Makes sense, not a lot of space companies to begin with, much less with people that have a startup mentality. Feel like the culture at Boeing or NASA is going to be very different from the one needed for a pioneering startup.
And even then it's only a handful of investements, with how much liquidity is/was in the market not surprising that people got a few million for moonshots given how the potential for a whole new industry.
Conversely- I put together a list of all the Space industry startups that YC funded over the last few years[1], thinking it would be entirely "ex-SpaceX" founders. But it turned out to have a pretty distributed mix:
Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful.
Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies.
And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same time we see mediocre build quality. I just don't understand how such organizations can be both filled with terrible people and rock stars at the same time and survive for as long as the Elon companies have done so.
> I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies.
I mean, only one of these stayed more than five years; one only stayed _two_ years. And, frankly, if you're in a leadership position in a company, you say nice things when you leave after two years. It is What is Done. I don't think you can really read much into these sorts of statements either way; they're pretty much following a formula.
Even if we give them the benefit of doubt that it's not a PR thing, when you're in a leadership/distinguished/emeritus position, the org often looks very different than how it looks when you're a foot soldier.
In a 10,000+ person org you’re likely to have a huge variation in personalities, then you have pseudonymous internet commenters who may have an axe to grind or other agenda and be happy to cherry-pick one way or the other.
I've learned to be super careful about what senior people say about other senior people. Because it actually reflects well on you to say nice things about already respected people, it's a free PR boost. It makes them sound generous and also knowledgeable. But, I've seen this happen a lot in big companies, someone will say "Well X is a fantastic engineer" or "X does great work" and my first thought is "Well that's interesting, since you have literally never worked with him, seen anything he's produced and have no engineering knowledge". So actually, whilst it sounds like a good endorsement, what is actually happening is that the person is playing politics. This is especially true when talking about public figures - Sam Altman in his recent interviews has been incredibly diplomatic about Elon, despite the fact that it's pretty public knowledge Elon tried to take over OpenAI and now loudly disparages it. Sam is playing politics, and you have to take that into consideration when thinking about these endorsements. Andrej Karpathy wants to have a good career in Silicon Valley and the way to do that is to gush about how fantastic Elon Musk is.... whilst quietly quitting the company having not delivered what he was working on.
I work in a industry with around 1000 engineers in that field in my location. There must be like 10 big companies where I can work in the area. Basically everyone knows each other and when you interview someone, it's easy to get the person's reputation.
I just got a new guy in January (didn't do the interview myself, I was away), I know his ex boss very well and of course I phoned him to know how he's like. He depicted me a kind of bad picture of him.
After 3 months I agree that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But unlike my friend, I'm not asking for perfect code, I'm asking for throughput and bold moves in the wilderness. With that consideration, the guy is actually ok compared to others!
I've come to learn to not rely a lot on outside advice on people, and I prefer to judge it myself in situ. The team, the company, the project or simply personal life can greatly affect someone's performances, and it is not because someone is great at company A that he will be great at company B.
As a younger self, when I heard a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I assumed that I'd have to work hard to reach their level, without realizing that they may actually not have a clue.
Now, when I hear a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I realize it's just name-dropping.
I am sure that's true for some, but I doubt that's true when a Google exec talks about, eg, Jeff Dean being an absolutely fantastic engineer. Now Jeff Dean being, well, Jeff Dean is one thing, but I'm sure there are engineers at Google who the outside world has never heard of that have done fantastic work internally.
> This is especially true when talking about public figures - Sam Altman in his recent interviews has been incredibly diplomatic about Elon, despite the fact that it's pretty public knowledge Elon tried to take over OpenAI and now loudly disparages it.
OpenAI was co-founded by Altman and Musk together at the same time, with a huge amount of Musk's money, without which it would've never gotten off the ground in the first place. Also please give a citation for this "public knowledge". I'd counter that it's instead pretty public knowledge that OpenAI basically stole Elon's money on a promise of making an AI company that wouldn't lock things behind proprietary walls, but now has turned out to be the complete opposite. Sam Altman pulled a fast one on Musk and then pushed him out of the company.
Here's the reporting on the takeover attempt[1], it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected. Sam has been quite open about what is going on with OpenAI - namely that what they needed to develop the tech was billions of dollars, and the only way they would get that money is a private venture, which they've negotiated with terms that actually limit the upside with profits beyond a certain point returning to the non-profit entity, as well as the issues with dumping potentially dangerous tech straight into the public domain. Also, OpenAI was never a partnership between just Musk and Altman, there were half a dozen other people involved including Thiel and Reid Hoffman, there is no way that Altman unilaterally pushed Musk out. It looks a lot more like Musk wanted to be in charge, and doesn't like that OpenAI ended up succeeding without him.
Do you have a source that's not the Verge? I've learned to not trust them for anything Musk related as they have a history of incorrect and biased reporting.
> it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected
Elon provided $100M, were they expecting more than that? That's quite a lot of money for an early company.
> Also, OpenAI was never a partnership between just Musk and Altman, there were half a dozen other people involved including Thiel and Reid Hoffman, there is no way that Altman unilaterally pushed Musk out. It looks a lot more like Musk wanted to be in charge, and doesn't like that OpenAI ended up succeeding without him.
It doesn't surprise me that Elon wanted to be in control, given that they started to go against the joint vision established by Sam and Elon from the get go. You mention it was "half a dozen other people", but it was Elon and Sam that were the public leaders for the vision of the company.
Occam's razor is in effect. Elon is not good and smart. The onus is on your to proof otherwise.
I was going to comment on how this article is a Musk PR move. It's quite clear why the first thing he guts in a company is PR. He has simp's that will do it for free and because there is no official PR channel, a literal reality distortion field is created because only fanbois get access to the man, the myth, the legend.
I mean, I can't walk into a car dealership with $10,000 and tell them that's a big pile of money, and walk out with a $100,000 car, so I'm not sure why $100 million should get you $1,000 million of company, just because you asked for it.
I don't know man. What breaks that argument is that multiple people make the same positive claims about Elon: That he can handle unimaginable amounts of stress that would break others, that he seems to have a breath of deep knowledge in various different engineering disciplines and that he is committed to his vision. Your theory would make more sense if everyone was making up random praise about him but the interviews with the three people I mentioned were conducted years apart and weirdly all mention these same praises. Its possible that there is some coordination going on but across so many people from his different companies? There must be some sort of truth to the statements.
