• R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Jesus I’m no Elon fan but how many companies do you have to take from a couple million to hundreds of billions before you’re good at your job?

    What is it with modern society and the need to reduce everything about a person just because they’re a POS? He might be evil but he’s clearly pretty good at being a businessman or you wouldn’t even know his name.

    • RegularGoose@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Being a succsessful businessman does not make one a good businessman. Half of the equation is ethics, because it fucking matters.

      A successful businessman with bad ethics and an unsuccsessful one with good ethics are both bad businessmen.

      The only good businessman is one who both succeeds and has good ethics.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      While he has had some success, he’s also demonstrably been a glory hog benefiting from crazy good luck.

      He had an Internet company during the first dot com boom. He got a bunch of cash from Compaq for effectively nothing, because businesses had to snap up anything vaguely Internet. Right place at right time, basically won a lottery.

      So then he founded an Internet bank. But want allowed to lead it, no matter, either way it was overshadowed by PayPal, which was a runaway success. Somehow he managed a merger with him being put in charge of the joint company. Then he almost tanked it and was put aside to salvage the company. However, he managed to be popularly thought of as “the PayPal guy”

      He founded SpaceX. Off the top of my head, that one seems fair enough.

      Then you have Tesla, which existed prior to him Knowing about it, yet he still insisted on being called a founder. It’s possible that without him, Tesla wouldn’t have gone far, but either way, he’s been a glory hog about it to the point of again getting himself framed as “the” Tesla guy.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Also in the case of Tesla, it was a company entering a market with virtually zero competition. Compare the available fully electric cars of 2013-4 and take a wild guess as to which consumers were drooling over: the one that looks like an actual car or ones that screams “eco-friendly toy” (Mitsubishi i, Nissan Leaf)?