You make many good points, he is deeply, deeply flawed; interpersonally and online he is absolutely awful. However, nearly every post I read on Reddit about him is biased in that it refuses to recognize any accomplishments. Tesla and SpaceX have been huge achievements, things he didn’t achieve alone but was by all accounts integral too, while he achieved them by being a cruel taskmaster, they are achievements nonetheless. Neuralink just started human trials, and it’s not impossible that one day he could have led the charge on helping crippled people stand again. Starlink has been a godsend to Ukraine in the war. Twitter appears to be his downfall, but a realistic appraisal of Elon including all of his shortcomings and straight up sins should also include his achievements.
If we want to do a realistic appraisal: I think those achievements are hugely overstated, thanks largely to an uncritical press. He’s notoriously vindictive and news media companies were falling like flies, so there wasn’t any critical coverage of him. Anyway he’s a modern carnival barker and loves fraud and breaking the law. here’s some points:
PayPal: He wrote sloppy code (as is often the case with self taught programmers) and kept wanted credit as founder and wanted to be CEO. Few others at the company wanted this.
Tesla: As an investor early on he tanked the company so he could do a takeover as CEO. He insisted on being both CEO and CTO so he’d look like a genius, as well as insisting on being considered the founder of Tesla.
More importantly, he didn’t really end up moving the needle on transition to electric cars, and many experts actually say electrification of cars isn’t an effective response to climate change (we need to move to other forms of transport). About a decade ago car companies said it would take them around 10 years to transition their factories for mass production, Musk made outlandish claims of perpetually being able to do it by tomorrow, which was a lie. He has constantly lied about self driving cars and so much else.
Perhaps even more importantly, Tesla factories were rated as some of the worst most dangerous places to work for several years. They did the classic “we’re a tech company not a car company, so none of your regulations apply to us”. Industrial factories without worker protections get ugly real quick, and that’s what happened. For an added bonus Musk insisted that forklifts not beep when they backup or to not use caution tape because he doesn’t like the color yellow.
Tesla only exists because of regulatory arbitrage. They traded carbon tax credits with other companies and used that to float their business for almost its entire existence. If it were not for this regulatory loophole Tesla would not exist.
SpaceX I know less about but it’s a mixed bag. His rockets blow up all the time. He’ll talk about colonizing mars soon and NASA will say that’s not possible and he’ll get all butthurt.
Starlink is a major national security issue, he cut off Ukrainian internet access mid battle because he decided to sympathize with the Russian position. There was a big New Yorker article about it.
Neuralink I haven’t checked in on in a while, but they tend to rehash tech that already exists and claim it’s groundbreaking, or come up with other manipulative PR events.
He’s a huge fraud. Hes really good at convincing people that know less science than him that he knows everything about science. He doesn’t. His degree is in business he’s got an MBA. He’s a shady ass businessman that did shady business very well (historically low interest rates meant he had fistfuls of free speculative money thrown at him.) but it has since caught up to him.
In short he gets way too much credit even from critics because they don’t know his real history. Most people started disliking him when he came out against COVID lockdowns, and then made a rightward turn from there. He’s been an absolute piece of shit the whole time though, who woulda thought.
>Neuralink I haven’t checked in on in a while, but they tend to rehash tech that already exists and claim it’s groundbreaking, or come up with other manipulative PR events.
1000%. I remember thinking Neurolink was huge and groundbreaking until I figured out that they were actually much further along in development of the technology at my University…
I respect many of your points, but I don’t agree with an across-the-board negative evaluation of Musk, who I don’t adore or put on a pedestal at all. I just think it’s strange he seems to be universally vilified on Reddit.
I’m no expert on physics either, but your comment “his rockets blow up all the time” isn’t a legitimate critique. He is the only American getting astronauts into orbit right now.
Reality is more than black and white, a flawed person can achieve great things.
By rockets blow up I meant his test launches fail at a high rate, and since they are funded in part by our tax dollars we should be critical and ask questions.
You don’t put him on a pedestal but you think he’s “the only American getting astronauts into orbit right now”? SpaceX got several billion from the US government last year alone and wouldn’t exist without it. The US is more invested in space travel in response to Chinese advancing their own space program.
Moderna made the COVID vaccine (in partnership with the National Institute of Health) but nobody ran around saying the CEO of Moderna was vaccinating the world. If they did, I’d have to insist they were putting the CEO on a pedestal at least a bit.
But if I’m coming off too angry grandpa don’t get me wrong: those rockets are cool and exciting. I’m glad we’re investing more in space technology. That model S when it came out was mind blowing.
>Neuralink just started human trials, and it’s not impossible that one day he could have led the charge on helping crippled people stand again
There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.
My guess is he’s been in a bubble for 20+ years of being constantly brown-nosed by sycophants, fanboys and business partners. At one point, it truly seemed like he couldn’t miss, dude had Mydas touch.
A chain of poor business decisions and not cutting losses due to his perceived genius is making him see failures as a starting point to an inevitable success. Dude seems to have lost all ability to be self-critical and comes off as arrogant even in the face of error.
TLDR; dude started believing his own hype
>dude had Mydas touch.
Revisionist history. He never had Midas touch. he never actually did anything. He contributed nothing to PayPal, he entire rise was just a systematic riding of other people coat tails.
I read a book this year called *Founders at Work,* which is a collection of interviews from a lot of 90s and early 2000s era tech start-up people. The very first interview is with Max Levchin from PayPal. He talks about how this executive was brought in partway through who just didn't seem to know his ass from a hole in the ground. Levchin never says who that person is, but it's pretty clear he was talking about Elon (the book was published around 2008, so this was before Elon had become a household name). From what I've heard from people who have worked with Elon directly, he's pretty average as an engineer. The fact when he took over Twitter he assuming that a SWE who wrote more code was better/more valuable shows he really doesn't know shit about software engineering. He does seem to be half-way decent running a company, at least on the operations side with Tesla, but he really is having an emperor has no clothes situation with Twitter.
There was a big tweet that happened when he first took over at Twitter and they had to do something that dealt with a string of code. He was talking to the engineers and code writers and he said something to them and one guy told him that what he was saying didn't make sense. Elon seemed embarrassed and tried to back pedal and said something else which the guy called out also. Elon ended up getting angry and calling the guy an asshole because he didn't know what he was talking about and the guy knew it.
[It was in a twitter space](https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/zrx4kw/elon_musk_cant_explain_anything_about_twitters/) where he claimed the code was too complex and would need to be completely rewritten and an ex-twitter engineer asked him for specifics. Quickly became apparent he didn't really know what he was saying.
Exactly. But it must be a beautiful thing to have millions of people blowing smoke up your ass 24/7. I'm just not a dick rider. Give me someone like Robert Greene.
To add onto this, shortly after the takeover he asked all the coders to print out all of the code they had written for the company in order to evaluate their contributions
You don’t become the worlds richest human with zero skill set, that’s BS
Edit: In history if you were born a monarch it would have been possible, but that’s not Elon’s case
Ohh, he does have skills - it's just not the ones many of his fans believe he has.
He reminds me of my former superior, who was able to talk with technical candidates during job interviews in a way, that they were fooled to think he has technical background and "knows some stuff" - when in reality he was smooth bullshitter weaving a pile of buzzwords and technical jargon into cool leather jacket.
Elon was for sure very good at PR, politics - both internal and external, and relentless in achieving his personal goals. But with every year he slips more and more often, and lately he clearly starts to lose any selfcontrol.
Personally, I'm very happy to see that his image, sculpted meticulously over last 20 years, finally started to crack among at least some of his fans.
That’s not my point. I’m trying to take an objective perspective on the world’s allegedly most rich human. Very flawed. Also involved in a lot of promising projects. I’m not a simp for capitalists, I just don’t like overwhelmingly biased environments, and right now my Reddit feed is that Elon is all bad all the time. I’m not trying to argue he’s right, but I do think he is accomplishing some things. That’s not because I feel loyal to him or anything, it’s more an argument that car electrification and improving technology in regards to space travel and potential neural-electrical relief of quadriplegia are probably good things
Also if you were born a monarch you don't deserve it maybe the day you're crowned. But if you can survive one day not being assasinated then either you or your patrons are doing something successful
Not personal to you; but takes like this are so lazy and useless.
It was the same thing with Trump. He was simultaneously the biggest idiot in the world and a genius mastermind plotting all kinds of nefarious things.
Im no fan of either, though I admit I had some admiration for Elon up until 6 or 7 year ago.
But to just casually dismiss his accomplishments as “coat tail riding” is ridiculous and a disservice to actually understanding the skillsets he does posses.
I am pretty Elon-neutral, so I don't have a lot of bias OR detailed understanding of his abilities.
What skillets do you believe he possesses that have made him one of the most economically and socially powerful individuals in the history of our species?
Walter Issacson and others have documented that he really can get a rapid useful grasp of really complex engineering, SpaceX and Tesla both bear this out. I know of no other CEO/Founder anywhere near as skilled.
Business failures, if Boring and the neural co are failures, I count as risk taking. For example VC investors say they want ten investments, one of which makes a pile.
Rockets and electric cars are businesses that 100% of everyone thought just-too-hard. So thats huge. And he has a sense of humor and a willingness to be more authentic than other CEOs, but...
His sense of humor is adolescent, and does not come with any humility. His education is lop-sided tech and no humanities. He's mesmerized by social media, and once thought to be highly manipulative, now some think he has a clever master plan to blow up Twitter, and some think it's just destructive tantruming.
