this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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How is this guy one of the richest in the world? This is on the level of used car salesman.
He started rich, invested in a relatively early online bank that did decently, was CEO, got voted out of being CEO and they put someone competent in that position, where it evolved into Paypal. EBay bought PayPal for 1.5 billion dollars, and that gave Musk a stupid amount of money to throw at things, like founding spaceX and buying into Tesla very early. spaceX and Tesla have competent people.
Honestly, as far as I can tell, his whole business life has been coming up with ideas, finding competent people to help make those ideas reality, and then getting replaced with those people, leaving him with a large amount of money and time to repeat the loop. He also seems to be a good engineer for spaceX. If he didn't start rich, he'd be chief engineer somewhere and do a good job, but instead, he fucks up businesses and then usually gets removed. In twitter's case, though, he bought it personally, and there's no shareholders to kick him out, so all the business stupidity has to play out.
Close!
He doesn’t come up with anything. He just got lucky buying into other people’s companies based on their ideas.
Do you have a source? I admit mine aren't for sure free of bias, but I'm pretty confident X.com, the online banking company, was actually his.
PayPal (the service) wasn't, and it was eventually so important that they renamed the company after the service, so he's not doing great here, but he wasn't completely devoid of good ideas.
I wonder what happened to that, because he certainly is devoid of ideas now.
Okay so a cursory reading of Wikipedia (yeah I know, not the most credible) shows that you are correct about him being one of the key players in starting the online bank X.com with Peter Thiel and crew.
I concede that point! My apologies for casting aspersions.
Ooo, mention the part where when wanting to start SpaceX, Muskrat travelled the world trying to buy technology, while being what must have been a complete shite in Russia, a top Russian space scientist spat on him.
Well-deserved as far as I can tell. Had to get an expert to come with him before they'd even consider again.