America is such a great country that a random person can just fecklessly blunder into creating a revolutionary electric car company and cluelessly blunder into creating a rocket company that is the envy of the world.
Automotive and aerospace are not that similar to social media. People buying into the vision of "get the planet off fossil fuels for transport" and "get this species to Mars" are probably willing to make sacrifices that people working on social media are not.
It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another. Especially when the founder in question has displayed increasingly erratic behavior in the meantime.
Is today's Elon capable of doing what Elon from 15 years ago did at Tesla? I don't think that is necessarily in evidence, much less in a very different industry.
There's a lot to unpack here, for one do we consider those two enterprises to be successes? It seems too early to tell - they do appear to be influential, but the C64 and Palm Pilot were influential without being successful. It's also not clear if they are long term successful (I think Tesla will be, but SpaceX is very much currently dependent on government funding). Finally, it's not clear whether Musk was a critical driver of success - evaluating his contributions based on the outcome of a company is basically resulting.
Look, I don't know if Elon is a genius or an opportunistic parasite with really good PR. It seems unlikely if we ever will know that. What I object to is people pointing at his ultimate financial success and crediting him with the current result of 2 big companies whose future is very much not determined.
When I look at his process from this ant's perspective, I think he is an abusive unstable individual who takes credit for everyone's work and lies a lot. He also flip-flops depending on the wind. Is that success? Not based on my personal values. Have his companies accomplished a lot? Some of them, absolutely.
The definitions and evidence matter a lot, and I personally don't think any of us are qualified to make blanket statements based on incomplete outcomes. Further, I don't think his other companies that require primarily good engineering are very relevant to inherently people problems, like Twitter. My evaluation of how Musk handles people problems is that he is very bad at them, and I anchor my prediction about his Twitter leadership based on that.
What I think makes people skeptical of him is that deep down we all believe in nominative determinism. Who do you think runs a rocket company behind the scenes, "Shotwell" or "Musk"?
> Automotive and aerospace are not that similar to social media.
Yes. Social media is easier.
> It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another.
This is precisely about leveraging the Halo Effect fallacy. Elon Musk might not know social media, but the markets don't know that, nor do they care. The average retail trader sees "Elon Musk's company" and buys and holds, regardless of absurd PEs.
Musk knows the power his brand has. He's simply going to use that to pump up Twitter's valuation, all through the virtue of his "halo"
Dealing with people is generally far harder than pretty much any engineering problem. The same is true of Twitter, because there are no easy answers or even clear goals.
Exactly! I can't fathom that people don't seem to understand there's a comparable amount of new companies started every year in the space, automotive, and social network categories.
The easiest way to do this would be to make the site completely free of moderation, but that quickly becomes a cesspool. Are there other ways to define the core audience?
This is just a misdirection. I could just as easily said, nobody did it by themselves, including Musk.
What is “it” in this case?
NASA (and the DoD) had vertically landing reusable rockets designed for orbital flights back in the early 1990s. They were being successfully tested but budget cuts killed the program. They weren’t doing “it” because it wasn’t the same priority in that era. NASA has been researching COPVs for decades, etc.
The SpaceAct agreement between NASA and SpaceX allows for sharing of this kind of information. If you think SpaceX has done all their great work alone, you are misinformed and likely making you data fit your conclusion instead of the other way around.
SpaceX has some competitive advantages, but I don’t think they are what you think they are.
> If you think SpaceX has done all their great work alone
What I'm saying is SpaceX got it done. No other organization in the world did. The fact that SpaceX had an obvious learning curve of failing and exploding rockets makes it obvious it wasn't just copy and install NASA technology.
NASA's reusable rockets were on the space shuttle, which turned out to be fantastically expensive and impractical.
> NASA has been researching COPVs for decades
Somehow not resulting in a practical, inexpensive reusable rocket.
It's undeniable that NASA has made many great achievements. But making space accessible in an economic manner isn't one of them.
It's the Halo Effect fallacy to think competence in one field automatically translates to another. Especially when the founder in question has displayed increasingly erratic behavior in the meantime.
Is today's Elon capable of doing what Elon from 15 years ago did at Tesla? I don't think that is necessarily in evidence, much less in a very different industry.