"Brin & Page are widely regarded as nice guys, and so is Satya Nadella"
Actually, when I was there Brin and Page had a reputation for being somewhat brutal, especially Larry. Not in a loud and brash way but in the sense that if they were doing a product review or whatever, and one of them thought your product sucked, they'd just say something like "This sucks, why have you been wasting your time on it?" and feelings be damned. They just didn't really care about cushioning criticism apparently. I actually recall them sort of sarcastically insulting random employees, VPs or even entire projects at TGIF if they were being dumb, overly entitled or underperforming, in the way you'd not really expect ... as if those people worked somewhere totally different.
I don't know anything about Nadella but it's worth noting that he didn't build the company, he's more like a steady pair of hands. Bill Gates on the other hand had a similar reputation to Page and Brin, especially when doing product reviews. If he didn't like something he'd let you know in the bluntest way possible.
So it's not really clear to me to what extent Musk's recent behavior is genuinely abnormal. It may be simply that at the moment relatively few big tech firms are run by founder types. Actually, maybe only Facebook is right now? Others are across the board being run by 'calm' types chosen, one might suspect, for their ability to effectively execute on the foundations laid down by their predecessors.
I think there's significant distinctions between them though. Those founders usually prioritize success of their business so they will accept corrections if it turns out to be a significant risk to the business.
IMO, Elon's narcissism blocks him from taking any kind of such "corrections" because his priority is on building his own narrative of being a genius entrepreneur and engineer. (This explains that "code review" farce pretty well...) If he corrects his path, then it will be publicly portrayed as his defeat so he just can't.
This worked pretty well for him until now since he was able to equate Tesla/SpaceX as himself in public perception. If he can build the genius narrative, then it will be a significant advantage for those businesses as well unless there are undeniable public failures. He is a competent businessmen so he managed most of the smaller gradual risks pretty well. But something big like Twitter is probably out of his ability, or not. We'll see.
I don't. The culture of secrecy came from the top and they're both quite private men (very private, in the case of Page). Very little about their management style is documented and to be clear, what I'm saying is second hand knowledge. I was a cog - attended many TGIFs and got emailed by Sergey once, but never had a product review or other kind of important meeting with them.
It's worth stressing that I don't think either of them were bad people or even mean. Being very direct with feedback seems to be a common trait of successful founders and CEOs. I guess when you review as many products as they do, and have built at great expense a place a lot of people want to work, and decisions matter a whole lot, being indirect and super-polite seems like a poor use of time. Also people don't like getting negative feedback, so unless it's ultra-clear it probably just doesn't sink in.
I don't much know about SpaceX, but I stopped at "Tesla being objectively successful." Nothing at all indicates that for me. It's definitely popular and making big moves, but so did FTX. Given empty promises, shoddy design, crypto and other financial f**ery, etc, I see no good reason to strongly believe Tesla is in anything for the long haul.
Tesla has 68% of the electric car market, 20% of the luxury market, and 2-3% of the overall auto market. Where does your personal definition of successful begin?
Just not enough time in the market + Elon being good at capital raising and cheerleading. I'm not saying they're definitely a failure, I'm 100% saying there's no reason to necessarily believe that this sustains in the future.
"Tesla has a real shot at being successful" is definitely true. "Tesla is unquestionably already a success" is not.
That’s not really comparable. Tesla make tangible products that are readily sold and actively used all over the world. Their success has been so great that it pushed other companies to move into the EV market. Tesla are known to make premature promises sure, but they do eventually deliver on those promises.
I can't deny the cheerleading factor, for sure. But we also know there's a LOT of hot air in this company. The question is, does that hot air get replaced with quality, or does the thing deflate? Time will tell.
A little over ten years ago they sold fewer cars than Rolls Royce. Today they sell more cars than Volvo, and they are profitable. That's objectively successful.
That they were arguably the main reason why every other carmaker is transitioning to electric cars is subjectively (to me) a far greater success. The transition is past the point of no return even if Tesla were to disappear tomorrow,
That is very fair. I definitely agree if Tesla turns out to be some kind of failure in other regards, it gets credit for "forcing a change in the game."
Teslas have very little different from other electric cars, when it comes exclusively to hardware. The difference is the software, which, no, you can’t take apart, and given that “FSD will be here any day” for many years now (and also kills people), I’m not convinced there isn’t fuckery happening there either.
Tesla (to their credit!) took advantage of an unserved opportunity, including heavy government subsidization, to build electric cars. And they fucking did it.
However, I strongly doubt they will succeed going forward. They are in the midst of a wave of competition from Porsche, Mercedes, GM, Ford, VW, Kia, etc; across all segments of the market. They have failed to deliver on self-driving, and have a 0% chance of success moving forward (as admitted by pulling their lidar sensors out). They still aren't particularly good at fit/finish/quality of their cars.
And finally, Tesla (imo) desperately needs a ceo who thinks about little more than threading the needle on the narrow success path moving forward. Instead, they have someone busy breaking Twitter.
So, is Tesla objectively successful? I'd say no, because I don't think it's clear they will be a live company in 10 years. I think a huge amount of their success came from being the only company that sold a non-shitty electric car, and now that competitive umbrella is gone, they're likely to fail.
Of course anything can happen in the long run, but right now it sells products that millions of people love and is a public company that employs 1000s of people — that's already a pretty high bar to me!
