While I have not reviewed a lot of Musk speak, let alone armed with enough to credibly review his commentary, but based on my own field and “respected technical leaders” that interview with customers and the press, with broad acknowledgement that they really know their stuff…
Most of them I’ve known can sound very confident and credible while saying completely incorrect stuff. No one tries to correct them because them being actually correct doesn’t add value and trying to fix that is more trouble than it’s worth much of the time. The people paying attention don’t know well enough to recognize they are wrong… usually…
Upon occasion my company throws one of these “geniuses” at a customer that actually knows what they are doing. Then I got to see our executive basically try to gaslight the audience when they challenged his competency. The sales people has to last minute pull in the actual technical people to try to repair our image after the customer interacted with the executive…
Now one would think, clearly, after such an embarrassment, surely the company learned to field the actual technical experts to deal with technical questions… But no, for every smart customer that is turned off by that executive, there’s 10 more clients that don’t know any better and respond so much better to his baseless confidence than actual competent discussion. Also, those 10 suckers will also get suckered into more high margin stuff versus the smart customer, that will be really good at getting the most cost effective products, with low margin and skipping the pointless addions.
That’s dead on. Great description, that’s exactly the dynamic he had with the public
The only difference is people who saw through the facade were happy to let him hype up good technologies… well, at least until we found out he’s always been a fascist at least
Yes, as long as you were on the side that benefits from success, it was better to leave things “simple” and not challenge the incorrect stuff out loud you aren’t going to “well actually…” the “expert” if it risks your job and/or the wrong stuff isn’t too important or too hard to overcome when the rubber meets the road.
Still, sitting in a room or otherwise being a party to a conversation where an executive is constantly being confidently incorrect and still praised as a smart expert likely making 7 figures is maddening.
While I have not reviewed a lot of Musk speak, let alone armed with enough to credibly review his commentary, but based on my own field and “respected technical leaders” that interview with customers and the press, with broad acknowledgement that they really know their stuff…
Most of them I’ve known can sound very confident and credible while saying completely incorrect stuff. No one tries to correct them because them being actually correct doesn’t add value and trying to fix that is more trouble than it’s worth much of the time. The people paying attention don’t know well enough to recognize they are wrong… usually…
Upon occasion my company throws one of these “geniuses” at a customer that actually knows what they are doing. Then I got to see our executive basically try to gaslight the audience when they challenged his competency. The sales people has to last minute pull in the actual technical people to try to repair our image after the customer interacted with the executive…
Now one would think, clearly, after such an embarrassment, surely the company learned to field the actual technical experts to deal with technical questions… But no, for every smart customer that is turned off by that executive, there’s 10 more clients that don’t know any better and respond so much better to his baseless confidence than actual competent discussion. Also, those 10 suckers will also get suckered into more high margin stuff versus the smart customer, that will be really good at getting the most cost effective products, with low margin and skipping the pointless addions.
That’s dead on. Great description, that’s exactly the dynamic he had with the public
The only difference is people who saw through the facade were happy to let him hype up good technologies… well, at least until we found out he’s always been a fascist at least
Yes, as long as you were on the side that benefits from success, it was better to leave things “simple” and not challenge the incorrect stuff out loud you aren’t going to “well actually…” the “expert” if it risks your job and/or the wrong stuff isn’t too important or too hard to overcome when the rubber meets the road.
Still, sitting in a room or otherwise being a party to a conversation where an executive is constantly being confidently incorrect and still praised as a smart expert likely making 7 figures is maddening.