This is exactly right. Elon Musk can do it, this random street magician can do it, Elizabeth Holmes can do it. We hold these millionaires up as if they're some sort of super geniuses. Nope, they're mostly just charismatic. The world is yours if you can talk a big game, even if it's mostly bullshit.
He's smart enough to say "self driving cars are coming soon" or "neural link will be done in five years" or the millions of other things he's said are right around the corner. The other grifters weren't as smart.
All companies should seek to be ambitious. It’s one thing to have a tangible product in development be hyped and other to be selling literal vaporware without the internet of delivering or lying about possessions.
Elon has things to show for these claims. His cars do self-drive, though not at an average human level yet. But if you've been following the progress, he is quickly approaching that point.
Musk bought into both of those, however much he would like it forgotten.
The only thing he started himself that has worked out so far is SpaceX. Yet the whole Martian colony line is 100% grift. Starlink might yet flop, as it needs more subscribers than it probably can support. SpaceX has been very good at eliciting government handouts.
Starship will absolutely not be able to turn around in less than 30 days until after they figure out a tile scheme different enough from NASA's, if ever.
It is very far from certain the chopsticks catching scheme will work.
Each time a Superheavy detonates on the launchpad (which will happen) will set them back months, because it will wipe out the whole "stage 0" and tank farm.
Very early on. And grew, at least Tesla, many orders of magnitude from early prototype to mass production.
> SpaceX has been very good at eliciting government handouts
Contracts, not handouts. Which they have delivered on in spades.
Starship and Starlink are still early, yes. But Falcon 9 has brought launch costs down considerably, is putting more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, and is currently the only way the United States can get astronauts into orbit.
You correctly note that of all Musk initiatives, only SpaceX has shown partial success, and that only via direct government subsidy.
You correctly do not assert that Martian colonization or suborbital passenger or freight service are better than grift even with a 100% Starship success.
You correctly do not assert that any other Musk initiative, including hyperloop, domestic robots, self-driving cars, electric trucks, are anything other than grift.
He has accomplished more than many people thought possible, so I’ll continue to believe he will deliver some, but certainly not all, of the things you mentioned. Being ambitious and risky doesn’t make it a “grift”.
And “government subsidy” is a complete red herring. Inventing and building things takes money, I don’t care if that comes from the government or private investors. I’d say he has plenty to show for the investment the government made in his companies.
The only reason he has as much as he does is via grift, puffing the value of his properties. He has delivered a bunch of legendarily unreliable expensive cars and a bunch of rocket launches, and been handed pots of money of far greater value than anything he has delivered. Grift.
And he gets free puffery from internet volunteers.
Elon Musk may not be a sympathetic Human being, but he certainly isn't a grifter.
What amazes me the most is that he is able to get project management in place that works. Somehow most (or all) of his companies get shit done, and it is indeed some amazingly complex shit. That may be his super power, beyond having been lucky with his first investments giving him the billions for the next endeavors.
One thing to remember is that these companies are ones that he's effectively just bought, he's not necessarily bootstrapped them and dictated how they should operate and organize, we don’t know how involved he is. The only things I've really heard from him as a leader are from Tesla - demanding people work longer hours, forcing employees to work during covid, union busting and stuff like that. So this suggests that either
- he is publicly brash and careless, but privately very efficient and savvy
- or his companies get shit done without his involvement, or despite his attempts at getting involved rather than because of them.
Blatant misinformation. Musk joined Tesla when there were I believe 3 or 4 other people. He founded SpaceX himself. He help fund both with essentially all the money he made from PayPal. And he’s known for being incredibly hands on, sometimes literally living in Tesla’s and SpaceX’s factories.
He might be brash but he’s clearly been an effective leader.
It’s not alive. It’s an observation of the reality of the thing that Tesla has actually shipped. Dangerous, prone to failure, beyond untrustworthy. Don’t be fooled by the easy cases. No one ever believed that the easy parts would be the problem and Tesla has made zero progress on the hard aspects.
I don't think most of them have, in fact most of them haven't.
Hyperloop, Cybertruck, inter-city rocket flights, Mars colony - these are ideas that haven't or won't succeed because they're ridiculously impractical and/or pointless, and seem to be more about projecting a futuristic image than anything else. (The alternative explanation is that he's a lot dumber than he seems.)
But, he throws ideas at the wall and some of them work out. It's a similar thing venture capital companies do with their startup portfolios, but mixed in with a lot more futuristic PR fluff ideas.
> The alternative explanation is that he's a lot dumber than he seems
In light of his recent difficulties with Python (and in combination with a few other bizarre comments and actions) this is starting to seem increasingly likely.
On the other hand, he has, in fact, built the world’s largest EV manufacturer (~70% EV market share, globally, 2021) and world’s largest space launch provider (~66% mass to orbit, globally, 2021)
You're missing reusable rockets, robot barges, supercharger network, desirable electric cars, cars over 400 mile range, installing a battery farm in South Australia in 100 days or less...
I can't believe you're serious if you don't think any one of these would be considered career-capping achievements for most people.
Starlink may actually be a great example of the grift. Starlink is not a widely available functioning system yet, and there's a strong chance it may never be. Musk himself has been dropping hints to that effect, and there are plenty of analyses out there of the problems with the Starlink business model. Musk's own statements make it clear that he knows Starlink has a high chance of failure - but, it has a big benefit for him because it drives demand for SpaceX launches and, at least until it does fail, it bolsters the public image and feeds the futuristic vision he's trying to sell people.