Elon M fried his braincells over at Tesla in an unwinnable situation which was saved by angel investors at the last moment. From that point in time to the present compare the advanced chips made at Tesla to Ford, GM for proof of Elon M and the vision thing. The Elon M companies fit together to tell a story that feels futuristic.
Quality Assurance is one of the hardest things at any manufacturing company, because it absolutely doesn't care about "rock stars" or any other fluff. If your employees are tired and burned out, then yelling at them won't fix anything because it's not about whether they get it right that time, it's about getting it right every time.
Which means rested, attentive employees who are not going to be "rock stars", they're going to do the job correctly and then go home because that's what's required.
I'm inclined to agree with this. Its just amazing that they still haven't fixed these issues even to this day when it has become a running joke at this point.
Hot take: The people you mentioned are hired to bring big-name cred to the organization. None of them stuck around (correct me if I'm wrong, I've only done a cursory glance just now), they all left. Eg, they're the "top tier engineering" part of the companies, and other employees (and I've dealt with these employees at Tesla in a past life, so I can attest to their terrible attitude) are the "mediocre build quality".
Astronaut Garrett Reisman worked for 7 years there and is on record stating that is all the stress he could handle.[1]:
Jim Keller has a history of joining a company to start a project and then leaving once it is complete. He did this multiple times in his career and was with Tesla until they completed the self driving computer. He has also left behind a team of stellar well known people.
I am not too sure about Andrej Karpathy. I dont know if we have enough of a history to know when he chooses to join and leave companies.
There must be a lot of lower level engineers who have to be developing all these amazing subsystems in the car and other products.
Wonder what the turn over is for the really skilled people. Maybe the truly burnt out people or just stragglers are the ones you are encountering.
I overlapped there with Garrett, and while our work rarely overlapped, he was certainly around and "in the trenches". My point is that, from my point of view, he was a real person rather than a figurehead.
To some extent I could say the same for Elon, who was certainly around a lot. He was more of a general visiting the trenches, though. Also a real person, but of a different caste.
I was one of those lower level engineers building stuff. I stuck around for 3 years, and left when I was happy rather than burnt out. It was my first job after school, and I wanted to try some other companies before settling down.
Based on her TED interview about passenger travel on rockets being in service by 2028 cheaper than business class, I'm gonna say they might be doing well in spite of her rather than because.
I’m sorry but you clearly know nothing about what you’re talking about. Throughout the entire industry she is absolutely credited with SpaceX’s success. SpaceX dominates because of reliability, and the reliability stems from business units Shotwell manages, not Musk.
My personal anecdote is that I had an ex-SpaceX engineer as a VP of Engineering for a startup I worked for. And he was great. He is a nice guy, super friendly, very knowledgeable, solid manager, always bringing people into the fold, and technically very talented.
The company he was the VP of Engineering for was an indoor vertical farming startup (which is failing), and he moved onto a new venture in the climate space.
Vertical farming is a solution in search of a problem. It's not viable and it doesn't solve any meaningful issues in agriculture. In cities, land is more productive when used for other purposes (residential, commercial, retail, etc.), and out in the country where crops are typically grown, space simply isn't an issue to the point that you need to go up. Indeed, way more food is currently produced than is actually needed for human consumption (most cropland in the US is used to feed livestock or turned into bioethanol).
I always assumed the key word here was “indoor,” and not “vertical.” Indoors is a place where it is much, much, easier to automate and control growing conditions. Both could add up to faster better cheaper. Given how amazingly huge; dense; and performant logistics has gotten, I can’t imagine the real estate angle is moving the needle very much.
Indoors is much more expensive though. You've got to build the buildings and all the infrastructure. Outdoors in big simple fields has a lot of pluses. And it's time-tested. There's no particular reason to think that the majority of food will ever be grown indoors, or even a small but significant fraction of it. Not on Earth anyway.
This has never made sense to me. Vertical farming is just greenhouses except with artificial light instead of natural sunlight. Presumably the renewable source of energy for that artificial light would be solar panels. So why not just build normal greenhouses?
They have only ever managed to grow lettuce with vertical farming. Produce out of farm gate is at the bottom of the supply chain. It will never be profitable unless people are willing to be 4-5x what they pay for lettuce now.
Expect price increases and food shortages this year because of rains in CA. We are not allowed to plant for 45-60 days after last rains so field can dry out.
The truth is that we do have a real food shortage situation now. The vertical farms won’t make a dent in making up the gap. Not even close.
Theoretically the advantages are light sources focused where the plant needs when they need it resulting in faster growth. Just turns out that for most crops, that (and lower land use) isn't enough to cover the disadvantages of the extra infrastructure needed. Plus you can install lights in a greenhouse...
My uncle is in that business. Even with organic (so no chemicals) techniques the amount of optimization that can be done is staggering. Companies do keep their knowledge very secret, so you won’t know as an average farmer, it’s definitely not an open source spirit in the farming industry.
> Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else.
One claimed to have worked closely with Elon, but after seeing him lie about so many other things I don’t trust anything he told us.
They were weirdly, unnecessarily ruthless in everything they did behind your back. But they were also highly polished and charismatic when addressing you directly.
Obviously this isn’t unique, but it was weird to see how consistent it was from this group of people.
Then that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades.
If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.
This is a common fallacy. Modern businesses are enormous and succeed or fail for all sorts of reasons. Trying to figure out who is actually responsible for the success of a company is difficult. Just because a company is successful, doesn't mean every employee of the company is great. It's essential to understand what the dynamics of an industry is in order to understand why a company is successful. In the case of SpaceX there's no doubt there are some people there who are great engineers. But that's probably not why they beat Boeing.
A real-life reusable rocket that lands back on the pad was an exciting project to be a part of, no matter if you were doing it in a virtual sweatshop.
I could see being part of that ultimate goal as being a motivation to work for the aliens from the Simpsons (don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!)
But given the progressive nature of the projects and “for all of humanity” vision that was presented, I have always been disappointed to hear these things about the operation. I’m glad I didn’t sign up, and it was tempting.
Look at outcomes. The whole thing was _actually_ about cornering access to LEO, the whole time. And it largely worked.
