[cbozeman]

> How about merely building a business?

More people need to be told this.

The combination of work ethic, of risk tolerance, and of perseverance against ridiculous odds that is required to build a Tesla, or an Apple, or a Whatever, is extraordinarily rare

[coldtea]

I'd say the combo of "work ethic, risk tolerance, and perseverance against ridiculous odds" involved in Tesla/Apple/etc, is orders of magnitude more commonly found than actual Tesla/Apple/etc level success...

[goatinaboat]

I'd say the combo of "work ethic, risk tolerance, and perseverance against ridiculous odds" involved in Tesla/Apple/etc, is orders of magnitude more commonly found than actual Tesla/Apple/etc level success...

Agreed. For every tech millionaire there are a thousand guys who are just as smart and worked just as hard and it didn’t work out for whatever reason. Maybe their timing was off by a mere 6 months for example. There’s a lot of survivorship bias in what is in large part a lottery.

[zimpenfish]

> Maybe their timing was off by a mere 6 months for example.

First job I had (1995) was "Classified Ads on the Internet" - back then it was expensive to host a website and hugely expensive to add CGI (I think Demon wanted maybe £300 a month for that?) and the money ran out after a year. If they'd been able to keep it funded for, say, another 2-3 years, until home internet was more accessible, I think they'd have been in a pretty good position to own UK classifieds on the web (at least for a while.)

[rjyoungling]

Webvan vs. Instacart. So many dead startups that are brought back because they were just too soon.

[alasdair_]

> So many dead startups that are brought back because they were just too soon.

I recently had a recruiter from color.com reach out to me...

[rjyoungling]

Dang that's fascinating

[andrepd]

You forgot two factors: capital (which excludes the vast majority of people om earth), and an enormous amount of luck.

[closeparen]

It's pretty easy for a technology business to get capital these days.

[mguerville]

It’s not that easy, even in SV and within my batch at 500 startups (arguably one of the better credentials a startup can have at an early stage) the struggle to raise was real. And then back in the Midwest a lot of startups I’ve advised have had a hell of a time raising.

If you aren’t well connected or hyper credentialed (or if you’re a minority founder), raising capital is very hard. It’s easier than it’s ever been, but it’s not « easy »

[rorykoehler]

I don't want that capital though. All it's doing is ossifying the power structures that are the cause of the major problems we are facing. It's a trap.

[andrepd]

Indeed. Who are these people, why do they get to decide what gets built and what do people labour on? I want democratisation of capital.

[closeparen]

Sure, democratize capital. Then it will be decided by a few thousand voters in swing states, with “who are you and why should you get to decide” problems that put VC to shame.

A lot of VC capital is democratized: an elected official appointed a pension fund manager who decided to allocate some funds to a particular VC firm.

[andrepd]

Who said anything about swing states, and how is an opaque political appointment a democratic way to decide anything?

[wwweston]

I'm all ears.

[closeparen]

Check the footer of the website you’re on right now? The whole thing is content marketing for an offering of capital.

[pjc50]

But how much capital do you need to get in front of YC in the first place?

It's a genuine question. Who's the poorest YC founder? Least family wealth, least angel/seed investment. Who genuinely managed to get YC funding without putting in any money of their own?

[coldtea]

Ah, the "pretty easy" part is "convince some VCs"?

[bawolff]

Yes indeed, convince VC's is a lot easier than being born a millionaire

[coliveira]

Tesla was built by a billionaire. There was little to no risk involved.

[cbozeman]

Musk had about $140 million when he ~started~ bought (sorry) Tesla. That's a pretty far cry from a billion. On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars.

[coldtea]

>On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars.

Generous subsidies for electrics in the US and other countries helped with that.

Like generous government money funnelled through NASA contracts helped Space X repeat what NASA did in the late 60s/early 70s, slightly improved, 40 years later...

[coryrc]

Yes, I remember when NASA was launching reusable rockets as regular supply missions and weren't using 5% GDP, and did such a great job they didn't end up giving $400MM/year to Russia to hitch rides on the Soyuz for the last decade.

[coldtea]

That would be the "slightly improved" part, "50 years later".

