I wasn’t trying to rub it in and I’m sorry if it came out that way. Please accept my apology.
There exist people who work a lot and don’t work hard. I’ve known a few billionaires (or at least, people who became billionaires). Let me assure you that they worked both a lot and worked hard.
…wealth to scale:
(Shift and mouse-key to scroll)
Nobody works “lots and hard enough” to earn or deserve wealth at that scale.
If the news reports that a police officer killed a drug dealer, stole the drugs, and started selling them and this became some big issue in society, nearly half of everyone would decide that the cop was a hero and the drug dealer was a devil, and the other half of everyone would decide that the drug dealer was a saint and the cop was a psycho Nazi.
Those are both wrong answers. The cop might have spent most of his time preserving the law and doing things as he’s supposed to. The drug dealer might have a family that he took good care of. They might have both been horrible in every single way. Most likely, they’re fairly average if you take everything into account.
Musk has been chosen as a hero by some and those people are stupid for doing that. Making any real live human being into a hero is probably not wise. Doing the exact reverse and plopping the guy down with Stalin and Hitler, though, isn’t the right correction. That’s equally unreasonable.
Musk is a bit nuts. He’s probably fairly good at technical stuff compared to the average person, and he seems to be a hard worker who doesn’t expect anything from others past what he expects from himself and those people are all completely free to go work somewhere else. Not a one of them has ever had a gun put up against their heads and been told to “work or die”. You can’t exploit people who knew what they were signing on for and agreed to it, and who could simply go across the street to work for Facebook or fifty other companies.
If people chose you as their god incarnate, I assume that you would do some things that people found unethical. You might start banging the groupies or convincing them to dox politicians that you hate, etc. That doesn’t make you evil, it just makes you average. Musk has probably kept his behavior relatively moral, considering that he could live a life of debauchery and partying. As a living god, he’s fairly unintrusive - so far as I’ve noted. On the scale from Jimmy Saville to Warren Buffett, he’s far closer to Buffett.
…doing “evil” things makes you evil.
That’s really the best they can come up with? The majority of it is pretty much Musk being a bit of a jerk.
The COVID stuff is the worst, because it potentially had health consequences. But there didn’t appear to be any actual demonstrated effect.
On the other hand, Volkswagen’s lie “our diesel vehicles follow all emissions regulations” lead to the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people. Actual real-life dead people. Not Bill Gates getting offended about something said on Twitter.
In the same vein, we have from other automakers lies about:
“climate change isn’t real”
“we can’t build vehicles with lower emissions”
“electric vehicles aren’t practical”
“tetraethyl lead is perfectly safe”
And so on. All of Musk’s stuff added up isn’t a millionth as consequential as any of those, and more.
For the things that he said, if saying stupid things was evil then we’re both living in Hell cause I guarantee you that almost everyone around you and in the mirror is evil (and I say that about myself as well).
For the things that he has done, I’ll still stand by “closer to Warren Buffett and further from Jimmy Saville. Sadly ordinary.” Give a normal person a lot of money and a bunch of cult followers, I guarantee that most of them will be worse than those examples - and that’s taking the examples at face value, which might not be reasonable.
…securities fraud is bad. Reopening a Tesla factory in violation of public health orders is bad. Ignoring repeated complaints that people were called the N-word and that his colleagues “had drawn swastikas and scratched a racial epithet in a bathroom stall and left drawings of derogatory caricatures of Black children around the factory is bad. Running a company where female worker said sexual harassment was “rampant,” alleging “nightmarish conditions” is bad. What they did to Martin Tripp was bad. Paying a private investigator to dig up dirt on the person he called a pedo is bad.
Elon Musk is a bond-level-cartoon-villain. He is a bad man. Sexist, racist, misogynist, anti-worker bad man.
As long as you aren’t a woman or a person of colour or one of the workers he regularly exploits, sure.
That wasn’t a list of just the stupid things he has said.
He stands closer to Ernst Stavro Blofeld than he does to Ms Moneypenny.
Every single person on the planet is going to suffer for the previous and ongoing lies about climate change, and by massively delaying the transition to clean vehicles.
Previous automakers gave every single person in a developed country permanent neurological damage, and probably depressed average IQ by 2-3 points. That is Bond-level villany.
