That's not remotely saying the same thing. Just because someone could do it doesn't mean it will happen. These things require MUCH more then just the possibility of it happening. For example I could go out right now and murder someone. Doesn't mean I will do it. I'm certainly capable of it. In fact most people are in this exact situation yet there are only a tiny amount of murders happening each day compared to the people capable of it.

So the real question is. Is there someone else with a similar or better drive then Musk, that is as smart as Musk, that has as much discipline, has the right personality and at the right time. The answer is much more likely to be no then yes in my opinion. Because if the answer is yes we would have another Musk or close to it.

I don't know. I happen to believe that many, many people are capable of running and growing a successful business, and that the limiting factor (and the reason they haven't already) is access to capital, not some special personality trait or pedigree or family background or really any particular expertise. Definitely millions, probably tens of millions, and maybe even hundreds of millions of people are capable of starting the next SpaceX-like enterprise, and the lack of access to $100M is the only thing stopping them.

We'll never know, though, because no bank or investor just hands out start-up capital to nobodies.

(I also happen to believe, and HN is going to hate this, that the high percentage of businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it. The trick that hasn't been solved yet is consistently finding who those many capable people are beforehand.)

Have you had any ideas that would move the world forward a bit, but never acted on it? Did any of them still not end up existing after a few years? That's the difference between an individual acting. Those things could've moved the world forward, only by you, but you didn't, so they didn't.

Thiel is right about the indeterminate optimism and determinate optimism outlined in Zero to One. Many people just expect things will naturally get better, no need to actually do it yourself, that it will happen anyway. So it's funny that the things that need doing only get done by people that believe they need to do it. (practically all of the tech and company builders believe the Zero to One thesis)

Without Musk, what space industry would there have been? Blue Origin was a me-too a decade later. Virgin was a me-too failure. Boeing can't get their astronauts back right now. If you remove Musk, everything that's bad right now is delayed another decade.

> businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it.

Doesn't that disprove you previous hypothesis? Unless you think that the people who are handing out the money and the ones they are handing it to are somehow exceptionally incompetent? Why would that be the case?

I am saying I think it's possible that investors use terrible and backward signals for who to invest in, and that might be an alternate explanation of the 90+% miss rate (and 1-5% unicorn rate) of a cohort of invested companies. To the point where their investment choices might be even worse than random chance. Almost like they are investing based on the inverse of what they should be. We'll never know because there is no counterfactual fund that invests in the companies nobody else invested in, to test whether they were false negatives.

To some extent building and running a business is a zero sum game, you don't have to be good at it you [just] have have to better at it than other people.

Tech is also special in that it's often a winner takes all (to varying extents) market. A bunch of small/medium companies selling similar products usually can't survive long-term since geographic barriers aren't really a thing anymore.

So I simple don't think it's possible for 50-90% of all the companies were talking about to survive and grow at a pace that's fast enough for VCs. If they can't grow they'll will be outcompeted/bought out by companies that can't. Even if they can survive and grow at a modest pace long-term there is no point for VCs to invest into them.

I don't see how picking more competent people could significantly change this situation. They are all still competing for slices of the same even if that pie is constantly growing entrenched player with a lot of resources have a much better shot at capturing that growth than any newcomer.

> We'll never know because there is no counterfactual fund that invests in the companies nobody else invested in, to test whether they were false negatives.

I don't see how could that work unless VCs reduce the number of companies that they invest in by a magnitude or two.

> businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it.

Doesn't that disprove you previous hypothesis? Unless you think that the people who are handing out the money and the ones they are handing it to are somehow exceptionally incompetent?

Yes many people are capable of running and growing a succesful. business. That's not Elon though. Elon has grown and is running multiple industry leading at the same time.

Sort of. Because a lot of what Musk was doing didn't make much sense at the time. Basically you needed a person who was already very successful and had a lot of clout and was willing to bet all that on a boondoggle (certainly not in hindsight). There aren't that many people who are in that position and are willing to go all in on something like (while having the vision, skills and lucky to pull it off and prove everyone wrong).