I’d probably be terrible because I have zero interest in business management and greed is not my strong point. But that wasn’t my point. My point, in my most recent post, was that quite a large number of ordinary people would be capable of doing those jobs. How do I know this? Because they’ve done it. To wit:
This is begging the question. The argument that some of us have advanced is that it takes no great, specialized, or magical skill to manage a large business (beyond obviously a good knowledge of the business itself) and have provided evidence for that fact. Simply asserting that “of course it does, therefore your’re wrong” doesn’t advance your argument, and neither do your flawed analogies. Flying an airliner takes a great deal of training, running a business can obviously be self-taught to most folks, and while running a large corporation is obviously different than running a small business, we also know that it can be successfully self-taught at each step of the way as the business grows.
I can also give you an example of a major failure of some of those “skills” that you seem to be championing. I once worked for a small-ish tech company whose owner, as the company grew, came up with the idea that the company’s tech development efforts should be comparmentalized into separate departments (nothing wrong with that) and that each department should be headed up by an MBA – a graduate of a business school, trained in those very “skills” you value so much.
The MBAs knew nothing about the business or the particular technology they were overseeing, and had little interest in it. The whole thing was a colossal flop and was abandoned within a year. I’m surprised it lasted that long. What this company needed was innovators at all levels, not freaking business school graduates.
Karl Jobst, a Youtuber who covers cheating and fraud in the world of competitive video gaming (he got Billy Mitchell stripped of the Donkey Kong records he cheated to achieve, for example) has a video out about Elmo’s paying people to play Diablo for him and other gaming shenanigans.
I’d be willing to bet the average person doesn’t know how SS works. That doesn’t make your statement untrue, but I can think of a number of people, including my parents, who would not be able to tell you the basic outline of it.
I would guess the type of people who don’t understand how SS works are the type of people who are convinced that Musk will scrap SS and replace it with something which costs nothing and gives even more benefits. When they eventually lose SS and end up with no benefits at all, they’ll blame the Biden somehow.
The fact that low to middle income Trump voters in LCOL areas thought they’d see any benefit from “No Taxes on Social Security” goes to show that they don’t fully understand how it works.
This is from last year but it’s a good rebuttal to “Ponzi scheme” claims.
The ironic line in it to me:
If billionaires like Elon Musk paid into Social Security at the same rate as the rest of us on all of their income, we could expand benefits for everyone and pay them in full forever.
I maintain that Musk is an organizational genius, based upon his performance at Paypal and Tesla and SpaceX. It’s very rare to have a serial succeeder. Is he great manager? No. Is he a turnaround artist? No. Could he do I good job as bog standard S&P 500 CEO? I very much doubt it. Musk has a strong skill set, but it’s narrow.
If he didn’t have such a exceptional skill set, there would be many more people with an analogous track record. There are not, so he is. Unless you think that not many people want to make oodles of money. Theil isn’t in the same league.
It’s obviously very dangerous to have a person with poor impulse control running the country, and I’m not just talking about Elon Musk. Trump is the same way.
Anyway, the Musk bubble appears to be popping. Bloomberg:
While Elon Musk is busy in Washington, his publicly traded company has been suffering. Having skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, Tesla is now in free fall and increasingly a target of protesters. Every weekend, more people have shown up at Tesla dealerships across the US with signs and chants, demonstrating against Musk’s effort to gut federal regulators and agencies while firing tens of thousands or workers with Trump’s blessing. Overseas, it might be even worse for the carmaker: Tesla sales have collapsed in Europe. Maybe betting on Trump boosting Musk’s companies wasn’t the smartest move for investors after all?
The remainder few paragraphs are pretty ugly. Gifted article, good for 7 days.
I’ll counter with Neuralink and the Boring Company and Twitter.
The ‘genius’ in those earlier companies (and it’s no accident those came earlier) is that he did not try as hard to look like a genius of that sort.
He partnered with the right people to do the actual running and organizing of things and mainly handled the cheerleading and fundraising end of things. Even the motivational part, at least for some people. And I’ll admit he was (maybe still is? when he’s not really high) perhaps a genius at that side of things.
Now, for whatever narcissistic reasons, he wants to ALSO be seen (not really ‘be’ but ‘seen’) as a genius as a hands-on CEO and as an engineer/scientist/programmer. And he’s not good at that part. Not at all.
If he really wanted to cement any sort of legacy, he’d have let himself remain a figurehead CEO while his quite apparently willing flunkies - like Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX - did the real day to day stuff.
People like Musk, Trump, and Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) have some weird ability to get people to believe in their ideas and invest massive amounts of money in their companies regardless of the feasibility of their ideas. Regardless of whether or not they should be admired for that ability, the fact is that being able to raise large amounts of money is one of the main aspects to having a successful business. Even though I think Musk is an moron, he’d be a great person to bring on board to raise money for a company over a typical smart person. Many companies have great people but can’t generate sufficient cash flow to stay in business. With someone like Musk raising money, the cash would be flowing in and be able to keep the business running until it could become self sufficient.
Many companies have massive failures on their path to success. Consider a company like Apple. It had massive failures with the Lisa and NeXT computers. Or even Apple computers in the 90’s. Apple was on it’s way to failure when they turned things around with the iPod and iPhone. Failures are to be expected. The ability to keep the cash flowing regardless of the failures is what helps make a business successful.
Hey, no fair cherry picking his failures. It’s only OK to cherry pick his successes. And cherry pick the times when those successes were actually successes. If Tesla is having issues now, surely it’s not because Musk did something non-genius, right?
It’s like Trump. If he just wanted to have the title of President and goof off all day while other people did the work, he could have. But he also can’t stand being seen as a figurehead puppet while others are the “real” brains.
Musk is the same way. He has to be “the” genius behind the companies or nobody can be.
