A modern day Tony Stark is 'impossible' because no one person can achieve the total amount of expertise and do the actual intellectual and physical labor needed to build anything really cool and effective, esp. at scale. You can't really build a magical reactor and suit of powered armor in a cave, with scraps.
If you're only willing to give a guy credit if he personally designs, builds, tests, and produces the end product without delegation, then literally nobody gets credit for cool stuff happening.
Maybe when Elon is fully Neuralinked up and has a squadron of those Optimus robots responding to his very thoughts he could go it 'alone.'
But the dude who can identify, acquire, and direct the necessary experts and keep them motivated and funded long enough to build some cool shit is like 1/3 of the way to being Tony Stark.
My point about Elon has long been that YES, he constantly overpromises and underdelivers. But he still delivers more than his closest competitor so he wins anyway. Overhyping a product matters much less if you're the only one who can deliver anything close to the hype.
At least part of that has to do with him putting in absurd hours and, as we see above, actually adding his technical input to the process rather than just sitting back and funding other workers. Indeed, the Principal-Agent problem would suggest that if you just sit back and fund people, they will optimize for getting paid rather than delivering results, so I think he throws himself in there mainly to make sure everyone else is, too.
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Notes -
A modern day Tony Stark is 'impossible' because no one person can achieve the total amount of expertise and do the actual intellectual and physical labor needed to build anything really cool and effective, esp. at scale. You can't really build a magical reactor and suit of powered armor in a cave, with scraps.
If you're only willing to give a guy credit if he personally designs, builds, tests, and produces the end product without delegation, then literally nobody gets credit for cool stuff happening.
Maybe when Elon is fully Neuralinked up and has a squadron of those Optimus robots responding to his very thoughts he could go it 'alone.'
But the dude who can identify, acquire, and direct the necessary experts and keep them motivated and funded long enough to build some cool shit is like 1/3 of the way to being Tony Stark.
My point about Elon has long been that YES, he constantly overpromises and underdelivers. But he still delivers more than his closest competitor so he wins anyway. Overhyping a product matters much less if you're the only one who can deliver anything close to the hype.
At least part of that has to do with him putting in absurd hours and, as we see above, actually adding his technical input to the process rather than just sitting back and funding other workers. Indeed, the Principal-Agent problem would suggest that if you just sit back and fund people, they will optimize for getting paid rather than delivering results, so I think he throws himself in there mainly to make sure everyone else is, too.
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