Comment on The super-rich are disappointingly boring.
sj_zero 1 month ago
To be fair, Elon Musk seems to be doing exactly what you're talking about.
You don't go to space or start building electric cars to get rich, that's not even an expected outcome of such things. You get companies like that because you want to do those things and that's the frame you see the world through.
His acquisition of Twitter is really the ultimate example. He picked up a shitty social media website, and I guarantee you that's not something you do at that moment because you want to become rich, it's something you do because it piqued his interest and he was the world's richest man.
But Elon is a good example of why even if you're the richest man on earth you don't want to draw too much attention to yourself. As the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. How much time and energy does he have to spend on court cases because of something he said or did or because people just don't like him? It's best to stick to the infinity pools rather than arouse the ire of those who are even more powerful than the world's richest man.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Bullshit. Both of those ventures were heavily subsidized for-profit businesses from the start.
sj_zero 1 month ago
What you said and what I said can be true at the same time.
They were for-profit and subsidized, but you still don't get into these fields to get rich, and other than Tesla and SpaceX nobody has. Even so, based on business fundamentals Tesla shouldn't have made Elon rich, he just happened to ride a broken stock market caused by state socialist market interventions in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis.
If Elon just wanted to get the highest numbers, especially at the time it seemed the best idea would be to head out and build a new Internet company. Given his showmanship there's every reason to think he could have founded some new company with unlimited margins that sold bits and bytes to people. Instead, he went with companies that had to manufacture difficult to manufacture things, heading into industries where margins rely not just on efficiently transporting data from point A to point B, but in building complicated physical devices -- an infinitely more complex, higher risk venture with much lower potential payoff in terms of profits.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You make some good points. Plus, he didn’t always seem as off the rails as he does now. Idk if that’s just because he managed his public image better, or if his success went to his head, but I acknowledge that he might have been a different person when he started those companies than he is now.
sj_zero 1 month ago
Something we all have to fight for is to keep our feet nailed to the floor when we're experiencing success. When you're the world's richest man and there's so many people calling you genius all the time and kissing your ass I suspect it's really easy for your internal critical voices to get the volume turned way down and people actually need that part of themselves or they just start saying whatever pops into their heads.