[whoknew1122]

You buy or found them and make yourself CEO.

The real question is whether someone can be CEO of 5 companies and do a good job.

Personally, I think Musk is much better at being a brand than a CEO. But you can hide a lot behind smoke and mirrors if you're the richest person in the world and other rich people will throw money at you just to be your friend.

[aantix]

John Carmack considers him a true engineer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE

I think Carmack would call him out (Elon) if he thought less of him. Carmack seems honest to a fault.

I don't think "smoke and mirrors" is justified.

[yks]

Musk’s thing is an ability to say things that are kinda common sense and evident to most low-level techies but which the modern corporate culture prohibits to say aloud, e.g. “lots of managers is actually bad”. Musk says that and everyone is “wow what a maverick”, some L4 eng says that and people comment how it is a loser mindset.

He may be a “true engineer” but I don’t think a particularly genius one at that.

[robenkleene]

Curious what you think of Google's experiment getting rid of managers in the early 2000s?

I think I originally read about this in Measure What Matters:

https://www.amazon.com/Measure-What-Matters-Google-Foundatio...

Here's a blog post that seems to summarize:

https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...

(Personally, I came away from reading about this incident thinking most organizations have an appropriate amount of managers.)

[yks]

I think "no managers" approach can work only for tiny organizations. Rigorously hiring self-motivated people might delay the need for managers somewhat but at some point they are inevitable. Once managerial layer is in place, it is looking to grow itself and eventually that growth becomes detrimental by slowing down the project delivery. Different corporate cultures and initial trajectories affect the speed of this evolution, but it seems like every org more or less follows this path if we're looking at the span of decades.

> most organizations have an appropriate amount of managers.

technically true, but what would be the measure? if only we could check the alternative timeline with less managers.

I would not be surprised if quantity of managers in any org is asymptotically approaching the maximum number possible while the org is still able to produce any output.

[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

Like many, I have a lot of respect for Carmack. But I'm not sure how his opinion on Musk is relevant. Nor do I see why I should take Carmack's opinions as gospel.

When it comes to Carmack's comments on large scale businesses he says a number of things nowadays that one might consider one step away from PR talk (or business diplomacy). Such statements from him might not come from a place of dishonesty, but he certainly is not "honest to a fault" either nowadays. [1]

[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1348691869971185667

[dwater]

That's not the issue being discussed. His engineering capabilities are irrelevant to him running the day-to-day operations of 5 of the biggest companies in the world at once.

[IgorPartola]

In what universe are these the biggest companies?

[dwater]

They're not FAANG or JPMorgan, but he's not the CEO of Elon's Cheese Emporium on Main either. SpaceX has a market cap of $100B, Tesla $700B. That's bigger than any company I'm CEO of.

Actually, due to the downturn Netflix's market cap is only $125B, and Meta is $250B. So although they aren't all monstrously huge, I'd say Elon's companies are pretty big and require work to keep running.

[jakemoshenko]

Tesla is 65 on the Fortune 500, and Twitter was ~600 before the acquisition. SpaceX is also huge, but it's hard to say just how huge without it being public. The amount of commitment and work to become CEO at a company that's even 600 on the Fortune 1000 is insane. A quick google says there are 213 million companies in the world, I think having at least two in the top 1000 counts, no?

[zerohp]

Carmack should read the Hyperloop paper and see if he still feels that way.

[whoknew1122]

I'm not an engineer, so I can't really comment on whether someone is a good engineer or not. But he's not engineering here. He's leading 5 companies.

In corporate culture there's this thought that being good at something makes you good at managing people who do that thing. But that's not true. Being an engineer and a manager of engineers requires different skill sets. And being a CEO is many levels divorced from a manager of engineers.

Elon as an engineer or coder stopped being relevant after Paypal. Now it's about Elon the executive. Which, as an outside observer, seems more to be about Elon's brand than any actual managerial genius.

[cameldrv]

The flip side to this is that there's a thought that you can be a good manager without being at least adequate at the task that is being managed. I've found this to be untrue, and overwhelmingly the best managers are also good at the job they're managing.

