Comment by wpietri
2 years ago
For sure. Given that Musk was fired from [deleted, see note 1] and PayPal, you'd think they might have had more questions. But people look at failure much more carefully than they look at success.
I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incentive to keep quiet. But one possible explanation is that he is good at PR and using hype to raise money, but is not a competent manager without help. Consider, for example, this bit from someone who says they were a SpaceX intern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042958
Musk is a celebrity. Celebrities start successful companies all the time. Is Rihanna a brilliant business woman for starting a successful beauty line? Is she a business genius, which is what Musk gets labeled so often? Maybe she really is, but I don't see her get that label, I think her value add is very clearly "she is famous, people will buy shit that she puts her name on".
What they have in common is that they have fame and money, and it turns out you can do a lot with that.
Many celebrities end up burning out or spending all their money, start failed businesses, etc.
Rihanna imo is very savvy and the Fenty brand was a very successful business, involving a couple pivots from fashion to more lingerie and beauty. The big Savage x Fenty musical production event every year is a smart move that leverages her music industry connections and draws lots of interest and new customers.
Arguably she is doing better than Musk atm, given that he started life with a huge capital advantage and is likely losing big on Twitter right now (as well as tanking his public image).
Fame is like a flywheel with a feedback loop. Once famous everything you do makes you more famous, even bad stuff.
Hence celebrities getting married and divorced every three weeks, it keeps them in the news.
Musk simply does a lot of the basics right and knows how to talk bullshit, had the assets to start at all, is apathetic to social perception (his narcissistic sociopathic tendency) which makes it easier to go against the flow both in a good and bad way, and has the mental ability to work long hours.
His successes just delivered what the market demanded but established powers did not want to pursue for one reason or another. He knows to outsource actual work to experts and offers them attention which is easier due to his interest in tech/science. Of course, he sees them as tools and he doesn't need to care about labor laws but that's a part of the longer list of his flaws and mistakes.
After Tesla/SpaceX took off, it has been as you described.
> I think her value add is very clearly "she is famous, people will buy shit that she puts her name on".
Musk example[1] of this, he sold 1 million USD worth of perfume with smell of burnt hair in a few hours.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/elon-musk-sel...
They also start moderately but not wildly successful companies and then leak fake tax returns to look more successful, like Kylie Jenner.
This feels disingenuous.
Elon Musk was barely more than a nobody when he got involved with Tesla and started SpaceX.
Fenty was founded after Rihanna had scored countless hits and was basically a household name.
> Elon Musk was barely more than a nobody when he got involved with Tesla and started SpaceX.
He was extremely wealthy and had a lot of connections from buying his way into other companies. He was not yet a household name/ global celebrity, only one in more niche (but very powerful) circles, that changed soon after.
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Who is "Rihanna" ?
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Is her beauty line worth more than (top three classic beauty supply companies)?
Rihanna’s underwear company Savage X Fenty was estimated to be worth $3 billion earlier this year, which is roughly the same as the market cap of Victoria’s Secret.
Probably that estimate would be lower now, given the market downturn. But clearly she’s well on her way to building up a competitor to the established brands.
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Can you just make your point?
Yes. That's what market cap means. I can understand you might disagree with the valuation, but that doesn't change it.
Also, don't forget that Rihanna has something the top three beauty supply companies don't have - a growing brand. That has a massive impact on market cap.
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Does her beauty line rival that of the gods? Because I don’t want another Trojan War starting.
SpaceX worked because they hired experienced people from ULA and other launch services companies who weren't held back by the fear of risk taking that is endemic in the MIC. They wouldn't have succeed if they just tried to play rocket engineer like Carmack did.
Musk is a victim of his own success. Even if he isn't solely responsible for the success of Tesla and Space X in his mind enough of it is him.
The problem here is overconfidence / blind spots. Twitter is a different type of business. Musk looks to be doing a Mike Jordan or a Shaq. Basketball isn't baseball, nor is it rapping. Both of them recovered from those bad decisions. Will Musk? Time will tell.
Yeah, there's a phenomenon called "Acquired Situational Narcissism", where if somebody spends enough time in an environment that's all about them, they start thinking it's all about them.
There's some evidence Musk was like this all along, but it is a lot harder to learn humility when you're doing well.
