Problem is, they don’t know how to run businesses either.
Muskrat:
Had daddy’s money to get him going, and was in the US as an illegal immigrant (sure, tries to revisionist history the situation now.)
Tesla: He came in after it was established, demanded to be revertigo’d to a founder, all cars were iterations on the original design until the CyberCuck.
SpaceX: Musk founded it, but he didn’t do anything other than bitch at smart people. If you have money to burn and smart people working for you, you’re not innovating, you just have enough spaghetti to throw against the wall until you fix the problems that would have inevitably been solved anyway.
Boring Company: Just a scam based on something he saw on SeaQuest DSV when he was a kid to stop California from building surface high speed rail, oh, and a stupid blowtorch a child could have made in a garage.
Starlink, sub of SpaceX: Likewise, spaghetti, and probably some weird fever dream of being a James Bond supervillain.
A lot of what made Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink possible, was that he circumvented traditional engineering development processes to apply software development processes. (Likely because he had no idea and thinks he’s being “out-of-box” and “cyber”.) This leads to much more danger and waste, as software dev principles are absolute garbage for things that matter. That corner-cutting and money-burning, however, allowed him to develop faster than the traditional companies. Net-sum, maybe it has helped push innovation. However, when a space capsule gets lost in the atmosphere because of a bug in ImageMagick, people will probably rethink that idiocy. (Or all the people that have literally died because of defects in Tesla cars, already. Which is sad and anger-making. Just the fact they turn off auto-drive, including braking, just before a car wreck, to escape liability, is deplorable.)
Twitter
This was him actually being a “business person” in real life, handled like a professional toddler, said things on Twitter that forced his hand in buying it.
Then he had to cash out Tesla stock got loans from Larry Ellison from Oracle, a Saudi Prince, the country of Qatar, and banks (Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Japanese banks Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and Mizuho, Barclays and the French banks Societe Generale and BNP Paribas.) just to buy Twitter.
Then put the big bright X on top of their HQ that he then had to take down because he followed zero building code
Laid off employees that knew how the place worked, beta-testing what he is now doing in the Federal government equally ineffectively.
Had no concept about how any of their infra worked, went through that bout where 2FA stopped working because he saw a line item expense and not “this breaks the functionality,” destroyed the point of the blue check system, and on and on.
And now that place is mostly Russian bots, trolls, and the news people that lurk to see what goes on.
Set it up so all the debt accrued in the acquisition falls on Twitter, and not him, so when it inevitably fails, he doesn’t incur any further debt from it.
Claimed for it to be a free speech haven, and personally banned people constantly for childish reasons.
Mango Mussolini:
Had mommy’s money to get him going
Had 5 successful buildings built, mostly in the 1980s
At least three of them had fraudulent financial statements, inflated valuations, and inflated tax losses
At least four failed building ventures
Had a failed “university”
Failed vodka business (how hard is that, right?)
Failed steak business (LOLWAT)
Failed airline
Failed board game
Failed casinos in Atlantic City
Failed magazine
Failed luxury travel organization
Failed mortgage company
Failed presidency that took Pres. Biden’s administration most of their entire term to fix. We’re talking documents that are gone, departments that are deleted, abject chaos that had to be rebuilt from scratch in some cases.
Not an exhaustive list. Edit: Added some more exhaustive.
Problem is, they don’t know how to run businesses either.
Muskrat:
Mango Mussolini:
Not an exhaustive list. Edit: Added some more exhaustive.