The VF article couldn’t even demonstrate that conditions at Telsa were outside typical industry averages. Yeah, it sucks. Lots of things suck.
…and Elon Musk is still a bad man. A cartoonishly bad man.
And yet, Elon Musk is still the king of the Bond villians.
Whatever the “typical industry averages are”, they don’t give Elon Musk a pass for being a very bad man. And if the industry routinely accepts labour law violations, racism, sexism, misogyny, then it all needs to be exposed, rejected, and burned to the ground.
And if we have to start with Elon Musk’s empire, then so be it.
So, while you acknowledge that Musk’s foibles don’t add up to a fart in a hurricane compared to other rampant crimes, your focus remains on him for… reasons.
This argument is starting to sound like the ones about Hunter Biden’s laptop and Hillary’s emails.
…I haven’t acknowledged nor conceded this at all.
This thread is about Elon Musk. My focus remains on him because I’m staying on topic.
Elon Musk is a bad man who does bad things who became the richest man in the world despite having no business acumen because he ruthlessly exploits (in a cartoonish bond-villian fashion) everybody in his vicinity.
That is nothing at all like “Hunter Biden’s laptop and Hillary’s emails.”
Some would say succesful ruthless exploitation shows the presence of some part of what makes up business acumen. Not a good part and probably counterproductive in the end, but still…
“being a Bad Man” is not the same as “having no business acumen”: both can be true and still it would not be that one follows necessarily from the other.
…"having no business acumen” is the underlying premise of the OP. That much is assumed. If you want to dispute that? Go ahead. I would suggest that we start with this definition here:
And see how well Elon Musk fits that model. " Ability to link cause and effect" and “Self Awareness” though did make me giggle.
Nope. But I see more attention to litigating if he’s A Bad Man than the assumed lack of business acumen.
But Donald Trump DOES talk about it nonstop.
A bit? That’s quite the understatement. He’s full on loony tunes.
Also, good at technical stuff compared to the average person is a pretty low bar. He might clear it, but there’s no real evidence that he has any particular skills in technology, programming, or engineering, and in fact, clear evidence to the contrary.
I don’t think Musk is anywhere close to a Hitler or Stalin, but I also don’t think he is worthy of being the richest person in the world because I don’t think he’s really earned it. He simply isn’t the sort of person I would look at and say “Yes, based on your exceptional talents, you deserve to be the richest person in the world.” Of course, I also don’t think anyone should be as wealthy as Musk. It is a poor use of the world’s wealth to have it increasingly concentrated in fewer people but that’s a whole other story.
And in case, you’re wondering, people that I think perhaps deserve the title:
Gates (legitimately built Microsoft, did lots of scummy antitrust stuff, but he’s doing good works now)
Jobs (legitimately built Apple not just once but TWICE, the company is kind of evil though)
Bezos (legitimately build Amazon, he treats his employees VERY badly though)
Buffett (consistently making money in the markets is a legitimate eye for quality)
There’s probably others but they come to mind. Of course, the people on that list had all sorts of help from all sorts of people, organizations, government, but their skill is undeniable. You can see a consistent pattern of action that created success. Musk doesn’t have that. He kept getting removed from companies, that succeeded despite him, and then had two of his latest companies saved from bankruptcy, has other ventures that are just dumb (e.g., Boring Company), and his actions with Twitter really show just how incompetent really is, and how the defects in his personality affect his ability to conduct business.
In a fair and just world, Musk would not be the richest person. The fact that he is tells us that our economic system is deeply flawed.
If Twitter is worthless, does that change the situation? Has anyone done this kind of analysis within the past week?
It is up to the government to create the rules under which business acumen will or will not be associated with ruthless exploitation. The easier it is to unionize, the less business sense it makes to be a ruthless exploiter. Labor is weak in the United States, so it makes more sense to exploit than it used to.
One objection is that when unions were strong, protections against racial and gender discrimination was weaker. This is true, but on balance I think there is more business benefit to ruthless exploitation today.
Musk’s requirement that workers work very long hours was normal in the 19th century, and then was properly outlawed. And then it was, for most of us, re-legalized. Musk is, to an extent, a bad man. In other senses, he is responding to the incentive structure he finds.
