
Ask HN: Why Do We Act Like Elon Musk Is Super-Man? - cconcepts
Granted, he is an insanely gifted and hard-working guy who obviously understands both technical and managerial aspects really well, but some people act like he is achieving all this on his own when he has thousands of people working for him who are among the best minds available.<p>Is it not (at least partially) a marketing technique that Musk gets a huge portion of credit and attention for the successes at his companies? A central persona for the media to focus on and create a &quot;Musk Effect&quot;?
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ForHackernews
I think many HN users tend to be Elon Musk fanboys because he (or at least his
public persona) represents an idealized vision of what they wish they could
be. He's fantastically wealthy, successful and driven, and he's working on
"important" projects and Big Ideas. More to the point, he portrays himself as
an engineer/visionary. Unlike other "heroic" figures in business (e.g. Steve
Jobs, Richard Branson) Musk styles himself a builder, an engineer first and a
businessman second, and so HN users who are primarily software engineers who
maybe dream of starting a business see themselves in him.

~~~
cconcepts
Yes, it all just seems so well executed. I find it hard to imagine that level
of cool is achieved without a well oiled PR machine working in the
background...

(At least thats my cynical initial reaction)

~~~
ForHackernews
Obviously there is. How many people even know that Musk didn't found Tesla (he
was an early investor who later stepped in as CEO)? It's clearly a good PR
strategy to identify him closely with their brand, and give the company a
persona. Quick, name the CEO of Ford!

~~~
stephengillie
Henry Ford. No, wait - Lee Iacocca.

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Fede_V
So, two distinct comments:

\- We, as a species, tend to attribute way too much credit to the people in
key roles and not enough to the people around them. You see this in sports, in
tech, and in politics. I wish there was a name for this cognitive failure,
because I see it all the time and it really deserves its own name.

\- The second point - as to the merit of Musk. You've already discussed his
managerial and technical excellence - but for me, what sets him aside from
many other highly talented peers (Zuckerberg, Page, etc) is that he focused on
very concrete 'solid' problems. Facebook is a marvel, but to me, rocket
science will always remain more impressive than social media. This willingness
to take on incredibly difficult problems is something that I really admire -
which is also why I love what Gates is trying to do with his foundation.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
> I wish there was a name for this cognitive failure, because I see it all the
> time and it really deserves its own name.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality)

~~~
ForHackernews
Also the (largely discredited)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory)

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andrewtbham
You dismiss Musk's accomplishments because he has so many of the "best minds"
working for him. That is exactly the wrong way to look at it. Go out and try
to recruit someone who is brilliant. You will see it's a non-trivial task.

Furthermore the reason I believe him to be the most significant entrepreneur
of all time is this... No one that I know of... has taken progressively larger
fortunes and bet them on such high risk venture. No one ever has done that...
Most people would have retired after zip2. Even a highly driven person would
have probably become a venture capitalist after paypal... like Peter Thiel
did. Also, no one that I know has come so publicly to the brink of failure and
succeeded like Elon did in 2008. The underlying reason is no one has vision
like he does. Going to Mars, and accelerating the transition to electric
vehicles are huge ideas... The vision of going to Mars alone is in the same
league as JFK and going to the moon. And that's just 1/2 of what is working
on.

~~~
adventured
Howard Hughes effectively did these things, in terms of constantly leveraging
his fortune into extreme risk to push numerous businesses forward.

Hughes' companies technical accomplishments were vast. In many ways he was
Musk, before Musk. His were among the first companies to work in space, and
was prodigious in aviation and aerospace. I would argue Hughes exceeded what
Musk has accomplished by a dramatic margin - so far.

Eg:

"The company developed radar systems, electro-optical systems, the first
working laser, aircraft computer systems, missile systems, ion-propulsion
engines (for space travel), and many other advanced technologies."

"Hughes Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division
built the world's first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom, in
1963 and followed it closely with the first geosynchronous weather satellite,
ATS-1, in 1966. Later that year their Surveyor 1 made the first soft landing
on the Moon as part of the lead-up to the moon landings in Project Apollo."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Aircraft_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Aircraft_Company)

~~~
andrewtbham
I don't know a lot about Howard Hughes, but there are some obvious parallels.
They were both maverick entrepreneurs in multiple industries, and both in
aerospace.

