crush-n-spread

  There's also probably a bunch of people from rural areas in your downtown office who think you're crazy. The foreigners probably think the same thing.

I have found this to be true. Two disparate groups reject the narratives that dominate North American media: Male foreigners from arab and poorer countries, and whites from rural North America. The whites don't voice their opinions, because they get viciously attacked; the Arabs and immigrants from poorer areas just laugh at us.

I feel that we're only getting the half of it since we're seeing 30-40fps video, but in real life it's going to be much different than what we see.

What's your point? Others can raise money more easily than you can, due to some ambiguous idea that investors prefer these other people from Stanford? No one that is going to build a successful company should care about that. Because you're 10x better than the competition. The lack of an inherited advantage isn't going to make the difference between success and failure for you.

The thing is that you can sell a good product without VC money, even it's a high-capital product.

OK so your post boils down to "VCs want to see growth or prestige". It's actually that they want to see customers and revenue, not necessarily growth. And so the sentence "VCs want to see revenue and customers or prestige" is completely reasonable.

Look, if you're a VC who goes to those "clubs", and you trust the people there and are comfortable giving them your money, _great_. Why should they be handing it out to you, with your no-revenue company and no prior associations?

network effects, and convenience.

They are not struggling. This Yahoo article is fear mongering. I just listened to the whole earnings call and everything sounded terrific: They pulled their best engineers to Gigafactory to mitigate a supplier misleading them about one of their battery production lines, and so they dropped production of S and X. Apparently as a result of the supplier f* up, they rewrote "20 man years of software in 4 weeks". Which is absolutely incredible.

Don't listen to this fear mongering BS. Tesla is the only one in the electric car game. Who else has the charging network, the half-million pre-orders, the 3.5 billion in cash and easy ability to raise more, the Elon shine?

Can't stand these articles

I listened to the whole earnings call that just happened, Elon said they had laid of 2% of their work force which is much low than industry standard for yearly layoffs.

Elon quoted GE which lays of the bottom 10% of their staff every year. It's not that bad.

It's too expensive to mine minerals and send them back to Earth. Until we are launching hundreds of rockets a day, we can forget about this.

Lots of comments here about how to be a successful CEO. We should all be looking at Elon Musk as the prime example. Work 120 hour work weeks when the going is tough, 100 hour weeks when the going's good, and if you're just starting out, spend every waking hour on your product/company.

If you do this, people will tell you you're insane, and you'll eventually stop. That's why Elon is different, because he cannot stop. I feel that this alone explains 90% of the CEO question - who can choose to stop and who cannot choose to stop.

Wait a second. In the quotes I took of Jackie, he says that he is critical of Japan behind closed doors. Your Nazi comparison holds no water.

You claim that having solidarity with your nation, family, corporation, etc. is an enabler of evil. But what you see as evil probably looks a lot like dominance, control and strength to the rest of the world.

Ultimately, national power is extremely valuable on the global stage. Every single industrial nation on Earth has tens of thousands of business leaders and decision makers working to usurp that power from other nations as their own; this must be known and acknowledged! Whether it be exploitative trade agreements or owning parts of a neighbouring country's industry, to have control and dominance over other nations and their diverse varieties of resources is what wars are fought over.

Thus, if Americans do not seek to solidify their dominance at every moment, their dominance will be taken from them at some point; of this we can be sure. We _must_ have solidarity. It is not an enabler of evil - rather, it protects us from the evils that others might inflict upon us. Because that's how the world works. We fight over resources.

Jackie is Chinese. He ought to be pro-China. In the WaPo article you linked, he says the following:

  If our own countrymen don’t support our country, 
  who will support our country? We know our country 
  has many problems. We [can] talk about it when the 
  door is closed. To outsiders, [we should say] “our 
  country is the best.”

and

  Seriously, I am always like, when the door is 
  closed, “Our country is like this and this. Who 
  and who is not good.” But outside, “Our country 
  is the best, like so and so, is the best.” You 
  cannot say our country has problems [when you are
  outside], like “Yes, our country is bad.”

Can you fault him for that? Perhaps it is the American standard that is wrong. Perhaps it is wrong to talk poorly of your own state on the global stage. Just because Americans (who own the fruits of 70-odd years of global dominance) are willing to disparage their country to no end, does not mean that it should be a standard for everyone.

t. Canadian