# How does someone with no business acumen get to be the richest person in the world? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 14, 2022, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903 "2022-11-14T19:46:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 24
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2023, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/461 "2023-11-09T15:47:56Z")
Matt Levine, writer of the Money Stuff column at Bloomberg, essentially proposes a highly similar framework to my theory, except [applied to Ray Dalio](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridgewater-had-believability-issues#xj4y7vzkg). You need to register a free account to read so I’ll provide a limited excerpt below: > [@Matt Levine](#): > > You could imagine three phases in the life of a wildly successful billionaire hedge fund manager. In Phase 1, _before_ you become a wildly successful billionaire, you will have access to more or less accurate facts about the world. ​[…] Iif you _do_ become a wildly successful billionaire hedge fund manager, it’s because you were good at it, because you had an unusual skill for finding out and understanding the truth. > > In Phase 2, _after_ you become a wildly successful billionaire, your access to information will change, in some good ways [and] bad ways. The combination of your money and your past success will make everyone defer to you in ways that make you worse at your job; you will not get the spirited pushback and frank debate and negative feedback that you got in your scrappier anonymous days. But [this] is an extremely well-known problem, so you will compensate for it. You will hire people who are not cowed by you, who will tell you the truth and push back on bad ideas. > > In Phase 3, after you have been a wildly successful billionaire for a while, that will stop being fun? Like: > > - If people constantly push back on you, and if your ideas are constantly tested by reality, that will keep you sharper and allow you to make more money for longer, but it’s hard work. > - If people constantly tell you that you’re great, you will lose your edge, but you will spend your days coddled and happy and surrounded by praise. > > At some point you won’t need to make more money. You will have less need to be right, and more need to be told that you are right. You will get more comfortable with comfort. But you are, still, the person who got to where you are by being good at finding out true facts about the world. So you might keep in place the _trappings_ of Phase 2. You will keep _telling_ people “no, I mean it, be ruthlessly honest with me, if my ideas are bad you have to tell me.” They will just understand that you _mean_ something different. “Boss, you know me, and you know that I am ruthlessly honest with you and would push back if your ideas were bad,” they will say. “So you can believe me when I say: This is the best idea I have ever heard in my career.” And then you give them a $50 million bonus and they are happy and you are happy and _it just doesn’t matter that much_ if your idea was, in fact, bad. Maybe you’ll lose money! But you have plenty of money. Why not trade some of it for praise? Everything about it feels fundamentally right and I’ve not seen people levy critiques against Ray Dalio that he isn’t obviously smart but a new book about Bridgewater has just come out, prompting a [bunch of](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ray-dalio-rob-copeland-the-fund-book-excerpt.html) [new](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/james-comey-dalio-bridgewater-the-fund) [stories](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/how-does-the-worlds-largest-hedge-fund-really-make-its-money.html?searchResultPosition=1) that are just wild and this theory fits the facts well. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2023, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/462 "2023-11-09T16:04:04Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > It works in this case because nobody is providing proof of anything except that Musk is not perfect. “Not perfect”? The guy is a complete, raving loon, not to mention a shameless bigot and staunch white supremacist. Check out the “Musk buys Twitter” thread in the Pit for lots and lots of specific examples of his ongoing idiocy, with some speculation that drug addiction may be a contributing factor. Your insistence that only the super-wealthy have any right to criticize Musk is laughable. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2023, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/463 "2023-11-09T17:08:45Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > He does stupid things. Have you never wasted money on a bad decision? Does that make you a stupid person, or someone who like everyone else had done a stupid thing at some point in your life? Let’s say that the world’s fastest man - a gold Olympiad - is in an accident, mangles his leg, it turns gangrenous, and the leg is amputated. Minus specialized equipment, the man is no longer the world’s fastest man. That’s not denying his past successes, it’s just accepting the current reality. In the last few years, Musk went from being a guy whose business moves you read about and you never really needed to consider his personality or private life, to being that guy who tweeted that a cave diver is a pedophile, because he rescued some children before Musk could build a submarine; who designed and pushed through the cybertruck; and who bought a failing business and turned it into an even larger dumpster fire and paved the way for its competitors to take over the space. I can’t say with 100% confidence what happened to Musk but I do feel like we’re witnessing the life progression of a new Howard Hughes / John C Lilly / Nikola Tesla. That doesn’t deny the successes of the past, it simply accepts the reality of the present. Smart, capable people can totally lose it just as much as an athlete can lose a limb. We’re not immune to the devastations of the world. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2023, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/464 "2023-11-09T18:21:49Z")
