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Yevgeny Simkin's avatar

I think a *little credit is due in that he has the right ideas at the right time (though his batting average is about .300) and is able to push those ideas beyond the "wouldn't this be nice" stage that those of us who also have good ideas but lack the resources to found them have to settle for.

However, as far as I know, this is the first time he's taken something that already exists and come in to "fix" it.

He essentially just paid $44b for the Twitter brand. The tech, the culture, and the product are basically garbage. It would have cost him $10m/ $20m to just build the thing he claims to "want" from scratch (though now we see he's actually quite confused about what that actually is) and if it was good he'd have no problem enticing people to switch.

Instead he paid many orders of magnitude more for something that can't be fixed and he'll need to scrap anyway.

And then he proceeded to migrate his image (to the extent that there were many people who felt somewhat generously about him) from eccentric whiz-kid to erratic (and heartless) nincompoop.

I guess he's still the "richest" man on Earth though all that richness is tied up in the value of his properties and much of that value depends on his cult of personality. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla stock started dropping precipitously over the next 6 months as a result of all this. I own a 3. It's a nice car - but all the other car makers are now playing in the E space and much of what they're making rivals or exceeds Tesla's product. Oh, and Autopilot is absolutely positively nowhere near ready for production release. At some point in the not too distant future - that fact is going to start catching up to their stock price as well.

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SoCal's avatar

Elon Musk did not start Tesla or invent electric cars. Electric cars were invented a long time ago, granted they were not good. (https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car)

Elon Musk did not started Tesla. He bought Tesla with money that he made from Paypal. Yes, he is the one who made Tesla as it is now (which I give him credit for), but he did not invent electric car or start Tesla.

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Liberal Cynic's avatar

Other than maybe PayPal, Musk has had no "right ideas at the right time".

What he's had is daddy South African blood emerald money combined with his PayPal money and used that to buy into already existing companies and get himself listed as a "founder", i.e. SpaceX and Tesla.

Hey, actually that sounds like Musk's Twitter certification strategy. Spend some money get the "Founder" label. Spend some money get "Twitter Certification".

It comes down to that Elon's big idea is just spending money.

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orbit's avatar

Money he never earned.

It was either gifted or gained from investors.

Now he's simply pissing away other people's money.

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Nov 7, 2022
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Yevgeny Simkin's avatar

It's a great question. I signed the various paperwork without reading it (as one does when buying a car and needing to sign 50 pages of boilerplate to get to leave the lot). Would I be surprised if something of that nature is buried in that language? Not even a little, now that you mention it.

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