It was Confinity and it was a strictly 50-50 merge, so it is not like Thiel acquired it or anything like that. Thiel has an entire chapter on it.
Elon Musk | Owner of X and right wing man-child
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
That’s true. He was ousted within one year, I believe to be replaced by Thiel although he remained as the largest shareholder for some time (if my memory is correct).
Hahaha
his success in business points that way
I'm certainly not under the impression rich people have to be smart, you'd have to be a moron to think that
its not binary though
he can be smart, lucky, and still do moronic things
Is there any actual evidence that he is smart.
he founded a car company that became the biggest car company by mcap
is it just dumb luck?
Could be.
Someone should go on twitter and ask him his IQ. I’m sure he’s bound to respond.
Yes.
The fact you have to use mcap as a metric rather than profit, cars sold etc shows it was all just luck.
Which one? Because he didn’t found Tesla. That would be part of the lack of morals I mentioned.
he also seems to have done alright with SpaceX and exited his first company at a $1.5bn valuation
obviously having rich parents is the platform but would love me some of that luck to be honest
fair enough, he was the person who made it a success though.. right?
what do you mean?
No. That would be the luck part. Because that would be the people actually designing and building the cars, not the one being born in endless wealth and financing it.
I mean, what? He was the CEO and just got lucky with all the other stuff?
Come on, I think he's a massive twat as much as the next person but I'll give him some credit for building that company.
He didn’t build it. He bought it. That’s a difference. The only ones capable of building such a company are highly educated engineers and so on, who spent years researching their field.
Musk is just some dude with loads of money. If I had loads of money, I could easily do the same. But loads of money wouldn’t turn me into an engineer.
The only thing I used to give him credit for, was a smart choice of companies to buy and good timing. Then he took over twitter.
of course he built it after he came in, that is what CEO's do with companies
they were a small start-up and he took it to become a famous global car brand
so he didn't build his first company then? or SpaceX? He's not an engineer so...?
He lacks morals and has a ton of money at his disposal. That’s it. There is no more to it. He hasn’t invented any useful product or anything. All he did was financing people with better ideas than his.
Not saying he didn’t achieve great things at Tesla. But there are reasons for its valuation that no longer apply.
1) it was the first EV manufacturer, but now every other car brand has EV and they will sell more.
2) Viewed as a tech company due to the self driving software, many now think this being legalised is far away, and most of the tech that can be legally used on the road is available in other car brands.
3) hyper speculative tech market that saw even things without a working product hit ridiculous market caps.
4) Elon being a face, worked both ways for Tesla share price.
Tesla was on the path to becoming priced as another car brand. This has been accelerated due to various things such as general down trend in the market, Elon selling shares, recession / COL fears etc.
That shows an amazing lack of understanding of what’s involved in starting up a successful company. The brains behind the tech are only part of the picture. More often than not they have no idea how to do most of what’s required to build/run a big business. Why would they? They trained in science, not business. Hence they invariably need help from someone with a bit of business savvy.
I have no clue how much Musk contributed in this regard because I don’t know enough about his businesses. But I can assure that the vast majority of successful start-ups wouldn’t have got anywhere if they relied solely on the brains behind the technology to run the company.
These are the people meant by so on. Of course you need other staff too. All doing things he isn’t part of. All doing stuff he can’t.
He just gave them money. That’s it. He’s no different to someone like Trump. Sometimes being rich and having no morals is more than enough. He’s been shown up often enough to conclude this. Especially since buying twitter it’s become obvious that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
It’s easier to waste money then it is to put it to good use. So while he’s not the engineer/scientist he thinks or others think he is a great businessman. The two usually need each other.
It’s no different at Apple or Ford. Any company especially those at the forefront of tech has a demanding leader with the ideas and the engineers to try and do it. Steve Jobs didn’t physically create the iphone, engineers did. But he thought of it, put the idea to design team with his brief, then it got worked on by all the parties, compromises were made between the design team and the engineers on what was possible. Then Steve Jobs busted balls and demanded more when they they thought more couldn’t be done, until finally a product that pushed the limits of the time was produce.
Last edited:
so you're saying he wasn't actually CEO of these companies?
Yeah I agree, and I think it was way overvalued. But a part I think people don't understand about public companies in the early phases is the need to build a high mcap to raise more capital as cheaply as possible and finance the growth of the company. Musk has played a huge part in that for Tesla certainly and that has driven the growth to a large extent.
Zero because he built nothing of value besides a large number on a screen.
Tesla has no special tech, no IP, no huge amount of car sales, has barely turned profit in it's existence, been nearly bankrupt, manipulated their stock price and lied to the SEC and NHTSA.
They designed a car ten years ago and haven't updated it at all. They're built in tents, outside with all the QC of a Russian kinder egg. Every innovation and product release has been found to be vapourware.
It's been a clear case of what SBF called "the magic box". VCs wanted to believe the Tony Stark myth, every investor understood if they backed it, they could make the value of the magic box gain value, guess what it did. Any fundamental analysis shows clearly it's overvalued several hundred times.
It's been one step away from a Ponzi scheme since Musk took over.
Because any other metric you'd use to qualify and quantify a car manufacturer has to be ignored because it would show that Tesla is massively overvalued and that tag of "biggest car company" is false.
fair enough
I actually don't know anything about it so not a lot I can counter
also I don't want to defend him anymore because he's massive tool-box
Excellent
What the feck type of corporate policy is "follow the science"?
The jury is clearly in at this point: the man's a fecking idiot.
Harsh on Escobar.
one which wants to allow wiggle room for conspiracy theorists and rightwing grifters to flourish
And put those round earthers in their place too.