They've only "cornered" access to LEO because they vastly outperform the competition in almost every conceivable category. That should get you a short term monopoly.
"More revenue solves all known problems" -- Eric Schmidt
"The only thing that matters is product-market fit" -- Marc Andreesen
Being in a good market with the first product that can satisfy that market solves all sorts of management sins. Look at Twitter, Zenefits, Uber, WeWork, Zynga, Digg, etc. Or for that matter - how do you think Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA started looking like jokers?
Dominance in a market is usually an anti-signal for management quality, because it means you can get away with stuff that you couldn't in more competitive markets.
What was the ACTUAL lesson with these two? I can guess your intent, but could you specify? Also I think the grand father version instead of the baby version. Apple is massive...
* Figure out what the product must look like early, and keep your vision consistent for a long time.
* Dive into the details of the product, and try to get quality at the lowest levels.
* Hire great and motivated people.
* Remove roadblocks that prevent people from moving quickly.
Those are the real lessons.
My current job does all of these, and doesn't do the "Treat people like shit," thing that is the core culture of Elon's companies. We move faster than the Elonverse companies, while working on a problem of similar difficulty.
Thanks for this, well distilled. I used to be anxious about how the handful of folks I knew running breakout companies all leaned heavily towards asshole. Was it a necessary but not sufficient trait to achieve great performance?
I’ve come to learn that if you do the things on your list well, some people are going to see that as being an asshole.
Clearing roadblocks quickly ( and nearly all roadblocks are made of people-problems after about 50+), insisting on certain aspects of a product vision for years, and engaging in someone else’s details are all strongly correlated with annoying someone.
I also learned that the assholes I knew were just the usual mean, dunning Kruger style people that exist everywhere. Those traits ultimately meant their inner circle perpetually excludes the kind of really great people you’d want to surround yourself with.
Or maybe SpaceX did that despite being held back by those people. NASA's management is rather infamous too so it's not like they're competing against much there. Every time NASA's managers gained too much influence over the engineers people actually died.
Engineers are pragamtic as profession. Managers are glorified sales, their primary product is selling their team and move the goal post forward.
As as a software engineer, I'd rather buy my next car from an engineer who designed it rather than anyone else in the chain. Not because we speak similar languages but because I know that engineer will happily list ever bit of that makes them feel uncomfortable.
Engineers main task is to physically make something.
Even in software engineering something is being physically built up to run the software. We decided to call this the cloud because we let sales people define it. It ain't a cloud, you cannot fly a plane through it.
Construction is the one step that cannot be easily cheated. The machinery we build today is massive and complex so while the bureaucracy prevents a single engineer from addressing the issues, they are position to see see it.
My first question for a rocket company isn't the CEO's confidence. It is, would engineer #134 use this product with their families? Would you entrust the lives of our children to what you've built?
From what I understood SpaceX was founded by some brilliant engineers and Elon just became the poster boy with no actual engineering credentials. Undoubtedly he is business-savvy but it seems not that surprising managers who take credit for the engineers' work might thrive there.
Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint. I've seen non-technical managers being able to hold conversations and make insightful comments having been around engineers for so long. A little bit like ChatGPT, now that I think of it. And they definitely can serve as a counter-balance to over-engineering.
But would they be able to code a single HTML page on their own? I doubt it. They definitely know how to spec one down to the last detail, but alas there's a distinction here. And I would also argue Tom might be a little biased in his opinion. I don't particularly have anything against Elon but I'm not surprised certain type of people with personality faults gravitate towards him.
> Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint.
Sure, I agree. However, there are many other examples that you can easily look up. But I do find the by amount of mental gymnastics in your response interesting.
I think it's fair to say that the opinion of those who have worked with Elon closely for many years hold the most weight. Compared to outsiders who just speculate on the internet.
All right sir. You seem to hold a strong opinion about the subject, i do not. I find it funny rebuting me by using term mental gymnastics but i find this debate fruitless to pursue. A speculating outsider on interwebz. Okay. Sure.
I based this on the intuition witnessing his incompetence managing Twitter. For a great engineer, he certainly lacks awareness that I attribute to either ignorance or being more accustomed to handling things in abstract - not in practice.
> They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else
> Obviously this isn’t unique
Most middle management is like that. You must be extremely lucky to work people who are not like these. During my 20 years I had maybe 3 people out of the 100 I have worked with who were decent and looked out for the people who they managed.
Same for me.
I worked with managers who mostly tried to do a decent job, some failed some succeeded, some were incapable others were good even when working at 50% of their capacity.
I've only had to deal with one bullshit machine and he quickly moved to another location, my guess is he is moving every time his bullshit has grown to difficult to keep up.
I have a similar experience but haven’t worked for any big tech or name brand companies. The vast majority were in the health tech space with a smattering doing things that would be considered ethically sound (ie. Solar energy marketplace).
I have had a couple nightmare supervisors who were obvious sociopaths, and have several who were incompetent, but for the most part only worked for folks with high EQ.
1. One nightmare CEO in an early stage tech startup.
2. A dozen managers at Mozilla, which ranked from "should have remained a dev" to "great managers". One of them was politically-minded, everybody else was truly attempting to make the team and the project work.
3. A few managers in a more recent tech startup, all of them good (albeit over-worked).
You must have bad luck. Many middle managers are previous ICs who are still trying to pay the bills -- they're not automatically bad people. Consider also that bad companies hire bad people -- so maybe you could consider that as well.
My experiences with management have been pretty positive. But I am biased: if my situation sucks -- I leave. Perhaps you stayed longer than you should have...
VCs and other startups love to shower these people with money like they’re the second coming only to find out that their success was purely circumstantial and mostly a confluence of a ton of factors that had nothing to do with them like luck and timing.
Strange generallization. In any environment there are always those that don't belong.
There must be some double digit percentage of them who are genuinelly sculpted in specific way in that harsh working environment. Or you are saying that stressor doesn't make you better in any way (if you survive it).
Probability looks higher that you will find such people at ex-Space X group then other more relaxed and/or bureaucratically leaden companies, IMO.
They shower them with money because, as always, they don't know who is genuine and who is not, only results will tell but looks like a solid bet anyway, more then showering with money random engineer of ex anything.
The VC model is invest in a bunch of companies, with the idea that one goes to the moon and the rest fail. One success pays for a lot of failures.
