> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.
Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).
Yeah, I was thinking exactly that. Assuming that this is the case - that Musk is joining as a savior - is silly. He doesn't fit the profile nor has the track record for that.
He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.
Strange that both of you would say that. He's a ruthless result-driven executive that doesn't accept excuses. If it's at all impossible for something to get done, he'll get it done.
I'm not at all a fan of him, but his power is in execution. A vision is worthless.
The vision may be worthless on its own, but in people like Musk or Jobs, the combination if the vision and the ability to execute is absolutely explosive.
Both sell/sold products that hardly need any marketing.
Musk never said you can't put trains in his tunnels. He happens to have a car company to help, but I bet if he had a train company sitting around they would develop something for the tunnels.
Boring company tunnels are wider than London subway tunnels.
Squandering an entire companies potential as a PR move for your other company is hardly big brain executive work though. Film executives do that all the time, and they're some of the dumbest people doing supposedly intellectual work.
His power is in blood diamond money from mummy and daddy during apartheid. His power is in ignoring regulations and laws he doesn't like. His power is in being a modern-day version of PT Barnum.
Execution and result-driven like that giant coffin-box he tried to claim could be used to rescue boys from a cave where rescuers were swimming through spaces so narrow they couldn't wear their diving gear?
Result-driven, power-in-execution executive who took a decade to build a luxury car that had initial quality, paint, NVH, and interior quality equal to an economy sedan made by Ford or Honda. His cars often literally don't line up the same way on the right side as they do on the left. Oh, and also about a decade to get the motor/drivetrain unit on the Model S to not destroy itself every 10,000-20,000 miles. It still can't handle being driven through too large a puddle without ingesting water through the speedo sensor port...
Autopilot routinely "phantom brakes", and FSD "Beta" likes to drive at telephone poles, veer at cyclists, and pedestrians standing on street corners.
I wish I could find the article describing his efforts to get the model 3 production fixed. Endless issues because the robots weren't assembling the cars precisely enough. He was told they needed to go back to workers assembling the cars. Ran around screaming profanity at people, demanding they fix automation. Bunch of people got up and quit to his face.
Months more of delays and issues until he finally listened to someone who had been saying all along that they needed to grow capacity by having more people assembling the cars. Boom, production volume and quality issues gone.
Musk is a rich man-baby who has relied on shouting at people to get things done.
> His power is in blood diamond money from mummy and daddy during apartheid.
It's weird that people made up a fake biography just because they don't like when he tweets on Ambien.
In particular I don't think this was an advantage, I think it was a disadvantage, and at most he started with no more privilege than any other Stanford grad. (Which is a lot!)
> I wish I could find the article describing his efforts to get the model 3 production fixed. Endless issues because the robots weren't assembling the cars precisely enough. He was told they needed to go back to workers assembling the cars. Ran around screaming profanity at people, demanding they fix automation. Bunch of people got up and quit to his face.
I read that article and it was obviously made up. It claimed people were being sent through the air by machinery exploding like they were DBZ characters.
Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws stemming from the fact that they were ruled by the same Britain that ruled South Africa, isn't exactly lying. The OP's details were just a bit fuzzy.
The Musks lived in the biggest house in the richest neighborhood of segregated Pretoria, and Elon was able to avoid the draft from the same apartheid South African military that his father engineered for.
You'd definitely need to have a certain amount of privilege to do that, and to leave adolescence with anecdotes about selling pocketfuls of your dad's emeralds, like this[1]:
> A teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father, Errol Musk, had a casual attitude towards the family’s considerable wealth, including the stones that came from the Zambian emerald mine in which Errol owned a half share. Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewellers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’
And none of that matters. He has a lot of money solely because PayPal investors gave it to him for no real reason, just like Peter Thiel. But nobody pretends Thiel is some kind of racist old-money villain. (Although they do call him a vampire and he is a lot of other things.)
