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Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

I certainly hope Elon Musk has profit as his motive, otherwise his lifes work will end up in vain.

As O'Reilly said - you need to make it to the next gas station. If Elon Musk wants to launch rockets and make new car companies he's going to need to be profitable in that enterprise, or it's going to hurt a lot of people in a pretty short amount of time.

My point is this - he has to have profit as his main motive or he would fail. If you're going to change the world, you have to last long enough to do so. In order to do that, everyone involved has to be getting out more value than they are putting in. And that is profit.

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There's a "profit spectrum". On the one side of it are money hungry wall-street bankers, who for them profit is the only motive all else be damned.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are non-profit companies. Some live without profit, based on donations, Others live as a "social corp" where all profits go to scale up growth, while keeping their main motive a non profit goal. Some of those non-profits can create huge changes.

In the middle you can also find lifestyle entrepreneurs. For many of those profit is not the main motivation.

So yes, there are successful entrepreneurs who are not motivated mostly by profit.

"he has to have profit as his main motive or he would fail"

Obviously it has to not go under but I bet he'd be happy driving on Mars in his solar-powered electric car if his companies made just enough to get by.

If by "main motive" you mean a minimum requirement then we agree. But for some that's just to get leeway to do the things they really want to do.

This is a stellar example of the muddled-headed thinking I keep posting about.

Define 'just enough to get by'.

Even if investors and employees are in it for a higher altruistic goal, they'll still want a good return on their time and money. Very few people are wont to just burn money so that someone else gets to enjoy playing CEO of a cool company. And even if they do enjoy it for a couple of years, the fun will soon stop.

Profit has to be the main motive for any long-term, successful enterprise. And the really big goals require really long periods of profitability to keep everyone interested and invested, whether with their money or their time.

It was hypothetical if someone with that kind of ambition could make just enough that he accomplished all these great things even if it left him middle class, he'd take it. I agree it would take a huge amount of cash to get there, but the point is the end goal wouldn't be money.

I've noticed by your responses you think everyone who thinks any entrepreneur wants anything besides profit is "muddle-headed." The world is "muddled." Not everyone is playing the same game in life, for some people, money is the game, for some people, money is just something you need to play it. I've noticed some of the former types really want everyone to be playing the same game so they can measure up.

I'm not going to argue any more, because you don't see my point. I'll reiterate once more, in your example: any entrepreneur who wants anything, whether it is a cure for aids, a colony on another planet or just to build a gigantic Hearst castle to show off must first create profits. Thus profits must be their first and primary motive. You can say you did it for whatever reason, but you can't dismiss making a profit as the fundamental purpose of the activity. Everything else flows from the first objective.

Suppose I am craving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Suppose that a spreading knife is an essential and irreplaceable requirement to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Would you say that my first and primary motive, and fundamental purpose is obtaining a spreading knife?

I don't think it's at all deceptive or muddle-headed to say that I'm really just hungry for a sandwich.

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