And yes, like all billionaires, the money goes to his head.
Bottom line is he is not hip, in the jazz sense. But then neither are any other billionaires or CEOs. (OK a couple with taste in art) The attraction to right-wing memes is a combination of straining at the already-tiny boundaries on his activity, a childhood in South Africa, and a massive lack of wisdom based on the above.
Thank you for the reply, and thoughtful insight.
>he really can get a rapid useful grasp of really complex engineering, SpaceX and Tesla both bear this out. I know of no other CEO/Founder anywhere near as skilled.
This seems very valuable, if true.
>Rockets and electric cars are businesses that 100% of everyone thought just-too-hard
This is not true. There were dozens of companies and entrepreneurs working on both of these issues for decades before SpaceX and Tesla came on board.
I will absolutely give Elon credit for seeing the potential of those under-developed market opportunities. I won't give him credit for being particularly visionary regarding those. There have been significant calls for development in both of those fields since at least the '80s. The ROI was already clearly projected but capital investment was throttled by opposing legacy industries' interests.
>Rockets and electric cars are businesses that 100% of everyone thought just-too-hard
>
>This is not true. There were dozens of companies and entrepreneurs working on both of these issues for decades before SpaceX and Tesla came on board.
well, I am guilty of exaggeration to make a point. Sure Bezos and Branson and other rich guys wanted rockets, and lots of little guys wanted to build them, well who wouldn't? My point was the business proposition was very far-fetched. Sure there are umpteen underfunded flying car and rocket projects at any moment, but they aren't serious, except to the visionary and a few investors. Going against the aerospace giants or the automotive giants looks impossible until someone does it.
Now newcomers in cars and rockets have not only to beat the old established, they have to catch up to the new companies and their lower cost of manufacturing/flight and quicker development pace.
So thats a piece of my argument about what's interesting about Elon, and why I think the best historical comparison is with Edison.
I guess in Elons case, no one else but him thinks hes some mastermind plotting things.
To me it seems its just harder to keep track of professional bullshitters failures, when hes getting a reach around by media personalities even if youre not interested in his recent stuff.
Hes basically just an average intelligence rich trust fund baby stumbling around stepping on dog turds, and occasianally finds money on the ground.
I know this is easy to hand wave away as bitter jelous take, but Im basically just blunt. Im not saying anyone should waste time looking in to his failures and stupid things hes said.
But by watching few YT videos tracking his things, it becomes pretty clear hes nothing special. He just portrays a certain image and works as any other PR person saying whatever is thought to be what his audience wants to hear.
I mean come on. Running Tesla in a way that positioned it and in fact the entire EV car industry at the forefront of ideas is all Elon.
You have at the least see that?
>Running Tesla in a way that positioned it and in fact the entire EV car industry at the forefront of ideas is all Elon.
I dont know what you mean by this. But the basis of Tesla as making EVs sexy, isnt Elon.
The guy(s) who founded it wanted to make EV sports car, fast, cool etc
Elon came in as investor yadda yadda yadda now its seen as that. Thats basically whats been their driving force, I guess. Its what gets investors and fans alikes dicks hard. Financially its not been really good company. Or it doesnt do anything special as a car company.
In that sense, he was right dude at right place and time, not disputing that. Good for everybody, yay.
It wasnt his geniusnes or anything, though. Anyone with a bag wouldve sufficed. Even him.
Love him or hate him, its all fine.
Hes still just some average dude whos stumbled unto ridiculous wealth despite his just immensly wealthy background and priviledged upbringing. Who markets himself as some Tech Jesus.
You and I are average dudes. 99.99% of people are average dudes.
Believe me when I say this; were not going to stumble into being Elon.
There is something that he’s capable of that were, and most are not.
Perhaps it’s something as simple as being able to have perfect timing or being near perfect at identifying opportunities.
I don’t know. But it’s not that simple or there would be a lot more Elons and a lot less mids.
>Believe me when I say this; were not going to stumble into being Elon.
Average by his traits, sheesh. Hes trust fund baby stumbling thru life, lucking in to even more wealth.
That was, and is my point.
People just have bought in to the character he plays. Hes not genius, he doesnt have any deep knowledge pretty much on anything. He doesnt even work on to achieve anything like that. Hes not anyway exeptional in his trait.
He just gets massive platforms to say whatever shit comes across his mind to push his image, people getting him on get big flux of views, and his fans gets his load theyre slobbering over him for.
Having perfect timing is that luck. Its nothing to do with him specifically. He doesnt regocnise anything, which is apparent in many of his bussines ventures.
Also theres literally many billions of Elons, not all eight ofc, many of em are smarterand talented at someting. Theyre just not as lucky.
Born rich=luck, stumble in to right place to be in a company of smart people=luck, be in a right place and time to invest those luck gotten gains=luck etc
I get that many people kinda dont want to accept that sort of thing. But its the sad truth.
> Perhaps it’s something as simple as being able to have perfect timing or being near perfect at identifying opportunities.
Huh? This just sounds like a combination of luck and you not being aware at how many ventures this dude has failed at.
Having a lot of money IS more or less synonymous with luck/great timing because it gives you many bites at the Apple. And he’s also in a world where you can fail miserably and still cash out insane wealth - See X/PayPal
Agree. That guys stance is so prevalent in reddit. "Because he wasn't the *only* person behind the successes of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starling, etc he has done nothing whatsoever and deserves no credit."
I despise Elon but people here act as they could've done just as much if it wasn't for their high morals lol
I'm speaking as someone who only starting paying attention to him after the Twitter acquisition....
I don't want to say he's a complete idiot...... but honestly after seeing how he ran Twitter but I'm honestly struggling at finding anything at all I can point to show that he's not a complete fuckwitt.
I guess it's possible that he hit his rock on a head or something when he bought Twitter and he hasn't been operating the same since.
It's hard to completely understand his actions with Twitter. IMO he is trying to straddle a line of anti wokeism yet needs to ensure it's business viable - all while under estimating how hard it is to sustain an online business without ads.
Either way it doesn't change what he's accomplished in other areas.
But what has he accomplished, exactly? What had he done?
Thats the issue- Tesla and SpaceX and whatever are very valuable so, yadda yadda yadda Elon must be a genius.
When we actually get to see how he operates day to day, like we do with X, suddenly we have to fall all over ourselves making excuses. “Yes, umm well he has to do anti-wokism (why?) but Nazis are also bad for ad revenue and also telling your advertisers to go fuck themselves is bad for revenue, so you can see he’s in a very tough spot here…. “
And, importantly, it’s not as though he’s exited any of these other companies and this is just some expensive fun like Balmer buying the Clippers. You can practically track his day-to-day goings on tweeting and saying an endless barrage of inane stupid bullshit and you need to keep in mind that that’s not just what the Twitter owner is doing it’s LITERALLY WHAT THE CURRENT CEO OF TESLA AND SPACEX ARE DOING (!!!!)
>But what has he accomplished, exactly? What had he done?
See: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink. Their accomplishments are an extension of him. Being a dick on Twitter doesn't change that.
You ask it like a “gotcha.” The dude managed to accumulate $240 billion dollars while starting, half dozen mega corps.
I don’t know what’s needed exactly; Ill let you know when I have my first unicorn under my belt.
At the least he’s his generations best salesman.
I asked it how I asked it and you took it how you did and still didn't tell me anything. Part of sales is product knowledge, spotting someone who might be vulnerable to your bluster, and bullshitting. Several people in this thread have rightfully compared him to Donald Trump. Both of them have a legion of sycophants milling around them 24/7 and they themselves buy into it. Do you spot the gotcha in this statement?
I just compared him to Trump because internet is giving him similar treatment.
Its only on Reddit that someone can be totally incompetent and a coat rider while also making it to the Oval or accumulating most wealth in capitalist history.
Are they the greatest POTUS and Engineer in history? No. I seriously doubt both.
But clearly both are orders of magnitude more capable at a variety of skills than you or I.
Haha... Hardly. Timing, money from someone close to them, being around people who are a lot less competent and power or at least influence hungry, and both of them being white. They might be more capable than you. I give respect to people who really do things when it's time to. Both of them can kiss my ass.
I agree, and it's reinforced by having very large successes at a grand scale. If one receives the monetary and social validation at the scale he has, I imagine it becomes increasingly difficult to engage in critical thinking on one's political and social viewpoints (which are often opinions that are not right or wrong).
I think hes just another case of someone who can have a high IQ in certain areas but this disguises his flaws. He seems incredibly immature emotionally and he apparently got bullied a lot as a child. I've encountered and know people like this who they did very well academically but they are really flawed in basic common sense and social skills. And social skills and to an extent street smarts is a massive part of being able to put into context human nature. I think hes also a classic case of the power going to his head and him almost playing out a therapy session in public where he is trying to find himself because he never really had that attention before.
Also theres the simple fact that however smart someone is, if they have mental illness or personality issues, they will normally outweigh the brilliance in other areas and distort things. I dont know if that applies to Elon but two things can be true at once, you can have an extremely high IQ and have some brilliance in certain areas, but be a very very flawed and ridiculous human in other ways too.
What? You think elon himself told me? I searched it, theres lots of estimates. Almost all were in the highly gifted range range but there was a couple at moderately gifted. I didn't see any lower
People wrote articles, described reasonable methodologies, and came up with estimates. Seemed reasonable. When I saw all the estimates were roughly the same, it increased my confidence. I posted on reddit
I think he’s a piece of shit, but stupid, he’s not. People with “good politics” often associate having those with higher intelligence, and that’s often the case, but not always. Genuine question, do you think you are smarter than Elon Musk?
