Of course he was rich. Numerous articles talk about his family and the emerald mine. His family gave him only $28K like Trump only took $1million from his father, or like Musk went to Stanford. He lies.
You tried to compare Trump with Musk. The level of wealth they started from is just not remotely comparable.
$28k is less than the average car. It’s much less than an average 4-year degree, of which about a third of Americans have. Having access to that level of money is just upper middle-class, not rich.
The $28k figure is from Vance’s book, which was largely written without any input from Musk at all.
…so you concede that Musk is an unredeemable arse hole with no moral scruples who treats his staff like shit and one of the reasons why he is so rich is because he is a complete and utter bastard who doesn’t care about anyone else except himself?
Okay then.
“Greed is good.” And Elon Musk is one greedy motherfucker. Lets not pretend otherwise. It isn’t because he is a smart investor or a smart businessman. Its because he is a ruthless, heartless, prick.
Oh, and he started out rich.
63% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. 28K is about twice what I made last year after taxes. Its more than just “having access to just 28K.” That’s a red herring. Because that wasn’t all the money he could have accessed if he needed too.
Yes, Musk is a jerk. Big deal. He largely employs well-paid professionals that have a choice where to work. It’s common knowledge that many of his employees burn out in short order, after which they can have their pick as to where to go next. It’s not such a bad deal for them–work your ass off for 2-3 years out of college, cash out the stock grants, then go to work for Blue Origin or ULA or someone else and relax with a 40 hr/wk job. They’re adults that can choose where they want to go.
That puts you at roughly poverty level in the US for an individual. Well under poverty level if you have a family.
The $400 million claim is extremely dubious.
The amount Trump actually got from his father is almost certainly in the range of $15 to $20 million, in three chunks; a $7.5 million loan (which was paying interest, so really not really being given money) a sneaky, likely illegal loan of $3.5 million in uncashed casino chips, and a trust fund.
Fred Trump also co signed a $70 million loan, but that appears to have been paid.
Fred Trump couldn’t have given Donald Trump $400 million. He wasn’t that rich.
Well, I’ll grant that I’m just going from the NYT article, which gives a figure of $413M in 2018 dollars. I can’t access it now, but the Wiki page says they identified 295 revenue streams, not just the small handful you’ve mentioned. Obviously, I can’t validate their findings. But note that inflation from 1970 to today is nearly 8x, so depending on when the original transactions took place, the raw dollar figure might only be in the tens of millions.
…you do realize that bad bosses aren’t a good thing, right? Musk is more than a jerk. He’s an abusive boss. He rips off his staff. He cuts corners, and is unsafe. Spies on his staff. Allows racism and sexism to run rampant.
Yes, that’s a big fucking deal.
Yeah, in America the billionaire class has done really well for itself by essentially destroying basic employment rights. The gap between rich and poor just keeps going up.
This isn’t a good thing.
Yeah, its common knowledge that he is a abusive boss that does everything he can to screw over workers. That’s just what I said.
This isn’t a good thing.
And no, not everyone just gets to “have their pick as to where to go next.” That isn’t the way the world works.
The vast majority of Twitter employees decided it was a bad deal for them. And you don’t get to decide what is and isn’t a good deal for them. Nathaniel Aziel Gonsalves didn’t think it was a good deal. Montieco Justice didn’t think it was a good deal. Tesla was an abusive workplace if you happened to have the wrong colour skin. And they didn’t just get to move onto Blue Origin or ULA and relax for 40 hours a week after that. Because that isn’t the way the real world works.
The excuse for all of the worst excesses American-style capitalism has to offer.
Yeah, 2021 really fucking sucked. No need to rub it in.
I’m sorry to hear that, and apologize for being inconsiderate. I got caught up in the point I was trying to make. Hope things get better for you.
For what it’s worth, I distinguish between people in a position of power vs. not. Well-paid professionals don’t need anyone’s sympathy–they can take care of themselves, and have numerous backstops in place.
That’s obviously not true of people in tenuous economic situations. I’m all in favor of UHC and other programs to provide those backstops.
I think it’s an advantage when people of all stripes can take risks, like changing jobs or career. It’s a distinct advantage the wealthy have, particularly in the US. We’d all benefit if people did not feel stuck in their current position.
South Africa’s income inequality is (and was) very very high so even being upper-middle makes you statistically in the 1%. But other than that I agree with you. My impression (as a South African myself) is that the Musks were obviously wealthy, but not famously wealthy in the jet-setting, tabloid sense that Elon is now.
Y’know, looking at the thread title: there is a difference between “fucking up their latest venture” and just plain and simply “having no business acumen”. There is no shortage out there of people who were very succesful at X but failed when they assumed that what worked at X will work at Y.
Ah, the inflation thing is important though; if one is comparing Trump’s financial performance against the stock market, you cannot double count the effect of inflation. Saying he got $400 million in the 70s and 80s and inflating from there doesn’t provide a genuine picture of his performance against the market.
Of course, it’s nearly impossible to ascertain how rich he actually got. He lies constantly about this stuff.
If the goal of business acumen is to make the most money, we have to recognize, like it or not, that Musk has shown overwhelming business acumen. Perhaps the important qualities for business acumen are not what we think they are. In fact, if I knew what they were and were disposed to exhibit them, I might be more successful in business.
