from Hacker News

Book Review: Elon Musk

by spenrose on 1/3/24, 3:44 PM with 35 comments

• by roughly on 1/3/24, 6:30 PM

  Lightly mentioned in the article, but I think a key part of Musk's success comes down to two traits: he's willing to take large risks if he thinks the "right answer" requires it and he's willing to put significant capital up to do so. For Tesla, things like the aluminum bodies mentioned in the article or the "gigacasting" later took the kind of significant investment that most companies aren't comfortable making; SpaceX, for its part, blew up enough rockets to have put most companies off their lunches. There's shades of Jobs, who would not accept an inferior product made for expediency, and of Bezos, who's one of the few other company leaders with a history of gambling like that, but really, I think the willingness to aggressively deploy the capital required to achieve the answer he thinks is the right one is the core trait underpinning his success.

  (I think the article's also broadly correct in the diagnosis of his failings, too - the gods don't give with both hands, as they say.)

• by ZeroGravitas on 1/3/24, 4:37 PM

  > Likewise, Musk didn’t found Tesla, and he didn’t invent their revolutionary battery technology.

  Do Tesla have revolutionary battery technology?

  > But when the founders came to him asking for an investment - and saying the batteries were the main sticking point - he introduced them to a battery inventor with revolutionary ideas

  Who is this, and what did he invent?

• by gumby on 1/3/24, 3:58 PM

  What is the appeal of reading biography? Personally I’ve never understood it.

  Biographies of historical figures can be interesting to me not for the person themselves but as a vehicle to describe the society they lived in. Thats what makes Plutarch’s “lives” dull but a biography of Cicero interesting (to me).

  But a recent or even contemporary figure? Yawn.

  Perhaps there’s something insightful that I don’t get?

• by arrakeen on 1/3/24, 5:41 PM

  what is it about this mostly-text page that Firefox is struggling so hard with?

• by ZeroGravitas on 1/3/24, 4:47 PM

  > He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator.

  This seems like a bad business decision, yet is apparently the cherry-picked highlight of his technical acumen.

• by j_crick on 1/3/24, 6:37 PM

  For some reason this page doesn’t load on mobile Safari because it crashes. Reader mode doesn’t render anything either.

• by netrap on 1/3/24, 7:34 PM

  > Musk has a saying: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely”. The most entertaining outcome here would be for Peter Thiel to take over Twitter and rename it “PayPal”. I can’t wait.

  Amazing review. Opened my eyes. I need to read the book now...!

• by Workaccount2 on 1/3/24, 4:15 PM

  TL;DR: Musk is a hyper focused nerdy engineer with poor social skills. The reason people like him is because he genuinely is a nerdy smart engineer. The reason people hate him is because he genuinely has poor people skills.

• by cwillu on 1/3/24, 7:20 PM

  (2023)