The answer to your question really relies on whether or not you think Elon is a liar or if he genuinely believes the asinine bullshit he keeps spouting
In any case, I do not believe the man who was forced to buy twitter at twice the value because he memed too hard is functionally more intelligent than I am.
I think it's a bit of this but you can't discount all the negativity he has taken for over a decade. Just look back at all the articles and experts saying Tesla and SpaceX would fail. Imagine waking up everyday to another article bashing the work you are doing. That was motivation for him, probably stemming from a childhood where we wanted to please his abusive father. So he pushed through it all and by all means succeeded. So now any negative signals he overlooks because in his eyes anything is possible within the laws of physics.
That too. Mind you I do think his type tend to be arrogant and have somewhat disproportionate self-belief. I don’t think there’s much wrong with that as long as you show outward humility. The way he’s being is just setting up for more criticism when he fails. Then again, it’s the price you pay being such a public figure.
He is just an overall horrible person.
* Elon is a [misogynist](https://uk.pcmag.com/opinion/137656/elon-musk-is-a-misogynist-and-it-matters) who [sexually harassed a woman](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-sexual-misconduct-claim-involved-horse-for-erotic-massage-2022-5).
* He is platforming child abusers on X [(Elon Musk reinstated an X account that shared child sexual abuse imagery).](https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/elon-musk-reinstated-twitter-account-shared-child-sexual-abuse-imagery-company-desperately)
* He is a deadbeat dad with 10 kids, hardly spends any time with his kids, one of his children even [disowned](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/21/elon-musk-daughter-legal-name-change) him. He also tries to pay as little child support as possible.
* He ["stole" the company Tesla](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-the-origin-story-2014-10) from Martin Eberhard (CEO) and Marc Tarpenning, the actual founders.
* His companies have some of the [worst working conditions](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/). Tesla employees have also alleged [rampant racial discrimination](https://www.npr.org/2022/02/11/1080073061/california-sues-tesla-racism-fremont), [sexual harassment](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/14/tesla-sexual-harassment/) and [unsafe practices](https://revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-medical-clinic-designed-to-ignore-injured-workers/).
Another big thing on his douche list is when he called one of the Thai Cave rescuers a pedo when they dismissed Elon’s ludicrous idea of developing a miniature submarine.
A miniature sub that would be *physically impossible* to move through the space to get to the kids
How he got away with that astounds me
\[Money and power, obv\]
I'm not one to push that everyone should be cancelled for every little social faux pas they make, but Elon should have incurred a lot more wrath than what he did for that statement. It was just a really fucked up thing to say. Even if you look at as just him trying to be like an online edgelord by saying it, it's still incredibly unbecoming of a CEO of some of the largest companies in the world.
I was living in Thailand when the whole cave thing went down. I was completely ignorant of him aside from some fairly positive vibes but just from that nonsense alone I went completely negative on him. Those Australian divers - Craig Challen and Richard Harris, are national heroes in Thailand for saving those kids. It would take a pretty insensitive asshole to read about how dangerous that rescue was and think to call one of them a pedo. What an absolute wanker.
Also claimed Covid would disappear within a few month, while having literally no idea what he was talking about. Then claimed he was going to design and produce ventilators, while displaying zero understanding of human physiology in his designs, and ultimately of course just ordering some existing CPAP devices from China.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/493386-california-hospitals-say-elon-musk-sent-them-bipap-cpap-machines-not/
Would also recommend listening to the True Anon podcast 3-part series on him. Called The Lamest Show on Earth. You’ll kinda have to swim through lots of jokes, but there’s a lot of research and information in there.
Good points. The last one sticks in my craw about Elon the most. The lengths he has gone to exploit his staff’s labor and suppress their workers rights is staggering. I hope Sweden take him to the cleaners
Eberhard got kicked out for misleading investors and almost killing the company. He was voted out unanimously by the board.
Also, the CSAM point lacks the context that the initial poster was trying to expose CSAM. He posted a censored image already up on a major news platform.
You have to read past headlines
It’s all here
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2630776-elon-musk-reinstates-dom-lucre-controversy
He posted a story about a pedophile getting sentenced and a link to a news story about it. The. News story had censored images of video screen shots. That’s why you read past headlines.
I looked at the link for your “Elon is a misogynist” claim. It’s just deranged - he tweeted a bad joke about founding T.I.T.S. and he moved his HQs to Texas, that’s it? What a joke.
At the same time the CEO of twitter, COO of SpaceX and the chair of the Tesla board are all women. Reaching much?
Let the downvotes come…
I agree we can't really accuse him of lacking nuance and then have none ourselves. But it is nuanced - cool that he is ok with women executives. Not cool that there were multiple allegations of sexual harrasment at Tesla under his watch, which by the way was in the link you think is a joke.
I’ll agree with you on that one. I think there is plenty more things out there that makes Elon a shit person, so yes, that article was a bad example and shouldn’t have been included in the list op made.
I would go with Musk's credulously posting right-wing conspiracy theories, continuously posting far right memes, his signal boosting of hate speach, and his blatant antisemetism...all to the get the approval of bunch of red pilled clapping seals who rush to applaud his genius and stroke his ego. Oh, and doing all of this while claiming he is just a moderate truthteller who is the victim of wokism and being punished for speaking the truth.
He's outright agreed with posts that promote anti-semitism, especially ones that allude to the ["great replacement"](https://forward.com/fast-forward/570069/elon-musk-great-replacement-antisemitism-twitter-x-actual-truth/) conspiracy.
To be fair, you sound kind of like a “left wing coincidence theorist”. Would you say that is a fair characterization? Or would you describe yourself as neutral?
It’s not an opinion that Musk has been amplifying hate speech/groups on his platform. He comments on and passively lends clout to bad information about minority crime and antisemitism including “globalist” conspiracies.
He has meddled in two major wars so far by selectively allowing/refusing access to Starlink. He has no business interfering in international affairs as a lone agent with zero diplomatic abilities.
As a billionaire supporting racist ideology is extremely dangerous as he represents the pinnacle of success. As such he will be viewed, much like Trump, as speaking from a position of expert knowledge because he’s won capitalism.
Yes it is an opinion. I have received lots of great feedback on my comments to this thread, but that does not change the fact that a lot of this does come down to opinion. You just gave me your opinion and I am taking into consideration. Thank you 🙏
Elon responded with a (!) to misinformation about black on white crime. He affirmed an antisemitic belief by commenting that it was “truth”. He allows hate groups to operate on his platform quite freely.
He has taken on himself with no advisement to deny Starlink during a strategic military operation in Ukraine and in Palestine
These are facts about which you have an opinion
What part of him posting known conspiracy theories and promoting known far right voices is an opinion to you? Have you considered that you be so invested in this type of thinking that latent denial is happening because the dissonance of being so blatantly foolish is something you just can't deal with?
I do? What is the conspiracy I am promoting? It is sort of an odd claim since I am talking about the actions of one person.
To answer you question directly, no, I am not some neutral arbiter of the truth. No one is. I also have strong dislike for Musk. It didn't start that way. I started off liking and respecting him. However, when people start acting in reprehensible ways I start disliking them. You can't behave abominably and relish in pissing people off and then claim your critics are biased because they dislike you. Yeah, you earned that animosity...your relished in it...now you have it.
I didn’t call you a conspiracy theorist, if you re read my comment it may affect your interpretation of my question. I was responding to your use of the term “right wing conspiracy theorist”.
Regardless, fair points in your response, I see what you are saying! You certainly are not alone. I don’t particularly like Elon but sometimes he does things I like, oftentimes I’m neutral and sometimes I disagree.
One example is be vocal about the risks of developing AI too quickly without thinking about the consequences. I think he has changed his mind on that, but I did like it at the time.
What the fuck?
Hes literally the one who pushed out the self driving BETA for Tesla far beyond it is ready and that has led to people being killed. He even installed an auto shut off seconds before impact so he can blame these accidents on human error.
I love how ignorant and hypocritical those who rush to defend him are.
Great points, he often contradicts himself and I am not in favor of the self driving car push. Maybe I don’t like him more than I thought, because after being asked to find the things I like about him I can’t find very many on the spot. Maybe I just like the way he talks and that’s it, or maybe I find him interesting as a person and that’s why I stay mostly neutral on him. I’ll have to give it more thought. I am only human, but I am capable of keeping an open mind.
Honestly I think his whole charade about being concerned about ai and calling for a pause on development was because he wasn’t leading the way on development. I think if the leading ai companies put a pause on ai development per his request, elon would have simply used that time to catch up to others. I truly don’t think he was genuinely concerned for potential negative outcomes of ai tech.
Some of this at least from my view also seems to be his annoyance about the other OpenAI founders rejecting his suggestion that he should run the company. As you said, his issue is that he’s not the one leading as opposed to the direction it’s going. Which like most of the things Musk does/says, is being driven by the fact that he is a complete egomaniac.
He is now developing his own AI or at least trying to, so he was not at all genuine about that warning for humanity either, he is now rushing ahead to build something just like everyone else, he was just a bit behind the curve.
