I'm not sure "mature" is a word that can be applied to anything Musk touches. When Tesla abruptly stopped shipping right-hand-drive cars in the UK, they included complimentary grabbing sticks with the left-hand-drive cars that were delivered to buyers, in response to customer complaints about not being able to use toll booths.

Founder or no, I do think he deserves he credit for the company's early growth and viability, though. At a time when it needed showmanship, he was its showman. But it has long since outgrown him.

> I'm not sure "mature" is a word that can be applied to anything Musk touches.

Certainly Musk is very far from the traditional notions of maturity that you'd expect from a corporate executive, and clearly Musk doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's mature or not. But there's absolutely no question that Tesla and SpaceX are both as mature as any corporation could possibly be.

> At a time when it needed showmanship, he was its showman.

I never understood this line of thinking. I think Musk is a self-evdently terrible showman[0] but everyone has retconned some supposed showmanship as a component explanation for Tesla's market success. In my opinion, Tesla never needed a showman, because the product itself was always the "showman." Musk could have handed launch event duties off to a marketing exec and the outcome would have been functionally identical.[1] Perhaps marginally fewer early sales, but they were manufacturing constrained for so long that it wouldn't have had any impact on production ramp or total deliveries.

I'd bet at least 99% of Model 3/Y buyers never saw the launch event. They bought the car because of word-of-mouth from satisfied customers and positive reviews. The launch event sold a bunch of pre-orders, but there were enough people interested in the car to fill their order book for a long time. Within a year, these cars were selling themselves.

There's a lot of parallel with Jobs. In Jobs' case you also had a pre-eminent showman, but ultimately the star of every show was the product itself, not the slide deck or the speaker's tone. Both Musk and Jobs were obsessed with the product, and steered the ship of their respective corporations to focus on making a product worthy of dramatic reveal. This meant knowing what about the product actually mattered. (Consider, for example, whether it was more important for Tesla to focus on software or panel gaps.)

When the "Model 2" is ready, Tesla could do literally nothing to launch the vehicle. Just add it to their website and they'd sell everything they could possibly manufacture. Its continued success will be driven by customer satisfaction with the product, not marketing. The only point in having a launch event would be fan service.

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[0] I would distinguish his skill as a presenter with skill as a speaker. He's a terrible and often cringe-worthy presenter. But when he's talking about things he's passionate about, he can be a deeply compelling speaker.

[1] Arguably better because a C-suite in suit-and-tie would have stuck to the script and not waffled on with overly optimistic predictions about future R&D milestones.

> clearly Musk doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's mature or not.

That's not the problem with him, though. The problem is, he clearly doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's an asshole or not.

And since he seems to be such a huge one of those, it would be nice if he cared that pretty much everyone thinks he is, because then maybe he'd try to stop being one.

> The problem is, he clearly doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's an asshole or not.

It's a natural consequence of a progressivist assumption that all ultra-rich people are assholes. Given that, you can't fault an ultra-rich person from concluding that being called an asshole is noise to be disregarded. IMHO the real problem is too many people are consumed with having an opinion about whether he's an asshole or not. What I see is a bunch of highly online people who utterly exude delight in saying anything mean about Elon, which is a sad state for them to be in — regardless of Elon's inherent virtues or iniquity.

In the past couple of years he's fallen much too far down the right-wing rabbit hole for my tastes, but I don't blame him given how the political left are constantly berating him for not adhering to the Correct Opinion™ on the full suite of progressive issues. The left have forgotten how to win arguments on their merits, or how to tolerate a diversity of views. The left have rejected him, but the right still want to talk to him, and people wonder why his views are being increasingly shaped by right-wing perspectives.

Regardless, who cares what Elon thinks anyway? I don't form my political opinions by agreeing with whatever any ultra-rich person says, and I don't know anyone who does.

> It's a natural consequence of a progressivist assumption that all ultra-rich people are assholes.

Or he feels he doesn't have to care, as a natural consequence of there being so many people holding the regressivist assumption that being ultra-rich means one can't be, or it doesn't matter if one is, an asshole.

> Regardless, who cares what Elon thinks anyway?

Far too many people, it seems, including quite a lot of the HN commentariat.

> I don't form my political opinions by agreeing with whatever any ultra-rich person says, and I don't know anyone who does.

Look around a bit better then; there's droves of them.