Btw, now that he's rich because Tesla investors keep on wanting to give him a lot of money for no reason, seizing/nationalizing the company and giving it to the poor wouldn't work, because those investors don't want to give _them_ money.
> Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws stemming from the fact that they were ruled by the same Britain that ruled South Africa, isn't exactly lying. The OP's details were just a bit fuzzy.
So why is Kimbal Musk a nobody, while Elon isn't? They grew up in the same house, shared the same privilege, are children of the same parents etc. If all this matters so much, Kimbal should grow up to be someone like Elon.
This is very true, and another thing is, he wasn't even a founder of Tesla. He swooped in about a year after it was founded with wads of investment cash, and with his now well-known egotistical drive, decided to make the company all about him. When of course all the actual work was being done by the experts rather than this arrogant dilettante who did more to impede their work than effectively manage it.
This isn't true. The employee account was 2 or 3 (depending on accounts) at the time when he supplied almost their entire funding round after basically no one else would, and continued to supply funding rounds. Saying "in about a year after it was founded" implies that they had done real work in that year when in fact they couldn't even pay their own salaries. The company would have ended right there, just like so many other "two guys and some incorporation papers" companies.
Musk invested in the company, became chairman of the board and quickly became active in their normal everyday operations.
You really hate and despise that guy, don't you? I guess this is driven by Tesla. People are less dismissive about Musk if they concentrate on SpaceX and not Tesla.
Like it or not, Musk has a talent for attracting young talented engineers and giving them a huge playground to show what they can do. That is the main reason why SpaceX took off so massively, not any shouting to get things done (everyone can do that, but successful space startups are rare, so it isn't an obvious path to success). SpaceX engineers are allowed to have some initiative and aren't kept in a narrow corridor set up by typical corporate bureaucracy.
Contrast this to Bezos, arguably a very strict businessman who used to be much richer than Musk - several orders of magnitude, in fact. Bezos isn't any softer than Musk on his employees, arguably even harder; less shouting, but more pressure. But Blue Origin is a snail compared to SpaceX, even though it was founded 2 years earlier. They have enough money, but they have a problem attracting engineering talent and retaining it.
He often doesn't do things "by the book" and will not wait for what he thinks is unnecessary red-tape. He will skirt around regulations and taunt the process the entire way. We've seen it many times before, and it's always purely in the benefit of whatever company he's helping at the time.
He has no problem throwing people/money/etc. at the problem to get the result he wants and if someone so much as says the opposite, they are removed from the equation (fired, publicly ridiculed, etc.).
I personally don't see what benefit he can bring to Twitter other than shaking up the culture. Who knows, he may even come in, take over, and claim to be a founder of Twitter, just like he did with Tesla.
> He has no problem throwing people/money/etc. at the problem to get the result he wants and if someone so much as says the opposite, they are removed from the equation (fired, publicly ridiculed, etc.).
Not just fired or ridiculed, Musk and Tesla have also tried to have a whistleblower murdered by accusing them of being a mass shooter and having them SWAT'd[1].
> Early on, according to Gouthro, a company lawyer told him that the previous head of security at the Gigafactory, Andrew Ceroni, had left after a bitter dispute. The lawyer said Ceroni had spied on a union meeting on Musk’s orders and then threatened to tell the world about it when he left the company.
Considering where Tesla was when he joined and what they have become, I’d say it’s fair to call himself a late-joining founder. This would obviously not be true of Twitter.
> I personally don't see what benefit he can bring to Twitter other than shaking up the culture. Who knows, he may even come in, take over, and claim to be a founder of Twitter, just like he did with Tesla.
He didn't "come in", in as much as he "made the company". The company was "two guys and some incorporation papers" before Musk's involvement. The company, for all intents and purposes, did not exist before Musk's involvement.
Whether that made him a founder is irrelevant, but it's important to not imply that he just "bought" a company that already had a product. There was no product.
It's only useful if the shit that is "gotten done" is actually an asset to the company and its bottom line or service to the public. Change for change-sake is almost always a bad thing.
Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).