However, Elon Musk started from very humble beginnings, whereas Hughes was
born into a fortune. Also, Elon's story is not finished. He has really just
scratched the surface. If Tesla continues as a niche car manufacturer and
Space X doesn't create re-usable rockets, then Elon will not be even in the
top 10 most important entrepreneurs. But if his vision comes to fruition... If
in 20 years, all cars are electric and supplied by giga-factories or
competitive clones. If super-charger technology is a standard like 120V
electrical outlets... If we have re-usable rockets. If space x provides global
satellite internet access to earth and Mars. If we have a colony of 1 million
people on Mars... Then Elon will be the most epic entrepreneur of all time.
The compelling thing is his vision and the trajectory of his success.

------
anders30
You are absolutely correct that he does not accomplish these things on his
own. That is a valid point that can be said of many people today.

Having read books like "Good to Great" and "Creative Capital" and given my own
personal experience at a large company, I raise Elon Musk to the "Super-Man"
level because of his leadership. Consider the technical challenges and
setbacks that his companies (Tesla and SpaceX) have faced. It is no easy task
to maintain the vision and energy necessary to motivate the thousands of
people who work for him in the face of such issues and audacious goals.

I don't really consider him Super-Man by the way and I have never met him. I
only know how difficult realizing my own visions in life have been. To be in
his position certainly requires more of "something" that I am yet to discover
in myself. I therefore consider him worthy of my respect.

------
barnabee
1\. He is working on things that are hard, rarely attempted and extremely
important with potentially huge long term impacts, e.g.:

\- Making cars electric (Tesla) and electricity renewable (Solar City) which
if successful in a big way will help to combat climate change and provide a
step towards a 'post [energy] scarcity' world.

\- His desire and efforts to settle humans on Mars (SpaceX) are one of the
best chances we have to become a multi-planet species which some consider a
very important goal for humanity in and of itself and also provides some
insurance for the long term survival of our species.

2\. He does these things in a way that suggests he cares about the overall
advances produced by his work in addition to the profitability and success of
his companies (e.g. by releasing patents). This could just be clever marketing
and rhetoric but it appears genuine and of benefit to the world in general.

3\. He comes across as an engineer and a 'nerd' \- whether by being honest
about failures or getting the in jokes. Even if it's all for show, he pulls it
off well enough to endear him to large sections a crowd like this one.

Few if any others with the money and capability to be successful are working
on these problems (and even fewer look like they might be succeeding). Where
it is happening, it's often hidden inside secretive 'skunk works' type
organisations which deny us the opportunity to imagine the impact they may
have and elevate those responsible to 'super man' status.

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zoba
Imagine the world as it is now, but, with Elon Musk and the effect he has had
subtracted from it.

If you did this exercise with most people, there wouldn't really be much
difference. However with Elon, it would be impossible to calculate the
difference.

PayPal probably would've still happened, but not in the same way. And there
likely would've been less of a subsequent impact from the investments and
experience gained by the people who worked at PayPal.

Tesla has put pressure on the auto industry to be innovative in a way they
hardly felt prior to Tesla. Aside from electric cars, theres the Gigafactory,
and the new pressure on dealerships.

Aside from SpaceX, I've only heard of Virgin Galactic in the same area... and
Virgin Galactic is not nearly as advanced as SpaceX.

The point is not that none of this would've happened without Elon. The point
is that it /did/ happen, and it happened /because/ of Elon. Elon may not have
the power of thousands of minds in his own mind, but, he has organized all of
those minds in such a way that it creates new opportunities for everyone - not
an easy task.

------
Htsthbjig
Because HE IS a superman, an extremely gifted individual for what he does.

Like a Messi in Soccer Michael Jordan in Basket,or Sampras, Federer in tennis,
there are people that are-was really much better in their field than anybody
else.

"but some people act like he is achieving all this on his own when he has
thousands of people working for him who are among the best minds available."

This is exactly where is is a superman, managing other people, if you want to
ignore that Elon wrote software on his own and made a ton of money from it as
a kid.

I know that you never managed bright people because you consider it easy. You
imply that if you left them alone they will do bright work.

E.g You could have geniuses writing code that are troublemakers, depressive or
just so cynical that destroy the company from inside out.

Every single stereotype of person could be poisonous for the company if you
don't manage it well.

The proof that this is not easy is that there are lots of big companies full
of brilliant people that flop in the market.

