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@Masta he started studying on a scholarship, started a company and sold it started a new one, paypal, sold that, started SpaceX and invested in Tesla.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not bad for someone who started without anything. -
@Voxera Not bad indeed, it's even really impressive and I've no trouble admitting that. But again that doesn't change what I was saying at first : that's business skills here.
Surely that's not nothing, that makes him someone successful and proves he's intelligent I guess, and has some other qualities. But I still think he receives all the credit for things his employees are truely responsibles.
Just read or watch the medias, listen to some conversations about the topic and you quickly get to the easy thoughts: "Tesla is so innovating, Musk is a genious".
I'm sure these companies are full of creative minds, people who really have found solutions to complex problems. But we just never hear about them, just about their boss.
Let's try to compare with things we all know. If we try to think that way really, Berners-Lee has not invented the web, but it was whoever at thé head of CERN at the time. Eich was not responsible for creating JavaScript, the boss of Netscape was. And so on... -
Facebook is an interresting case, personnally I think that starting this in a major university has really helped. After all, at that time many web developers were on the same path: adding more social features to their products, etc. MySpace was already there but not just it. I pretty well remember we were spending a lot of time on forums back then, and for those amongst us who knew how to code, the goal was to make a site like Facebook before Facebook was even born.
So yeah, I thing the audience targeted by Facebook since the begining has played an important part in it's development. I think somebody else than Zuck', in the same environment, could have get to a very similar result. -
@Nanos
"For success, do I just need to create a Facebook group and wait for it to fill up with knowledgable folk who can work on a project together.. ?"
Well that's far-fetched. Of course you can't "just wait" for brilliant people and receive success. Of course management skills are useful in every project. But let's try to reverse the thinking here : You could be an exceptional leader. You could inspirate motivation and energy to people, you could bring them together around shared values and use that to make them work. But is it enough to really be successful ? Even if the people you choosed are lacking knowledge and capabilities ?
Without even taking into account the fact that "starting a projet with folks on Facebook" and "hire professionnals by contract to make them work in their field of expertise in exchange for money every month" are to very different things... -
@Nanos
"Why was that, what causes folk to just give up and not keep working on a project ?
What has Cliff got that is different to most others ?"
I don't know, and yeah I wish we had the answer to these questions. But I'm really well convinced that's not only due to one man. It's a social thing, fore sure, something happening between people at the right time and the right place. But in my opinion, the same "leader" with different collaborators, or a different environment, may not achieve similar results... -
@Masta If you are a very good leader you either do not gather useless people ;)
Or you see behind the outer shell and manages to pull out competence hidden.
A great leader is not just a businessman but someone that inspires people to do more than they though they could.
Thats why a coach in a sports team can make or break a team without even playing them self.
And Musk has repeatedly manage to gather the right people and gotten them to do more while also handling the business part.
And those three skill are not present in many leaders, most have one or maybe two skills. -
And for Facebook and Harvard, it's not just the "physical" location that played a part, but also the network aspect in universities. Students did (and still) have the needs to comunicate quickly and efficiently. And students were (and still are) young people, happy to discover and share new things.
At the time it was the perfect combo for Zuck': he was surrounded by people who needed his idea, and these people had the perfect age and habits to massively share this idea and the resulted product.
So yeah, starting Facebook in Harvard helped a lot, but not just because of the physical situation. It's not the fact that it was on a campus that helped. It's the fact that it was inside an already-existing network: the students network. -
@AndSoWeCode Ok, sorry.
Not nothing but still not really starting with a silver spoon.
If you compare with other successful corporate leaders I think you will find most started ahead of him. -
@Voxera
"If you are a very good leader you either do not gather useless people ;)"
Why not ? You gather people you can reach. Maybe I'm a good leader, but somewhere in a small country without anyone with the skills I need around me.
I don't think that's such easy.
Kind, you born a leader and in every place you will go in your life, with every person you will meet, you will achieve great things because you were born like that and that's all. That's really to Disney for me, almost magical. The real world is much more complicated! -
@Voxera
"Thats why a coach in a sports team can make or break a team without even playing them self. "
...and not because he has the ability to choose who plays and who don't ?
You're sure ?
Let's be fair here: I don't say leadership doesn't exist. You're partly right, a coach can have a psychological influence on the players without using direct authority. But he also has that authority by the rules, and no reason to not use it. Which strengthens his ability to "make or break" the team. You have more fear of the coach when you know he can forbid you to play the next match. -
@Nanos It never hapened to me, but I can imagine the frustration.
Actually I almost never use Facebook anymore. I have a lot of "friends" on it, but the content is too useless. The only things that keeps me from deleting my account is I still use Messenger to talk with people. I wish it's possible to delete my fb profile while keeping all my friends on Messenger... But it's not. -
This is by far the most interesting thread I have seen in devrant in quite some time. So here's my two cents
The media hypes Elon musk because it's their job to hype stuff. If they don't do it their rivals will, coz that's just business too.
