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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 0001
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founded a long while ago
He successfully bought his way into those industries. His most successful companies were not started by him, and tend to flourish once he’s gone.
Once you have enough money it’s pretty much impossible to do anything but fail upwards
And who else bought into and became the face of those industries right before they blew up? It's just dumb luck he happened to invest in those 4 companies right? He had no clue or insight and him and randomly just happened to buy some of the most influential companies of the modern era before anyone had a clue.
I swear to God with your people. If you didn't invent it then you had nothing to do with it 🤦♀️.
Name 5 people who have been more successful in the modern era in gaining money and influence through capitalism. Feel free to pick from any of the billionaires who have had all those advantages. You can't because as much as you hate him, he's objectively more successful than his peers.
There's this book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success. You should read it.
You should check out the "If Books Could Kill" episode on Outliers
And while you’re at it, listen to the whole If Books Could Kill catalog!
Are you serious? Does anything you’re seeing in the world today indicate that there is some kind of meritocracy in place?
Enron was super successful - they were seen as the smartest guys in the room. I don’t even have the time to list the number of major financial companies that have bankrupted themselves after decades of profits. Then there’s companies like Theranos.
But it’s not even really about people who are stupid, con artists, or both getting into power. It’s probability.
If you were to flip a fair coin ten times and it came up heads every time, you’d think you were pretty lucky (or that I was losing about it being a fair coin). However, the chance of that happening just at random is about 1/1000. If everyone in your town were to do the experiment, many people would throw ten heads in a row, depending on the size of your town. If we do it at the state or country level, some people will get 25 or more heads in a row. It doesn’t mean they’re luckier or better at coin flipping.
So what do we see in the case of Elon? First, he started out with table stakes. That’s rare enough. Then he got involved with a dot-com at the exact same time that everyone was doing that. Like with the coin flips, most of them failed and some were successful. But let’s recognize that the “success” was an acquisition and that he was fired shortly after his ideas were shown to be detrimental to the success of the company. When he was fired, he still had an enormous gain which again we can find several causal factors that have nothing to do with Musk being smarter than a chimpanzee.
But there’s a second dimension we need to account for. Under capitalism, success gets reinforced because actual statistics is hard enough for most people that they just go on re-enforcement of individual successes. The system is literally built on foundations that the rich will tend to get richer, mostly because they’re the ones weitong the rules of the game.
In Twitter, we see what Elon as an individual actually brings to the table, other than pockets full of cash. He took a $44B company and in a year turned it into an estimated $4B company. Jack Dorsey, $44B. Elon musk, $4B and falling.
When the bill comes due, when the cybertruck continues to not ship and is crap when it does, when the 18 wheelers continue to underperform minimal expectations and get plowed under by the rest of the industry, when they finally realize that FSD will never happen given Tesla’s limitations on the tech, it will start to fall apart. It’s a con game disguised as meritocracy.
None of those guys went from millionaires to richest billionaire in the world. I guess Elon must be more talented or richer than them?
I think you didn’t follow my argument at all. It’s not talent. It’s luck and feedback loops.
There’s some really accessible books on statistics right now, including one written by Nate Silver, that consider questions on topics like why the Mona Lisa is considered by some the world’s best and possibly most valuable painting.
I’ve had drinks with several senior engineers and managers at Tesla. The gull wing doors that keep breaking? Elon’s idea. They initially pushed back, he insisted, then when they relented he didn’t like the design and so lent a hand and made it worse after not having participated in any of the design meetings leading up to it. Stainless steel cybertruck? Same deal. Killing off all of the brand equity associated with “Twitter?” Same.
In fact, Twitter gives us a view on the purest Elon, because he literally fires everyone who disagrees with him. Twitter shows us what Elon looks like when allowed to do whatever he wants.
But look: just start learning more about statistics, base rates, positive reinforcement loops, and such.
I've heard from an insider that SpaceX has an Elon wrangler whose job it is to keep him away from anything important when he's on-site. You can point this stuff out to the man's admirers, but you can't logic somebody out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.
No I understand you.
Musk is just the luckiest of the billionaires he out performs. Again nobody can really point out which billionaires with all their advantages that have beaten him. They all out of sheer luck, haven't performed as well.
Yes, good to see you finally got it!
👌
Would you like to suck his dick any more?
It is dumb luck. Once you have that much money you fail upwards. It doesn’t matter if 20 other projects fail if one makes billions.
If you didn’t invent it you didn’t have anything to do with it. If you funded it you still didn’t have anything to do with it, you just enabled someone else to do it.
Not even one
Yeah. Good evidence capitalism is broken in the context of modern society.