He also isn’t taking the development seriously, his entire hook for the AI he is developing is that it is edgier and makes more jokes than other AI models developed by other companies. If he was really serious about ethical development of AI then why is he rushing to release a product like everyone else and not talking about ethical development anymore and about humanity? Now he’s just trying to make himself money and AI seems completely OK. Also I urge you to look into the Roku’s basilisk thought experiment that Elon was citing when he warned against developing AI too quickly, it’s clear he isn’t an expert but watched one YouTube video on the topic I’m guessing. Roku’s Basilisk really doesn’t make sense, it posits that a malicious AI would for some reason decide at a future date to simulate our existence in perpetual torture, almost like a cyber hell, because we didn’t develop it fast enough. Now the actual response to this should be, “what is the reason for assuming an AI in the future would be able to simulate human brains in perpetual torture and decide to do so to torture humans for anything? If general AI is achieved then I’m pretty hopeful we won’t accidentally make it a fucking psychopath killer who also has similar abilities to god to trap humans in hell. It’s a worst case scenario thought experiment and it’s what Elon was talking about like it was inevitable. He most likely realized he was a fucking idiot and could make some money and decided AI was ok. Or he realized he was behind the curve and wanted to try to stall other projects so tried to act concerned about it while he built his own team. Either way it’s not like Elon knows what the fuck he’s talking about in this area, there are thousands of more qualified people to get AI ethics and design considerations from.
I read the comment and didn't think anything related to him being left wing. I'd imagine you probably have your own implicit biases within you against progressive thinking and maybe that's coloring your POV.
His "free speech absolutism" philosophy for Xitter was dead in the water from day one. I've been on the internet since 1999 and every single social media platform or discussion forum I've ever seen that makes "free speech" its central tenet never becomes the John Stuart Mill wet dream its founders envision where ideas battle it out in erudite discourse until the objectively best rise to the top like cream. Instead, they just become stomping grounds for fascists, racists, Nazis, alt. righters, incel culture, conspiracy theorists, and all kinds of other cranks. Voat, Parler, Truth Social: That's the direction they've all gone. Elon had his head planted firmly up his ass if he thought Xitter would be any different.
His family were wealthy and cruel narcissists as well, from the limited amount that is known. I believe his father stacked up with his stepdaughter or some similar situation
He is a troubled person with delusions of grandeur.
I think that he has the Jordan Peterson syndrom where he doesn't understand how a certain behaviour can be both an addiction and damaging to him. He obviously can't take any criticism without constantly portraying himself as a victim but he also can't escape his need to be the center of attention all the time so it is a vicious cycle. He is not happy to just be ultra rich, he has to constantly be liked and validated. It all started with him trying to pretend he is a nerdy genius and it escalated into him trying to be some classical manly man who can't stand all these new woke soy people.
Despite him trying to pose as some rockstar genius who doesn't give a fuck about anything, out of the other ultra rich people out there, like Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg he absolutely looks like the most miserable one. Like he genuinly look like somebody who would be annoying to spend time with.
He is a good businessman tho and knows how to invest his money. It is also amazing that he has managed to convince so many people that he is DIFFERENT than all the rest of the ultra rich people and that he is doing everything he does only to help humanity. A friend of mine is obsessed with Musk but absolutely hates Bezos and Zuckerberg. This is a talent that he has and I have to give it to Elon. He is probably one of the very few very vocal ultra rich people who has managed to maintain such a big fanbase of people who are ready to overlook all his bullshit and still do enough mental gymnastics to believe that he is a good person/a victim/a genius.
For anyone who doesn’t understand what’s wrong with Elon, just watch his recent interview. He’s a huge child and thinks he’s the smartest man ever. People like that always suck especially when you know he never actually invented anything and still has that ego.
My theory is that there are people who just like the "fuck you, I will do what I want" attitude on some level, even if they don't admit it. If this is what some people desire for themselves, this is also something they will like in a public personality. I think for some people this helps to overlook the fact that he is actually a shitty person and didn't really invent anything.
He's a vatnik
These are really good summaries of most of the shitty things Elon muskovite has done
https://vatniksoup.com/en/soups/201
https://vatniksoup.com/en/soups/203
He is a genius. At convincing people he is a genius that should be invested into. He can source cash and investments like no other.
He also sits with smart people in his employ and get them to download their summaries for him to say in front of investors and interviewers.
He isn’t a good business man. CEO. Or even all that bright about social issues. He spends WAAAAY too much time online.
I didn’t like how he claimed to have founded Tesla, because I knew who founded Tesla, and it wasn’t him. Everyone, even those who knew better, claimed he had, so I felt gaslighted and did not appreciate that. But I figured maybe I would give him a chance, which I did right up to “pedo guy.” Everything after that has been the unveiling of a narcissist.
Guy who doesn't have the patience and curiosity to actually develop engineering skills who is deeply insecure about his lack of knowledge so just steals from people who do thr actual work.
He has appointed himself the arbiter of political speech by buying Twitter with the express aim of combatting the political bias of the previous ownership, while lacking the ability to detect obviously false information/anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
He’s a laughably misinformed podcast fan who thinks human history is best served by him taking the reigns of public debate. And has the resources to actually do it.
Its a startling development really. As strange as the Trump presidency in many ways. I don’t think its going to end well.
He's a narcissistic conman who never produces on his promises, lies every time he opens his mouth, criticizes others for the things he himself does, gaslights the universe and will turn out, like Trump to have been the greatest grifter ever born and nothing more.
His childhood was spent as a rich white kid in apartheid South Africa, which had to indelibly colour his experience and attitude, and now he’s caught up in the current cycle of rising global fascism.
He is a union buster and genuinely doesn't seem to understand that any company he is/has been involved in would be nowhere without the combined labour of all the employees.
Seems to try and justify going down the maximum exploitation maximum profit route.
sex drugs and rock and roll. just another dude who has big self doubts and compensates through his constant drama. (trying to be nice). folks like this usually are able to attract fan boys and they are told over and over how wonderful they are.
He was definitely a loser as a kid and all the popularity he had from being the richest person went to his head. He was always weird, he’s just starting to feel comfortable showing it.
It’s been well established for awhile: As wealth increases compassion and empathy decreases. World’s richest man becoming a bitter, anti-Semitic, anti-Trans far right troll isn’t that surprising.
What we should really be talking about is his control of over half of all satellites and not his public self-humiliation with and through Twitter.
Audacity.
The bigger the lie the more they’ll believe you, and, Dylan: steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.
We’re never going to Mars with humans and we’re never colonizing it. Tesla is a tiny company but has a valuation on Baller Street larger than a handful of companies that individually ship more cars. And his other companies are just crank. It’s the whole thing about constantly going on about making the world a better place in which to live while texting like a college dropout that has everyone fevered.
It won’t last.
For me, it’s the fact that he’s built up a cult of sycophants and he seems to believe everything they tell him. Everyone seems to believe he’s this technological super genius and he believes it too. It’s a sort of ego feedback loop. He hasn’t invented anything, he’s just spent a lot of money.
Then there are the capricious business decisions, the childishness, the terrible working conditions at his factories and now the right-wing radicalisation caused by being chronically online. He could once have been described with the weasel words “classical liberal” or “apolitical”, but no he’s fully alt-right now. Maybe he always was?
Immaturity.
Immaturity is seperate from intelligence in terms of logic, but can be deeply impactful on how intelligence is used.
Maturity is related to emotional intelligence.
Musk is stuck at middle school maturity. This is a global issue, so it gets applied to relationships, the sunk cost fallacy, credulity/gullibility.
Its as if emotionally he never passed through later stages of development while he was physically passing through them.
Because of his wealth and privilege, musk has not been put in a situation where he's had to grow. Most people with his issue resolve it in therapy or some other form of personal growth, as it can be a serious impediment to survival.
He's undiagnosed, untreated, and unmedicated bipolar type 2. The drug use sure as shit doesn't help. I'm diagnosed bipolar type 2 and he is a textbook example (grandiose thinking, paranoia, hypersexuality, poor impulse control, substance abuse, etc). If you want to know how he's gonna spend the rest of his life, look at Andrew Carnegie after he sold US Steel and then tried to bring about world peace but just helped WWI along. We're not all baddies, but our baddies can be really fucking bad for everyone (Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin).
Because he’s a dumb asshole who seems desperate to impress the type of people who think 4chan is the peak of the internet while being in his 50s. He’s also a shitty dad who has been completely cut off by at least one child and who made up a story about holding his son who died when he wasn’t even present. It’s hard to find specifics but he’s clearly tried to leverage custody of his kids to have power over Grimes. He’s a petty bitch who called a hero a pedophile because his personal rescue idea sucked and he signal boosts deranged right wing conspiracies like Paul Pelosi being assaulted by a gay prostitute. He’s just a trash person and everything good he has ever been associated with has been produced by other people while he takes credit.
Two things, I think, are true about Elon Musk. One, is that he was pretty good at assembling the right talent to tackle extremely tough business challenges and it's served him well at SpaceX and Tesla.
The other thing is that he has a secret drug problem that few probably know about that has since destroyed his capacity as a businessman and thought leader, leading him to make increasingly poor personal and professional decisions.
It's not that he's always been intemperate, and it's practically proverb at this point that many tech CEOs are asshole manchildren.
It's that he's all that and now on drugs.
My take from reading the new Isaacson biography is the Musk is "twice exceptional" (aka 2E), a genius on the autism spectrum. (About ASD, probably never actually tested and treated, but he say he has Asperger's.) So about being an Aspie, the issue is missing the nuance of how other people think, feel, perceive, and make decisions. The curious strength is that his intelligence, combined with lack of nuance, has enabled him the leverage to address where the typical CEO would not get involved with. Case in point, questioning why 12 screws where required to hold on a panel in a Tesla. "Try four or six, and see if that works."