> [@Matt Levine](#): > > wildly successful billionaire hedge fund manager There has been analysis on this kind of wild success. In nearly all cases, it’s luck, and the success cannot be reliably reproduced over time. If you have 1,000 hedge fund managers, maybe 1 will be wildly successfully in any given year just by sheer probability. That doesn’t mean he’s good. On one end of the spectrum is imposter syndrome, someone who is really good who thinks they’re not as good as everyone else thinks they are. Then at the opposite end is the wildly successful hedge fund manager. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2023, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/465 "2023-11-18T05:21:12Z")
> **[Disney, Comcast, Lionsgate pull ads from X over antisemitic posts](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/17/apple-disney-x-musk-antisemitic/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzAwMTk3MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzAxNTc5NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MDAxOTcyMDAsImp0aSI6ImU4ZDMxYzY2LTg0YmItNDUyZi1hZGEwLWM4ODU3ZGY2NjBlZCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5LzIwMjMvMTEvMTcvYXBwbGUtZGlzbmV5LXgtbXVzay1hbnRpc2VtaXRpYy8ifQ.HULDfCS9uDHbf5ml6gg6Db35BJpRppVwSwkqTxze4dA&itid=gfta)** > > Disney, Lionsgate and reportedly Apple join the list of firms pulling ads from X amid CEO Musk’s promotion of an antisemitic post. Business acumen? ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2023, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/466 "2023-11-19T22:07:50Z")
It’s rare that I get to experience pure schadenfreude. I treasure it. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2023, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/467 "2023-11-20T05:23:30Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#): > > There has been analysis on this kind of wild success. In nearly all cases, it’s luck, and the success cannot be reliably reproduced over time. If you have 1,000 hedge fund managers, maybe 1 will be wildly successfully in any given year just by sheer probability. That doesn’t mean he’s good. Yeah. [As I remarked about a year ago,](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/155) > [@Kimstu](#): > > […] there are a lot of rich people of varying levels of wealth engaged in various business operations, all of which are subject to some degree of random chance and luck. Just because a few of them are repeatedly successful doesn’t necessarily imply that they’re business geniuses. Maybe their success could be partly or mostly due to their encountering highly improbable, but statistically inevitable, unusually long sequences of lucky breaks. I personally have no idea how smart Elon Musk really is, although like everybody else I can easily see how stupid he often appears. But I know it’s statistically fallacious to take it for granted that Musk must be exceptionally smart just because he’s (still) exceptionally rich. It’s true that as a general rule, stupid people don’t become exceptionally rich. But it’s perfectly possible, statistically speaking, that once in a long blue moon some wealthy person could become exceptionally rich—even unprecedentedly rich—despite being stupid, just because they got unprecedentedly long and lucrative streaks of good luck. Random chance is capable of producing some really astonishingly extreme outliers. It just doesn’t produce them very often. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2023, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/468 "2023-11-23T07:16:53Z")
> [@BeepKillBeep](#): > > So there you go, you can search for that one later on and we’ll see what happens. Well, it’s been a year! Apparently, Discourse notifications do work. Twitter doesn’t seem to have died. I’m reminded of this article, also from just over a year ago: > **[Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/)** > > One insider says the company’s current staffing isn’t able to sustain the platform. Basically, nothing from that article came to pass. Almost the exact opposite, really: the article stated that small problems would keep compounding until they became significant (within six months, which was considered “generous”). But in fact what happened is that while there were some early glitches, they all got squashed pretty quickly. The only real issues have been limited to new feature releases, or stress tests beyond what’s been tried before. There have been no significant outages of any kind, and lately there haven’t even been small glitches (aside from the usual complaining about how the algorithm ranks people’s tweets). Has traffic collapsed? Doesn’t seem like it. I captured this ranking from [Semrush.com](http://Semrush.com) last year (October '22): [https://i.imgur.com/xWH8LJZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/xWH8LJZ.png) Twitter at #4 with 8.0B visits. And then from September this year: [![](https://i.imgur.com/Yzt3e1r.png) ](https://i.imgur.com/Yzt3e1r.png) Well, they’re down to #5. But with 8.4B hits, so overall traffic has increased. Interestingly, though, [X.com](http://X.com) gets 1B hits. If you add them together (since they go to the same place), it would put Twitter above Wikipedia and back at #4. Either way, this isn’t exactly some giant collapse. Ok, but what about the zeitgeist? Has Twitter left the public consciousness? This is fuzzy and impossible to say anything objective about, but again: doesn’t seem like it. For instance, the recent stuff about OpenAI was entirely hashed out on Twitter before it made it to the media (which just repeated what was already posted). So major stories are not just breaking on Twitter, but it’s actually the primary source for information on these stories. And not that the SDMB is exactly a hot website, but the external social media links here are still dominated by Twitter. It’s certainly the most common social media source in breaking news threads like “Russia Invades Ukraine”. As for its peers, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Mastodon link to anything, and just one or two Threads links (which couldn’t be read in-line). Bluesky is still closed so I suppose it’s no surprise we don’t get anything from there. The only social media site that sees remotely comparable use here is YouTube, but it’s not as common for breaking news stuff (plus a lot of people don’t know how to work around Discourse’s breakage). At any rate, obviously there is still a great deal of turmoil, especially with respect to advertising. But even with zero advertising, Twitter would be losing money at a lower rate than when it was bought, and Musk can easily fund it indefinitely with money from his sofa cushions. So it’s unlikely to go under from lack of funding. Does the current state even remotely resemble the catastrophe you predicted? They haven’t yet turned it into an “everything app,” so we’ll have to wait and see on that one. But in my view, the site still functions we well as it did before Musk bought it, and as best I can tell, whatever political extremism exists there is invisible to anyone that doesn’t intentionally seek it out. ---
**Author:** ![BeepKillBeep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/9e8a1a/32.png) [@BeepKillBeep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BeepKillBeep)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2023, 11:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/469 "2023-11-23T11:32:04Z")
I think it is quite the stretch to say things are going well, what with 2/3rds of the advertisers pausing or leaving the platform. And of course recently most paused advertising on the platform. [https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html) > **[Advertisers leave Elon Musk's X after their ads appeared next to pro-Nazi posts](https://www.npr.org/2023/11/22/1214619331/advertisers-leave-elon-musks-x-after-their-ads-appeared-next-to-pro-nazi-posts)** > > NPR's Michel Martin talks to Lauren Goode, senior writer at Wired, about the challenges facing X, formerly named Twitter, after multiple advertisers pulled out over antisemitism. And there has been a notable increase in Lindell pillow type ads. So ok, it didn’t fully collapse. Congratulations to Elon for not making it quite as much as catastrophe as was originally thought. So let’s just say Twitter’s “success” does not inspire me to think that Musk is a business genius. Especially since all of Twitter’s hardships seem to be directly caused by Musk. That’s pretty amazing for a business genius. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2023, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/470 "2023-11-24T00:17:35Z")
This article claims that the government and military are going to use more of Musk’s services. > **[The White House May Condemn Musk, but the Government Is Addicted to Him](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-pentagon.html)** > > Rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single technologist with views that it has so publicly declared repugnant. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2023, 8:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/471 "2023-11-24T08:15:37Z")
> [@BeepKillBeep](#): > > So ok, it didn’t fully collapse. Congratulations to Elon for not making it quite as much as catastrophe as was originally thought. I’ll take that 🙂 . There are undoubtedly still some self-inflicted issues. But I think it’s safe to say that much of the reporting a year ago was, shall we say, a bit over the top. The MIT article I cited was one of the _milder_ ones. There was always going to be a conflict between advertisers and allowing more extreme speech. This would be a problem if the goal was to absolutely maximize advertising revenue. That does not seem to have been a goal. I recently saw a Community Note applied to an advertiser, calling them out for claiming some celebrity endorsement (Rogan, maybe? I’ll have to check), which turned out to be bullshit. I’m sure the advertiser was not pleased. But I’d hope most would agree that this is a good thing to allow–misleading advertising is a huge problem, so any mechanism for citizen pushback sounds great to me. As for the advertiser pause–I’m looking forward to seeing how the lawsuit against Media Matters goes (they were the ones that initiated the latest round). Bernie Sanders supporters in particular should be interested–Media Matters was David Brock’s creation, and Brock produced various anti-Sanders hitpieces. He’s responsible for a huge amount of (legitimate) grievance against the Democratic establishment. And possibly responsible (in part) for Trump’s election, due to Sanders supporters staying home because they felt that the system was rigged against them. