Quote: (09-08-2018 04:53 PM)WalterBlack Wrote:
I'd rather he get the chance to try to invent things than walk away. Nikola Tesla invented all kinds of shit & had lot of revolutionary ideas and died poor.
THIS.
Plus Nikola Tesla blogged his big thoughts before there was such a thing as a blog.
Here's one of his essays.
You know when Musk talks about terraforming mars, etc..., it's part of the same way of looking at the world from a "what if we all get together and do X" level rather than the nuts and bolts economics required to actually execute such a plan.
You know how in Contact all the countries needed to pool their resources to build and power-up that spaceship? That's the sort of thing Musk likes to think about, and you don't get there through private industry, not without running up ponzi-scheme like debt-loads. You can only do it when you can convince an entire country or group of countries that its an existential necessity.
So that is where all these ideas go to die. It takes a DIFFERENT kind of smarts to make stuff happen and Musk has shown to be...not that good at it. That's why he keeps missing targets and sleeping on the factory floor. He's making mistakes and, at best, moving two steps forward, one step back. His fans think this is to be expected. It's not. It's amateurishness.
Not only that, but Tesla has gone through waves of bringing in seasoned experts.
They brought a guy in from Audi to help with the Model 3 ramp. WTF happened? Well, they must have never implemented many of that guy's ideas because...Musk wants to fix what was never broken out of hubris and a need to keep challenging himself.
The net result is I'd guestimate at least a quarter or even half of Tesla's long-term debt is a direct result of avoidable errors on Tesla's part.
So yes, Musk is a genius...but only at certain things. He is not a genius at anything and everything he sets his mind to. And THAT is why he needs to delegate.
The only business angle he's running correctly right now is SpaceX and I am just waiting for a deadly manned Falcon 9 or BFR accident because it won't take more than a couple of those to ground SpaceX forever.