Andy Serwer makes an argument for breaking-up big tech:
I think it is a mistake to lump Musk's companies with Amazon, Google, and Facebook. While the latter have built verticals at or approaching monopolies, the same cannot be said of Musk's enterprises. Tesla is highly capitalized but is a small player in terms of market share. An argument can be made that it is much more prevalent in the EV market, but it keeps the barrier to entry high only due to the excellence of its products, something the other vendors have been unable to match and that a breakup would not solve.
Furthermore, I do not understand what Serwer means by "In Musk’s case, his companies should end up as separate public companies."... they are already!
Innovation is also at the root of SpaceX's success; the idea that it is better to start simple, be bold, fail often, improve, and more importantly, act, rather than plan and design for years and try to anticipate any and all issues before even the first attempt.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22221214/elon-musk-charity-donations-richest-person
It seems, from the outside looking in, that Musk's strength lies in his natural ability to judge and anticipate the results of a course of action in fields that he knows sufficiently about (engineering). He also builds extremely high performance team.
These are commodities that are in short-supply. Therefore, I believe that it is where he should put some of his focus and cash on:
- Where it doesn't have enough in-built knowledge to make an assessment, he gets people that do and that can be the Musk of Healthcare, Musk of the Arts, etc...
- Have a fund that give $1,000,000, no strings attached to a startup that pass Musk's and his board-of-advisors' sniff test.
- Hundred, if not thousand of companies would be created, disrupting all fields of activities, and hopefully, with a success rate higher than the typical venture-capital backed initiatives, due to the superior initial assessment of need/viability of solution
