[ramraj07]

I agree that you shouldn’t discount what Elon does or says. He’s clearly one of the most important individuals of our time. Doesn’t mean whatever he says is gold though. Same standards should apply.

I agree that his naysayers are making a grave mistake of calling him universally stupid. He’s a vile selfish person, who makes a lot of bigoted stupid statements and actions, but ignoring him would be the end of us.

A Tamil saying I like translates (by ChatGPT) in English as, “Regardless of the speaker’s guise, Seek the truth that in the statement lies.”

[Qwertious]

>ignoring him would be the end of us.

How so? That's an extraordinary claim that you haven't remotely justified.

While it's possible for anyone to say something smart, Elon Musk is no more likely to have clever insight than the average janitor.

He makes a bunch of insightful-sounding claims that only make sense if you don't have a clue on the subject he's talking about - like when he stack-ranked by lines of code, at Twitter.

[ramraj07]

He hasn’t made a single smart decision in Twitter, agreed. But in every other venture that’s not true.

[Qwertious]

Neuralink, Boring, Solarcity? These are basically worthless when you take a closer look:

Neuralink is at best replicating decades-old research, all while horrifically violating scientific codes of ethics,

Boring is just a tunnel digging company (tunnel-boring is a very often unavoidable construction technique and thus is a very mature technology, he's not going to magically find an order-of-magnitude technical breakthrough) whose basic premise is that you can increase throughput per dollar by digging lots of slightly-smaller tunnels for cars instead of a single subway-sized car; a premise that is objectively false.

Solarcity might have been an interesting idea but was handled poorly and went bankrupt, at which point Musk forced Tesla to buy it so he personally could avoid the bad PR of "Musk's company goes bankrupt!", which is quite illegal and an abuse of his power as CEO of Tesla.

Starlink flat-out makes a loss per satellite launched, and scaling its userbase up won't fix that; it's dead once it runs out of investor money.

There's this weird situation were Musk has N different ventures, and each venture looks alright on the surface but is rotten when you take a closer look - but everyone thinks "well sure, but the other (N-1) ventures are doing fine, so maybe I'm missing something about this one?", not realizing that all the other ventures are just the same.

Please, please do the following exercise: ignore all the PR you've heard about Musk, and pick one of his companies that's not Tesla and look closely at it. Evaluate if that company makes sense on its own merits, without Musk.

[callalex]

The idiomatic translation to English would be: “A broken clock is right twice a day.”

[ramraj07]

This is again implying that he’s nothing but an idiot. I don’t know why people are incapable of acknowledging he’s an insightful but crazy and evil person.

[callalex]

The negative implications from the message deliverer come from you, not me. You are probably correct about him being an idiot, but the phrase being translated specifies that the message delivered is not relevant to the message, in the same way that I would not call a clock an idiot for being low on battery power.

[neither_color]

Well said. I just sped through his new bio and while the author seemed overly-apologetic about his assholish tendencies(like in the Thai cave diving incident), his ability to inspire his engineers and get things built is undeniable.

[ramraj07]

Marc Andressen mentioned in the Lex podcast that Larry Page mentioned his plan for “funding humanity’s future” would just be to give all his money to Elon and let him do whatever.

I wonder if he will still say that, after learning Brin divorced his wife for likely cheating with Musk.

This seems like a perfect encapsulation of this person (and the snobbery of everyone involved of course).

[Qwertious]

>his ability to inspire his engineers and get things built is undeniable.

I deny this. He provides money and hype, and hires the best engineers in the industry who then get results. In some cases things gets things built, but that doesn't mean Elon Musk was personally useful to any given project besides providing hype and money.

[ramraj07]

“All he does is organize everything and choose what he focuses on” sounds like you say this is easy and simple. I really don’t want to be a Musk defender so I’m gonna stop here.

[Qwertious]

I didn't say he organizes everything, I said he provides money and hype. I also accidentally implied that he was picking the best engineers, which I didn't mean to do.

His "choices on what to focus on" are at best extremely vague and at worst extremely wrong - when he insisted the Tesla Roadster be made out of carbon fibre, resulting in the car costing over $100k, that was the wrong thing to focus on. When he focused on "let's bore small underground tunnels for cars", that was still wrong. When he decided "let's build electric cars" (and then bought a preexisting electric car company, whose starters presumably were also focused on electric cars), that isn't all that impressive.

So in case it wasn't clear: I'm calling Musk a celebrity figurehead, whose personal talent is fully displayed in his management of X.com.

[mortureb]

In this case it’s more like the clock was always right until it was broken.