Waiving due diligence is a crazy dumb decision. The one lesson in my career is always do due diligence, whether you're making a $40B transaction, or negotiating stock options with a startup. People cheat. A lot.
I agree. I don’t know what his motivations were or are. This whole thing about not accounts is even more ridiculous when you consider that Musk was tweeting about not accounts in January. Elon Musk knee bots were a problem before he made an aggressive acquisition maneuver, and knowingly waived his rights.
But people keep telling me this guy is a genius. I guess I’m not smart to understand his level of thinking.
I tend to look at track records. Jobs started Apple, Pixar, and came back to fix Apple 2.0.
That's three unicorn-grade successes. Within those, he had similar streams of successes, like OS-X and the iPhone.
That's genius.
Two footnotes:
- I'm not sure genius is a good reason to worship someone or treat them as a hero; it's to me, it's more about what you do with that genius. For example, Hitler was a genius speaker, and Stalin was a genius administrator. Many geniuses I've met are not-nice people.
- Jobs had one major failure: NeXT. NeXT was still pretty brilliant, even if it didn't do well in the market.
Waiving due diligence is a crazy dumb decision. The one lesson in my career is always do due diligence, whether you're making a $40B transaction, or negotiating stock options with a startup. People cheat. A lot.