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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I think there is a common mistake among tech investors of overestimating the chance that a successful founder/CEO will do it again. There was something similar going on with Tesla - if you asked Tesla bulls what the trillion dollar company Tesla would grow into looked like (it is hard to justify a valuation of more than about $300 billion for a pure-play car company), they would generally was lyrical about some non-automotive business (energy and AI being the main ones) that Musk was going to expand into.

Musk does seem like a bit of an outlier. He was pretty important in PayPal. Then SpaceX and Tesla. That’s three very different companies but all really successful.

Tesla battery tech is actually pretty advanced. I could see a non car use case, but to me to really accomplish that you need to spin it out for fit and focus reasons.

Same with SpaceX and Starlink. Starlink seems to have a clear use case of internet provider (Elon didn’t reinvent this but basically improved on historic DSL). To really harness this, need to focus on Starlink qua telecom.

With all of that said, the company on most bullish on is SpaceX. Asteroid mining could be incredibly valuable.

I'm bullish on SpaceX too - so is Musk given that he doesn't let peasants invest in it. I suspect if there was a SpaceX IPO the fanbois would drive up the stock price to the point where I ceased to be bullish.

Musk is clearly more likely than the latest Y Combinator wunderkind to build another $300 billion company. But I still think the overall chance of him doing so is <50% (particularly given that he is suffering from the great fame->loss of focus->loss of productivity problem that ends Nobel laureates research careers). And the chance of him doing so in a way which generates value for non-Musk SpaceX or Tesla shareholders is even lower because he has demonstrated a willingness to found new companies while remaining CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the Tesla and SpaceX boards have demonstrated a willingness to let him do it.

Agreed that musk is probably “done” founding new companies. But basically founding two 300b+ companies + playing a large role in a third is already almost unprecedented.

The closest I can think of is Jobs (Pixar and Apple—and with Apple he basically reinvented it)

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