So if you personally see a lot of failures, that doesn’t mean the VC model is failing. Although most VC funds lose money (there’s a power law for their returns too!)
Paul Graham wrote a scathing summary of VCs, and one reason for YC is to be more honest and fair (YC still aims for capitalist gains, they just play the game differently). http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html He also wrote that it is near impossible to pick investment winners (which is what VCs are “supposed” to do).
Well the op article is specifically about people who left SpaceX and are seeding into startups, so in this thread we very much care about this selection bias.
I have seen this kind of behaviour in the consulting business here in Germany many times. Actually so often that I started to believe this is the culture around those companies. No integrity, no real teamwork, lying behind your back, ego driven, playing the blame game, very poisonous atmosphere.
Remember: it is all up to you to set the company culture. If you find the right people who can thrive under the freedom and responsibility that comes with it, I am sure you will have created a great place to work!
Well, they were former SpaceX people. Perhaps the good eggs are kept and these were SpaceX castoffs? But that is probably giving SpaceX too much credit. I get the sense that they simply have an insane turnover rate that sucks a little good work from everyone before kicking them to the curb. I would expect people grown in such an environment to be at least a little poisioned.
At my previous company they hired a guy from amazon (aws) to be our new manager.
He sucked.
Overnight he implemented all the bullshit meetings they had over there. At said meetings he wouldn't listen what people said, and he'd forget what tasks he'd tell people to focus, so the next meeting he'd scold people for wasting company time doing stuff that was not the task they had been assigned.
Well, at a place like SpaceX you have many layers of people. First, you have people like Elon and the managers who learned from him. Elon is famous for ripping people to shreds in meetings. Yelling and screaming at them. Telling them just how stupid they are in front of the entire room.
Layers of managers emulate this and treat people like shit in meetings. Not everyone, of course. You then have thousands of young freshly-graduated people who are in a range between not having a clue to believing they are hot shit because they come from a top university and work at SpaceX.
In the middle of all of this, you have a —-relatively speaking— small group of older, experienced people who make it all work. They work around folks who can’t create a decent Excel spreadsheet to save their lives and the “I have a Masters degree from MIT” crowd who truly need to be humbled.
Somehow the entire thing works. A reflection of society in some ways? It seems every company and society is, in some form, carried on the shoulders of a select few who actually get it and are capable enough to make it happen.
This is basically cargo culting/ type I error. I've worked for companies that were explicitly NOT this way, they were just fine.
Hell even my immediate boss at aforementioned company was not that way but he was tanked by my skip boss (the musk co. Guy) and immediately my productivity tanked too.
> The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
Sounds the type of person that typically gets promoted into those roles.
Anecdotal, but I’ve found many people who complain about abusive managers are doing a terrible job and are looking for any excuse to be a victim or explain why their crap work is not appreciated.
Well in this case more than one of the managers was not someone I reported to (only one was my boss) and a bunch of them were actively let go because of their awfulness. I don't actually care about the perception of my work. I care specifically about the startup community and am trying to get other people to not bring in middle managers from musk companies without carefully vetting them, because it will mean pain for their employees.
I wish it was more like this at existing companies.
Why everyone isn't leaving Adobe, Meta, and Google to found their own AI / generative media startups astounds me. If you work in our incredibly lucrative field, you may be able to afford a few quarters of leaning into risk.
Startups are like a brush fire. Old incumbents have so much legacy code and cruft that nimble upstarts killing them is healthy.
The "SpaceX diaspora" should be the norm everywhere opportunity arises.
I've come to appreciate that equity for your time !== equity for your money. Take cash in excess of your burn rate in-hand over equity any day. Then take that excess cash and buy equity.
Compared to taking a $250k base and $250k equity offer from a startup, it's substantially better to take a $500k cash in-hand offer from FAANG and use your extra $250k to cut angel checks. Some early-stage startups that try to court you will instead take a $10k check on the spot as an early investment. So not only do you diversify your investments and get a better class of equity with cash, you also get the upside of guaranteed outcomes on a salary.
As a startup founder who doesn't pay himself much, IMO people either care about money or they don't. Depends what you're optimizing for. But if you're obsessed with cash you shouldn't start a company IMO. You're better off working for "FAANG" or whatever the cash obsessed optimizers are calling it these days.
I mean obviously if you start a company you want to optimize for it making profit, but the original goal should be, primarily, totally disconnected from money. Any monetary benefits should be a side effect of providing value. In the most ideal world, your equity turns into cash 10-15 years later, but you shouldn't set out with that being your goal.
My perspective on this is coming from someone who made easy money on a ridiculous business selling proxies to SEO spammers in college, and I didn't know what to do with the money (I spent it all on worthless shit). I've learned I'm much happier when I'm meeting some minimal survival baseline while trying to build a sustainable organization that produces a useful product.
To be fair, not everyone who optimizes for cash is "obsessed with cash" or a "cash obsessed optimizer" -- life circumstances like dependent family, the oppression of college debt, etc make stability of a large corporation attractive to some, even if they would take on risk given other circumstances.
Example: taking 80k/yr out of college while having to retire 2k/month of college debt, then using the rest to afford bay area rent + commuting expenses + rest of life would have been hard and arguably not a good use of a young person's early career phase. They might opt instead to work at a bigco until their debt was sufficiently retired, then with the safety net of {an established career + no debt + some money in the bank} swinging for the fences at a startup later. You're more likely to get leadership roles at startups when you have a few years under your belt anyway.
Oh, totally agree - what you optimize for is a personal preference. I don't have a wife nor kids and that significantly affects the constraints of what I'm willing to do. And I've got nothing against anyone who chooses to work for FAANG, this is just my personal outlook: if you're concerned about money, you should take it from the people willing to pay you for your work. But if you've got an investor willing to pay you to develop something, then you better not be thinking about your own personal "total comp," because you've got (a) employees who need to be paid and (b) investors who want to see your company amount to something. As someone who's never had "a real job," I can promise you - my friend at FAANG contemplating quitting to pursue their own ideas - the grass is always greener on the other side.
> if you're concerned about money, you should take it from the people willing to pay you for your work
I think this is half-right. When I evaluate startups I'm often expecting FAANG pay, but I don't expect some of the benefits. Generally the hefty expectation is in RSUs, because at a FAANG those are almost a third of what I make. I also don't accept inflated future leaning valuations, I rate them at current value. If I'm taking a gamble on a third of my salary I want to put the risk multiplier on that third, so I'll charge more.