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2023, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/472 "2023-11-24T08:27:37Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#): > > This article claims that the government and military are going to use more of Musk’s services. Of course they are. SpaceX is by far the best in the launch provider business by any metric–cost, reliability, launch cadence, range of services, etc. Starlink is by far the best satellite-based internet provider, and Ukraine would have collapsed within the first few weeks without them. Tesla produces the best EV charging infrastructure and virtually all EV manufacturers have switched to the Tesla standard for North American cars. The White House pushback is, IMO, linked to one thing: unions. Trump won because he got working class votes from people who did not particularly care for progressive policies and felt like they’d been ignored by Democrats (and Clinton in particular) economically. And Biden won by winning those votes back, and being a legitimately more credible union supporter. So Biden cannot give the slightest bit of credit to Musk, on any front, because Tesla and SpaceX are not unionized. Biden even tried to tie the EV subsidy plan to union production (IMO, basically holding the climate hostage to serve them), though I think some of those restrictions got cut eventually. A while back he held some EV conference and forgot to invite Tesla. While claiming that GM is the EV leader in America. It’s hard to argue against the tactic, because I think it’s working. Nevertheless, the government needs those services. So they’ll use them and try to be quiet about it. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2023, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/473 "2023-11-24T14:48:45Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > There was always going to be a conflict between advertisers and allowing more extreme speech. There is also a difference between allowing more extreme speech, and the company owner himself posting or at least applauding that extreme speech. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2023, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/474 "2023-11-29T17:34:26Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > It’s rare that I get to experience pure schadenfreude. I treasure it. I hope this link finds your approval. > **[I Saw The Tesla Cybertruck Up Close. It Still Looks Horrible](https://insideevs.com/news/694929/tesla-cybertruck-matte-black-impressions/)** > > After seeing the Tesla Cybertruck up close and in person, I have real worries. And I will admit being baffled by some people’s reverencial attitude towards Mr. Musk. People who are not stupid, really not. And still switch off all critical thinking when evaluating Mr. Musk’s words and deeds. There seems to be a parallel here with other people, intelligent people too, but mostly different people, who suffer the same delusion with Mr. Trump. I do not understand it. Perehaps I suffer from Musk Derangement Sydrom? ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2023, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/475 "2023-11-30T03:35:56Z")
When I first saw that truck I thought it was a concept exercise that would never see a production line. I am puzzled at the kind of person who would see that and say, “Yes, that meets all my transportation needs.” I think buyers are buying it so they can be the first one on their block to have one. That build quality makes it look like someone’s garage project. Maybe Batman’s “throw away the first version” of a Bat Truck. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2023, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/476 "2023-11-30T04:29:26Z")
> [@BeepKillBeep](#): > > Especially since all of Twitter’s hardships seem to be directly caused by Musk. That’s pretty amazing for a business genius. For example, why would a media operation need advertisers? > [@](#): > > Video of the interview, which was widely circulated, showed that Musk said, “Don’t advertise,” on Wednesday during an on-stage interview at an event in New York. “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.” > … > “What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company,” he [said](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/elon-musk-talks-x-advertiser-exodus-dealbook-summit-1235698937/) on Wednesday. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.” Because of course, Elmo’s decision to re-tweet an anti-Semitic tweet couldn’t possibly have contributed to the flight of advertisers. It’s the advertisers who are killing the company. > **[Elon Musk hurls defiant, profanity-laced retort at fleeing advertisers](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/29/elon-musk-hurls-defiant-profanity-laced-retort-at-fleeing-advertisers)** > > At New York event Wednesday, X owner had choice words for Walt Disney and others who pulled ads over antisemitic content ---
**Author:** ![not\_what\_you\_d\_expect](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_what_you_d_expect/32/3246_2.png) [@not\_what\_you\_d\_expect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_what_you_d_expect)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2023, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/477 "2023-11-30T07:35:07Z")
I just watched that entire interview. In some ways, he seems like someone starved for attention and approval. Anytime the audience reacted with a chuckle at something he said, he would repeat it again and again, as if the laughter was feeding his soul. And boy is his laugh dorky. Obviously, he’s brilliant in ways I’ll never understand. He can’t see past the motes in his own eyes though, in my humble opinion. At one point in the interview he says something about the ring of power and the dangers of having it, but seems to think he is immune. He’s not. Another bit about free speech was amusing, but not in the way that had him giggling. Free speech is absolute, but he’s free to make people who don’t pay him less visible on the platform because, well, it’s not free in that way. It’s just free to everyone to post about Nazi’s as long as they put a community note on the bottom. Why, even he got a community note! He’s just an oddball. ---