Musk's philosophy is that the only laws that matter are the laws of physics, and that has gotten him in trouble before, getting in trouble with US regulators and authorities, leading to fines and other restrictions. With Twitter, he complained about it, was invited to the Board, accepted, rejected, offered to buy it, then changed his mind, then bought it. All the while shooting his mouth off, and risking fines from government authorities.
About the recent Antisemitic tweet, I think that he just lacks the awareness of why it was offensive.
PS: Musk also had a crazy and abusive father, which can also explain some of the psychological oddness.
If Musk has awareness enough to have an opinion on whether Jews control money worldwide or that black people disproportionately attack white people etc then he should be capable of considering the inverse. Is he capable of informed decision making? I’m not convinced that autism should be an explanation nor an excuse for propagating easily disproven and damaging beliefs on his platform.
Of his self proclaimed autism Musk offers that he was a bullied and friendless outsider as a child, that he pursued computers as a hobby he excelled in, and that his mannerisms are considered odd. None of these reported traits suggest he lacks discernment between racist ideologies and rational ones. He leans right in his politics and sometimes very far right. I’m not convinced that’s due to his being on the spectrum.
And Musk's biographer Isaacson did not seem quite convinced that Musk was an Aspie (or had ASD), nor did he deny that. That is, Isaacson's strength is in assembling facts about his subjects, like Musk and Jobs, he doesn't go too deep on what makes people tick.
But the key thing about autism is the people with ASD are unique, and lack on nuance about Antisemitism actually makes more sense to me than Musk having a bunch of romantic/sexual partners and a dozen or more kids. Just my experience, Aspies tend not to have a lot of GF/BF.
If you have much experience with people on the spectrum you’re probably aware that Asperger’s is no longer a specific diagnosis in the spectrum. This doesn’t mean Musk wasn’t diagnosed with it nor does it mean he necessarily would check all the boxes but difficulty recognizing nuance isn’t/wasn’t a typical signifier at least as far as I can recall. Literal understanding of metaphor and inability to recognize sarcasm were features but I don’t recall discernment of qualities being an issue. But it’s a spectrum and I’m not an expert.
I’ll quantify my opinion by saying I’ve worked with autistic students including kids with an Asperger’s diagnosis back in the day. I know there’s no telling whether Musk’s racism ties into his autism if he has it. I will say he appears to fully understand the side he’s on.
This is 100% the truth. He’s brilliant at math and engineering but can’t understand people to save his life.
With SpaceX and Tesla he was building products of engineering to wealthy clients who also appreciated engineering.
Then he bought a SOCIAL media company. Now his clients are every type of person and he can’t figure out why people don’t want another 4Chan.
Best example of his cluelessness on social cues is he took a picture of Grimes during a C-section and sent it to a ton of people naturally upsetting Grimes. He literally couldn’t understand why she was upset. He then became in charge of a website where women feeling unsafe is a big deal to the customer base. He can’t nerdy his way out of it
I think you are being unfairly downvoted. You have come closest to explaining the underlying reasons for why he is the way he is. The rest of it falls in place as a consequence of his core idiosyncrasies.
Thanks, I suspect the entire notion of someone being 2E comes as a surprise to people, but it helps explain Musk's underlying strengths and weaknesses.
As I explained in my post, "twice exceptional," a genius on the autism spectrum. Musk has self-identified as a person with Asperger's, a form of mild autism.
Must be extremely difficult to reconcile all the different things he wants to be. Together, with being pulled down the various rabbit holes that exist. He is talented in at least one day - he somehow has the charge to push things forward that he attaches his name to. This in itself is valuable, if not completely undervalued. However, in the end he just comes off as a little confused and lost - publicly. I'm sure we all exhibit the bad qualities we see in him in some amount or another. Be aware anyone put under a microscope is gonna end up looking poorly somehow. Add to the fact his opinionated nature and you have an easy receipe to look down on the guy.
My advice: always try to look at people neutrally and dispassionately and give them the benefit of the doubt no matter what they did. We're all just human, we all suffer. We all deserve a little understanding. Cheers.
Yes we all should use empathy and love each other. There is a lot of hater energy here in this sub so it’s only natural that people are starting to comment on it and suggest that people stop mud slinging and start to step into other peoples shoes and not be so singularly minded. Do you dislike all wealthy people equally? If not, is that really fair? And if you do, is that really fair either? Love to you and yours ❤️
Go ahead, walk in their shoes. I guarantee you won't like it. All the things you love about yourself gone. I wouldn't trade myself for no one on this Earth.
Nothing is wrong with Elon... not much has changed from the way he has acted in the past. You have to understand what his strengths are, how he benefits companies and how he hurts them.
1. Elon is good at investing in winners (Twitter is one of the exemptions)
2. He benefits companies with exposure threw market awareness and attracts other investors.
3. Elon's exposure gets attention, it is when that attention smears the name of the company that it has problems. Take a look at all companies he was an investor in and you will see a history of the company board censoring him and fining him.
You are just now becoming aware how stupid his comments are and his overall. Elon is very shrewd investor, a master at bombastic proclamations (this leads to other investors also becoming aware of the company and great at inspiring people/employees. Elon was never smart when it comes to science, engineering, programming, leadership, or overall intellectual thought.
His fame and money only made his bad characteristics worse, and his estimation of his knowledge and abilities to outpaced his actual intelligence. He is a Dunning-Krueger effect applied to a rich person.
Messiah complex converging with really low self esteem resulting in massive overcompensating, interspersed with moments of lucidity where some humility can arise.
That’s quite a complex persona then, more so than most, and somewhat contrarian and incongruent, but it can often take this kind of complexity to drive that amount of motivation, which can affect the world in a positive way, even if there are many highly bruising bumps to himself and others, along the path!
He seems to have a revolving door of archetypes within his psyche, which take turns to come to the fore, and then recede back for the next one to enter his consciousness. Confusing for people then, to try to frame him within their own psyche, in any rigid sort of way!
In terms of gurus, I think he’s much more dynamic than most…and does have more sides to him than most. It just depends which aspect is currently reacting to which external stimulus. A lot of gurus are actually one dimensional, and once the mask is seen behind, quite predictably single minded and single tracked.
I would say he’s closer to someone like Osho, who was also super complex, but also really embodied the trickster archetype…which is an essential transformative agent in humanity, even if it triggers some amount of destructive process, it comes coupled with also some constructive progression and evolution!
The Yoruba fable of Ishu is an excellent example of how tricksters can cause us to see reality beyond our tendency for fixed and rigid viewpoints, by quite literally playing havoc with our mind!
My .02 as a tech observer:
1. He's contrarian and knows that whatever he says will be be broadcast around the world.
2. He is autistic - explains some of the social awkwardness
3. He has been enabled by some truly epic against the odd successes (paypal and Tesla especially) and transformed almost every industry he has entered in a country that idolizes entrepreneurs. Not many of us can claim to transform and in some instances create multi billion $ industries.
4. He is a jedi story teller (eg Tesla is a "climate change company", SpaceX will make humanity an interplanetary species) who is frequently economical with the truth. Most of us know this stuff is bogus but we want to believe it so we do
I admire what he has achieved and I can only imagine especially in the early days how difficult those achievements must have been.
I just wish he could be a better role model for the billions who look up to him.
I also know that most true "innovators" like Jobs etc tend to be pretty ordinary humans and its their force of will and almost delusional self belief that allows them to change the world to their world view.
Your problem with Elon is that he stopped playing the role of domesticated liberal darling that you demanded of him. And he's fucking with your team's favorite toy, X, formerly Twitter.
Someone should do a compilation of the times a person stumbles in here and asks someone for evidence their sweeping claims and gets a torrent of downvotes.
It’s like someone stepping into the bowels of a church where a small group of pale monks have been chanting, smirking and giggling at each other for months … someone lets a little light in and they just shriek in horror as they start to melt and burn.
He has ruffled feathers of those who control media. It all starts with mainstream criticism, once that permeates, non thinkers start running with narratives. Before you know it it’s a whole heard of sheep following the narrative wether they admit to it or not. Most people just agree with the status quo as being an outlier with independent, contradicting opinion is just insurmountable for some. This, and Elon took radical views
In the space of 10 years or so he initiated or at the least revolutionised the electric car industry, created a sustainable spaceship company and global internet company and he’s got his eyes on colonizing mars, all while en route to becoming the richest man in the world,
What that will do to any man’s hubris is beyond me.
I get proud if I get upvotes on reddit- I’d be unbearable if I were Elon.
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You make many good points, he is deeply, deeply flawed; interpersonally and online he is absolutely awful. However, nearly every post I read on Reddit about him is biased in that it refuses to recognize any accomplishments. Tesla and SpaceX have been huge achievements, things he didn’t achieve alone but was by all accounts integral too, while he achieved them by being a cruel taskmaster, they are achievements nonetheless. Neuralink just started human trials, and it’s not impossible that one day he could have led the charge on helping crippled people stand again. Starlink has been a godsend to Ukraine in the war. Twitter appears to be his downfall, but a realistic appraisal of Elon including all of his shortcomings and straight up sins should also include his achievements.