If there was someone else in that situation instead of Elon musk they would have done what he has and if Elon musk was present in some other situation things wouldn't be the same either.
Yes there are a lot of companies out there but how many of them are named after a pun, how many are building spacex
I think the true genius of Elon musk lies in challenging our perception of normal. -
Musk may be just a successful businessman, but not every businessman can create so much technological progress in so little time. Some of his ideas are crazy and unrealistic but on the way he already achieved some great things that force the competition to wake up and get shit done as well.
People like him because he's proof you can be successful and still talk about cool technology and your sci-fi vision instead of business bullshit bingo. -
To say Musk is anything less than a genius would be an understatement.
Yea yea he is Rich bla bla. Look if Musk was in it for the money he would be handling things a lot differently. He invested most of his own money during the 2008 crisis while he could've have just retired. So don't give me the 'he is an evil business man' bs. That is just jealousy speaking.
Now you can say that Musk is just doing management and that management is easy *spoiler its not* but even that isn't true. Sure he might not do a lot of engineering anymore these days but at the beginning I am pretty sure he was the lead engineer because of a lack of funds. Musk is a genius for a multitude of reasons in my opinion and you haven't given any proper arguments again in my opinion why he is not.
Starting businesses is hard, I wouldn't know where to start. Engineering stuff is easy, I do it every day. Heck all you have to do is pick up some books and read. Things will go on there own from there on. -
@Masta I did have an “or” after that.
If you read the rest you see that I also believe a leader can help people to be more than they seam or think they can.
So in the end there are very few truly useless people. -
It seems like no one understands that CEOs of aerospace companies are more lead engineers than CEOs.
People like Bruno, Musk and even Bezos don't just run the company — they could build a turbopump with a blindfold on.
Sure, they have armies of engineers helping them, coming up with good ideas of their own, but a lot comes from their desk as well.
Musk doesn't even run SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell does.
People over-hype a lot of things, and with Musk it gets out of hand because he still talks like a software dev. He thinks out loud, speculating about technology, disregarding deadlines. -
@Nanos It's not a great idea to do that in front of customers though.
With technically minded coworkers I also just blurt out: "We could build a machine learning model on top of that database, set up an API to refine suggestions, etc" -- As in: Nice to have, in a year or two, lets build the basic version, I'm just putting a dot on the horizon.
But Musk does this out loud in front of the world, and I think it's his greatest weakness. It generates too much hype, and hype is a bubble. It will eventually pop.
Mass production of cars is hard, digging tunnels is hard, getting to Mars is incredibly hard.
I think his companies are of great value to the world, and will bring a lot of change, over time. But most of his timelines are off by a few years or even a decade, and there are a lot of blind fanboys cheering and believing everything he says as if he's some kind of prophet. -
It's true that lower level staff builds the actual products but when people have only that argument I can't stop thinking how stupid they are.
For anyone disagreeing with that just look around you and name a single engineer that designed and built the products you use on a daily basis.
In most cases you can hardly name a single person working in the company that built the stuff you use.
No one really cares about the engineers that work at Musk's or anyone else's company, they just want to try and give some credibility to their pathetic attempts at getting some attention by not agreeing with the majority just so their insignificant lives get some meaning.
Conspiracy theorists claim they know the "truth" no one else knows because that gives a meaning to their, buried in brain-dead routine, lives.
As for you OP, name 3 persons that made this app a reality.
Found this in our codebase, apparently one of my co-workers had written this
I really don't get all the Musk fans. I mean, sure you can find some value in Tesla or SpaceX, sure you can think theses companies are truly innovating. But why give all the credit to the rich businessman who seems to spent more time promoting himself than really working on science stuff, and not to all the ingeneers and creatives who are really putting some hard work on every day ? All Musk is really doing is running a business. He seems to do that pretty well, agreed, but after all it's "just" that: business. He's not the genius, nor the creative. He has money and invests it well, that's all.
I don't get why so many people give all the credit to him, even here on devrant where it should be logical to find more people supporting the real brains behind the tech.
"He has a vision about the future, he's imaginative..."
- Well that's bullshit.
Once again: he has money, a lot, and a certain skill about how to invest it (and about doing some proper marketing too), which companies to buy, etc. That don't make him such a great visionary about the future of the human being, just a great businessman. I'm sure you can find millions of people around the world with better ideas about the future, but they're not in his position. They're not rich, they're not CEOs, they're mostly unknown.
Stop follow the stream by glorifying businessmen just because medias are talking lot about them. Instead, know where the real talent (and work) is. Give credit to Musk employees, not to him.
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