I'm not at all an Elon fanboi, but you do have to respect that launch cadence (to the degree you have to respect anything.)
Let's face facts. Without Elon, there would be no SpaceX, and no Tesla. Musk deserves credit for two great achievements.
Most people have a far more scalar worldview. :(
Even Einstein has been attacked in this way. People try to dismiss him as a great man because he treated his wife poorly.
Steve Jobs disowned his daughter. He rooked Woz in the Atari deal. He's been nasty to a lot of people. It doesn't detract from his incredible success.
The point is, we all have our flaws, and zeroing in on a great person's flaws as a way to diminish his achievements is, frankly, small and petty.
"nu uh! they suck because unrelated thing" is an expression of insecurity.
But when it is less malicious, public, and monetized, such a focus-on-flaws way of viewing people would seem to have some utilitarian value. Regular news of palace scandals does not do much damage to the national welfare. Vs. having a very flaw-focused outlook on whether the great, royal Prince Andrew should be trusted around your under-age daughter might prove extremely beneficial...
But that credit does not extend to letting him get away with being an asshole. He is frequently deliberately offensive. He promotes dubious ventures. He's frequently in trouble with the SEC for violating securities rules, including the latest debacle with Twitter. He has been over-promising and under-delivering on Tesla's FSD for a really long time.
I own Tesla stock because I believe in the company and think it has, and will, do great things. But that doesn't make Musk less of a jackass.
Being a jackass is hardly the worst thing a person could be. In fact, it's pretty ordinary. We've all been a jackass in our own lives here and there.
You achieve something when as a CEO you sign off a consequential improvement in the quality of life of a lot of people, then you pass the baton and the company is still there.
Tesla is just a car company that jumped early on a quite singular and unprecedented political trend (limiting ourselves for the benefit of people who'd be alive 150 years from now). If the unprecedented trend disappears, so will Tesla.
Space has been driving big entities out of business ever since the Apollo program days, there is no quality of life and no ROI for us up there.
Musk has nothing in the bag as a matter of accomplishments because his companies are not 'in the bag' type companies. Examples of 'in the bag' type companies are : Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, Exxon, Shell etc.
He's essentially a politician
Did the miss when the EV2 was going to be released?
"I'm not at all an Elon fanboi, but" is just a variant of "I hate Trump, but".
He shouldn't be let off the hook for allegations of racism at his firms either, but that's between claimants and him, nothing to do with me.
> Can you make the case that they wouldn't have been as successful without him?
Easy. They never, ever would have sold it to Musk if they knew it could be such a runaway success and make them container ships full of money. They had no idea how to do it. Musk did.
This is the crux of my argument. If Tesla failed, would it been because of Elon? Did X.com, Boring Co., etc fail because of Elon?
I could point to his bitcoin investments, many discrimination cases, failure to release Autopilot (against his own promises), SEC action, and Tesla share price manipulation as examples of him hurting the companies success, and directly connect them to his actions. Could you do the same for the companies success?
Easy. Nobody else's electric car company succeeded.
What's the common factor in Tesla's and SpaceX's highly unlikely successes? Elon Musk.
What's the common factor in Pixar's and Apple's recovery from near bankruptcy and catapulting to the top? Steve Jobs.
Define "succeeded"? Tesla was definitely not first to market, Ford is expected to surpass them in EV cars shipped by end of this year, and Tesla is well known for their poor car QA + service (as an owner myself).
The comparison between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk is very apt, but I think you lack the historical knowledge to understand why that is.
You might not be aware that your replies to me have exhibited 3 characteristics of losing the point:
1. inserting extra words into what I wrote so you can then attack the strawman
2. diversion into arguing about the meaning of words
3. lobbing a personal insult
I'm sure you can do better.
If I say with "provide a reason why Elon is necessary to the success of the company", and you respond with "Look at the success of these two companies he led" that's completely tangential to the question.
So in exchange for "doing better" answer a simple question for me: What specific actions did Elon take that led to the success of Tesla and/or SpaceX?
I've provided several specific actions that were to the detriment of Tesla, so it should be straightforward to do the inverse.
By your "make the case" criteria - has there been any business leader who clearly deserved credit?
If we knew how many companies Elan has lead, and the percentage of barely-founded little companies from ~2003 which have been as successful as SpaceX and Tesla over the past 2 decades, then we could perform the calculations, and see what the odds actually are on Elan hitting two such jackpots by random chance & survivorship.
Elan's Wikipedia entry only has him leading ~10 companies. If you could name a few hundred more, that would help your case...
Other players on the same team were not remotely as successful.
The owner of the team matters less to the success of the team than the participants, as is easily proven by the argument you have just made.
If Elon had consistently led successful teams, as Jordan has, then the correlationary argument would be more convincing. Since he has led a mix of failures and successes, the likely indicator is the teams that worked for him, not his own ability.
> Since he has led a mix of failures and successes, the likely indicator is the teams that worked for him, not his own ability.
Or far more likely, he knows how to assemble a team that can deliver, knows how to motivate it to succeed, and knows how to get financing for it. Which is an essential skill for an entrepreneur.