While he has had some success, he’s also demonstrably been a glory hog benefiting from crazy good luck.
He had an Internet company during the first dot com boom. He got a bunch of cash from Compaq for effectively nothing, because businesses had to snap up anything vaguely Internet. Right place at right time, basically won a lottery.
So then he founded an Internet bank. But want allowed to lead it, no matter, either way it was overshadowed by PayPal, which was a runaway success. Somehow he managed a merger with him being put in charge of the joint company. Then he almost tanked it and was put aside to salvage the company. However, he managed to be popularly thought of as “the PayPal guy”
He founded SpaceX. Off the top of my head, that one seems fair enough.
Then you have Tesla, which existed prior to him Knowing about it, yet he still insisted on being called a founder. It’s possible that without him, Tesla wouldn’t have gone far, but either way, he’s been a glory hog about it to the point of again getting himself framed as “the” Tesla guy.
Also in the case of Tesla, it was a company entering a market with virtually zero competition. Compare the available fully electric cars of 2013-4 and take a wild guess as to which consumers were drooling over: the one that looks like an actual car or ones that screams “eco-friendly toy” (Mitsubishi i, Nissan Leaf)?
While he has had some success, he’s also demonstrably been a glory hog benefiting from crazy good luck.
He had an Internet company during the first dot com boom. He got a bunch of cash from Compaq for effectively nothing, because businesses had to snap up anything vaguely Internet. Right place at right time, basically won a lottery.
So then he founded an Internet bank. But want allowed to lead it, no matter, either way it was overshadowed by PayPal, which was a runaway success. Somehow he managed a merger with him being put in charge of the joint company. Then he almost tanked it and was put aside to salvage the company. However, he managed to be popularly thought of as “the PayPal guy”
He founded SpaceX. Off the top of my head, that one seems fair enough.
Then you have Tesla, which existed prior to him Knowing about it, yet he still insisted on being called a founder. It’s possible that without him, Tesla wouldn’t have gone far, but either way, he’s been a glory hog about it to the point of again getting himself framed as “the” Tesla guy.
Also in the case of Tesla, it was a company entering a market with virtually zero competition. Compare the available fully electric cars of 2013-4 and take a wild guess as to which consumers were drooling over: the one that looks like an actual car or ones that screams “eco-friendly toy” (Mitsubishi i, Nissan Leaf)?