Never Bet Against Elon

Thiel bet against Musk when he removed him as CEO of PayPal. That seemed to work out ok.

This article is an example of why cherry-picking is a logical fallacy. There are a lot of examples where a bet against Musk’s claims would have been a good idea. Examples include Tesla Solar Roof and the whole SolarCity acquisition, timely release of the Tesla Roadster gen 2, the Cybertruck (a major commercial flop), the $25k Tesla, the Boring Company, the Hyperloop, and of course a Mars colony.

Thanks for the info, Claude!

IMHO Elon Musk is very good at complicated problems, but not so much at complex ones.

By complicated I mean problems that can be decomposed into well-understood tasks with clear constraints, measurable completion criteria, relatively predictable dependencies, and short feedback loops. Think designing and building rockets, factories, data centers, going to the moon, etc. With these types of challenges, his style and strengths make a lot of sense:

- rethink from first principles

- identify the bottleneck

- challenge industry assumptions

- assign ownership

- remove the constraint

- iterate very quickly

Complex problems are a different story, and he doesn't seem particularly well suited for them. A complex problem has unknown unknowns, contains problems that cannot necessarily be decomposed because they are novel and not yet well understood, and has feedback loops that produce emergent behavior. You can't simply solve problem A, move on to B, and then C, because solving C can change the assumptions you made about A.

Examples of complex problems would be would be FSD, the Twitter ecosystem, curing some types of cancer, politics, etc.