I remember some statements around pricing for Tesla models by him that made me wonder (I think it was something like 'a Tesla model should cost the same amount everywhere on earth', which struck me as both admirable and naive), but having built up multiple billion-dolllar companies it's hard to deny that he must have made a lot of good decisions.
I think there may very well be such a thing as business acumen, I know several people who were succesful building multiple businesses in different industries (nowhere near a scale that you'd have heard of them, but still). Some skills like negotiation, sales/marketing/PR, motivating employees, being good with numbers,... are universally useful for all kinds of business.
Business acumen seems to be a pretty broad term. There is a subset of skills useful in many situations and for many business but maybe for some business some specific skills that are outside of 'business acumen' were the trigger for success.
Maybe Musk has bad 'business acumen' but is good at coordinating engineering teams and that lead to the success of SpaceX and Tesla but doesn't work for Twitter because its not really an engineering problem.
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I remember some statements around pricing for Tesla models by him that made me wonder (I think it was something like 'a Tesla model should cost the same amount everywhere on earth', which struck me as both admirable and naive), but having built up multiple billion-dolllar companies it's hard to deny that he must have made a lot of good decisions.
I think there may very well be such a thing as business acumen, I know several people who were succesful building multiple businesses in different industries (nowhere near a scale that you'd have heard of them, but still). Some skills like negotiation, sales/marketing/PR, motivating employees, being good with numbers,... are universally useful for all kinds of business.
Business acumen seems to be a pretty broad term. There is a subset of skills useful in many situations and for many business but maybe for some business some specific skills that are outside of 'business acumen' were the trigger for success.
Maybe Musk has bad 'business acumen' but is good at coordinating engineering teams and that lead to the success of SpaceX and Tesla but doesn't work for Twitter because its not really an engineering problem.