 characteristics of fascism, and Elon also lines up quite well (and certainly lines up by extension by actively campaigning for Trump).

Can you think of any aspect of Elon Musk or his preferred candidate's beliefs that do not qualify? Do you see any actions taken by him that strongly refute any of these 16 characteristics?

https://www.keene.edu/academics/cchgs/resources/presentation...

1. Check - anything Trump says is true, there is no room for disagreement.

2. Check - Trump's entire platform is outrage fueled with lies, and Elon is an outrage bait with his online presence. Example: election loss denial

3. Check - The Trump platform is fixated on national decline and victimhood. Elon agrees and has made comments about how China has better workers than the US, etc. MAGA as a slogan is focused on this point.

4. Check - Trumpism is all about white replacement theory and is extremely xenophobic.

5. Disdain for human rights, for sure, see "the enemy within" statements

6. Trump and Elon have both scapegoated a mixture of LGBT, transgender, Mexicans, Muslims, and a long list of other minority scapegoats

7. Big time yes. January 6th was a literal coup attempt by Trump's armed paramilitary

8. Big time yes

9. Literally Elon buying Twitter and his subsequent actions on the platform describe this point perfectly.

10. Yep

11. Not so much for Elon or Trump's personal beliefs but they use this for their base of power, e.g., Trump Bibles

12. Big time yes for Trump ("I don't pay overtime") and Elon

13. Obvious yes

14. Trump and Elon together both represent cronyism and corruption. Their money is already entangled together and Elon will probably get a cabinet position or other direct benefits in exchange for his support

15. It is definitely Trump's desire to claim any lost election as fraudulent and end elections, and he encouraged his supporters to vote for him just one more time and then they won't need to vote again

16. Perhaps the only point that doesn't have any direct and obvious connection with Trump and Elon.

mapt• 2 years ago

Up until he lost his goddamn mind to the alt-right meme machine, to Twitter, to Ambien (or whatever else he's on), and to his own ego.

He was successful because:

1) He got very lucky in the 90's tech boom. Right time, right place, won the lottery.

2) He had enough scientific, engineering, and science fiction education to appreciate and differentiate the 3 edges of:

* "physically possible"

* "possible within the constraints of a project that I can imagine"

* "possible within the constraints of a project that the market can imagine"

and to dream big nerdy dreams rather than to dream specifically of seeing line go up.

3) He was capable of pushing past the last constraint & occasionally the second constraint in a way that was persuasive enough to investors to power a reality distortion field composed of hope for a future that he understood to be technically possible, and convincing them that he was banking on his own success. This is a rare talent, and why tech co-founders have business co-founders. He was always able to put a down payment on these dreams because of #1.

4) Then once he had the money from investors, he put his companies almost entirely in the hands of enthusiastic engineers that were happy to be allowed to contribute to an epic project with actual funding to build the future, rather than spending their lives rotting away writing technical documentation for a defense prime or writing grant proposals or teaching CS101 in a community college or making the 17412nd mobile gacha game. They were given aggressive goals, an aggressive schedule, not a lot of salary, and not a lot of sleep, but free reign to make decisions, move quickly, and break things. The cult of Musk looked less like a religion and more like a fun university extracurricular research project, but for 60 hours a week w/ room & board paid.

Very little of the 'business community' has any special expertise beyond specific social skills, most of them have forced themselves into very-short-timeframe thinking, and they have no idea what's actually possible, when or how to put their faith in the engineers, or what might result. They distrust this entire caste & culture of people, and they perennially shortchange their efforts.

5) Other companies would have outsourced hundreds of parts on these projects primarily to protect management from liability should a project go wrong and the board demand that somebody be ritualistically fired. SpaceX & Tesla preferred to just build their own fabrication shop and hire people to run it, and vertical integration skipped over the prevailing GARGANTUAN market inefficiencies associated with running a complex private-sector supply chain, evidently because there's a top-down disrespect for the sanctity of MBA-type management and for the idea of being accountable to a board of these type of people.

stfp• 2 years ago

Great take imo, thanks

richerram• 2 years ago

Not sure we all have the same definition of what successful means... pretendig to know at a high technical level what happens in the 5+ companies you are the ""CEO"" of, while fighting trolls on twitter all day and having children with 4 different women (that we know of), children of which at least one doesn't want to know anything from you and all this while switching your stance on politics by 180 degrees because it serves your business well...?

I mean, the system in which we live right now has a very particular Objective Function that optimizes for money and like in the social networks case where they realized the system shaped towards the objective function without considering the well being of its members, it optimized for screen time through extremism, hate speech and fake news... in the same way our current societies don't favor the nicest, most caritative, nor even smartest members; it favors the ones who are willing to cheat, lie, step over, dehumanize others... all for the sake of "being successful".

DemocracyFTW2• 2 years ago

Is this the right place to publish an uncritical ode singing the praise of an outspoken fascist, an active supporter of an insurrectionist, a man that has been seen on television laughing about being a criminal and being responsible for torturing animals?

Why Is Elon Musk So F'ing Successful? And how do we do more of it?

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