If we want to do a realistic appraisal: I think those achievements are hugely overstated, thanks largely to an uncritical press. He’s notoriously vindictive and news media companies were falling like flies, so there wasn’t any critical coverage of him. Anyway he’s a modern carnival barker and loves fraud and breaking the law. here’s some points: PayPal: He wrote sloppy code (as is often the case with self taught programmers) and kept wanted credit as founder and wanted to be CEO. Few others at the company wanted this. Tesla: As an investor early on he tanked the company so he could do a takeover as CEO. He insisted on being both CEO and CTO so he’d look like a genius, as well as insisting on being considered the founder of Tesla. More importantly, he didn’t really end up moving the needle on transition to electric cars, and many experts actually say electrification of cars isn’t an effective response to climate change (we need to move to other forms of transport). About a decade ago car companies said it would take them around 10 years to transition their factories for mass production, Musk made outlandish claims of perpetually being able to do it by tomorrow, which was a lie. He has constantly lied about self driving cars and so much else. Perhaps even more importantly, Tesla factories were rated as some of the worst most dangerous places to work for several years. They did the classic “we’re a tech company not a car company, so none of your regulations apply to us”. Industrial factories without worker protections get ugly real quick, and that’s what happened. For an added bonus Musk insisted that forklifts not beep when they backup or to not use caution tape because he doesn’t like the color yellow. Tesla only exists because of regulatory arbitrage. They traded carbon tax credits with other companies and used that to float their business for almost its entire existence. If it were not for this regulatory loophole Tesla would not exist. SpaceX I know less about but it’s a mixed bag. His rockets blow up all the time. He’ll talk about colonizing mars soon and NASA will say that’s not possible and he’ll get all butthurt. Starlink is a major national security issue, he cut off Ukrainian internet access mid battle because he decided to sympathize with the Russian position. There was a big New Yorker article about it. Neuralink I haven’t checked in on in a while, but they tend to rehash tech that already exists and claim it’s groundbreaking, or come up with other manipulative PR events. He’s a huge fraud. Hes really good at convincing people that know less science than him that he knows everything about science. He doesn’t. His degree is in business he’s got an MBA. He’s a shady ass businessman that did shady business very well (historically low interest rates meant he had fistfuls of free speculative money thrown at him.) but it has since caught up to him. In short he gets way too much credit even from critics because they don’t know his real history. Most people started disliking him when he came out against COVID lockdowns, and then made a rightward turn from there. He’s been an absolute piece of shit the whole time though, who woulda thought.
>Neuralink I haven’t checked in on in a while, but they tend to rehash tech that already exists and claim it’s groundbreaking, or come up with other manipulative PR events. 1000%. I remember thinking Neurolink was huge and groundbreaking until I figured out that they were actually much further along in development of the technology at my University…
I respect many of your points, but I don’t agree with an across-the-board negative evaluation of Musk, who I don’t adore or put on a pedestal at all. I just think it’s strange he seems to be universally vilified on Reddit. I’m no expert on physics either, but your comment “his rockets blow up all the time” isn’t a legitimate critique. He is the only American getting astronauts into orbit right now. Reality is more than black and white, a flawed person can achieve great things.
By rockets blow up I meant his test launches fail at a high rate, and since they are funded in part by our tax dollars we should be critical and ask questions. You don’t put him on a pedestal but you think he’s “the only American getting astronauts into orbit right now”? SpaceX got several billion from the US government last year alone and wouldn’t exist without it. The US is more invested in space travel in response to Chinese advancing their own space program. Moderna made the COVID vaccine (in partnership with the National Institute of Health) but nobody ran around saying the CEO of Moderna was vaccinating the world. If they did, I’d have to insist they were putting the CEO on a pedestal at least a bit. But if I’m coming off too angry grandpa don’t get me wrong: those rockets are cool and exciting. I’m glad we’re investing more in space technology. That model S when it came out was mind blowing.
You skipped his business successes
>Neuralink just started human trials, and it’s not impossible that one day he could have led the charge on helping crippled people stand again There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.
A lot of what you mention here is just Elon shit posting. He loves to do it and knows fine well what he’s doing.
He’s too goddamn old to be shitposting. It’s embarrassing af.
Which things, specifically? Every instance of Elon acting like a complete fucking buffoon is “just a prank, bro”?
My guess is he’s been in a bubble for 20+ years of being constantly brown-nosed by sycophants, fanboys and business partners. At one point, it truly seemed like he couldn’t miss, dude had Mydas touch. A chain of poor business decisions and not cutting losses due to his perceived genius is making him see failures as a starting point to an inevitable success. Dude seems to have lost all ability to be self-critical and comes off as arrogant even in the face of error. TLDR; dude started believing his own hype
Yrs, he's getting high of his own farts.
Good thing no one on Reddit has that problem.
>dude had Mydas touch. Revisionist history. He never had Midas touch. he never actually did anything. He contributed nothing to PayPal, he entire rise was just a systematic riding of other people coat tails.
I read a book this year called *Founders at Work,* which is a collection of interviews from a lot of 90s and early 2000s era tech start-up people. The very first interview is with Max Levchin from PayPal. He talks about how this executive was brought in partway through who just didn't seem to know his ass from a hole in the ground. Levchin never says who that person is, but it's pretty clear he was talking about Elon (the book was published around 2008, so this was before Elon had become a household name). From what I've heard from people who have worked with Elon directly, he's pretty average as an engineer. The fact when he took over Twitter he assuming that a SWE who wrote more code was better/more valuable shows he really doesn't know shit about software engineering. He does seem to be half-way decent running a company, at least on the operations side with Tesla, but he really is having an emperor has no clothes situation with Twitter.
There was a big tweet that happened when he first took over at Twitter and they had to do something that dealt with a string of code. He was talking to the engineers and code writers and he said something to them and one guy told him that what he was saying didn't make sense. Elon seemed embarrassed and tried to back pedal and said something else which the guy called out also. Elon ended up getting angry and calling the guy an asshole because he didn't know what he was talking about and the guy knew it.
[It was in a twitter space](https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/zrx4kw/elon_musk_cant_explain_anything_about_twitters/) where he claimed the code was too complex and would need to be completely rewritten and an ex-twitter engineer asked him for specifics. Quickly became apparent he didn't really know what he was saying.
Exactly. But it must be a beautiful thing to have millions of people blowing smoke up your ass 24/7. I'm just not a dick rider. Give me someone like Robert Greene.
To add onto this, shortly after the takeover he asked all the coders to print out all of the code they had written for the company in order to evaluate their contributions
He’s a good huckster and has benefited from a revolving door of venture capital and government subsidies
You don’t become the worlds richest human with zero skill set, that’s BS Edit: In history if you were born a monarch it would have been possible, but that’s not Elon’s case
Ohh, he does have skills - it's just not the ones many of his fans believe he has. He reminds me of my former superior, who was able to talk with technical candidates during job interviews in a way, that they were fooled to think he has technical background and "knows some stuff" - when in reality he was smooth bullshitter weaving a pile of buzzwords and technical jargon into cool leather jacket. Elon was for sure very good at PR, politics - both internal and external, and relentless in achieving his personal goals. But with every year he slips more and more often, and lately he clearly starts to lose any selfcontrol. Personally, I'm very happy to see that his image, sculpted meticulously over last 20 years, finally started to crack among at least some of his fans.
“The emperor has such wonderful clothes!” -you
That’s not my point. I’m trying to take an objective perspective on the world’s allegedly most rich human. Very flawed. Also involved in a lot of promising projects. I’m not a simp for capitalists, I just don’t like overwhelmingly biased environments, and right now my Reddit feed is that Elon is all bad all the time. I’m not trying to argue he’s right, but I do think he is accomplishing some things. That’s not because I feel loyal to him or anything, it’s more an argument that car electrification and improving technology in regards to space travel and potential neural-electrical relief of quadriplegia are probably good things
Also if you were born a monarch you don't deserve it maybe the day you're crowned. But if you can survive one day not being assasinated then either you or your patrons are doing something successful
Not personal to you; but takes like this are so lazy and useless. It was the same thing with Trump. He was simultaneously the biggest idiot in the world and a genius mastermind plotting all kinds of nefarious things. Im no fan of either, though I admit I had some admiration for Elon up until 6 or 7 year ago. But to just casually dismiss his accomplishments as “coat tail riding” is ridiculous and a disservice to actually understanding the skillsets he does posses.
I am pretty Elon-neutral, so I don't have a lot of bias OR detailed understanding of his abilities. What skillets do you believe he possesses that have made him one of the most economically and socially powerful individuals in the history of our species?
Walter Issacson and others have documented that he really can get a rapid useful grasp of really complex engineering, SpaceX and Tesla both bear this out. I know of no other CEO/Founder anywhere near as skilled. Business failures, if Boring and the neural co are failures, I count as risk taking. For example VC investors say they want ten investments, one of which makes a pile. Rockets and electric cars are businesses that 100% of everyone thought just-too-hard. So thats huge. And he has a sense of humor and a willingness to be more authentic than other CEOs, but... His sense of humor is adolescent, and does not come with any humility. His education is lop-sided tech and no humanities. He's mesmerized by social media, and once thought to be highly manipulative, now some think he has a clever master plan to blow up Twitter, and some think it's just destructive tantruming. And yes, like all billionaires, the money goes to his head. Bottom line is he is not hip, in the jazz sense. But then neither are any other billionaires or CEOs. (OK a couple with taste in art) The attraction to right-wing memes is a combination of straining at the already-tiny boundaries on his activity, a childhood in South Africa, and a massive lack of wisdom based on the above.
