Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies.
Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.
But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile.
He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.
He did not baselessly claim a critic was a pedophile. He baselessly claimed the first foreign rescuer called to the scene [1], who called in his friends who successfully navigated and mapped the caves and found the kids, a pedophile.
> In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.
You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it? Also, I can't find the source for this bet, only some bets about covid, and whether the tesla roadster could be built at all.
If you start off a sentence with "Some cracks started to form in this when", and then describe a situation using negative adjectives (ie. "reckless"), it's fair for most assume that the "recklessness" was your justification for the aforementioned claim. If that detail is irrelevant to your argument, then you shouldn't include it.
As for the object level question of whether taking such a bet is "reckless" at all. It's entirely impossible to tell without knowing the bet amount, and his finances at the time. Musk was recently able to take a $40B hit to his finances when he was forced to buy twitter (after trying to back out), with seemingly little consequence, so it's unclear whether an absurdly large bet would actually be "reckless".
>Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward.
Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.
You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X, then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.
> Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.
I don't see how this affects anything the GP said.
>You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X, then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.
It's called confirming what your opponent's argument is, so you're not arguing against a strawman. If you check how the OP actually replied, it seems like he entirely abandoned the "he kept it all for himself" objection.
Oh it was reckless. That was the era when built quality was rock bottom. People were getting cars that were missing parts, or where things were attached completely wrong.[1] He was expanding production so fast that it caused a serious liquidity crunch at Tesla. But he got lucky and managed to squeeze through the problem.
Unless there's something the article totally omitted, your original retelling of the story was heavily misleading. For one, it's not a bet and is seemingly actually a performance bonus, which nearly every F500 company has for their executives. As such, there was very little downside if he lost the bet. It's also unclear why CEOs trying to hit aggressive performance targets is a bad thing in and of itself. You could still object to it on the basis of bad working conditions for workers, or corners cut on the product being made, but you mentioned none of that in your original comment, which seems to imply you were fine with all of those things, and was only upset that Musk didn't share in the rewards (???).
Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.
But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile.
He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.