This is a weird comment.

Musk is showing himself to be, well, kind of stupid. We've seen him make moves that are obviously bad and didn't pay off. If you look a little bit deeper, you can see that he has a pattern of making bad decisions. He may also make some good ones, but isn't it more likely that "his" other companies (which he did not create) are succeeding despite him, not because of him? After all, many other smart and ambitious people work with him.

Many other smart and ambitious people work for many people. At the least, you are giving him credit for attracting very smart and ambitious people. Not very many people can do that.

> At the least, you are giving him credit for attracting very smart and ambitious people. Not very many people can do that.

Er... fine. But ... much stupider people have had similar success. I don't think attracting ambition is a worthwhile trait on its own and it's not something I'm going to praise him for.

Actually, if I step back, I don't even think that's true. Again, he didn't create any of these companies, nor did he run them alone when he was CEO. Many very intelligent engineers joined companies he was running because they believed in the product. They may or may not have even heard of him when they joined a given company.

> Er... fine. But ... much stupider people have had similar success.

Have they? The number of people who have built a Tesla-size company is very small. The ones who have built a SpaceX-size and a Tesla-size one is minuscule.

He was credited with "attracting very smart and ambitious people", not building those companies, and that's what I was referring to. I think it's debatable that he "built" those companies, but we should be specific when we're analyzing a person's qualities.