He was a complete nut, but a sympathetic one because originally he was a desperate cancer patient trying to leave his poor family something they could live on for a few years after his expensive medical treatment. By season five, he was fully focused on building a drug empire, wiping out enemies (and innocents who got into his way), and amassing more wealth than his unborn great-grandkids could ever spend. BB was a morality tale about the utter loss of morality, and how anyone with money needs to guard against it because money has a way of eroding your values and turning you into a sociopath.
I think that’s absolutely true about most people who earn their money, once they get above a certain income level.
I mean someone like Mark Cuban could have very easily just retired on his billion dollars he got from selling broadcast.com to Yahoo! back in 1999, and just woke up at 9, eaten at the best restaurants, dated supermodels, traveled wherever he wanted, etc., gone and done philanthropic work, volunteered locally, and so forth.
But he chose to get into investing and sports teams. Why? Because people like him are driven to compete. They’ve got to keep score somehow- they can’t sit back and think “Heh… I’ve got a billion dollars. I won!” when there are people with two billions out there.
I suspect there are a LOT of people out there like that- they’re the people we see buying status symbol cars, wearing absurdly expensive jeans and shoes, and who aren’t billionaires. It’s all about keeping score and status for a lot of people, and when you’re a billionaire, that takes the form of amassing more and more wealth, because at some point, you can literally buy anything material that you want and not have it dent your bank account the least bit. I mean, buying a Rolls-Royce is probably within the tolerable error on someone like Mark Cuban’s wealth.
You never know, at any moment they could go sliding into financial ruin.
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They are also driven to try and accomplish stuff with their money besides conspicuous consumption, philanthropy and otherwise shitting it away. There are actually benefits to growing a business - you get to employ more people and pay them more money. Not to mention accomplishing whatever that business does. A lot of people like Mark Cuban seem to enjoy doing that. For all his faults, Elon Musk does seem to be motivated by great achievements like electric cars, rockets to Mars, boring giant holes in the ground and tweeting.
Do you seriously buy this self-serving twaddle?
Do you suppose that Donald Trump (or Musk or You-Pick-Em) derives pleasure from employing 500 people in some business when he’s convinced that he could turn the same profit with 400 or 499? All these rich pricks care about is their own bottom line, but if they need to hire people to do work for them (and pay them! real money!) they explain how much good they’re doing for society by supporting needy people and giving them actual salaries.
They begrudge every nickel they have to pay their employees, and if they could get away with paying fewer nickels to fewer employees, they’d do it in a flash without a second thought. And mock you for having that first thought.
He seems to value being seen as having great accomplishments, not so much actually having them. Hence why he pushed to make it seem like he started Tesla. Hence why he floats big ideas and then doesn’t follow through. It still seems to be part of the narcissism.
And it seems highly unlikely that the type of person you describe in your posts has the capability to care about the wellbeing of others. As you say, those who make less money than them are seen as their inferiors. The name of the game is extracting as much value out of people as possible for the least amount of money.
There are side benefits, sure. But I don’t think it makes sense to ascribe them to Musk’s intent.
Perhaps.
I suppose it depends on what you consider an “accomplishment”. Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Elon Musk and his $6.5 million investment came on board as employee #4 and majority shareholder a year later. Fast forward through years of various rounds of funding, leadership changes, restructurings, and other internal politics, Elon Musk became CEO of Tesla in 2008. Since that time, Tesla has grown to over $58 billion in revenue and finally started turning a profit last year.
Did Elon Musk personally design the cars? No. I’m not even sure how much he is involved in the day to day operations of the business. But that’s not really his job. At that level Elon Musk’s job is stuff like establishing the overall vision of the company, securing financing, managing budgets, etc.
Now it could be argued that many a different CEO might have done a better job at Tesla or people might not like Elon Musk’s particular style or personality. But he’s the one running Tesla for the past 14 years so I suppose so long as investors see a return on their investments and customers don’t care how the CEO of their carmaker acts, Elon Musk can be as big of a jerk as he wants.
What will be interesting is seeing what happens with Twitter. A year from now, Elon Musk is going to either look like a genius or like he lost his mind, depending on how well Twitter is doing as a company.
Tesla is more a favorite of traders (people that buy and sell stocks) than investors (people that want to hold a stock long term). From an investor perspective, they’ve got too many headwinds, and one of those is Elon Musk. As a result, while the EV market is growing (6% of auto sales) their share is shrinking (4% this year). The company had a huge head start, but as the other automakers join the market people will go with familiar brand names with better quality, if not the latest gadgets. A key benefit to getting a Tesla was eventual Full Self Driving but that ain’t happening anytime soon, and the subscription model reduces its appeal. The company has most been kept afloat by hype and subsidies, and both are on the wane.
As for Twitter - it will be more than a year before it turns around. The saddest part of the whole thing for me is the previous version was almost there. The company is a balancing act of appealing to advertisers while keeping users without pissing off dozens of foreign governments, and they almost had it. I think in a year, maybe two, they would have been consistently profitable. Then along came Elon. If it still exist in a year, it will take another five to turn it around.
I’ve personally gone from “I want a Tesla” to “I’d sooner drink bleach” in the last few months.