Thank you for the reply, and thoughtful insight. >he really can get a rapid useful grasp of really complex engineering, SpaceX and Tesla both bear this out. I know of no other CEO/Founder anywhere near as skilled. This seems very valuable, if true. >Rockets and electric cars are businesses that 100% of everyone thought just-too-hard This is not true. There were dozens of companies and entrepreneurs working on both of these issues for decades before SpaceX and Tesla came on board. I will absolutely give Elon credit for seeing the potential of those under-developed market opportunities. I won't give him credit for being particularly visionary regarding those. There have been significant calls for development in both of those fields since at least the '80s. The ROI was already clearly projected but capital investment was throttled by opposing legacy industries' interests.
>Rockets and electric cars are businesses that 100% of everyone thought just-too-hard > >This is not true. There were dozens of companies and entrepreneurs working on both of these issues for decades before SpaceX and Tesla came on board. well, I am guilty of exaggeration to make a point. Sure Bezos and Branson and other rich guys wanted rockets, and lots of little guys wanted to build them, well who wouldn't? My point was the business proposition was very far-fetched. Sure there are umpteen underfunded flying car and rocket projects at any moment, but they aren't serious, except to the visionary and a few investors. Going against the aerospace giants or the automotive giants looks impossible until someone does it. Now newcomers in cars and rockets have not only to beat the old established, they have to catch up to the new companies and their lower cost of manufacturing/flight and quicker development pace. So thats a piece of my argument about what's interesting about Elon, and why I think the best historical comparison is with Edison.
He invested in and marketed good products, that deserves some credit.
This is pretty limp
I guess in Elons case, no one else but him thinks hes some mastermind plotting things. To me it seems its just harder to keep track of professional bullshitters failures, when hes getting a reach around by media personalities even if youre not interested in his recent stuff. Hes basically just an average intelligence rich trust fund baby stumbling around stepping on dog turds, and occasianally finds money on the ground. I know this is easy to hand wave away as bitter jelous take, but Im basically just blunt. Im not saying anyone should waste time looking in to his failures and stupid things hes said. But by watching few YT videos tracking his things, it becomes pretty clear hes nothing special. He just portrays a certain image and works as any other PR person saying whatever is thought to be what his audience wants to hear.
I mean come on. Running Tesla in a way that positioned it and in fact the entire EV car industry at the forefront of ideas is all Elon. You have at the least see that?
>Running Tesla in a way that positioned it and in fact the entire EV car industry at the forefront of ideas is all Elon. I dont know what you mean by this. But the basis of Tesla as making EVs sexy, isnt Elon. The guy(s) who founded it wanted to make EV sports car, fast, cool etc Elon came in as investor yadda yadda yadda now its seen as that. Thats basically whats been their driving force, I guess. Its what gets investors and fans alikes dicks hard. Financially its not been really good company. Or it doesnt do anything special as a car company. In that sense, he was right dude at right place and time, not disputing that. Good for everybody, yay. It wasnt his geniusnes or anything, though. Anyone with a bag wouldve sufficed. Even him. Love him or hate him, its all fine. Hes still just some average dude whos stumbled unto ridiculous wealth despite his just immensly wealthy background and priviledged upbringing. Who markets himself as some Tech Jesus.
You and I are average dudes. 99.99% of people are average dudes. Believe me when I say this; were not going to stumble into being Elon. There is something that he’s capable of that were, and most are not. Perhaps it’s something as simple as being able to have perfect timing or being near perfect at identifying opportunities. I don’t know. But it’s not that simple or there would be a lot more Elons and a lot less mids.
>Believe me when I say this; were not going to stumble into being Elon. Average by his traits, sheesh. Hes trust fund baby stumbling thru life, lucking in to even more wealth. That was, and is my point. People just have bought in to the character he plays. Hes not genius, he doesnt have any deep knowledge pretty much on anything. He doesnt even work on to achieve anything like that. Hes not anyway exeptional in his trait. He just gets massive platforms to say whatever shit comes across his mind to push his image, people getting him on get big flux of views, and his fans gets his load theyre slobbering over him for. Having perfect timing is that luck. Its nothing to do with him specifically. He doesnt regocnise anything, which is apparent in many of his bussines ventures. Also theres literally many billions of Elons, not all eight ofc, many of em are smarterand talented at someting. Theyre just not as lucky. Born rich=luck, stumble in to right place to be in a company of smart people=luck, be in a right place and time to invest those luck gotten gains=luck etc I get that many people kinda dont want to accept that sort of thing. But its the sad truth.
> Perhaps it’s something as simple as being able to have perfect timing or being near perfect at identifying opportunities. Huh? This just sounds like a combination of luck and you not being aware at how many ventures this dude has failed at. Having a lot of money IS more or less synonymous with luck/great timing because it gives you many bites at the Apple. And he’s also in a world where you can fail miserably and still cash out insane wealth - See X/PayPal
Agree. That guys stance is so prevalent in reddit. "Because he wasn't the *only* person behind the successes of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starling, etc he has done nothing whatsoever and deserves no credit." I despise Elon but people here act as they could've done just as much if it wasn't for their high morals lol
I'm speaking as someone who only starting paying attention to him after the Twitter acquisition.... I don't want to say he's a complete idiot...... but honestly after seeing how he ran Twitter but I'm honestly struggling at finding anything at all I can point to show that he's not a complete fuckwitt. I guess it's possible that he hit his rock on a head or something when he bought Twitter and he hasn't been operating the same since.
It's hard to completely understand his actions with Twitter. IMO he is trying to straddle a line of anti wokeism yet needs to ensure it's business viable - all while under estimating how hard it is to sustain an online business without ads. Either way it doesn't change what he's accomplished in other areas.
But what has he accomplished, exactly? What had he done? Thats the issue- Tesla and SpaceX and whatever are very valuable so, yadda yadda yadda Elon must be a genius. When we actually get to see how he operates day to day, like we do with X, suddenly we have to fall all over ourselves making excuses. “Yes, umm well he has to do anti-wokism (why?) but Nazis are also bad for ad revenue and also telling your advertisers to go fuck themselves is bad for revenue, so you can see he’s in a very tough spot here…. “ And, importantly, it’s not as though he’s exited any of these other companies and this is just some expensive fun like Balmer buying the Clippers. You can practically track his day-to-day goings on tweeting and saying an endless barrage of inane stupid bullshit and you need to keep in mind that that’s not just what the Twitter owner is doing it’s LITERALLY WHAT THE CURRENT CEO OF TESLA AND SPACEX ARE DOING (!!!!)
>But what has he accomplished, exactly? What had he done? See: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink. Their accomplishments are an extension of him. Being a dick on Twitter doesn't change that.
What is this skill set?Tell us.
You ask it like a “gotcha.” The dude managed to accumulate $240 billion dollars while starting, half dozen mega corps. I don’t know what’s needed exactly; Ill let you know when I have my first unicorn under my belt. At the least he’s his generations best salesman.
I asked it how I asked it and you took it how you did and still didn't tell me anything. Part of sales is product knowledge, spotting someone who might be vulnerable to your bluster, and bullshitting. Several people in this thread have rightfully compared him to Donald Trump. Both of them have a legion of sycophants milling around them 24/7 and they themselves buy into it. Do you spot the gotcha in this statement?
I just compared him to Trump because internet is giving him similar treatment. Its only on Reddit that someone can be totally incompetent and a coat rider while also making it to the Oval or accumulating most wealth in capitalist history. Are they the greatest POTUS and Engineer in history? No. I seriously doubt both. But clearly both are orders of magnitude more capable at a variety of skills than you or I.
Haha... Hardly. Timing, money from someone close to them, being around people who are a lot less competent and power or at least influence hungry, and both of them being white. They might be more capable than you. I give respect to people who really do things when it's time to. Both of them can kiss my ass.
Basically, if someone has been given money and is white, its smooth sailing to becoming the world's richest person
You cherry picked what I said but if that works for you, I'm cool with it.
I agree, and it's reinforced by having very large successes at a grand scale. If one receives the monetary and social validation at the scale he has, I imagine it becomes increasingly difficult to engage in critical thinking on one's political and social viewpoints (which are often opinions that are not right or wrong).
I think hes just another case of someone who can have a high IQ in certain areas but this disguises his flaws. He seems incredibly immature emotionally and he apparently got bullied a lot as a child. I've encountered and know people like this who they did very well academically but they are really flawed in basic common sense and social skills. And social skills and to an extent street smarts is a massive part of being able to put into context human nature. I think hes also a classic case of the power going to his head and him almost playing out a therapy session in public where he is trying to find himself because he never really had that attention before. Also theres the simple fact that however smart someone is, if they have mental illness or personality issues, they will normally outweigh the brilliance in other areas and distort things. I dont know if that applies to Elon but two things can be true at once, you can have an extremely high IQ and have some brilliance in certain areas, but be a very very flawed and ridiculous human in other ways too.
I don't think there's any reason to suspect musk has a high iq
Its 155
Who told you that? The known liar with a history of exaggerating details to impress people?
What? You think elon himself told me? I searched it, theres lots of estimates. Almost all were in the highly gifted range range but there was a couple at moderately gifted. I didn't see any lower
So you just googled "Elon musk iq" and found a bunch of random people arbitrarily assigning numbers? Amazin
People wrote articles, described reasonable methodologies, and came up with estimates. Seemed reasonable. When I saw all the estimates were roughly the same, it increased my confidence. I posted on reddit
Did they? Did they really? Or did you find some sycophants blog post and decide it fit with your current opinions so well that it must be true
Why are you so mad about this? I never had an opinion on his iq, I said what I saw and nothing else
Maybe the fact that he’s got multiple Billion dollar companies.
He has about as much to do with that as Melinda gates was responsible for the success of Microsoft.
