provoost on Nostr: Certainly no need to give him a pass. Even if we is an absolute genius in some areas, ...

Certainly no need to give him a pass. Even if we is an absolute genius in some areas, and even if he was major factor in the success of some of his companies, it gives him zero credibility on unrelated topics. He's a narcissist who does not understand or care where his expertise ends.

That said, even though Tesla isn't doing great as a business, I think it's only fair to call it a success. Ditto for Starlink which provides orders of magnitude more bandwidth than e.g. Eutelsat, which much cheaper and easier to use tooling. I think that's true even if you account for the fact that these enterprises are heavily subsidised by stupid investors and government subsidies.

The question then is: is it just a coincidence that Musk bought himself into these two companies, or did he actually have a material effect on their success? The presence of perhaps a dozen failures doesn't really matter I think. There are plenty of rich people, and even more corporations, that spend billions and billions on hundred or even thousands of ambitious projects that go nowhere.

Which makes me think that two is statistically significant. But you'll have to ask Taleb :-)

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nevent1q…3u5p

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.