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Comment by bongobongo | Hacker News Reader

Yikes, dude. I'm sorry, but Elon Musk is just a guy with money. He's not a demigod. He's not a genius. He's not even a captain of industry. He's just a rich guy playing with money and and building a personal brand.

I'm not saying that he doesn't have ideas, and that some of those ideas aren't the totally self-serving delusions of a rich dickhead, but a good many of them are, and I certainly don't want any part of "the path toward the Big Vision" of some rich dickhead. Seriously, buddy. Listen to yourself. You just described "the path toward the Big Vision" of some unelected billionaire as if it were some form of spiritual revelation or ideological telos.

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I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun.

But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.

> I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun.

Not to nitpick, but if you were to go by the typical comic-book example most 'rich dickheads' end up being super-villains.

If the question is : Do I want the immensely rich to start moving the world around from under my feet with their unlimited resources in order to do 'Cool Things'?

A: No, I don't. 'Cool Things' is too loosely constrained a parameter to allow trillions of dollars to flow into unchecked. What happens when some ultra-rich individuals definitions of Cool Things involves morally unethical behavior?

Do I like Musks' ideas and plans?

A: Yes.

> But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.

Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.

I agree, it looks pretty hopeless sometimes, and I definitely appreciate what Musk and Gates are doing.

I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.

Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think this is impossible.

Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top.

Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.

There will always be people in power. But maybe it is better if those people are elected, and operate in view of the public

I’ve read the book you’re referring to. We absolutely should not try to prevent people from amassing enough individual power to do what Elon et al are doing. Bureaucrats are generally good at some things (eg reliably running services that are well known quantities and should be provided to everyone regardless of profitability), and generally awful at others (eg efficient innovation in new fields). You need a mix of both types to both run the world and keep it moving forward. I for one am very happy that sufficiently motivated and skilled people are sometimes able to amass enough resources to try crazy things like competing with each other to start orbital launch companies and deploy a world-wide network of thousands of communications satellites to break the government granted chokeholds a few telecom companies have on internet access.

For me, the main takeaway of the book was that we should stop revering consultants/MBAs and their process.

That is a bold claim, for which you will need some pretty solid evidence.

An election is basically a popularity contest. Winning a popularity contests does not guarantee competence, reliability or even correctness of opinion.

We've got a couple of centuries of evidence that private individuals who stand to feel the effects of their choices are much better at conserving and rationing resources than elected officials.

If you make a list of the horrors of history and rank them from worst to mildest, you'll find that public officials (even in democracies) are much scarier than rich people operating private concerns.

Sorry I don't quite understand. Are you seriously saying democracy is a bad idea and that you would like to live in an oligarchy?

Private property and decentralisation are good ideas.

50%+1 liking the way someone talks doesn't mean that the person is fit to manage the whole economy for four years.

Oligarchies are even worse. The point is that people who win elections, and political leaders in general, are a much more concerning threat than wealthy, powerful & unlikable business leaders.

I'd be quite happy if governments had less power. People aren't threatened by rouge business magnates in the same way as they are by rogue public policy.

A few years of bad public policy does much more damage than any businessman can in a decade. Voters & governments are seriously not good at technical questions like resource allocation. Businessmen will stop doing something if it isn't working, voters usually push on regardless long after it obviously makes no sense to do so.

That all depends on who is doing the voting.

Why do you think those things are mutually exclusive?

Because I think we need to change the system so that unelected rich folks don’t have that much power. The more we legitimize their work the harder that will be. I’m all for them continuing their work in the meantime though. I’m doing a poor job explaining it. Defining check out the book I recommended. “Winners take all”

"He's not a genius" thats pretty debatable statement he has very deep technical expertise in a number of fields that alone can easily qualify him as genius.

>"He's not a genius" thats pretty debatable statement

Sure, it's debatable, but 'genius' is a non-standardized poorly defined opinion, anyway.

I don't care if he's a genius or he isn't. He's done very well for himself, and that's praiseworthy by itself without needing arbitrary titles stacked onto it.

> He's done very well for himself, and that's praiseworthy

Eh. Doing well for others is praiseworthy. Doing well for yourself is it's own reward, and neither deserves nor needs praise.

Re: unelected, people like to use the phrase "vote with your dollar" around here, so maybe all the people who liked X.com/PayPal and now Tesla cars have "elected" him according to that sentiment.

Voting with your dollar is how you elect the best products and services.

No one used PayPal because they liked Elon and thought he would make a great ruling oligarch.

Why can't OP not agree with (what he deems to be) Elon's vision? Because Elon Musk is rich? What had he been poor; would it have been Okay then?

I'm no Elon fanboy, but to patronisingly push someone down because they admire someone you don't idolise is... a bit rich.

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