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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

Things like this make one think. Perhaps bullshitting on a cosmological scale is an extremely valuable skill for a modern CEO of a billion dollar plus tech company?

Think about it. From the point of view of someone responsible for a huge company that may well go under due to bad cash flow. Is it better to bamboozle a thousand rich people into lending you a chunk of spare change for a couple of years, or risk going under with a company that employs thousands of people and affects hundreds of thousands indirectly in its supply chain. Considering it like that one can feel almost sorry for Elon forced into the role of a bullshitter by his enormous responsibility...

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I did not expect to read a treaty on why society has forced Elon into being a bullshitter that we should feel sorry for today. Thanks for the laugh.

The more Elon talks about something you know about, the more you realise he's not a tech genius, far from it, but he is a powerful momentum guy. By that I mean that he seems to have a compulsive need to constantly push himself and his companies forward as aggressively as possible, regardless of methods & outcome. That's definitely a skillset that CEOs need but I'd never want to be anywhere near Elon's version of it. Other CEOs manage to do the same without causing the same level of damage that Elon leaves in his wake.

Which other CEOs have managed to move as fast as Tesla and SpaceX in a hardware space without similar amounts of damage (presumably in the burnout sense)?

This assumes that I think being fast is by itself a worthy competition, which I don't, plus fails to provide a definition of speed. There are plenty of companies with phenomenal growth that we've never heard of because they don't make headlines. Even in the automotive market there are companies that are experiencing big growth and stealing market share from Tesla quicker than Tesla built that market. Yes they were first but that's no guarantee of long term success.

Picking from the dataset of companies you can think of is something that Musk's marketing strategy relies on as it's what we do when comparing companies for buying cars, buying stock or talking about.

You said other CEOs could do the same (the aggressive pushing) without the damage. I assumed you had an example or two in mind.

Tesla and SpaceX are infamous in the industry for burning their folks out. I personally know several.

A recent episode of The Verge's podcast titled "Land of the Giants: "The Tesla Shock Wave" uncovered how Tesla's work culture led to many problems for the employees like extremely long hours, unsafe working conditions, harassment, scandals, fines, lawsuits, and even the slightest of mistake could lead to termination."

Source:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livemint.com/companies/news...

Elon tends to get a pass (less so lately) because he delivers amazing things. Do the same thing and don't deliver and you're Elizabeth Holmes.

Or you could ask rich people and get willing contributions.

There is an amazingly deep irony that someone who was supposed to be building fully automated gigafactories, is being apologized for lying for funds and failing to deliver tech.

The sort of person who can drop a quarter million on vaporware probably wouldn’t miss that money anyway

You'd be surprised how silly people can be with the little money they have.

Completely. You’re messing around and next thing you know you own Twitter.

Someone losing their savings on a Roadster would be newsworthy enough that Tesla would just refund them rather than take the bad PR

And those people deserve to be rid of their money.

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