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Comment by nancyhn | Hacker News Reader

I realize I'm doing a quixotic thing by offering a different perspective to a hate mob, but he's clearly not motivated by appearing intelligent and is doing things with high risk to reward ratio on a long time horizon. He said repeatedly that SpaceX and Tesla had a low chance of success, but poured all his resources into them anyway. People thought he was crazy with examples of countless individual decisions over a 20 year period, but he ultimately succeeded and changed the world. Still the haters persist as an electric car (Tesla Model Y) becomes the #1 selling car in the world and rockets are routinely taking off. "Ha ha, look at this brainless moron doing this thing that looks stupid! See, I was right all along!"

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"Past Performance Is Not Indicative Of Future Results"

I think the actual dynamic here is that a personality who is good at inspiring passionate following in a small group of people [0] is not really a good personality for endearing himself to most people. So driving startupesque innovative companies working on hard engineering was in his wheelhouse. Whereas being on the political stage, and running a company whose chief asset is its hundreds of millions of users, is not.

With his ability to create that type of following, Musk would have been much better starting his own social network. Having found himself owning Twitter, he should have put the company into stasis mode, viewed the debt interest payments as a sunk cost of a bad financial investment, and brought in professional management to run the company and slowly cut costs. Alas, he was overconfident based on his previous successes.

[0] including yourself, referring to reasoned criticism as "haters"

> He's clearly not motivated by appearing intelligent

Musk has spent and continues to spend an inordinate amount of effort cultivating a particular image/brand of himself, one which has gained him a large following.

180 degrees the opposite. The longest standing criticism is that he's too off the cuff and doesn't have a PR team in front of him curating every word like other major CEOs.

Your statement does not represent the opposite of what enumjorge said.

Not having a PR team in front of him and being off the cuff is exactly how he cultivates his brand and has a large cult following.

Not cultivating is cultivating? That sounds like a tautology and doesn't agree with the OP.

He cultivated it himself, rather than having a PR team do it for him.

"Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made." ― George Burns

> He's clearly not motivated by appearing intelligent

Well he could've fooled me. He might troll every once in a while, but the rest of his public discourse is standing on a soap box telling us all we're wrong.

Exquisitely concise way of describing his shtick

They laughed at Einstein, they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. You don't see the losing outcomes in a game where someone becomes wealthy and famous by taking unlikely risks. Those outcomes lead to ignominy, not celebrity.

Musk reminds me of the guy who came up with the idea of scamming people by dividing them recursively into two groups, each of whose members receives an opposing prediction about some future event with a binary resolution.

By the time he works down from 65536 potential marks to 4 or 8 or so, they think he's a god, a time traveler, or a time-traveling god. They'll give him their life savings without a second thought.

You might be remembering Derren Brown's "The System": https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/derren-brown-the-system/

It’s an old scam that certainly predates Derren Brown. I read about it in a Martin Gardner column.

That's a brilliant quote, but Bozo the Clown didn't build anything, let alone build companies that build electric car factories and rockets. It doesn't apply here.

what did he "build" exactly? Can I see some code produced by him?

Bozo's trick is hard to do / Unless you use a lot of glue

- Possibly misremembered couplet from childhood, that also applies nicely at Tesla

> Bozo the Clown didn't build anything

Following his retirement, Frank Avruch, the first nationally-syndicated Bozo the Clown, launched his own website -- bostonman.com -- which, like the “Man About Town” segments he did for WCVB-TV news, provided information on special events, hotels, restaurants, museums, and theaters in Boston.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Avruch

I stand corrected. He launched a web site.

For all of his companies and ambitions, these days it seems like Musk is mostly preoccupied with launching a website.

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