Passion can get you so far in startups, but if you're engineer (especially not engineer zero) then you likely won't walk away with much unless you're accurately assessing risk. That said, there's a fair amount of startups that are not worried about having a reputation of early engineers working away with very little.
That said, I still have a mortgage and that's what informs my strategy when dealing with startups. If I didn't have a mortgage, I'd probably accept lower RSUs and a higher cash incentive.
You should pay your employees their market rate. Your risk of going out of business is higher is what warrants the bigger equity.
You spend all this time and salary to build a team that works like a well-oiled machine. It would be a shame to lose them to someone who simply pays the market rate.
Your team is likely going to be working more than overtime helping you build your dream. You should match what FAANG's paying them, if thats your competition for talent.
Yeah, I definitely agree. I'd rather pay a premium to get the best employee and take a discount myself, rather than pay someone below market while paying myself some absurd salary. Frankly I don't care what I pay myself as long as I can afford an apartment and groceries, and so far this has worked out well, as I love the employees we have. If I were exfiltrating a bunch of money for my own salary we would have been out of business months ago.
As a spectator to your conversation, I have to say I like and agree with your general philosophy. While I can't quite put a finger on what I like, I think the gist is operating under assumption of how the world, finances, and incentives SHOULD work, as opposed to how they currently work. And also maybe some dose of minimalism(?). Either way, I wish you all the best in building your startup!
> Some early-stage startups that try to court you will instead take a $10k check on the spot as an early investment.
How often are you seeing these deals?
In my experience, any company raising in increments of $10K is really only doing so as a way to get people invested (literally) so they can continue to hit them up for funding, connections, and networking later on. $10K doesn’t really go very far in terms of paying employees.
Of course that’s fine if it works out that way, but I’ve also seen companies who gather $10K from every random person who can invest end up with some wacky cap tables, which becomes a turnoff to future investors. This creates weird situations where they put a lot of pressure on buying people out of their investments just to clean up the cap table. Again, could be fine for a quick turnaround but it’s not quite the same as investing for the long term.
And then there’s the fact that most angel investments are just going to go to zero, but that’s the nature of the game.
That makes sense if you're optimizing for money. I think a lot of us that do startups actually enjoy the process as well. My years at FAANG were the years I felt the least proud of myself.
Twogler and ex-founder here - I ping-ponged from entrepreneurship to Google to entrepreneurship back to Google again.
I take the opposite approach, but with some caveats. Your financial success in any market is going to come down to information advantage - you need to have better data and better insights on the success of your investment than your competing investors. In general, you have much better data and insight into the risk factors and success probability of your own startup than you do into any startups you angel invest in. You also have better data on your own startup than you do on startups you work for, but probably have better data on how a startup you're employed at is doing than the investors in that startup do. Therefore you can make better choices about where to spend your equity (either sweat or monetary) when you're working for the company.
The major caveat - and one that took a lot of hard lessons for me to learn - is that you have to actually pay attention to that data. If your gut tells you it's not going to work out, cut your losses and find some other opportunity, regardless of sunk costs, how much you might be emotionally attached to the company, how much you love your coworkers, your fear of letting them down, etc.
But similarly, you also end up with a much higher-resolution model of the business world from actually experiencing work at several different startups than you would get from angel-investing in startups. So unless you've previously experienced worked at or founded startups, your angel-investing is basically going to be spray-and-pray, and do a lot worse than investing in your own company stock or even index funds.
The highest cash portion I’ve seen at mid to late stage startups was around 175k for a senior SWE. Equity offered was in the five digits, but I was coming from a boring enterprise company and not a hot FAANG.
Startups do not offer such high salaries. I'd be surprised to find a startup advertise a salary like that. You have to negotiate those salaries.
You aren't negotiating with a startup against their current bank account. Their bank account is only relevant in determining what they can _afford_, not how much they should pay. They should never pay more than they can afford, that's bad for both of you, but beyond that there is no ceiling to how much they should pay.
You are negotiating against the pool of risk-adjusted returns you are going to provide the startup. The more directly coupled you are to their ability to fundraise and generate revenue, the larger the pool of risk-adjusted returns you are negotiating with them against.
If there is a high probability that $10m in value over the next few years will directly result from hiring you, $10m that would be hard to unlock with any other hire, you aren't negotiating a salary anymore. You are negotiating your share of that $10m.
An oversimplified example: Let's say you expect to deliver that over 5 years. A $500k offer that is 50% equity is a 25% share with half paid upfront in yearly installments.
If you close that deal, the company is appraising the expected return of hiring you vs. the risk of the impact to their runway and making the bet that reducing their runway by ~$30k/mo will payoff without them going bankrupt.
I've found this is a good rule to follow in general. I never pay myself with value I don't unlock. I always appraise my salary, contracting rates, etc. by estimating the expected ROI for the work I do and I pay myself out of that. If I overdraw (charge more than the ROI), I won't take the job.
As an aside, this is part of the reason why (I believe) CEOs are so well compensated. They obviously provide value. But that value is incredibly difficult to measure. You know a good CEO is extremely valuable and a bad CEO is extremely expensive, but you don't exactly know how to measure the value they really unlock. So, short of an actual appraisal, they are perceived as infinitely valuable. Since neither side in the negotiation knows the true dollar value of a CEO, they are negotiating against what the company can afford since they both know the company will pay as much as they can afford to get a CEO.
My company immediately sues anyone who leave to join a competitor, and even more viciously attacks I would assume if someone were to actually start a competing business.
I think the key is that these startups aren't competing with SpaceX, but are rather SpaceX-adjacent.
There is also a uniqueness to the industry that SpaceX operates in, in that everyone is basically the US government, or the US government with a layer of paint. SpaceX isn't exactly going to sue the hand that feeds it, even if it's wearing a Boeing-logo glove.
The first two references are to the same case. An ex-employee kept his Tesla laptop with confidential information and turned in a personal laptop as his work laptop. That seems worth suing over.
>> My company immediately sues anyone who leave to join a competitor
> So do Elon's companies
Sorry to be pedantic, but there is a big difference between "sues anyone", and Tesla suing what must be a small percentage of leavers.
