>Elon Musk provides another example. Today, Tesla is worth more than $1 trillion. Without his will and personality, Tesla probably wouldn’t exist.
Yes it would. Mark Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard founded Tesla. They were later forced out by Elon.
They were arguably quite poorly compensated for their part in starting this company.
This speaks to the fundamental problem with this theory - it's all very well saying that Elon is worth his money because Tesla would be nothing without him, but what if it actually would have been wildly successful without him and he mostly rode the wave with his $6 million series A investment?
Of course, you cant prove what "would" have happened, you only know what actually did, so your valur is measured by whomever tells the most compelling story.
You can't prove it, but Musk is not a one-hit wonder. He's transformed the space industry by sheer force of will (as a part time founder & CEO), as Tesla has done for EVs, so it's quite reasonable to assign the success of Tesla to him.
Getting funding, finding the most talented engineers, deciding what to build and motivating people are the high-level skills needed from a founder/CEO. I don't see any argument here against his importance to all companies that he's been involved in. Nobody's claiming he's building rockets all by himself.
In this case it makes sense but in general you have to also ask about the environment. Was money cheap in that era? Was there a favourable media environment for that type of business? Was politics favourable? Etc.
Yes it would. Mark Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard founded Tesla. They were later forced out by Elon.
They were arguably quite poorly compensated for their part in starting this company.
This speaks to the fundamental problem with this theory - it's all very well saying that Elon is worth his money because Tesla would be nothing without him, but what if it actually would have been wildly successful without him and he mostly rode the wave with his $6 million series A investment?
Of course, you cant prove what "would" have happened, you only know what actually did, so your valur is measured by whomever tells the most compelling story.