[tikiman163]

If you think his ratio of good to bad business decisions is even average then you haven't been paying attention. Tesla has nearly gone bankrupt repeatedly, and it's stock price has largely risen the most after Musk was removed from controlling the company as a result of a series of tweets that were considered illegal attempts at manipulating the stock market. In point of fact, Musk still controls SpaceX and internal memos leaked earlier this year indicate that SpaceX could very well go Bankrupt within the next 18 months. The Boring Company is generally solvent and under Musk's full control, but it is far smaller, and could be in danger of law suits for effectively failing to meet contractual obligations regarding the tunnel the agreed to provide Las Vegas. The Boring Company's future doesn't look great to me, their results don't meet public expectations which could easily lead to funding drying up.

Also, anybody who thinks accusing a rescue diver of pedophilia purely because he told them not to interfere with rescue efforts is pretty far from being a genius. Musk has been lucky his whole life, people just rarely see his failures.

Basically, his press is full of shit. The claim that he learned to program and wrote a video game at age 10 is quite ridiculous. Seriously, there are online websites where you can play his "game". It's Space Invaders, except theirs only one alien, you can't have multiple projectiles on the screen at the same time, the alien doesn't fire at you unless they get extremely close, if the alien fires at you it locks your controls making it virtually impossible to dodge and prevents you from firing back, and when you successfully hit the alien it immediately respawns at a random location which may be in range of you, resulting in you immediately dying. My own nephew programmed significantly more impressive games at age 10, will people start following him and assume he's never made any mistakes if someone who owns an emerald mine gives him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest into new technologies and the businesses don't ultimately fail?

[Shaanie]

Is your nephew close to Musk's age? Programming a simple game in 1980 is much more impressive to me than doing the same in the 2010s.

[kukx]

You are basically making a claim that he is a bad businessman without mentioning that he is one of the richest people in the world. Why should anyone take your arguments seriously?

[nocoiner]

He signed a binding acquisition agreement in a $44 billion dollar deal without doing any due diligence. Bigger deals have been struck on similar timeframes, but rarely has the purchaser evidenced such obvious buyer’s remorse so quickly afterward, or embarked on the venture with as little thought as he put toward it.

That’s a pretty weighty fact on the scale of “Musk - canny businessperson, or remarkable streak of being in the right place at the right time.”

[kukx]

So you suggest he is a bad businessman and his success is only attributable to luck. To understand how ridiculous this claim is you first need to realize that there are infinite ways to fail and very very little ways to succeed. Good and bad decisions are not symmetric, it is not 50:50, it is more like infinite:1. But even if it was 50:50, for the thought experiment sake, if you make random decisions you quickly make a bad one, and to be successful you need to make way, way more good decisions than bad ones. Sure luck is obviously always a factor, but thinking that he created a car that he later sent to space on his own rocket is not a sign of extraordinary competence, well, to me you can as well claim that the Earth is flat.

[bathtub365]

I’m not an Elon Musk fan but it was 1981 when he was 10. There were far fewer resources for learning to program and make games in 1981 than there are today. Not to take away from what your nephew did, but there are currently hundreds of “how to make a game” tutorials available online in a variety of instantly consumable formats. There are even entire development environments focused on simplifying game development with low code workflows. In 1981 there wasn't even the concept of a widely accessible public Internet.