this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Hey guys, do you think Elon is just stupid and got lucky? I'm just asking the questions.
He is definitively a risk taker. The thing with a risk is that is easy to take if you have money, and if you have a lot of money you can fail many times.
He was born to rich family and had that luxury.
Here's summery of his evandors:
1995 - Founded Zip2 with his brother, got ousted from CEO position in 1996, the company was sold to Compaq in 1999
1999 - he launched his X.com with three founders
2000 - X.com merged with Confinity resulting in PayPal, Musk again was ousted as a CEO on the same year, in 2002 they sold it to eBay (he no longer was in the company but still had stocks)
2002 - He used his money from PayPal to fund SpaceX
2004 - Tesla. This one is interesting, because he is recognized by a lot of people as founder, but he was investor, but they let him to paint himself as Founder
2006 - SolarCity - it didn't do well and was purchased by Tesla in 2016
2015 - co-funded OpenAI, he resigned in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla AI
2016 - co-funded Neuralink
2016 - The Boring Company - supposed to be working on creating hyperloop, but that idea turned out to be failure, and now any mention of hyperloop was scraped from the company website. He apparently admitted that hyperloop was successful attack to stop California from building high speed rail.
2022 - Twitter
So it looks like largely his biggest successes were Zip2, X.com/PayPal and SpaceX and investment in Tesla. In Zip2 and X.com he was ousted before companies got successful.
SpaceX and Tesla are where he actually succeeded the rest after that he was just throwing money in investments. Technically that's also what happened with Tesla.
I think his smarts are focused on particular kinds of companies and particular kinds of projects, and a large pre-established social media company is very far outside of those usual areas where he's successful.
It's hard to do well with social media when you're a colossal asshole with poor social skills.
Actually he had many companies that failed or he was ousted of before they were successful. SpaceX is one that he actually started, even Tesla wasn't founded by him. It really helped to have money to invest.
Musk's first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn't until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn't build its first car until after Musk's acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
Which were the ones that failed or that he was ousted from?
Yeah, Zip2 was founded in 1995, he was ousted from it in 1996, the company sold in 1999.
He founded X.com in 1999, was ousted in 2000 before it became PayPal and sold to eBay in 2002
SpaceX was company that he actually founded and got successful, Tesla he technically didn't found but as you mentioned bought majority share and made himself look like CEO.
SpaceX and Tesla though are really run by different people SpaceX, they just learned how to deal with him instead of ousting it as the other companies did. But ok, I think he still deserves credit.
Though you omitted all the companies that he failed at. If you have a lot of money you can afford to lose frequently and still be successful. A luxury that you or me don't have.
"Ousted" is an odd word to use for "sold his share", but I guess if that's the word you want to use then he was "ousted". At massive profit for himself.
You haven't mentioned any companies that I didn't already mention.
Ousted means, the board of directors removed him from CEO position against his wishes (in case of Zip2), and in case of X.com they did it while he was on honeymoon. Both of this things happened BEFORE the companies became successful.
SolarCity, The Boring Company, X.com (basically his X.com that he is trying to revive with Twitter died when they merged with Confinity and created PayPal, and likely it's why he was ousted), I guess technically Neuralink has still chance to succeed.
wrong he has money