And NASA hasn't used "5% GDP" for 40 years. It has been less than 1% since 1973. Actually scratch that, it has been less than 1% the federal budget, which is much much less than the GDP.

Of course all that 50-years of IP got handed to the "private visionaries" of SpaceX for free, or rather, along with money paid to them...

[CraigJPerry]

If it was that low risk and easy for Musk, why didn't NASA just do it themselves? Or why not some other person? There seems to be quite a lot of space x competitors not doing as well as space x.

[samatman]

Yeah, just look at all the other profitable companies in the space which did it too!

Can't turn around without bumping into an electric car / reusable rocket company these days.

[coldtea]

Well, for electric car, that's true...

>Yeah, just look at all the other profitable companies in the space which did it too!

Did those other companies in the space (of space) got NASA contracts and subsidies?

[shaklee3]

SpaceX is not profitable.

[bigbubba]

140 million is a lot closer to a billion (7x) than most people are to 140 million (>140x.)

[wincy]

Additionally, during the 2008 financial collapse Elon Musk took the last of his personal fortune and put it back into Tesla. The company very likely would have folded if he hadn’t put up his own money, and Elon Musk would have no longer been worth very much at all.

[symlinkk]

Once you get past a few million dollars, the extra money is just bargaining power and losing it doesn’t affect your day to day quality of life

[sergefaguet]

Lol you clearly are mistaken about how human emotions and happiness works

[coldtea]

However it works, it's still true to "losing it doesn’t affect your day to day quality of life".

Butthurt emotions is not the same as lower quality of life (e.g. less access to food, entertainment, travel, housing, health, studies, taking care of kids/relatives, etc).

[just-juan-post]

Tesla was built by someone else and was purchased by a young man who grew up rich and insisted that as part of the transaction that his title be founder.

[throwawaysea]

Grew up rich? I don't think that's accurate. I know a lot of Musk-hating articles have been played up, particularly on socialist Twitter circles, alleging that Musk inherited family wealth from an emerald mine. But this is simply not true. The emerald mine story is dubious and vague, and it's only real mention is from Ashlee Vance's book on Musk, and her source is Elon's father. Elon and his mother fled an allegedly abusive relationship with the father, and had nothing in terms of wealth. It's why Elon had to work odd jobs after moving (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/odd-jobs-elon-musk-had-when-...).

[coliveira]

It is well know that Elon's father is a successful owner of an engineering company in South Africa. If something was missing in his youth it was not money. Of course, his father being rich didn't immediately translate into personal wealth for him, that's why these people like to claim that they are "self made".

[icapulet2]

Elon later got thousands of dollars from his dad to start Zip2 so it's not like he ran away without a safety net. He did what so many other trust fund babies have done: He slummed. Stop contributing to the Horatio Algers narrative that Musk spins, among hundreds of other yarns,

[throwawaysea]

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2

> In Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk, it is claimed that the Musks' father, Errol Musk, provided them with US$28,000 during this time,[4]:Ch.4 but Elon Musk later denied this.[6] He later clarified that his dad provided around 10% of US$200,000 as part of a later funding round.[7]

I feel like someone who is able to get 90% of their funding round could either convince an existing investor in the round or convince someone else to join the round. This doesn't sound like money to "start Zip2" as you claim.

Also, note that Elon had to shower at a YMCA while starting up Zip2 (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/19/how-elon-musk-founded-zip2-w...). Does that really sound like a "trust fund baby" to you? I feel like a lot of the myths trying to tear down Elon Musk's successes are all sourced from Ashlee Vance's book, which in turn are based on, as I understand it, interviews of Errol Musk himself (the father).

[seibelj]

This whole comment thread is hilarious. “Oh tesla, no big deal, anyone could have made it including me if I just had the same capital.” You guys are living in outer space!

[YZF]

Well, it's an intersection of having the right venture, the right person, with the right leverage, at the right time. Elon Musk is perhaps close to unique in that intersection.

Are there other people who could do it but were not in the right place in the right time or didn't have the right leverage (money, connections, etc.)? Lots. If you took away those parameters, if Elon was just an engineer working for Boeing with just enough money to go on vacation every year, then he probably wouldn't have founded Tesla. He'd be some middle manager somewhere like lots of other smart/capable people.