And your links describe lawsuits not for "leaving and joining a competitor", but for sabotage and trying to walk out with trade secrets, schematics and code.
> And your links describe lawsuits not for "leaving and joining a competitor", but for sabotage and trying to walk out with trade secrets, schematics and code.
To be pedantic, those are just claims Tesla made, and the articles even mention other IP-related suits by Elon's companies that were dropped because they were nonsense.
Even the first link about a $1 million lawsuit over "stolen trade secrets" was actually the farce regarding Martin Tripp. Musk retaliated against Tripp for whistleblowing on safety at Tesla, and then tried to have him murdered by the cops by calling 911 and accusing Tripp of being a mass shooter.
See also: When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower[1]:
> It started with a Twitter meltdown and ended with a fake mass shooter. A former security manager says the company also spied and spread misinformation.
I'm not going to take Tesla at their word when they have an extensive history of using bogus lawsuits to intimidate people.
> I'm not going to take Tesla at their word when they have an extensive history of using bogus lawsuits to intimidate people.
The lawsuit wasn't bogus, and Tesla went on to win that lawsuit, with a large payout from that former employee to Tesla.
I suggest having a more skeptical eye about what you read on the internet. There's a tremendous amount of very motivated reporters out there wanting to write about anything Musk related and will automatically believe any source that disparages Musk or a Musk company in some way. Your "See also" for example wasn't actually a Tesla whistleblower, and Tesla successfully won their case against such fake whistleblower. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-lawsuit-whistleblow...
These reporters have created a false impression about Musk and his companies that's now a sort of shared deception held by many such that they believe Musk companies are bad in some way and will further believe any negative news, causing a self-perpetuating cycle. It's been interesting to watch how it works over the years.
> A former Tesla Inc factory employee will pay Elon Musk’s electric car maker $400,000 after it accused him of tipping reporters about alleged production inefficiencies and delays, a court filing shows.
...
> According to the court filing, Tripp did not contest Tesla’s claims that he stole trade secrets, and acknowledged that his counterclaims were funded by a short seller of Tesla stock. The filing was signed by Tripp and a Tesla lawyer.
It helps that rocketry is 1) kind of a solved problem 2) a lot of unsolved problems get solved by NASA scientists so is open sourced 3) the laws of physics demand that certain outcomes.
That has not been my experience. If they have deep pockets they draw out the court case in an effort to make you quit, and the stress literally kills people.
In the end I agree vindication will come if you can afford to defend yourself, hire your own experts and retain competent council but your comment is a bit glib.
What's groundless is this mentality. Please read Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (a rule that is also well-adopted in state courts as well). As fun as it is to hate on big tech, one should still be mindful of the fact that their attorneys aren't stupid enough to file patently frivolous lawsuits that put their own law licenses on the line.
Has any corporate attorney ever been disbarred for filing frivolous lawsuits against individuals on behalf of their company? It's certainly not a common occurrence.
That, and why would a FAANG employee have more "founder attitude" than, say, an IBM suit? They've been the career choice of the "my car is bigger than yours" salary-seekers for more years than they had ever been recognizably "startup". One of the "A" hasn't been anything remotely related to startup since long before they ousted Steve Jobs!
Right now is also a harder time to start a startup because of the interest rate hikes reducing available capital. It already impacted SVB's deposits (and caused the ensuing bank run)
The definition of multimillionaire is a bit vague here, but I would assume the OP was referring to being in deca-millionaire territory. That is much more rare to accomplish at a FAANG company.
The average SWE at FAANG can become a deca-millionaire over the course of 20-25 working years.
Starting from $0, this requires saving $125k a year for 21 years to reach $10.06M at an 11.88% interest rate, which is the S&P500 average. Well within the capability of any senior SWE @ FAANG, and it only takes 4 years to get to senior.
But then capital gains taxes hit.
Anyways, yes, a startup employee on the other hand can become a deca-millionaire in a year or two.
Citation needed. Depends on how big of a multi you are talking about.
I know way more people with $1-10M who did it via corporate ladder climbing through FAANG than I do people who struck it big with a startup. At a certain point the balance is in favor of start ups but I suspect the number is somewhere in the 8 figure range which is correspondingly rare.
It's hard to blame interest rates for all the wealth in tech when you look at all the new products and innovations that have happened over the last 10 years.
Can you list some? I see the last ten years as a great failure in tech following the decade of real innovation and paradigm change that came before it.
GPT-1…4, Falcon 9 reusability (+ Starlink being possible), most modern VR headsets (Oculus public demo was just over ten years ago), 3D printing is a lot better on many axes, commercially viable consumer OLED, displacement of CFL with LED, vegan "cheese" alternatives suck much less than a decade ago, DNA tests so cheap multiple different companies spam advertising for them at me, vat-grown meat is slowly transitioning from sci-fi to panicking Italian farmers into calling for bans, electric cars have gone from expensive Tesla Roadsters to the ~ 20-fold cheaper Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, about 90% of all PV happened in the last decade (and following a roughly exponential growth rate).
I don't enjoy the work at Google as much due to bureaucracy, pace of work and politics. I previously worked at a startup and there is a stark difference in the work culture and environment. I'm working with the exact same team as that at the startup (we got acquired by Google). The same people i enjoyed working with, I absolutely hate it now.
Nothing ever gets done, even when it is possible to do so. Folks around here call it perf-farming.
There's nothing quite like shipping (or breaking!) something that impacts billions (with a 'b') of people . It was unexpectedly exhilarating for me the first time I shipped.
As a user of those products, one gets the impression that the improvements are more focused on what is in Google’s interest rather than what is in the users’ interest, though.
I guess that's one way to delude yourself. I'm just here (different big tech company) to get the biggest paycheck for the least amount of harm I could inflict on the world.
People can have feelings without being deluded; it's okay to feel motivated by how many users use the thing you made. You do you.
That said, many googlers do _not_ end up impacting millions or billions of users. So GP is a lucky one. Google has a lot of people working on infra, internal tooling, and subfeatures within products that don't / are hard to connect to usage.
I've had several opportunities to found/join very early stage startups. I've taken three of them, including a weird hybrid nonprofit startup.
* The nonprofit was a nice experience but burnt me out more than once. At some point, you need to have some time off. Being in an early stage startup discourages you from ever taking a break. Being in a nonprofit discourages you from ever taking a break. Being in both... well, eventually, I had to leave to preserve my sanity.