**Author:** ![BeepKillBeep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/9e8a1a/32.png) [@BeepKillBeep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BeepKillBeep)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2023, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/478 "2023-11-30T13:40:35Z")
I’m glad you posted this instead of me. If I had posted it, then I’m sure it would be dismissed as coming from a Musk-hater. But yeah, for a business genius, he sure doesn’t exhibit a lot of business genius. Or perhaps his acumen is simply beyond my simple brain to comprehend. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2023, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/479 "2023-11-30T14:02:18Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#): > > > [@TriPolar](#): > > > > Everyone who thinks Elon Musk is stupid and has a net worth 1% or higher than Musk’s, raise your hands. You’re all so smart I’m sure I don’t need to say this, but if your net worth is less than 2.5 billion dollars then put your hand down. > > “If you’re so smart why aren’t you [rich/president]”? “If you’re not [someone of the same group as the subject] you don’t get to judge?” What a trite cliché. Can’t believe it’s being brought up. People can certainly judge whether Elon Musk’s acquisition and subsequent management of Twitter has been a success. But it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that one of the wealthiest businessmen in history has “no business acumen”. That’s like asking “how does someone with no athletic ability get to play professional baseball?” about Michael Jordan. You can’t argue that Elon Musk isn’t a smart guy and a successful businessman. But he has a particular (some would say callous and authoritarian) management style that may not work in every sort of company. If anything, Elon Musk is an argument against the theory of the “professional executive” who can just drop into any company and run it. ---
**Author:** ![BeepKillBeep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/9e8a1a/32.png) [@BeepKillBeep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BeepKillBeep)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2023, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903/480 "2023-11-30T14:15:02Z")
Sure I can by looking at the evidence from Musk’s history. There precious little evidence that Musk is a business genius other than his wealth. But we all know that people can accumulate wealth without business acumen. Not that all people who accumulate wealth are just failing upwards. There’s plenty of successes with the evidence to back up their reputations. Warren Buffett is certainly a markets genius because he has a very long track record of success. Steve Jobs was certainly a business genius managing to build Apple not once, but twice. Musk made money selling a company in a tech bubble where any company with a .com was “worth” millions. Compaq vastly overpaid, barely used it, and then went under (not because of buying Musk’s company). Musk was a failure at PayPal and was bailed out by Peter Thiel. If not for Peter Thiel, than that’s where the Musk story ends. Now, his next decision was a good one. He bought into Tesla and marketed (lied) the heck out of it. Something he continues to do today. Tesla was mainly kept alive by the gov’t grants that Musk rails about today. > **[Elon Musk says Tesla was 'about a month' from bankruptcy during Model 3 ramp](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month-from-bankruptcy-during-model-3-ramp.html)** > > Musk has often spoken about what he calls the "production and logistics hell" of taking a new electric vehicle, the Model 3, into high-volume manufacturing. > **[It's Still Very Funny That 1,000 People Gave Tesla $250,000 For A Roadster...](https://jalopnik.com/its-still-very-funny-that-1-000-people-gave-tesla-250-1851038764)** > > That interest-free quarter-billion dollar cash injection definitely helped Tesla > [@](#): > > Tesla is a promise company. It makes promises to its customers, various governments, and other businesses. Those promises require up-front payment, and whether they come to fruition or not, the company keeps the money while continually blowing through deadlines. Space X is definitely his best unarguable success. But to what degree is he responsible for that success? He wasn’t visionary to see a gap in the market, because it was a well-known gap. There was even a prize for it. And he definitely didn’t design or engineer anything. It was one of the few instances where Musk had enough good sense to go and hire talented people. Is going and hiring good people “business genius”? I mean he probably clears Donald Trump at that point but … Boring Company is a stupid idea, that is failing. $750 million dollars for 2.4 miles of inefficient transportation. And all of the other Boring projects have fizzled because cities are going … “Uhhh… no.” Hyperloop was, and is, a lie. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903.md?page=23) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-someone-with-no-business-acumen-get-to-be-the-richest-person-in-the-world/974903.md?page=25)