jj4211

It happens, but it generally takes financial failure to drive off the people with pure money motives and yet still be alive enough for interested parties to keep it going out of actual interest and passion.

That's why in most of the examples, the goodness returns after something like a market collapse that scares off the investors leaving only the people with instrinsic interest in doing it right.

Oh sure they have to influence, but I would expect them to do so a bit more on the down low. If they have a whiff of self awareness, they know this will just do more harm than good to their interests.

Hell, that will happen at tens of millions. The magnitude of a billion is crazy.

Even if they are more driven to keep going, others turn to more philanthropic pursuits. Well before a billion the number becomes more like a high score rather than giving any quality of life improvements, so what's the point of getting more? Most will want to mean more to the world than just some high score. So accumulated wealth starts getting directed away for all but sociopaths that relish the high score in and of itself.

A celebrity graduation speaker that actually has something thoughtful to say that is realistic, relevant, and inspirational to the graduates? That's crazy, everyone knows celebrity graduation speakers are supposed to be self absorbed and prattling on about the stuff that excites them without connecting to the graduates, except maybe to be dismissive of the graduates and look down on them.

The Wozniak era of Apple was pretty much all upside. Whatever less than nice things to say at Apple almost certainly came about more than a decade after he had left them.

Of course, this argument is a pretty piss poor one when the example held up is Musk...

His first jolt was selling a website to a relatively clueless Compaq that did nothing with it except throw money at Elon. No idea if Elon's site was any good or not, but it didn't matter because the reality is that it folded without an enduring impact as part of the dot-com collapse. He used his winnings to try to make X.com the first time, and was a comparative failure next to Paypal, which, somehow, agreed to merge and put him in charge and he almost tanked it. Then ebay bought it out and Musk got maddening amount of money for doing nothing but screw it up.

Tesla is probably the first example of him not actively screwing it up, though his drama around "I wanna call myself a founder" was dumb. That said, any investor could have done it, so his 'value' was his lottery-like wins leading to that point.

There are others that are arguable, though recently had it happen where someone kept giving out names of impressive and seemingly valuable 'billionaires', and we kept checking and every last one were 'only' millionaires. So it seems like 'billionaire' remains a stupidly over the top concept that isn't particularly redeemable, with the defensibly decent folks staying under a billion through not being super greedy and/or philanthropy.

Neuralink I suppose is an example where his appetite for crazy risk might pay off or be terrible.

FSD implies no one else is trying for self driving, and that's no shortage there for that ambition.

Humanoid robots at scale, they haven't displayed a capability to suggest they have any better shot than others, and there's plenty of less loud companies trying. None are particularly close, so Elon stands relatively alone in proclaiming success without the proof.

I don't know that his crazy appetite for risk is on display with SpaceX. I would argue most of their real successes were relatively lower risk, and generally when the companies indulge musk at his craziest are like the other comment says, comparative failures.

Daniel Jackson

He may die a fair bit, but he won't stay dead for long.

The plague of work chats now:

Here's what ChatGPT/copilot had to say:

People can ask for themselves, you answering that way adds no value. Just say you don't know.

In group chats, keep your mouth shut and let people that actually know answer. Don't drown out the actual expert answers.

And holy hell the ones that will die on the hill that they are right because chatgpt agreed with them even when they are totally wrong...

Though the chance someone other than you dies from you taking a shit is pretty far fetched, and I'm not liking having to try to conceive of how that happens.

But a lot of activities are this way. Getting on a ladder in public could kill someone, just breathing around other people could kill someone, etc etc.

But what about monster HDMI cables?