Hacker News Reader

Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk leaves a trail of destruction with the early employees of his companies but the results are tremendous and have huge implications for humanity. I'll give Musk the benefit of the doubt at this point.

View on HN

I’m not sure that the high churn rate at the high end is really in Musk’s interest, but it MIGHT be in society’s interest. Instead of sucking up a bunch of highly skilled and driven people indefinitely, the few who are able to work well in that environment stay and are able to get stuff done while the others leave and spread the knowledge elsewhere, perhaps starting up competing efforts that either complement Musk’s efforts or give Musk a run for his money. This is a strong argument against Non-Competes.

It probably is in Musk's interest too. Musk has earned the benefit of the doubt in trusting his decision as to "should Very Smart Person X be employed by Neuralink" or not. There's a lot more to making a company successful than being competent and as much as I find Musk personally distasteful there is nobody with his track record at building transformative private sector companies.

Good example is the person who left Tesla and is now starting a Lithium battery recycling company.

It’s not Elon musk that’s doing the work, it’s the actual workers. Sure, maybe Musk has the capital and audacity to try these things, but that does not mean he’s the one putting in the skilled work required for this

That's like saying aerospace engineers don't deserve credit for building rockets because they don't physically build them.

Doing what Musk does is a skill, and a pretty scare one at that.

No, it's like saying the owners of aerospace engineering companies don't deserve credit for the designs the aerospace engineers working at them produce.

It's not a statement I agree 100% with, but it's definitely the case these days that individual workers are not given enough credit. It's also the case that the owners, executives, and other high-ranking management types are given far too much credit for successes and far too little blame for the failures.

Without any of the founders and Elon Musk there would be no Tesla Model Y. Doubt there are very many engineers about whom the same could be said. In totality the individual contributors are more important but Elon Musk is the person without whom the enterprise is dead on arrival.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com