this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
346 points (92.6% liked)

News

23427 readers
2506 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

He is remarkably bad at running a business for a billionaire.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That’s because he’s not and never was a businessman. He’s a tech guy who got super lucky and became filthy rich. Musk builds and designs shit, he doesn’t know squat about running a company. He should stick to playing with his rockets and making new roadsters. This whole CEO foray has turned out real bad.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

He’s a tech guy who got super lucky and became filthy rich.

Not even that...

He was (at best) an average coder decades ago who used family money to buy lots of startups and a few made a lot of money.

He was a gambler, not a businessman. It's just when you start out wealthy you can keep buying lottery tickets till you win. It doesn't even mean he was good at picking lottery numbers, he could just afford to buy more tickets than other people.

Musk builds and designs shit,

And definitely not that

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Not mine but... Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Also, we are all looking at this backwards. The very definition of survivorship bias.

We always only see the luckiest people. All the richest people have been super lucky, because if they weren't, they wouldn't be the richest. And also the most ruthless for the same reasons.

If you look at all the lottery winners, then by definition you will see people who gambled and won. Because someone has to win. That doesn't mean the lottery winners have some better skillets or are smarter at picking numbers than those who didn't win.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

He's not even a tech guy. He inherited his money, and then lucked into a couple jobs with actual tech guys that he could take the credit for. His entire career has been built around buying other tech companies that were just taking off, pushing the original founders out, and then taking credit for everything everyone else did.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

... lucked into a couple jobs ...

Strongarmed his way into other people's success, then slapped his name on it and claimed it as his own.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He wishes he was a tech guy. He just piggybacks off of everyone else. He's a leech, a parasite.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

What's crazy is that he had fooled a lot of people into thinking he was a tech guy with a very carefully crafted image, but he threw it all away to help the alt right

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Musk builds and designs shit

Does he though?

Musk attaches his name to things others have built and designed.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As surprising as it may sound, most billionaires do not arrive there through competence. They get there by way of inheritance and privilege.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How? That's exactly lucky timing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lucky timing is: being a white guy growing up in the 70s/80s America.

Besides that, if you look at the company he started. It started selling books, but he always wanted to sell other stuff. His shareholder letters describe his vision from the very first one and it is consistent. It didn’t change over time. They company got lucky, they talk about prime being a fluke all the time. But on the other hand, the culture in the company was something that supported a fluke like that to bubble up through the idea pond.

Any who, yea. I don’t care for the person that the media portrays him as today. But for his initial years I absolutely give him a lot of credit.

I haven’t heard off Amazon being built on stolen ideas or usurping someone else’s company or being born with a silver spoon.

Yes he was a white male in America in the 70s and has all the privilege associated with that, but there were like another 50 million in that category.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's more about launching a company right when internet purchases took off. People tried before, but the timing wasn't right. He had the right skill set, at the right time, and it took off.