“But a lot of people are envious of him and want him to fail. So I take criticisms against him with a grain of salt.”
I think he is brilliant and perhaps worthy of being labeled a genius. But, that doesn’t mean he is a good businessman or capable of taking an idea from a startup to a profitable business endeavor. Actually, there’s a long list of people such as Musk who failed in making the leap. I think eventually the board will remove him from the operations side and bring in a solid manager with auto manufacturing experience to turn the company around and make a profit. Hope so anyway.
Self promotion is the key to Musk’s business model.
People perceive that Tesla or SpaceX or Boring is likely to be the Next Big Thing, so they will front massive amounts of money to be in early. They believe these companies will succeed because of Elon Musk.
That is why Tesla is “worth more” than GM, even though GM builds a thousand times more cars, and has thousands of engineers more talented than Elon Musk. But is is too late to get in on the ground floor at GM, and nobody sees them as the Next Big Thing.
But people believe in Musk, and are willing to risk money to speculate that he might succeed. But the success of the venture is completely dependent on people’s perception of one man. That is how a single tweet can be worth $2,000,000,000.
But, that doesn’t mean he is a good businessman or capable of taking an idea from a startup to a profitable business endeavor. Actually, there’s a long list of people such as Musk who failed in making the leap.
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Musk co-founded and eventually sold Zip2 and made tens of millions of dollars. Musk then co-founded and eventually sold Paypal and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Musk then started SpaceX from scratch in 2002. He’s been running it since then. It now employs thousands and has an estimated private market value of $22 billion. Investors around the world are lined up to buy the stock if any becomes available. Musk bought his way into Tesla about the same time and he’s been running the company since then. Tesla employs around 45,000 people and has a market cap of $54 billion.