[HumblyTossed]

> highly capable of building significant things

In order for life to appear on Earth, a lot of things had to go right and in a specific order. Earth got lucky, it hit the 1 in whateverillion jackpot lottery.

I think the same about Elon. His luck ran out with Twitter. He's peaked and on the downward slope now. He's not some mastermind. He's not some uber-businessman.

[panick21_]

Like I guess if somebody creates a startup and sells it can be luck.

Musk did that and earned 20m. Ok lets claim luck, internet was crazy. Then he exited his next one with 100M. Well again lucky, its just internet stuff I guess.

Then he invested that in 2 companies, both in capital intensive technology industries that had a long history of failure where the US was not at all world leading. Now both companies are being valued over 100 billion $.

Like to claim that all of this is luck is just a claim that doesn't make any fucking sense. Maybe if both of the 2 companies had continue to exit and were just kind of there and hanging on, maybe then you could argue that somehow that is luck.

But leading two companies like Tesla/SpaceX at the same time revolutionizing the industry they are in. Common.

Twitter is different in that he bought a company that most people thought was totally overvalued and not profitable for far to much money when the value was very high and he did it for political reasons. That was of course stupid but it doesn't at all prove that he was just lucky up to this point.

[sp3000]

Bezos said it best on Lex Friedman recently, "It's impossible to build Tesla and SpaceX and not be a capable leader."

[zozbot234]

> I think the same about Elon. His luck ran out with Twitter.

Why would that be? Because some advertisers pulled their ads? That's not what he's trying to do. He wants Twitter - actually X now - to be the next PayPal, the Western counterpart to WeChat that folks can use to accomplish pretty much anything. The whole free speech angle is very much in service to that: no one is going to be financially dependent on a platform that can ban you for life simply because influential people did not like what you said in the platform's BBS-like "town square".

[cycomanic]

> The whole free speech angle is very much in service of that: no one is going to be financially dependent on a platform that can ban you for life simply because influential people did not like what you said in the platform's BBS-like "town square".

You mean like wechat? Also didn't Musk not (personally) ban people he didn't like (the private jet guy comes to mind, but also the journalists who reported on it)? Does he not count as "influential people"?

[Apocryphon]

> to be the next PayPal, the Western counterpart to WeChat that folks can use to accomplish pretty much anything

PayPal is not anything like an all-in-one app like WeChat, and basically every platform from Apple Messages to Facebook Messenger to Snapchat has allowed users to send money, for years. And a few of those apps have attempted to be all in one apps, with years of a head start in that space.

[CamperBob2]

No one is going to be financially dependent on a platform that can ban you for life simply because influential people did not like what you said in the platform's BBS-like "town square".

Exactly, which is why it will be a cold day in Hell before I deposit money with any company run by Musk. "Free speech as long as you agree with me" doesn't work for me.

[JumpCrisscross]

> His luck ran out with Twitter…He's not some mastermind. He's not some uber-businessman

He may not be now. But he was. SpaceX and Tesla are each Herculean achievements. We hail great men for much less.