But I also think that it is mostly in the last few years (after your example) that his judgement has become especially questionable. There are examples from earlier on that I think can now be seen as a through line to where he's ended up today, but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day. And I'm also not saying that every decision he makes is bad, but to me I think the recent track record is bad enough that these kinds of decisions deserve to be evaluated on their own, rather than given the benefit of the doubt.
> but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day.
Hmm... That's a reasonable conclusion. You could be right.
I'll be a bit more humble and admit that there's a lot I don't know, so for me, the jury is out.
Things may implode at Tesla, or maybe the company will grow 10x. I wouldn't be surprised either way!
Respectfully, I think you're trying to do the humble thing by taking a neutral position, which I think is laudable, but your position in this thread has not actually been neutral. Your position has been (and my interpretation of this latest comment is that it still is) that this decision is more likely to actually be a good one, because it was made by Musk. But that's not a "humble" position any more than mine is. The humble position might be something like "beats me! what do I know?". I think your position is more like "deferential".
Sorry if this turned out to just be a semantic point about word choice. I originally thought that maybe it wasn't, that maybe there's something real here about what it means to have a humble view, but now I think maybe you just did mean something more like "deferential", in which case this was a pointless comment and I apologize :).
> But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because ...
I think we're both agreeing that "the jury is out", but disagreeing about which side of the question that jury is deciding should be the one with the "presumption of innocence" :)
Yeah, there's an even larger track record of making decisions that look unwise in the moment and everyone told him they were unwise and turns out they were unwise. That Bayesian prior makes it the most likely outcome until the jury returns with sufficiently convincing evidence to the contrary.
But I also think that it is mostly in the last few years (after your example) that his judgement has become especially questionable. There are examples from earlier on that I think can now be seen as a through line to where he's ended up today, but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day. And I'm also not saying that every decision he makes is bad, but to me I think the recent track record is bad enough that these kinds of decisions deserve to be evaluated on their own, rather than given the benefit of the doubt.