[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.