Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).
He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.
I'm not at all a fan of him, but his power is in execution. A vision is worthless.
Never mind the fact that throughput would be limited to however many cars can fit in one lane of tunnel, that's just details.
Boring company tunnels are wider than London subway tunnels.
Both sell/sold products that hardly need any marketing.
Execution and result-driven like that giant coffin-box he tried to claim could be used to rescue boys from a cave where rescuers were swimming through spaces so narrow they couldn't wear their diving gear?
Result-driven, power-in-execution executive who took a decade to build a luxury car that had initial quality, paint, NVH, and interior quality equal to an economy sedan made by Ford or Honda. His cars often literally don't line up the same way on the right side as they do on the left. Oh, and also about a decade to get the motor/drivetrain unit on the Model S to not destroy itself every 10,000-20,000 miles. It still can't handle being driven through too large a puddle without ingesting water through the speedo sensor port...
Autopilot routinely "phantom brakes", and FSD "Beta" likes to drive at telephone poles, veer at cyclists, and pedestrians standing on street corners.
I wish I could find the article describing his efforts to get the model 3 production fixed. Endless issues because the robots weren't assembling the cars precisely enough. He was told they needed to go back to workers assembling the cars. Ran around screaming profanity at people, demanding they fix automation. Bunch of people got up and quit to his face.
Months more of delays and issues until he finally listened to someone who had been saying all along that they needed to grow capacity by having more people assembling the cars. Boom, production volume and quality issues gone.
Musk is a rich man-baby who has relied on shouting at people to get things done.
Musk invested in the company, became chairman of the board and quickly became active in their normal everyday operations.
It's weird that people made up a fake biography just because they don't like when he tweets on Ambien.
In particular I don't think this was an advantage, I think it was a disadvantage, and at most he started with no more privilege than any other Stanford grad. (Which is a lot!)
> I wish I could find the article describing his efforts to get the model 3 production fixed. Endless issues because the robots weren't assembling the cars precisely enough. He was told they needed to go back to workers assembling the cars. Ran around screaming profanity at people, demanding they fix automation. Bunch of people got up and quit to his face.
I read that article and it was obviously made up. It claimed people were being sent through the air by machinery exploding like they were DBZ characters.
The Musks lived in the biggest house in the richest neighborhood of segregated Pretoria, and Elon was able to avoid the draft from the same apartheid South African military that his father engineered for.
You'd definitely need to have a certain amount of privilege to do that, and to leave adolescence with anecdotes about selling pocketfuls of your dad's emeralds, like this[1]:
> A teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father, Errol Musk, had a casual attitude towards the family’s considerable wealth, including the stones that came from the Zambian emerald mine in which Errol owned a half share. Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewellers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’
[1] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-sells-the-family...
Btw, now that he's rich because Tesla investors keep on wanting to give him a lot of money for no reason, seizing/nationalizing the company and giving it to the poor wouldn't work, because those investors don't want to give _them_ money.
Who said anything about seizing the company? And what do easily duped retail investors have to do with anything I posted?
Zambia wasn't apartheid.
Notice that I said similar here, because Zambia did have laws that were similar to apartheid laws in South Africa.
Like it or not, Musk has a talent for attracting young talented engineers and giving them a huge playground to show what they can do. That is the main reason why SpaceX took off so massively, not any shouting to get things done (everyone can do that, but successful space startups are rare, so it isn't an obvious path to success). SpaceX engineers are allowed to have some initiative and aren't kept in a narrow corridor set up by typical corporate bureaucracy.
Contrast this to Bezos, arguably a very strict businessman who used to be much richer than Musk - several orders of magnitude, in fact. Bezos isn't any softer than Musk on his employees, arguably even harder; less shouting, but more pressure. But Blue Origin is a snail compared to SpaceX, even though it was founded 2 years earlier. They have enough money, but they have a problem attracting engineering talent and retaining it.
He has no problem throwing people/money/etc. at the problem to get the result he wants and if someone so much as says the opposite, they are removed from the equation (fired, publicly ridiculed, etc.).
I personally don't see what benefit he can bring to Twitter other than shaking up the culture. Who knows, he may even come in, take over, and claim to be a founder of Twitter, just like he did with Tesla.
Not just fired or ridiculed, Musk and Tesla have also tried to have a whistleblower murdered by accusing them of being a mass shooter and having them SWAT'd[1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
Jesus, what a megalomaniac.
He didn't "come in", in as much as he "made the company". The company was "two guys and some incorporation papers" before Musk's involvement. The company, for all intents and purposes, did not exist before Musk's involvement.
Whether that made him a founder is irrelevant, but it's important to not imply that he just "bought" a company that already had a product. There was no product.