I had seen lots of them, in fact my own experience tells me that incompetency
at the top is the rule, not the exception.

------
carsongross
I agree that there is a cult-of-personality around Musk, and I dislike his
politely-ignored reliance on government subsidies, but, to modify a tweet by
@ReactionaryCEO:

1965 Engineer: I'm working on a rocket to put a man on the moon.

2015 Engineer: I trick people into clicking on ads.

2015 Elon Musk: I'm working on a rocket to put a man on the moon.

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pseudonym01
To a lot of the comments going with some variation of "His business aren't
that successful and/or he is propped up by government contracts" I would say
that it is really easy to look back in hindsight and say Tesla/SpaceX aren't a
big deal but I think Tesla did for the electric car what the iPhone did for
the smartphone. Also maybe it is just PR but I really see many other private
companies launching/developing rockets.

As the public face of these companies that are so awesomely nerdy Elon Musk
gets the public credit for their success just like he will take the blame for
their possible failures.

~~~
ForHackernews
> Also maybe it is just PR but I really see many other private companies
> launching/developing rockets.

It's largely PR:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_companies)

~~~
pseudonym01
Ah, well alright then. Guess he deserves some kudos for being good at PR :P

------
devonjones
He's not superman, duh, he's Tony Stark.

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snowwrestler
> but some people act like he is achieving all this on his own when he has
> thousands of people working for him who are among the best minds available.

Yes, he does now, but at one point in the past, he did not. Building a world-
beating team is extremely difficult--IMO, way more difficult than most
programmer/engineer types here on HN give credit for.

Hiring super smart and dedicated people is hard to do, especially for a risky
startup. You have to identify the talent you need, and convince them to leave
their current job to take a risk on you (because talented people tend to
already be employed in nice jobs). And you have to do it very quickly,
repeatedly, without making too many mistakes.

It's difficult to get out of the hindsight mode, and remember that in the
early days all of his current companies looked unlikely to succeed. He's "Elon
Musk" now, but in those days he was just one of the PayPal millionaires--
potentially a one-hit wonder.

Beyond hiring, there is organizing the team. That means hiring leaders outside
the engineering comfort zone, like financial, sales, managerial,
communications, HR, etc. And organizing them and delegating the right work to
them, while maintaining focus on the things that only a CEO could do.

So, the fact that his companies employ thousands of top-notch people is, to
me, one of the best reasons to think of him as an unique and amazing leader.

On top of this, he's doing it in multiple industries at once--and in
industries that most people thought had very high barriers to new entrants.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Are these companies profitable? Aren't they heavily subsidized with government
grants and below market loans to the tune of hundreds of millions? Isn't even
a $1 million barrier pretty high?

------
college_rules
This is a simple one, there is no one else in the world pushing harder and
finding better performance results in pushing the limits of our human
abilities. No one else is challenging the status quo as much or has offered
more to humanity's longevity.

If the utilitarian, long-term survival of the human species is what one
believes in...there is no one better than Elon Musk at this point moving the
world forward.

Many people may argue my last point, but he gives hope and shows people that
they can achieve what they dream of and that is more important than just about
anything a single person is working on. Sure he has an entire team, but he is
the leader and without him, these companies simply would not exist and would
not be nearly as successful as they are.

It is a classic story of what a real leader looks like. In those respects, I
cannot think of a better leader on the entire planet.

------
japes98
He takes 'impossible' problems/markets and creates solutions for them.

We need to get him working on global warming.

~~~
ForHackernews
But...has he? He's CEO of a marginally-profitable electric car company that's
propped up by hefty government subsidies, and he's got a rocket company that
may or may not eventually make it significantly cheaper to launch things into
orbit (and again, gets almost all its funding from government contracts). Oh,
and there's the HyperLoop, if that ever happens / is even possible.

I don't want to come off as too much of a hater, because the problems SpaceX
and Tesla (note: the _companies_ , not the man) are trying to solve are
genuinely extremely difficult[0] but they sure haven't "created solutions" for
them yet. From the hype you read, you'd almost think SpaceX had successfully
recovered at least one reusable rocket.

Really, Musk's only incontestably successful venture was PayPal.

[0]
[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html)

~~~
myth_buster

      marginally-profitable electric car company
    

_Electric_ is the operative word here. If it were an IC car company then
perhaps on a stretch, it wouldn't be stellar.

