[fixprix]

Starship is going to launch the next gen Starlink satellites which SpaceX desperately needs to get in the air as with 5 million subscribers their service is being over saturated around the world. Especially in the developing world and many other places where Starlink hands down beats terrestrials offerings.

In terms of Elon's contribution, you couldn't be more wrong. It was Elon's decision to pursue Starlink - a business model that had bankrupted all previous companies that attempted it. Elon's decision to pursue reusability which made Starlink feasible. Elon's decision to fire all the upper management of Starlink when the program wasn't going well - and in under a year of that decision had completely redesigned satellites in orbit. And now it's Elon's decision to pursue Starship that is a money furnace, but if it pays off Starlink 3.0 could bring in an order of magnitude more money than it does now.

The same high risk, high reward methodology with a good dose of micro-management is how he's brought six distinct companies to multi billion dollar valuations. And how he's succeeded despite the incessant reporting of his or his companies imminent failure.

[bigyabai]

High risk high reward doesn't always pay off. Sometimes you gotta swallow a Cybertruck, or a $44 bln Twitter acquisition, or a high-margin Nvidia-fuelled AI datacenter, or a political lobbying shitstorm. All of which fall squarely in the lap of Mr. Musk as the adamant leader pulling the strings.

If you're correct and Elon is to be credited with these administrative successes, then turnabout is fair play in assessing his entirely unnecessary business strategies. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking Tesla would be undervalued if Elon hadn't bought Twitter. I heard the "underrated genius" shtick when Jobs died, and then every subsequent biography echoed his personal struggles and failures he hid to prop up his cult of personality.

[fixprix]

Twitter is once again worth $44 billion which arguably was an inflated price at the time of purchase. Tesla is a trillion dollar company. xAI is reportedly at $120 billion.

Idk man, big picture, I see nothing, but success with the media focusing on just the speed bumps along the way

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/technology/xai-elon-musk-...

[jmyeet]

Let's look at Elon's accomplishments:

- Ousted from Paypal for pure incompetence. Made money anyway from vested stock riding the dot-com bubble;

- Bought his way into Tesla then engaged in historical revisionism to paint himself a "founder". Tesla is a weird company because it defies any fundamentals. It seems to be valued between $500k and $1M per car sold in a year, which is just ludicrous. Tesla, as a company, has only survived by government largesse, be they carbon tax credits or the DOE loan in the late 2000s that saved Tesla from bankruptcy.

The only thing propping up Tesla now is import bans on Chinese EVs. Tesla isn't a car copmpany or an energy company. It's a proxy for investing in Elon directly. When Elon's relationship with the administration inevitably sours, Tesla's fortunes will sink as well. European Tesla sales have already dropped ~50% due to brand damage. The admin has cancelled an EV credit program that Tesla relied upon.

- SpaceX. This is a success. I still contend SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him;

- SolarCity. Failure. This became a recurring trend as SolarCity ended up owing a lot of money to SpaceX so the Tesla buyout was basically Elon using one of his companies to rescue another of his companies that owed a ton of money to yet another of his companies;

- Twitter. This one is hilarious because he completely overpaid for it. It seems like he was goaded into buying it by Peter Thiel and tried to get out of the deal until the Delaware Chancery Court forced him to complete the sale. By all accounts its lost 70-85% of its $44B purchase price. Elon ended up raising a bunch of money for xAI and basically used that to buy out his bad investment in TWitter, which for anyone else would be corporate fraud on a massive scale.

And what does Elon do all day anyway? Because it seems all he does is pretend to be a gamer and tweets nonstops. When does he actually manage any of these companies? In fact, his tweeting actually hurts his companies, Tesla in particular.

I'm honestly surprised there's still anyone who clings to the myth of Elon given all the evidence we have to the contrary.

[stormfather]

Electric cars are mainstream now. Reusable rockets are real. Twitter won an election and spawned XAI. Elon is the richest man in the world. Yeah bro, he's a moron. Sure.

[mempko]

Tesla was almost bankrupt when Musk went to the Department of Energy Loan Office and said he had an investment from Mercedes to get $465 million dollar loan to save the company. That singular act was why you even hear about Elon today. Without the loan, he would not have gotten the Fremont factory and project WhiteStar would have been dead.

Without that loan, Musk couldn't use his wealth to reinvest into SpaceX and also would have had a damaged reputation and credibility. SpaceX would have survived, but it's development would have been much much slower. You wouldn't have Falcon Heavy and Starlink, and Starship today.

So thank your government folks for creating both the electric vehicle market and private space market! Without the government creating these markets, there would be no richest man Musk today. So thank the ATVM program authored by Senator Stabenow and NASA's COTS program. The point here is to illustrate the huge amount of power the government has to pick winners and losers. That it is the government that creates markets to play in and money to play with.

[indoordin0saur]

It's not fair. His dad had a partial stake in an emerald mine!

[mlindner]

And later went bankrupt, and not the company bankruptcy kind, the personal bankruptcy kind.

[indoordin0saur]

> I'm honestly surprised there's still anyone who clings to the myth of Elon given all the evidence we have to the contrary.

If only there was some clear metric or way to quantify someone's business success... Hmmmm...