It’s probably safe to assume the truth is mundane. Tesla stock is definitely overvalued (at least it was a few months ago. I haven’t checked recently) and the Tesla brand will likely just become a staple car brand (ala Honda, GM, Ford, Toyota, etc).
Musk isn't doing anything very radical here. It's a leveraged buyout, and he's doing the things private equity firms often do after LBOs, like restructuring and layoffs. Loading up the target company with (apparently) unsustainable levels of debt. The main difference is that he's doing it in days rather than months. His stated goals (create giant global super-service) seems to be at odds with short term changes (turning it into $8chan and driving away users and advertisers).
Leveraged buyouts usually destroy companies, but they tend to do it more slowly while earning from existing customers and with significant less amount of public trolling. Typical leveraged buyout is designed to make you money by selling parts of company, by earning on existing successful products while killing future development etc.
PE's usually try rebranding and introducing new product lines to try to spiff up a distressed property. So far that part of the process is not going that well.
Also, there's not a lot of assets that can be sold off to raise funds. Often LBO targets are seen as worth more in parts than whole, but that's not really the case here.
Hustle culture, moving fast, breaking things etc are all fine and dandy when you are a new startup and trying to find your niche. But after you get something going and there are many people using your product/service, if you keep moving fast and breaking things, those users will go away.
Twitter users can be more tolerant of some amount of disruption because the service is basically 'cost-free banter among the community'. But if you are doing anything that people depend on, you will kill your business and reputation.
Look at Google. They didn't even 'move fast and break things'. They just 'deprecated' stuff on people's face when a product did not make billions fast enough.
If you subscribe to what Jim Collins called "the genius and a thousand helpers", then it's very possible Musk will be successful where he's currently guiding a thousand helpers. From that perspective, the bigger question is at what point do his other companies fall apart, if he cannot be the genius everywhere?
Readit News
Actually, when I was there Brin and Page had a reputation for being somewhat brutal, especially Larry. Not in a loud and brash way but in the sense that if they were doing a product review or whatever, and one of them thought your product sucked, they'd just say something like "This sucks, why have you been wasting your time on it?" and feelings be damned. They just didn't really care about cushioning criticism apparently. I actually recall them sort of sarcastically insulting random employees, VPs or even entire projects at TGIF if they were being dumb, overly entitled or underperforming, in the way you'd not really expect ... as if those people worked somewhere totally different.
I don't know anything about Nadella but it's worth noting that he didn't build the company, he's more like a steady pair of hands. Bill Gates on the other hand had a similar reputation to Page and Brin, especially when doing product reviews. If he didn't like something he'd let you know in the bluntest way possible.
So it's not really clear to me to what extent Musk's recent behavior is genuinely abnormal. It may be simply that at the moment relatively few big tech firms are run by founder types. Actually, maybe only Facebook is right now? Others are across the board being run by 'calm' types chosen, one might suspect, for their ability to effectively execute on the foundations laid down by their predecessors.
IMO, Elon's narcissism blocks him from taking any kind of such "corrections" because his priority is on building his own narrative of being a genius entrepreneur and engineer. (This explains that "code review" farce pretty well...) If he corrects his path, then it will be publicly portrayed as his defeat so he just can't.
This worked pretty well for him until now since he was able to equate Tesla/SpaceX as himself in public perception. If he can build the genius narrative, then it will be a significant advantage for those businesses as well unless there are undeniable public failures. He is a competent businessmen so he managed most of the smaller gradual risks pretty well. But something big like Twitter is probably out of his ability, or not. We'll see.
It's worth stressing that I don't think either of them were bad people or even mean. Being very direct with feedback seems to be a common trait of successful founders and CEOs. I guess when you review as many products as they do, and have built at great expense a place a lot of people want to work, and decisions matter a whole lot, being indirect and super-polite seems like a poor use of time. Also people don't like getting negative feedback, so unless it's ultra-clear it probably just doesn't sink in.
"Tesla has a real shot at being successful" is definitely true. "Tesla is unquestionably already a success" is not.
That they were arguably the main reason why every other carmaker is transitioning to electric cars is subjectively (to me) a far greater success. The transition is past the point of no return even if Tesla were to disappear tomorrow,
However, I strongly doubt they will succeed going forward. They are in the midst of a wave of competition from Porsche, Mercedes, GM, Ford, VW, Kia, etc; across all segments of the market. They have failed to deliver on self-driving, and have a 0% chance of success moving forward (as admitted by pulling their lidar sensors out). They still aren't particularly good at fit/finish/quality of their cars.
And finally, Tesla (imo) desperately needs a ceo who thinks about little more than threading the needle on the narrow success path moving forward. Instead, they have someone busy breaking Twitter.
So, is Tesla objectively successful? I'd say no, because I don't think it's clear they will be a live company in 10 years. I think a huge amount of their success came from being the only company that sold a non-shitty electric car, and now that competitive umbrella is gone, they're likely to fail.
Also, there's not a lot of assets that can be sold off to raise funds. Often LBO targets are seen as worth more in parts than whole, but that's not really the case here.
Twitter users can be more tolerant of some amount of disruption because the service is basically 'cost-free banter among the community'. But if you are doing anything that people depend on, you will kill your business and reputation.
Look at Google. They didn't even 'move fast and break things'. They just 'deprecated' stuff on people's face when a product did not make billions fast enough.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
The result is a reputation that cannot be recovered from.
http://calmerthanyouare.org/2015/03/19/betteridges-law.html