It's easy for anyone with an idea and a dream to do a startup and spend someone else's money.
Try to raise a significant amount of money. It's not that easy.
Sure, but it's what people
do these days. Hardly anyone puts up their own money any more, let alone practically
all of it to the tune of $100M.
His multiple successes suggest to me that it may be more than just luck. Same applies to Steve Jobs.
IIRC Paypal was not doing great financially, and ebay bought them out fairly cheaply in the scheme of things at the time.
Someone else could have come along at any time and pipped PayPal for six leaving them worthless.
I'm not saying it was all luck, of course not, but some luck
always plays a part in any success story.
There are countless people that had a better idea and better products and worked harder and were smarter businessmen than Musk, but many of them luck-out and never get the financial reward Musk did. As mentioned, PayPal actually got bought cheaply for $1.4BN. Not a Nest-like lucky dip of $3.2BN
Same for Telsa and Space-X. They were both on the verge of bandruptcy, as in weeks away for Tesla, before the 4th Space-X rocket finally worked and they got the NASA contract days later. That saved Space-X and Tesla. If that rocket failed, it's likely this thread would never have started.