This is hyperbole to an extreme. Elon Musk may not have committed genocide or espoused openly racist rhetoric but the evidence presented here and elsewhere makes it clear that he is crude, vindictive, exploitative, dissembling, odious, vainglorious person who puts other people down and pursues them in often petty and one-sided feuds to satiate his own ego. He has exaggerated his own accomplishments and diminished those of others, not even for profit or legal stature but simply because it makes him feel important. He has been credibly accused of abusive, neglectful, and vindictive behavior by both people who know him well and those with only a casual association. He has whinged about how wronged he has been by everyone from NASA to AOC while impugning and insulting complete strangers and SLAPP-suing people who could not have credibly stolen ‘his’ intellectual property or damaged his business interests or reputation in any conceivable way simply because he doesn’t like the multiple law firms he keeps on retainer to sit idle. He claims technical expertise in fields from aerospace engineering to neuroscience while barely being able to parrot basic jargon in such a discordant fashion as to make it clear that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about to any depth beyond a Popular Science article, and to excuse it all he claims to be on the autistic spectrum despite any evidence of an actual diagnosis.
This is not some manufactured conspiracy or misattribution; this is exactly what his history and behavior have shown him to be. He may not be Adolf Hitler but he is very much a Frederich Flick character, fêting would be demagogues like Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene in the supposed cause of “free speech” (even though the first time someone speaks a criticism of him he brings every resources to bear to squash them) and has private phone calls with Vladimir Putin, after which he announced his solution to the Ukraine ‘situation’ by insisting that Ukrainians capitulate by handing over a quarter of their sovereign territory in the name of “peace”. He’s worse than just a bad person; he’s an enabler of the worst of humanity, and attempting to ineffectually shroud himself in the clothing of a humanistic benfactor trying to save the environment or make humanity a “multi-planetary species” while he uses every available resource to persecute, defame, and humiliate anyone who disagrees with him and exploits people by quite intentionally manipulating markets via influencing speculators gives lie to the notion that he’s sacrificing himself on the altar of altruism.
As for his business acumen…even ignoring the various problems with many of his companies, and how the success of Tesla and SpaceX are clearly due to other people who are more intimately involved in day-to-day operations and business strategy, it is clear from his direct and visible ‘leadership’ in the Twitter takeover that he doesn’t have a fucking clue about how to run a business himself, either in the sense of maximizing profit or operating in compliance with labor and finance regulations. That he has taken Twitter—a fiscally problematic but functional and widely used social media platform—and essentially turned into a fireship that threatens to destroy everything it touches in the span of a couple of weeks indicates that either Musk is entirely inept in running a business, or else he has a deliberate strategy that involves digging a giant pit, dumping several billion of his own exaggerated valuation in addition to the suckers he managed to convince to invest it it, and has dumped a few thousand gallons of RP-1 and lit it on fire just to watch it burn. Which, if Musk’s intent is to demonstrate the absurdity of late-stage, speculation-driven market value capitalism, kudos to him. But if he is actually supposed to be a credible businessperson capable of making astute investments and accomplishing the height of success, he has pretty much undercut that reputation faster than Charles Bukowski could empty a bottle of cheap rye.
Regardless, that Elon Musk is a cartoonishly terrible person isn’t even in question at this point. He’s basically the very wealthy version of the uncle you hope doesn’t show up at Thanksgiving and embarrass everyone by telling progressively more off-color jokes in front of the kids, only of course he does because that’s his idea of a great holiday gathering. Musk is a concerted, deliberate, obnoxious asshole by design because he’s a thirteen year old edgelord in the body of a fifty year old man, a version of Big where the main character is cast as Tom Arnold instead of Tom Hanks.
Stranger
It’s virtually 15 years to the day that you posted that
And, well, I expect that your predictions of the future success of Twitter and all of Musk’s other ventures are about as reliable as your predictions about SpaceX back then. Regardless of whether you think Musk contributed technically or just has a good eye for hiring the right people, SpaceX went from essentially nothing to having the sole operational US crew launch capability as well as providing 2/3 of the world’s orbital upmass. And will likely continue that dominance given the incompetence of competitors like Boeing, Arianespace, and Roscosmos.