All we can really compare Musk to is to Bezos. Bezos basically destroyed Blue Origin in 2017 after they blew up a test stand. This is the sort of thing that happens when you're developing rockets. You just have to accept it and move on. It'll cost you millions and many months, but if you want to develop rockets... After the test stand incident Bezos fired the CEO, brought in an incompetent one and brought in a "no mistakes" type of culture that doesn't get anything done.
In contrast, check out the Tom Mueller interview about Elon Musk and "face shut off". This feature is one of the top reasons why the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine is such a great engine. Mueller thought it would be very hard to get it to work in a large engine and he was right. They blew up hundreds of engines and a bunch of test stands. But Musk was supportive the whole time. That's a big deal, and what you want from a CEO during development.
But "better than Bezos running a rocket company" is a pretty low bar to hurdle.
Tory Bruno at ULA and Peter Beck at Rocket Lab from the outside appear to be outstanding CEO's. But they've been starved for resources for different reasons. What could they have done with the resources that Musk & Bezos brought to their companies?
Rocket Lab in particular is one of the companies that could challenge SpaceX's dominance.
"Bezos basically destroyed Blue Origin in 2017"
This sort-of implies that BO was functional prior to that incident.
BO was founded in 2000. By 2017, they had existed for 17 years without reaching the orbit. (Which SpaceX managed in 6 years, Astra managed in 17 years, RocketLab in 12 years).
It seems to me that BO is just continuing to be an expensive failure, which, unlike all the other failed space startups, keeps dragging itself on, because it can rely on basically unlimited funding.
For the first part of its existence Blue Origin was basically a think tank. For a while its only employee was a science fiction author. Neal Stephenson is great, but he's not a rocket designer. As a think tank it was highly successful -- they successfully identified VTVL reusability as the future of space independently from SpaceX and similarly chose methalox. By 2017 Blue Origin was basically about a decade old as a "real" company. And progress was reasonable. New Shepherd was real and successful and looked like it could launch humans at any time. New Glenn was ambitious and BE-4 looked close.
Expecting them to reach orbit as quickly as SpaceX or Rocket Lab is unfair since SpaceX & Rocket Lab had an orbital rocket as their first product, and Blue Origin didn't.
It's unfair to compare everybody to SpaceX -- their success is exceptional. Pre-2017 Blue Origin wasn't as functional as SpaceX but I wouldn't call them dysfunctional. Post-2017 Blue Origin is dysfunctional.
This is all based on heresay, so take from it what you will.
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To be absolutely fair… do you have a reference for Zip2? I was at AltaVista for the acquisition and while I wasn’t close enough to it to be sure, I know he walked away with a bunch of money.
I worked at Zip2, and am pretty sure Elon was not fired.
Thanks for the correction! That's my mistake. I remembered it as the board firing him from CEO, as happened at PayPal, but according to Wikipedia, at Zip2 the board only refused to make him CEO.
IIRC some pieces frame Sorkin joining as Elon being "demoted" to CTO; after ousting Sorkin, he tried to become CEO but, as you said, the board shot him down.
In the bigger picture, Elon in SF twittering around while Gwynne runs Boca Chica may be a good thing.
No later than Friday, I was discussing with an acquaintance working for Tesla who compared Musk's leadership here to Trump at the white house: there is an entire team responsible for doing internal damage control after Musk announcements on Twitter. It's a lot of work, and sometimes the entire company just need to cope with the boss's whims (“ok next year there's going to be the Cybertruck thing [which he basically compared to the “not a flamethrower”] but fortunately for 2024 we're working on real cars”).
Musk is a fraudster. Someone must compile a timeline of his claims. Just the content that pops up from Thunderf00t on Youtube calling it out is enough for investigations. The only way I see investors going along with it is embarassment, riding the tide and not knowing when it will change. SoftBank style. It's changing now, economic corrections, just a time he's leveraged more than a sane person would value his companies at. lol
Then there's China. Tesla's 25% yearly revenue after being the first US company to launch without being 50% hand-in-hand with a local business. He agreed to teach the locals his methods, and they now sell straight-up copies at half the price. lol
I'm sorry but this whole thing is one big joke.
Where did you find that Elon was fired from Zip2 and PayPal?
As I mentioned elsewhere, I was wrong about Zip2; the board just refused to let him become CEO. But at PayPal, the board fired him after 6 months as CEO. That's documented in many places, including here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal