5 thoughts on “We are not trying to entertain the critics”

  2. Why is it that the successful strategy of a company’s founder is eventually abandoned for the exact opposite by his or her successors?

    • (Chinese) money.
      Witness the current catfight over MULAN.

      How often do we see a focused visionary followed by an overly cautious budget manager? Or a founder who won’t let go but has no follow up.

      Apple has been dealing with that since Job discorporated; unable to find a visionary, they turned a very good COO into a poor CEO. So Apple sits on a hundred billion and does nothing with it, all the while starving the Macintosh line, showing up late for ebooks, home automation, TV OSes, and launching a video streaming service with no archive.

      And tbat’s just one case. Facebook, Google, Twitter, all one-trick ponies. Tons of money but no idea for a second act.

      Meanwhile, down the coast in LA, the guy who started with literally nothing spins off entire companies in his spare time while reinventing cars, space transportation, and possibly neurology. Along the way he’s made his way up the money scorecard as a sideline to his goal of getting off the planet before it all blows up.

      Visionaries are rare. Visionaries who actually change the world even more so.

      • The guy who started with literally nothing got lots of taxpayer money. So did the people who got tax credits when they bought his products.

        I give him great credit for what he has accomplished, but the “literally nothing?” God Bless the taxpayer.

        • Yes. Literally nothing.
          Neither Tesla nor SpaceX were his first ventures.
          He started first with Zip2, a website building company, right after migrating to the US as a college student. That’s about as rock bottom as it gets.

          He sold it to Compaq after 4 years for $307M.
          Then he founded X.com as an online bank that got merged into Paypal and later sold to eBay for $1.5B.
          That provided the seed money for SpaceX and buying into Tesla.
          Since then he’s added the Boring co, SolarCity, the OpenAI initiative, and Neuralink. And he started the ball rolling on Hyperloop for others to commercialize.

          https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1093910/elon-musk-company-how-many-companies-elon-musk-spacex-tesla-boring-company

          Through Tesla, Supercharger, and SolarWall he is moving major portions of the world to solar electric and doing more to reduce CO2 emissions than all politicians and activists combined. He is actually forcing all the major car companies to go electric, which will do even more. His battery tech is years ahead of everybody else and he’s been funding even more sophisticated battery tech. To say nothing of his orbital internet.

          So yeah, he took advantage of tax credits available to all and he’s done work for NASA for work the rest of the military industrial complex didn’t bother to do. So he takes advantage of the environment and legal system to fight the AirForce and NASA HQ and their chums in the over-priced rockets business. And? He (and his crew) deliver more for less when others take far more money for doing lesser work over more time and do nothing to actually move the tech needle.

          So he’s a jerk, yeah.
          He also stutters.
          But the work he’s doing is actually changing the world.
          And that’s without considering what is likely going to come out of is rocket assembly line in Texas. He talks of building a hundred, 100 Ton payload spaceships a year and he ain’t kidding. That is going to disrupt pretty much everything.
          So far it looks like his crew is on the right track.

          The future is coming and he’s shaping it.

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