    
    
      propped up by hefty government subsidies
    

They are competing in an industry (oil/car manufacturing) where the incumbents
already get a large chunk of subsidies. So the table is already tilted.

    
    
      haven't "created solutions" for them yet
    

I think on the contrary, in case of Tesla, they have made an electric car
practical.

------
davidgerard
Because he has a strong track record of achievement, and of leading others to
achievement.

Apple wasn't all Steve Jobs either, except for the important ways in which,
y'know, it _was_.

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ratsimihah
Imagine what the world would be like with Elon Musks everywhere :D

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dyeje
Because he has an excellent PR team.

------
alphadevx
In the technology industry, what other heroes do we have to inspire us, if not
Musk?

~~~
kushti
Torvalds, "Nakamoto", Stallman, Snowden ?

~~~
alphadevx
They are all great thought leaders, but not really on the
industry/entrepreneurial side like Musk. None of them are multimillionaires
like Musk, and if you look at the other multimillionaires in the industry, few
of them are doing anything near as interesting with their wealth as Musk is.

~~~
hollerith
Mark Shuttleworth deserves a mention here, for raising the bar on the user
experience of _desktop_ Linux.

Before Ubuntu, many user would have rejected Linux simply because it lacked
system-wide good anti-aliased text (although a significant fraction of Linux
users don't care about this issue).

Like Musk, Shuttleworth has a net worth of 100s of millions of dollars.

------
ChuckMcM
Because he has a rare combination of traits which allow him to operate
effectively under extreme stress. You will begin to understand this after
you've experienced moments of high personal stress where you were also asked
to perform (or wanted in retrospect to perform).

Here is an example from a friend of mine who went to USC with me, you're in a
store and someone comes to rob it with a gun, the police arrive before they
finish, and they line you up with the other customers against a wall, wave a
gun at you and threaten to kill one of you if the cops don't let them go. The
police storm the store and shoot the perpetrator dead right in front of you.
Outside, sitting in the back of an ambulance being checked out, the detective
comes over and asks you "What were the other customers wearing?"

Now in this case the police thought the guy had an accomplice who was
pretending to be a customer when it went wrong. My friend realized he could
remember nothing of the event other than the end of the gun barrel, and that
the noise of the gun shots when the police stormed the store made the take
down some sort of sad silent movie. Under that level of stress he just stopped
thinking. And the police assured him that was absolutely the normal way of
things for people who had not be trained to deal with these situations.

The CEO of a company finds out that there biggest customer has just cancelled
its "non cancellable" POs and the company is not going to make payroll if they
don't do something in the next three weeks.

Being able to operate under stress, being able to make good decisions under
stress, things that Elon has demonstrated a number of times (and yes sometimes
the stressful event was his own fault but it didn't take him out of the game)

And getting people to do something well. Easy to say hard to do, they have to
want to do it. As you manage more and more people, you will get to experience
a diverse set of personalities and traits, the larger the group the more
diverse and the harder it is to get all aligned. To be a successful leader in
a large enterprise you have be able to get the best out of people, even when
they may not like working with each other, to achieve a larger goal. Bigger
the group, the harder that is to do effectively.

So you take him out of the equation, and the reset falters. Take Steve Jobs
out of Apple and Apple headed for the toilet. Put him back, and it comes back
from the dead to the largest company in the world. Sure that is the work of
thousands, but the guy inspiring those thousands has a disproportionate
effect.

Over your career you should evaluate your CEOs. Some will be great, and some
will be horrible. Look at what the company accomplishes under great CEOs and
what it accomplishes under horrible CEOs. Do that enough and you'll develop a
healthy regard for Elon has pulled off in both Tesla and SpaceX.

------
morgante
Correction: Iron Man

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ourmandave
He's the "disruptive startup guy" that gives the great minds the cool stuff
they want to work on. The electric cars, rockets, new battery technology, and
who know what is yet be unveiled.

All under the banner of "We're going to f*cking Mars!"

So yeah, giant nerd cred.

------
EliRivers
_insanely gifted_

In what way? As far as I can tell, he's smart but not particularly brilliant.
His business achievements don't seem to be the result of any particular
incredible ability in the field. What's the insane gift?

------
kushti
Probably because western boys are growing up reading comics with super heroes.
Comics-backed way of thinking isn't compatible with a critical analysis.

