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Elon Musk as educator
- Thread starter MoireBass
- Start date
He didn't launch Tesla...
"Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors. The company's name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. In February 2004, via a $6.5 million investment, Elon Musk became the company's largest shareholder."
He is, however, an excellent hustler and bulls****er.
I'm not a Musk apologist, but you are way off base here. He is one of the relatively few people who can take ideas and turn them into successful products. Tesla as we know it and Space X don't exist without Musk. That's not the work of a con man.
That unfairly diminishes the work of the actual engineers that developed the vehicles. Elon is the bankroll.
One of the things I appreciate about this conversation thus far has been the ability for most contributors to differentiate between how they feel about the man without discrediting him for some of the successful accomplishments in his life.
-Mike
-Mike
Having a visionary make the big picture decisions doesn't discredit the engineers or any of the people working for him. I would compare him to Steve Jobs, who never really engineered his products, but was instrumental in bringing technology to market. Apple quickly started circling the drain in his absence.
There are plenty of musical examples. Miles Davis gave Bill Evans just two chords and said, 'What you would do with this?' G minor and A. Evans brought back Blue In Green. Davis put the band together and guided it, and we have Kind of Blue. Then there is David Bowie with his many collaborators. I'm no fan of Musk, but I can't deny his ability to put people and concepts, designs and manufacturing, together.
Oh, I can think of a few, narcissist being the most publishable here, that could sum him up just fine.
Instead of labelling a person as an apologist, let’s just say that I the post is something of an apologia— but I think there is some validity in the claim that he isn’t exactly a con man.
I mean, I’d probably debate that claim because I kind of see the side as a different kind of bad news, maybe something we don’t have a word for. And con man might be the closest way to convey that assessment.
I’ve posted above how Tesla has messed with my life and home, by no choice of my own. So I have a low opinion of the guy.
Back to the education thing — I believe education has an importantly democratic core identity and that is wiped away when billionaires get involved.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation seemed to do more damage than good from where I stood during the early 2010’s
Agreed. It's easy to write off people we don't care for. It's quite another task to go a little deeper and see what it is about someone that endears them to others when we ourselves don't have those feelings.
I find this to happen now and then in my life with people I interact with. When I come across someone I don't particularly care for, but others do, I make an honest effort to see if I can see in that person what these other folks I know see. It happens most often in work settings. Although it most recently happened at a coffee shop we visit weekly. It ended up being a nice exercise in compassion and humility for me.
-Mike
buldog5151bass
Kibble, milkbones, and P Basses. And redheads.
The amount of money someone has means about as much as speaker size in a bass cab.
There are good rich people, just as there are poor ********.
There are good rich people, just as there are poor ********.
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I kind of agree with this, but not because such folks are inherently evil.
An unimportant role? Without funding and vision, little happens. If we took the sum total of wealth across the glove and distributed it equally among the inhabitants, we'd all have about $7k. We couldn't fund or accomplish anything. The fact that Musk is willing to invest his considerable capital in space travel, electric vehicles, internet accessibility, free speech, and other societally mutually beneficial endeavors should be a cause for celebration.