My previous comment wasn't saying Musk hasn't achieved anything. I was making a couple of points:
1. He tends to throw more ideas, more publicly, at the wall than most tech entrepreneurs.
2. Some of those ideas seem to be obviously impractical, to the point that he (hopefully!) must realize that, and the're probably intended more to boost the image of his companies in order to pump up stock value. And if you accept this line of argument, it's been a staggering success, making him the richest on-paper person in the world based on a car company and an aerospace company which, without his clever grift, would be worth a tiny fraction of their current valuation.
He'd only get depressed if he actually believed in those ideas, as opposed to just using them for image-building purposes. For the inter-city rocket flight one in particular, it's hard to believe he could seriously think that's practical, and certainly if he ran the idea past any experts at his companies they'd be able to tell him why it's not.
If you look at how he uses Twitter and other public ways to pump up stock prices, it seems likely that he figured out early on that there's lots of money in convincing people that the future is just around the corner and that you should buy shares in his companies to get in on the action.
He's the wealthiest-on-paper person in the world not because of the value produced by his companies, but because of the future value he's convinced people that his companies have.
Yes, this is my point. I'm not a fan of the "agile nomenclature". I see project management failing a lot.
I can only marvel at the stuff and complexity SpaceX and Tesla seem to be able to pull off, both in terms of software and hardware engineering and other organizing and logistics.
Sure. But they do actually do very impressive things. Generally people we write off as "grifters" do not actually produce anything of value.
And 10 years ago, the list of things they were merely purported to do includes many of the things that today they actually do. E.g. manufacturing EVs at scale, reusing rockets, etc.
Elon musk is pretty similar if you take a good hard look. He was an unsuccessful manager at a software company which got acquired. SpaceX is a successful company considering all it went through. It was founded on the basis of a manned carrier aircraft pushing the rocket and do a suborbital split. (they did this for years) Then they got a lot of investment and gave up on the original premise, instead going for controlled takeoff and landing. That failed spectacularly many times, but money kept pouring in. And now we have privatized satellite launches and Elon musk takes all the credit for it.
How is an aerospace company that did 31 launches last year, including some manned ones, pretty similar to a pharmaceutical company with an entirely pre-clinical portfolio of unproven "cures" invented by and licensed from a magician embroiled in a litany of fraud and other crimes?
I do not doubt the success of spacex, but Elon Musk is not the visionary genius people take him to be. His main skillset is luck and persistence.
I'm sure you've heard of the boring company which would revolutionize traffic except it did not and never will. He says "I have this idea make it work". This is the limit of his capability. In that way he's pretty similar to Elizabeth Holmes, except he isn't playing with the health of individuals for monetary gain.
Isn't success x% inspiration and [significantly larger than x]% perspiration? How does it matter if he achieves it through persistence. He is consistently able to build teams that deliver.
Consistence is something that is continuous and at the same level. This is not the case. But people don't care because SpaceX exists. At least some good came out of all this.
That is some pretty strong black and white thinking. I never said anything about Elon Musk being "visioniary genius". He does have some skill. He certainly has no fraudulent intentions.
Well, are you sure about that? The whole market manipulation he does with stocks and crypto is not ‘fraudulent intentions’? Sure, he might not be frauding with his products, but I would think it is fraudulent. Did he not actually pay a securities fraud fine a few years ago? And he just keeps doing it; he makes more from the rise and fall than he will ever pay in fines. It is smart but they are fraudulent intentions. We don’t really know how many corners were cut (or how deep) in other places; if they didn’t succeed we would have known about them probably, but things are easily forgotten when there is success.
The point being that there is a lot of success coming out of Elon Musk's ambitions and none so far out of the originally discussed pharmaceutical enterprise.
Sure, got your point. However, you said he has no fraudulent intentions. I think he does and that it is one of the pillars for his success; manipulate to get more money, use that money to fund ideas (and get others to co-fund which is easier if you pony up too). He just doesn't get caught too much.
I agree he is not just a 'luck' guy; he work(ed)(s) hard, is very persistent & pushes boundaries; he also knows how to manipulate the world successfully to pursue his goals, like Jobs & Gates & others before him. However, as far as we know, they weren't walking such a fine line close to fraud (although Gates was of course somewhat close to the illegal line with his anti-competitive actions in the EEE times).
> [SpaceX] was founded on the basis of a manned carrier aircraft pushing the rocket and do a suborbital split (they did this for years)
Is this actually true? The only air-launched SpaceX project I could find was the cancelled Falcon 9 Air [1], which I don't think actually flew, and was years after the Falcon 1.
Was there some undocumented air-launched SpaceX project going on between 2002 and 2006?
The hyped private project I remember from around that time was SpaceShipOne[2], which won the "X Prize", but that was done by Scaled Composites, not SpaceX.
Musk has, to my knowledge, never claimed that his own genius is what SpaceX or Tesla is based on. That's very different from Theranos, which was based on claims about technology developed by Holmes personally, or this company which is likewise based on a founder's supposed genius inventions.
Musk is at worst comparable to people like Steve Jobs or Donald Trump: people with a near pathological need to prove that they deserve their wealth by taking stupid risks. Risks that sometimes pay off. For every Trump or Musk, there are probably ten rich sons who took stupid risks and failed so bad they didn't get to take such risks anymore.
