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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

But he's quite clearly not a "real life Tony Stark". He didn't invent any of the stuff he sells. He didn't found Tesla, but bought it. He may claim he's directly involved in designing SpaceX rockets, but that's most likely a lie. Or maybe he believes it to be true; a couple of months ago, someone claimed that SpaceX had people whose job it was to distract Musk and make him believe he was contributing.

The way he mismanaged Twitter makes pretty clear he doesn't really know what he's doing. Even if the decision to buy was made after too much wine, he's had plenty of time to sober up since then, but he just keeps doubling down on all the worst decisions.

He's a great salesman. Or was, at least. He was like Steve Jobs who could sell the amazing work of Woz and other Apple engineers. But that charisma has gotten seriously dented now.

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> Even if the decision to buy was made after too much wine, he's had plenty of time to sober up since then

Well if he has bad habits, like a lot of us do, then its not just a matter of sobering up like it's a one time event.

> But that charisma has gotten seriously dented now.

The guy never had natural charisma in my opinion - a kind of glamour perhaps, from the wealth and achievements. I don't see the comparison with Jobs though, who was a natural salesman - Musk is a terrible public speaker, and should probably let other execs in his companies do the presentations.

Regarding the Stark comparison - IMO it doesn't matter how involved he really was with the engineering, or that he bought tesla etc - isn't it impressive enough that he made stuff happen? Can you nominate a better candidate for that comparison?

I don't mean to be confrontational though, and I respect your points.

>isn't it impressive enough that he made stuff happen?

But he didn't make stuff happen, he just paid for it. Why should we consider "Have enough money to pay for someone else to do good things" an impressive trait? Maybe we should stop deifying management for just doing a useful thing once in a while in between all the milking franchises and wealth extraction.

No one was more instrumental than Musk in making Tesla and SpaceX happen.

People who haven’t tried to run a company often fundamental misunderstand the nature the extent of the job, but claiming Musk is just “doing a useful thing once in a while in between all the milking franchises and wealth extraction” comes off like sour grapes.

> He didn't found Tesla, but bought it.

I guess you can make that argument if you tilt your head and squint a certain way.

But he did become involved in Tesla when the company had only 3 employees, and contributed >85% of the series A funding (and also led the B and C rounds). He's been there for 19 of the company's 19.5 years of existence... hardly a new kid on the block.

It’s abundantly clear to anyone who has closely followed the development of SpaceX and Tesla the tremendous positive impact both technical and managerial that Elon has had in his companies.

I think it’s a truly bizarre smear to claim he nor Jobs “didn’t invent any of the stuff he sells” when they are perhaps the two most notable technical visionaries of our time.

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