The problem for managers that don't have the domain knowledge is that they're completely reliant on others for technical judgement. If they don't have the ability to see whether what someone is proposing is reasonable technically, they also don't really have the ability to independently determine whether they should trust someone's technical judgment. This can lead to an excessive reliance on credentials, and a highly political workplace, since that becomes the main way to influence the manager's decisions from below.

[BaseballPhysics]

> John Carmack considers him a true engineer.

Cool. Then he should be an engineer.

But he's not. He's a CEO. Ostensibly.

And--and I really shouldn't have to say this--those are not the same job. So even if I buy that Musk is a "true engineer" (which I don't, by the way), that doesn't make him de facto a good CEO. In fact, it could just as easily be a liability.

[rocgf]

OP did not say he is not an engineer or a fake engineer.

[aantix]

> But you can hide a lot behind smoke and mirrors

You're a fake engineer if you hide behind smoke and mirrors.

[falcolas]

This thread is about his ability to be a CEO. Which can also utilize smoke and mirrors.

[aantix]

He's billed as an engineer that runs engineering companies.

That's his persona.

And it appears to be true.

[lokar]

See “The Elon Markets Hypothesis”

[eloff]

Except he was also doing a phenomenal job early in his career too. It's not all smoke and mirrors or connections.

[msbarnett]

Like when they had to force him out of PayPal before he destroyed the company with his “rewrite the entire backend for Windows Server” mandate?

[eloff]

Because successful people never make mistakes? I'm not sure what your point is.

[msbarnett]

The point is that "he did a phenomenal job early in his career" rather misses that his early career is more "incredibly mixed bag containing disastrous missteps" than universally "phenomenal".

[eloff]

That's missing the forest for the trees, don't you think?

[msbarnett]

No, I don't think that at all. Clearly. The Windows mandate was a colossal, world-historic fuckup that I think is indicative of his impulsiveness and representative of his capacity for making very very poorly thought through, Company-destroying decisions.

[aantix]

People evolve.

[pc86]

This isn't a question about evolution. They said he executed very well early in his career, and that's a good example of a colossal early-career fuck up (that coincidentally got him kicked out).

[jollyllama]

Isn't the kind of the point? Wouldn't he have had less CEO positions at that time?

[eloff]

Everyone downvoting me did worse in their career. It's easy to be a critic. But like him or hate him, you can't argue with the results that man achieved. None of us have done as much.

[danaris]

It's not about what he's "achieved". It's about what he started with, and the means he's used.

Most of us could "achieve" a whole lot if we were born the heirs to a massive fortune, with all the connections that implies.

[eloff]

Yes, I'm sure his estranged relationship with his South African father gave him such an advantage in Canada and California. All those connections! That's a low brow dismissal of his achievements.

[wittycardio]

But certainly you accept that now it's just about the brand ?

[filoleg]

All the FSD-overpromising tomfoolery aside (as well as a few other things that remain to be seen, like the Boring Company tunnels and Neuralink), I would say that making the first viable (and desirable; but I am ready to eat downvotes from people who will, rightfully, point out that it isn't desirable by them due to the interior not being as luxurious as similarly-priced mercedes/audi/bmw) mass-produced EV and the very recent Falcon-9 Heavy launch are kind of impossible to carry out just by the power of the brand. Especially since neither SpaceX nor Tesla had any brand power prior to actually consistently delivering the results.

[eloff]

For someone not on the inside to flippantly dismiss his contribution as brand only is just ignorance. There's a chance you're right, but you have no evidence to back up your assertion.

[bobkazamakis]

ah yes, he famously had no connections before his career, and his parents were poor immigrants with only a few emerald mines.

[joenot443]

Are you suggesting most wealthy immigrants end up founding a litany of companies?

This is a bit like attributing Wayne Gretzky's success to the fact Walter was a seasoned coach and a huge hockey fan. Obviously it helps having parents to enable your talents, but it's ignorant to pretend that rich parents alone will allow you to rise to the top.

[IgorPartola]

Necessary but not sufficient is a phrase that comes to mind.

[jackmott42]

Even if we believe his dads stories, he owned less than 1 emerald mine.

[filoleg]

And iirc, the overall dollar value of that "less than 1 emerald mine" was barely in mid-high 5 figures. Of course, not adjusted for dollar value at the time, but that adjustment wouldn't balloon it up to 10 times that in 2022 dollars.