$30k? I know immigrants with limited command of English who work low-paid service jobs and would invest that amount in their kids’ enterprise in a heartbeat from money they have squirreled away in a mattress.
Most of the people who have become the richest person in the world in my lifetime (off the top of my head, i can think of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, and Musk) are all reportedly extraordinarily hard workers. None started off by laboring in the salt mines but all had a single-minded devotion to accomplishing their goals and worked extraordinarily hard to achieve them.
Nobody is ever singularly responsible for their own success. Certainly, many successful people believe they are but that’s only because they have forgotten the people who helped them along the way.
I was just about to say the same thing.
It’s less than one year of a four-year degree.
You aren’t rich. That doesn’t mean everyone with a little more than you is rich.
Here, we agree.
In my experience, most wealthy people don’t talk about this stuff. Why would they give away the secret sauce? When wealthy people talk about this, they are usually lying. Warren Buffet seems to be the rare exception who both talks honestly about how he got wealthy (not that he could hide it) and shares tips to help other people get wealthy.
I wonder how many people who were successful at X just got lucky. If you have enough well-funded people out there trying random shit, some of them might succeed without any particular skill. Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. One way to tell the difference is consistent success over the long run.
And even then, given enough trials, it’s statistically inevitable that at least a few people will be consistently successful over the long run due merely to random chance. Like those stock-picker apps that accomplish amazing feats of consistently selecting profitable stocks, by the simple expedient of selecting many more stock combinations and merely not mentioning the ones that didn’t turn out so profitable.
I’m not a CEO or a business analyst, and I have no specialized knowledge or opinion about whether or to what extent Elon Musk (or Donald Trump, for that matter) may happen to combine their frequent public acts of undeniable stupidity with some form of above-average executive ability or “business acumen” that makes them very financially successful. But what I do know is that 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.
That is simply not true. It is nowhere near true. Plenty of extremely wealthy people came from very modest backgrounds.
The UK equivalent of Trump (at least in terms of “rich guy in the apprentice”) Is Alan Sugar. A complete self-starter from a council flat. Given absolutely nothing, completely self-made.
…every single worker deserves to work in a safe working environment. And if they have an abusive boss? Yeah, they get my sympathy. Being a well paid professional doesn’t change that.
Thank you.
Working lots and working hard are two different things.
Again, no need to rub it in.
But everyone who is rich is still rich.
@Banquet_Bear
People from poor families can become rich and people from rich families can become poor. If you believe otherwise then you haven’t done any research.
It is true that a very solid and easy way to get rich is to simply be handed everything. Nepotism is a human instinct and a significant portion of wealthy people simply grant everything to their children. Likewise, a lot of businesses are stable enough that they can basically run on auto-pilot. If you’ve got a factory that spits out a million soup cans a year, and you’ve got people who know how to source metal and process orders, then you’re basically done. The business just manages itself, so long as you leave it alone and many of those who inherit a business are smart enough (at least) to do that. They spend their days surfing, racing boats, etc. and letting other people do all the boring stuff.
But it’s not universal. I’ve met people who literally rose from nothing and I have met people who were given a perfectly reasonable upbringing and who could have used it as a launch point to success, but live in squalor. Usually, the second comes about because the parents don’t believe in nepotism.
Some bosses are psychopathic assholes and some are very nice people who feel like they have to take care of their employees to the best of their abilities. The latter who stay in business are the ones who cut employees to protect the livelihood of the majority, in a market where the consumer just buys the lowest priced product at the market, without considering what that means for the workers. You can’t employ more people and pay them better than the rest of your competitors and expect to stay in business. Whatever percentage of wealthy you decide are psychopaths - 10%, 50%, 90%, or whatever - market forces are nearly 100% psychopathic so even Mr. Rogers would have to lay off workers, if he ran a company.
If you look at the choices a CEO makes and decide that they’re all psychopaths then, to be sure, I understand it. But I’ve met these people. In the majority, they’re fairly normal. In a sense, the most sad thing about it all is that they pretty much are all just normal people - just as prone to following conspiracy theories, practicing nepotism, torturing small animals for fun, etc. as any other person of any particular income bracket. Some CEOs embezzle from their company and some store clerks pocket a percentage of the money they’re handed at the counter. So far as I can tell, it’s the same impulse. They’re not heroes and they’re not demons, they’re just people who managed to be okay at budgeting and organizing work between people. It doesn’t seem to take more than that to succeed.
If you’re making the assumption that Musk could only have gotten fabulously wealthy if he was given a fabulous fortune, that is false. That’s not matched by evidence and it’s not matched by reality. That’s just your mind falling to cognitive dissonance.
There’s an intersection here with risk-taking, though. Suppose you give people a choice: $1000, or a 10% chance at $100,000.
A poor and/or cautious person might choose the first, because $1k in the pocket now might really come in handy. The second choice might appeal to either a gambling type or someone for whom a guaranteed $1k is not a significant loss, and has a much greater return.
Of the risk-takers, only 10% get “rich”. Are they lucky? Well, yes. But there’s more than just that; they had to take the risk in the first place. And in most real-world cases it’s not just a matter of a simple choice like this; the choice might be whether to start a business that’ll almost certainly fail vs., say, taking a normal salaried job.
…he got fabulously wealthy by exploiting the people that worked for him, by being a serial liar, by being the “cult leader” of a group of techbros who have systematically dismantled long-fought-for labour protections.