Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

Some HN commenters never cease to amaze with their negativity...

This site is overwhelmingly supportive of Mr. Musk and his enterprises. Does everyone have to be?

Are you sure you're thinking of HN? The top comment on any article about Tesla here is usually someone saying "Whatever this article is about is old news and also a bad idea and also doesn't work, and BTW Tesla is losing money hand-over-fist."

Any company can build an electric car and lose money while doing it. The question isn't whether he can build a cool electric car, he clearly can. I really question the position he has put himself in financially.

- He used Tesla stock to secure loans he used to purchase his stake in Solar City, the decision to purchase Solar City is at least in part driven by the fact that Elon Musk IS Tesla, without him at the helm it would be a problem and if he got margin called it would affect Tesla since he would lose a significant amount of his shares. There is no Tesla boardmember/major shareholder that doesn't have a conflict of interest for this issue.

- His companies buy each other's bonds, they're basically just moving money around and building a larger house of cards - if one company goes down at this point I really don't see how it wouldn't have significant reprecussions for the others. This is especially problematic when it comes to Space X which is privately owned and its deep connection to his public companies.

- It seems that if I took a big pile of money in my yard and lit it on fire, Elon would probably want to compete there (and do it better than me). All of his companies are very capital intensive and he is very leveraged at this point and has a lot of people tied to his fate - him not being focused on any one business makes this a bigger problem.

And here's my biggest Elon problem:

- He is a walking PR campaign. Why do we barely know any of the higher level engineers at Space X or Tesla? He is splitting his time between multiple companies, I find it impossible to believe he is involved in every engineering breakthrough at all of these companies and yet I have honestly never once heard him give credit to any of his management or engineering team.

That last one is the worst for me. I don't think he's a great person and it's annoying seeing everyone fawning over him like he's Elon Kardashian for tech people. The fact an almost universal complaint at his companies is that people are undercompensated and overworked further reinforces my personal opinion he doesn't value the work of other people.

> He is a walking PR campaign. Why do we barely know any of the higher level engineers at Space X or Tesla?

Remind me a great deal of what existed with Steve Jobs. Another example is Jeff Bezos with Amazon. Not saying that in tech circles some of their execs and/or engineers are not well known but certainly not people that your Aunt would have heard about. Also I guess Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook (although Sheryl Sandberg is fairly well known). Another is the "Google Guys" but you don't hear much about them lately probably because the PR has been tamped down. But early on it was every magazine cover and apparently from what I heard later Sergey wasn't even anywhere near as important as Larry was.

This happens also with VC firms. One partner (in a small firm like AVC) is the big cheese, the others you barely hear about.

That said this is not unusual in business or for that matter team sports or even entertainment. For many reason including some people simply want to be behind the scenes.

I have literally never heard Elon mention another person who already worked at the company. I can find plenty of times he was announcing a key hire, like when they brought in Peter Hochholdinger. Every new feature, product, etc is announced by Musk. Which like you said is similar to Apple. I think similar to Jobs, Elon is at least significantly involved in a lot of details - and I think similar to Jobs he feels that since he was involved it wouldn't have happened without him.

Google isn't a good example in my opinion though, generally people besides the CEO announce their products, i.e. Google Maps was announced by Bret Taylor. Look at the history of Google and Microsoft and you will see tons of "xxx announces/introduces yyy". Tesla's entire history is "Elon Musk announces ..." (after teasing on Twitter for 5 months to keep the stock price up).

I don't think everything is bad about him. I think the thing he is amazing at is setting the vision for his companies - which is really valuable. It really seems like everyone understands the mission and where things are going and he's very clear about it. So I think he has good qualities, I just think he's also narcissistic, financially impulsive and unfocused.