Elon Musk's successful ventures...

[True Dough]

nazir afzal
@nazirafzal
Dec 6

Musk didn’t invent Tesla, he bought it.

Musk didn’t invent SpaceX, he bought it.

Musk didn’t invent Starlink, he bought it.

Musk didn’t invent “X,” he bought it.

Musk didn’t invent Trump, he bought him.

[localroger]

1. To be completist...

Musk co-founded (with his brother) Zip2 in 1995, providing city guides for newspapers. The going was rough at first and the founders had to work long hours and sleep at the office (the horror!) to save money. They sold it in 1999 with Musk getting $22 million of the $305M sale for himself.

Musk used his Zip2 profits to co-found a prototype online banking company he called X.com in 1999. (Yes, you read that right.) X.com merged with Confinity in 2000, and the merged company was briefly called X.com before rebranding after Confinity's killer product, PayPal.

In 2002 eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and Musk's share of that is how he bought into Tesla and SpaceX.

It appears that those long hours at Zip2 30 years ago represented the last actual work Elon Musk ever did.

[NotHardly]

2. I am tired of billionaires & their corporations killing people for profit.

[IbogaProject]

6. immigration fraud

He started with Zip2 while on a student visa, he should be deported back to South Africa.

[Mr. Sparkle]

3. For accuracy sake , he founded spacex and starlink

but he did buy the other three.

[orwell]

4. And Xi & Putin...

...bought Musk.

So...

[paulkienitz]

5. Musk, despite being a monumental pile of shit, does deserve some credit.

He didn't buy the fact that Tesla went on to break electric cars into the mainstream when no one else could, force the entire auto industry to pivot in the right direction, and do more than any other private organization to mitigate global warming. There were plenty of other electric car companies that failed.

He also didn't buy the fact that SpaceX similarly upended the rocket industry when no one else could. Dozens of companies had tried, and are still trying to catch up. Spaceflight used to be one of the most extravagantly wasteful things the species could do, and now it's much less so. And as a bonus, this success directly hurts Vladimir Putin.

The secret of Musk's success is that he knows (or at least used to know) how to pick a spot where something very difficult needs doing but nobody else sees how it can be done, work out how it can be feasible, and see it through. He may not be capable of that anymore, what with the privilege-besotted I'm-always-right fascist mentality he's now bought into, along with all the ketamine and who knows what else he may be tripping on... but ten years ago he was able to do these things when everyone else was failing to get them done. Maybe if he sobers up he can still be a valuable contributor.