Comment by jfengel
3 days ago
He ended up with all of the profits, but he didn't put in all of the work. A lot of people worked very hard for that wealth, either for salary or a minuscule fraction of the profits.
He gets to keep the lion's share of the profits because he was the one who took the risk with his capital. And bully for him; well done that man. But we treat him as if he had all of the ideas and wrote all of the code, and that's simply not true. It's a myth that the wealth owners tell us.
All of these products would exist with the CEOs who get the credit. If it weren't them it would have been someone else. Their expertise as CEOs is not to get the product done, but to get it done a week earlier than the other guy. And even that much is more luck than skill.
There's no way to say "Musk took this money from someone else". But that's different from "He has a million times as much wealth because he is a million times more valuable."
> He ended up with all of the profits
Obviously not. The investors got their share, and employees got their stock options.
> But we treat him as if he had all of the ideas and wrote all of the code, and that's simply not true.
What were the names of the crew of Captain Cook's ship? Who was under the command of General Sherman? Who won the battle of Yorktown? Who created Standard Oil? We give credit to the head of something, not to the people under his command.
> If it weren't them it would have been someone else.
Nobody knows that.
> And even that much is more luck than skill.
If I hit a home run once, I would attribute it to luck. If I hit a home run 3 times, then I have skillz.
Gates maneuvered 3 dramatic changes in Microsoft, where other companies failed at the transition. Jobs made 3 fortunes. Musk has made several diverse fortunes.
At some point, you're going to have to give these people credit.
Musk has created a million times more wealth than others. If his life story was a novel, I would have put it down as absurd.