* One startup turned out to largely be a con against VCs and one of the founders pulled the rug, vanishing on his cofounder and all the employees. Needless to say... that was a disappointment.
* The last one burnt me out pretty deeply. 15 years later, I still can't use the technology stack we were using at the time, despite the fact that I was one of the most notable names in that community.
Since then, I've said no to such offers. That is, I'm happy to join a startup, but I will not be a very early employee. I will keep myself in a position where I can afford to take a break if I feel a burnout coming, something I could not do as a cofounder.
So yeah, I very much understand why not everybody creates a startup. That and the fact that once you have created the startup, you need to work on so many things that are not what you wanted to do in the first place, from gathering fundings to paying taxes to securing parking spaces for your employees.
Incumbents like Adobe , Meta or Google were allowed to reach their size by letting them kill or buy the competition every time something else was rising.
As long as regulators won't do anything about that, the next startup challenging an incumbent is just poised to be bought("congratulation on your exit!") and killed. Figma is the latest example of this.
Figma's not a great example of "buying to kill" though -- I'd guess that Adobe would sooner deprioritize their existing products that compete with Figma and redirect their effort. And I don't see much wrong with FB buying Instagram or Adobe buying Figma or Google buying YouTube because these services actually got better to the consumer's benefit (and I guess to a limited extent the enriched early employees perpetuate the startup ecosystem).
In the case of Google & YouTube, I wonder if YouTube would even be able to turn a profit as an independent company (maybe today they could, but for most of their life I suspect they were unable generate any profit). I love having YouTube and would have been sad if they had to close their doors because nobody had deep enough pockets to nurture it into profitability.
Cruise & GM is another example of a potentially good purchase, since self-driving tech is going to require a lot of patience.
To be clear, I don't think monopolies are healthy in general since they perturb natural supply/demand signals, but there's certainly nuance in terms of how some of these deals benefit/hurt the general public based on whether the monopolist entities have vision and appetite for long term investment that would otherwise be tough to swallow.
Google buying Youtube was the only outcome where Youtube would survive, at least at it was. The same way Napster wouldn't have survived as it was.
We're in agreement here, but it's I think a broader discussion on how media companies make money and where we stand as consumer, in particular how we feel about RIAA/MPAA.
I still think Google is doing a good job, better than most of us would have predicted, but I personally would have preferred a world where Youtube was viable on its own. Looking at Spofify for instance.
> FB buying Instagram
Even the regulating agencies that let the deal pass are looking back at it as a wrong decision.
I personally can't find any single meaningful
aspect where we benefit from FB owning Instagram.
I partially fault Instagram for having a shitty business plan aimed at being acquired from the start, and kinda wish they had to make the hard decisions at the end instead of selling the whole audience to the worst company to handle it.
I guess I shouldn't have lumped that purchase in with the others -- maybe IG should be separate indeed. I thought maybe it was similar to YouTube at the time of acquisition but rethinking it now it probably wasn't.
The 7-to-10-digit exits by incumbents is what funds the entire[1] startup industry: compare number of startup acquisitions vs IPOs in the last 10 years.
If the FTC clamps down on acquisitions, there's going to be correction in valuations, and some statups will get killed by VCs who view modest successes as not worth their time.
I share your view on this, but also think the main reasons startup take the exits are the VCs. A founder of a VC backed startup will need extraordinary arguments to not sell to an incumbent for a high enough price.
So the whole startup game becomes a petri dish for incumbents to see the natural selection of ideas and pick up the viable ones without paying for the failed experiments, and the VCs footing the bill as long as their balance sheet works out in the end.
> Why everyone isn't leaving Adobe, Meta, and Google to found their own AI / generative media startups astounds me.
Mostly because I think the main value is captured by embedding these things into existing programs and workflows. “AI-powered” won’t really attract anyone to a new app when it’s so easy to add AI to existing ones. Also basing an idea around an OpenAI API seems fragile.
But it could totally just be that I lack innovative ideas.
Some of those folks are locked in golden handcuffs, some are expats on green cards, and some simply enjoy a less complex life of that comes with being a well-paid employee working for a well-known company.
Just to add more details on TNs if anyone read this, the visa is locked to the sponsoring company but it's possible to hold multiple TNs at the same time. Took me a while to figure that out. It can raise an eyebrow when crossing the border as it isn't regular to have more than one visa.
Starting your own thing or being an owner is not for everyone and doesn’t always live up to expectations. There is more stress, you are the person of last resort for fixing problems and need to be able to lead a team well if the company does well. There is nothing wrong with forgoing that, taking a salary and living your life when being an owner or going to a start up will bleed into your personal life.
If you're only really interested in the problems you're working on it's tough to go from somewhere everything else is taken care of for you except your problem. No worries about infra or business. What you get is the more academic ones staying and more entrepreneurial leaving
And to clarify, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being academic-minded. Based on my experience, most of the invention (not "innovation", which is the step after that) comes from people who are academic-minded.
Most people who work at those large companies you mentioned are there because they don't want to take any risk. They are happy in the comfort of a large salary, occasionally interesting work, huge network of people and are afraid of being impacted by the industry wide layoffs.
This is a very uncharitable view. Those types would exist at any company.
There is pretty high turn-over at the large companies as well. People can be there to help build their resume, help make connections, learn the ropes at a large company and gain technology exposure, etc..
My time at Amazon, I did see some people leave to form companies. Generally it was when someone particularly smart found a clique of a few other smart people and they then all quit and go off and do something else.
Actually just quit my job at Meta to do just that. So you're not far off, I think you'll be surprised at how many ex-FAANG startups you'll see in the comings months.
At least in our blind chat it seems there are several other like-minded people.
WFH led to the greatest productivity increase in history - by leaps and bounds. Surely you’ve seen all the studies proving this? There must be 1000’s of WFH startups valued in the billions.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
The properly GDPR compliant cookie banners allow you to itemize certain items on the website's TOS that you may choose to accept or not accept. Website TOS are very useful for the company operating the website and the cookie rules allow you as a visitor to get some of that usefulness back.
Browsers like Firefox could hypothetically kill cookies in their browser tomorrow but doesn't. Or at least make a big stink about it. Do you think they should? Do you think we'd be better off as a society?
I think when you click "accept", you also accept to things like fingerprinting and storing a fingerprinted identity on their server, as well as perhaps supercookies, that allow your ISP to track you.
Browsers can't tell if a cookie is a generic setting ("chose Yes/No on a banner") or a uniquely identifiable one; and they can't tell if a cookie is functionally required (ID for a logged-in session) or not (ID to track random visitors).
The distinction is legal, not technical; so it has to be enforced by legal, not technical means.
Firefox COULD default to cookies off (with an in menu widget to force them on for non-automatic handling), and if any forum submission happens _ask_ if the end user wants to accept the site's cookies.
Looking at a typical site, a reasonable user might want to accept one (or perhaps a couple) of many dozens of cookies a site attempts to set. Choosing it manually per site per cookie is difficult but perhaps theoretically possible, however even that still requires cooperation from the site to honestly identify that this one is the cookie which is functionally required, and these fifty are for ad tracking, and ensuring that cooperation still requires legal means and can't be done with purely technical ones.
Furthermore, there is the important distinction about multiple uses of the same data. There are uniquely identifiable cookies that are functionally required for one purpose but the site may want to use it for other purposes as well (e.g. share that data with heir "trusted partners" for targeted advertising) for which user may reasonably want to refuse permission, so a browser accepting a cookie doesn't imply such permission and something extra is required.
From people I've talked to, SpaceX pay isn't any better than "old-space" companies (even before you look at the hourly breakdown) and their equity isn't very liquid.
I read it as more of a euphemism for "smart, passionate people who were previously burning themselves out in pursuit of a single man's glory" but maybe that's not accurate
Actually yes. SpaceX doesn’t pay a ton in salary, but their equity options have been incredibly valuable, so overall compensation has been good. If they’ve been around for a while and have had time for their shares to vest, they’re probably millionaires.
SpaceX is worth a ton of money, and even tho SpaceX is private, they do regular private sales so employees can sell their shares. The early employees in particular have made a LOT of money. Gwynne Shotwell, the President of SpaceX, for instance, is one of the earliest employees and is worth over $600 million now, which is greater than the net worth of Elon when he started SpaceX (including adjusting for inflation). (And she deserves it, too. Absolute rockstar.)
SpaceX really does show that hard work in a startup can pay off handsomely.
That sounds great indeed. Didn’t think of private sales that let you cash out your entire portfolio (or even a large fraction of it) were practiced. Anyone here have an idea of current spacex valuation?
From the opening paragraph
"Earlier this week, Elon Musk — Grimes’s ex-boyfriend, the pancake-haired chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and also the man who joked about starting a “TITS” University on Twitter — was named Time’s Person of the Year for 2021."
(Although I may be showing a certain degree of misunderstanding of my own given how different languages slice up reality in different ways, and 胸 may not mean quite what a literal translation suggests…)
- it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners - so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people. Governments basically do this by providing schooling and health care to children till age of 18 or so. I mean the RoI on teaching Elon to read was fairly high. I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings?
- if MMT is right, then the problem is not limited capital but limited investment opportunities- but if we invest in everyone - what does that mean or look like?
> it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners
There's an entire industry of highly compensated people built around the idea that you can pick investment winners.
> so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people.
Banks have commercial lending departments that fill this function. Doesn't help with startup capital, but I doubt that is the limiting factor preventing most people from starting a successful business.
>>> There's an entire industry of highly compensated people built around the idea that you can pick investment winners.
Just because someone pays you because you say you can pick winners, don't make it so. Top VCs like top Heege funds do get access to the best options - but the vast vast majority of those industries don't outperform index funds (after fees).
Plus even for the good ones, it's only the handful of major winners that compensate for their parlours ability to pick winners.
Bert Bachart was asked "what's the secret to a hit song" and he replied "If I knew that why would I write anything other than hit songs"
There is a world of difference between "I have an idea and if it goes wrong I have some good war stories" equity investment and "I have an idea and if it goes wrong I have a decade of debt to pay".
Really commercial lending departments are just part of the banks real roles of printing money and managing the temporal shifting of the liquidity illusion - ie helping existing businesses manage cashflow issues - startups is a tiny fraction of funding. yet startups is where the huge growth can only come from.
> I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings?
It’s not the primary school teacher that made the investment. It’s whomever was bankrolling salaries and expenses for teachers, cafeteria workers, buildings to house the activity …
The “lien” on future income would likely be “taxes” (assuming public school here.)
Yes - I agree I was just trying to find my way towards
"the human economy is a whole, even within countries seeing government as a cost to be minimised, taxes to be avoided and private investment as somehow privileged"
is a poor analysis.
I mean such a huge amount of private spending is trying to alter "predominant cultural norms" - advertising etc. yet breakout successful companies tend to break at just the right time that their PMFit barely needs advertising.
Less dinosaurs trying to look cool and more evolved companies would help - and it would help in that we have constant turn over of companies would mean we were measuring actual productivity better - very useful in MMT terms.
Somehow I am feeling towards our tournament style approach of allocating the power to allocate resources is false. We have young democracies, but work in dictatorships - and invest in similar ways.
I think basically we need to find better ways of "doing democracy". imagine voting on internal projects? it will hurt but if we think democracy works then open discussion and decision making actually will result in stronger companies - or just a return of capital !
This poses a bit if an interesting quandary for society.
Which society paid for Musk to be educated? He grew up in South Africa. How much tax does he pay there relative to where he built his stuff? Where should he pay his taxes?
What about other people who grow up elsewhere and move? Is it ok to hire a load of doctors from other countries?
There is the glimmer of a movement here - the Yelland led move to 15% minimum corporation tax is part of the move to solve this very problem. The EU is trying to solve this. But it's reaching the point of dealing with cross border fiscal policy and that's really hard without become a real federation.
And Inthink that is the ultimate global goal here. Which is ... science fiction
Imagine how immigration would look different if South Africa had a lien on ex-citizens taxation - if a slice of every sales tax paid in Nevada by a Mexican citizen went back to Mexico City.
I am not sure how it plays out - but it's possible that countries that benefit from immigration have to pay for it.
And even then it's only a handful of investements, with how much liquidity is/was in the market not surprising that people got a few million for moonshots given how the potential for a whole new industry.