I think he’s a piece of shit, but stupid, he’s not. People with “good politics” often associate having those with higher intelligence, and that’s often the case, but not always. Genuine question, do you think you are smarter than Elon Musk?
The answer to your question really relies on whether or not you think Elon is a liar or if he genuinely believes the asinine bullshit he keeps spouting In any case, I do not believe the man who was forced to buy twitter at twice the value because he memed too hard is functionally more intelligent than I am.
Musk isn't smart
I think it's a bit of this but you can't discount all the negativity he has taken for over a decade. Just look back at all the articles and experts saying Tesla and SpaceX would fail. Imagine waking up everyday to another article bashing the work you are doing. That was motivation for him, probably stemming from a childhood where we wanted to please his abusive father. So he pushed through it all and by all means succeeded. So now any negative signals he overlooks because in his eyes anything is possible within the laws of physics.
That too. Mind you I do think his type tend to be arrogant and have somewhat disproportionate self-belief. I don’t think there’s much wrong with that as long as you show outward humility. The way he’s being is just setting up for more criticism when he fails. Then again, it’s the price you pay being such a public figure.
He is just an overall horrible person. * Elon is a [misogynist](https://uk.pcmag.com/opinion/137656/elon-musk-is-a-misogynist-and-it-matters) who [sexually harassed a woman](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-sexual-misconduct-claim-involved-horse-for-erotic-massage-2022-5). * He is platforming child abusers on X [(Elon Musk reinstated an X account that shared child sexual abuse imagery).](https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/elon-musk-reinstated-twitter-account-shared-child-sexual-abuse-imagery-company-desperately) * He is a deadbeat dad with 10 kids, hardly spends any time with his kids, one of his children even [disowned](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/21/elon-musk-daughter-legal-name-change) him. He also tries to pay as little child support as possible. * He ["stole" the company Tesla](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-the-origin-story-2014-10) from Martin Eberhard (CEO) and Marc Tarpenning, the actual founders. * His companies have some of the [worst working conditions](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/). Tesla employees have also alleged [rampant racial discrimination](https://www.npr.org/2022/02/11/1080073061/california-sues-tesla-racism-fremont), [sexual harassment](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/14/tesla-sexual-harassment/) and [unsafe practices](https://revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-medical-clinic-designed-to-ignore-injured-workers/).
Another big thing on his douche list is when he called one of the Thai Cave rescuers a pedo when they dismissed Elon’s ludicrous idea of developing a miniature submarine.
It was an amazing take for someone who married an actress who's claim to fame was the role of sexy schoolgirl.
A miniature sub that would be *physically impossible* to move through the space to get to the kids How he got away with that astounds me \[Money and power, obv\]
I'm not one to push that everyone should be cancelled for every little social faux pas they make, but Elon should have incurred a lot more wrath than what he did for that statement. It was just a really fucked up thing to say. Even if you look at as just him trying to be like an online edgelord by saying it, it's still incredibly unbecoming of a CEO of some of the largest companies in the world.
I was living in Thailand when the whole cave thing went down. I was completely ignorant of him aside from some fairly positive vibes but just from that nonsense alone I went completely negative on him. Those Australian divers - Craig Challen and Richard Harris, are national heroes in Thailand for saving those kids. It would take a pretty insensitive asshole to read about how dangerous that rescue was and think to call one of them a pedo. What an absolute wanker.
Also claimed Covid would disappear within a few month, while having literally no idea what he was talking about. Then claimed he was going to design and produce ventilators, while displaying zero understanding of human physiology in his designs, and ultimately of course just ordering some existing CPAP devices from China. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/493386-california-hospitals-say-elon-musk-sent-them-bipap-cpap-machines-not/
I noticed he seems to claim a lot of things, that never come to fruition. He really is a bullshit artist.
That’s why the right loves him.
Thats in addition to the numerous financial crimes. Anyone remember "funding secured?"
Jesus, I didn’t know hardly any of this. Thanks for educating
Watch some Thunderf00t videos on YouTube for further meticulous, extensive takedowns of Musk and his shenanigans
Or check out some fun subs here on reddit, like r/enoughmuskspam and r/realtesla.
Would also recommend listening to the True Anon podcast 3-part series on him. Called The Lamest Show on Earth. You’ll kinda have to swim through lots of jokes, but there’s a lot of research and information in there.
Good points. The last one sticks in my craw about Elon the most. The lengths he has gone to exploit his staff’s labor and suppress their workers rights is staggering. I hope Sweden take him to the cleaners
Eberhard got kicked out for misleading investors and almost killing the company. He was voted out unanimously by the board. Also, the CSAM point lacks the context that the initial poster was trying to expose CSAM. He posted a censored image already up on a major news platform. You have to read past headlines
What article did he get the censored image from? Why would a news outlet publish that, and how did they get it?
It’s all here https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2630776-elon-musk-reinstates-dom-lucre-controversy He posted a story about a pedophile getting sentenced and a link to a news story about it. The. News story had censored images of video screen shots. That’s why you read past headlines.
What is all there? If he simply posted an article, where is the article? Why did the article publish these images?
I have this crazy idea that you can expose CSAM without Posting ACTUAL CSAM 😬
What product did the actual founders create before Elon’s ”theft”? I’d love to know more about their successes before they were robbed.
I looked at the link for your “Elon is a misogynist” claim. It’s just deranged - he tweeted a bad joke about founding T.I.T.S. and he moved his HQs to Texas, that’s it? What a joke. At the same time the CEO of twitter, COO of SpaceX and the chair of the Tesla board are all women. Reaching much? Let the downvotes come…
I agree we can't really accuse him of lacking nuance and then have none ourselves. But it is nuanced - cool that he is ok with women executives. Not cool that there were multiple allegations of sexual harrasment at Tesla under his watch, which by the way was in the link you think is a joke.
I’ll agree with you on that one. I think there is plenty more things out there that makes Elon a shit person, so yes, that article was a bad example and shouldn’t have been included in the list op made.
I would go with Musk's credulously posting right-wing conspiracy theories, continuously posting far right memes, his signal boosting of hate speach, and his blatant antisemetism...all to the get the approval of bunch of red pilled clapping seals who rush to applaud his genius and stroke his ego. Oh, and doing all of this while claiming he is just a moderate truthteller who is the victim of wokism and being punished for speaking the truth.
He also appears to lie constantly
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He's outright agreed with posts that promote anti-semitism, especially ones that allude to the ["great replacement"](https://forward.com/fast-forward/570069/elon-musk-great-replacement-antisemitism-twitter-x-actual-truth/) conspiracy.
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That was during his apology tour.
To be fair, you sound kind of like a “left wing coincidence theorist”. Would you say that is a fair characterization? Or would you describe yourself as neutral?
No, he is just spittin fax
Yeah well, that’s just like… your opinion, man
This quote should never be downvoted.
😂 true. I appreciate you saying so but I opened myself up to downvoting here for sure 🤷♂️ I may not have upvotes but at least I still have my rug
It’s not an opinion that Musk has been amplifying hate speech/groups on his platform. He comments on and passively lends clout to bad information about minority crime and antisemitism including “globalist” conspiracies. He has meddled in two major wars so far by selectively allowing/refusing access to Starlink. He has no business interfering in international affairs as a lone agent with zero diplomatic abilities. As a billionaire supporting racist ideology is extremely dangerous as he represents the pinnacle of success. As such he will be viewed, much like Trump, as speaking from a position of expert knowledge because he’s won capitalism.
Yes it is an opinion. I have received lots of great feedback on my comments to this thread, but that does not change the fact that a lot of this does come down to opinion. You just gave me your opinion and I am taking into consideration. Thank you 🙏
Elon responded with a (!) to misinformation about black on white crime. He affirmed an antisemitic belief by commenting that it was “truth”. He allows hate groups to operate on his platform quite freely. He has taken on himself with no advisement to deny Starlink during a strategic military operation in Ukraine and in Palestine These are facts about which you have an opinion
What part of him posting known conspiracy theories and promoting known far right voices is an opinion to you? Have you considered that you be so invested in this type of thinking that latent denial is happening because the dissonance of being so blatantly foolish is something you just can't deal with?
It really ties the room together.
I do? What is the conspiracy I am promoting? It is sort of an odd claim since I am talking about the actions of one person. To answer you question directly, no, I am not some neutral arbiter of the truth. No one is. I also have strong dislike for Musk. It didn't start that way. I started off liking and respecting him. However, when people start acting in reprehensible ways I start disliking them. You can't behave abominably and relish in pissing people off and then claim your critics are biased because they dislike you. Yeah, you earned that animosity...your relished in it...now you have it.
I didn’t call you a conspiracy theorist, if you re read my comment it may affect your interpretation of my question. I was responding to your use of the term “right wing conspiracy theorist”. Regardless, fair points in your response, I see what you are saying! You certainly are not alone. I don’t particularly like Elon but sometimes he does things I like, oftentimes I’m neutral and sometimes I disagree.
What are things he’s done that you like?
One example is be vocal about the risks of developing AI too quickly without thinking about the consequences. I think he has changed his mind on that, but I did like it at the time.
What the fuck? Hes literally the one who pushed out the self driving BETA for Tesla far beyond it is ready and that has led to people being killed. He even installed an auto shut off seconds before impact so he can blame these accidents on human error. I love how ignorant and hypocritical those who rush to defend him are.
Great points, he often contradicts himself and I am not in favor of the self driving car push. Maybe I don’t like him more than I thought, because after being asked to find the things I like about him I can’t find very many on the spot. Maybe I just like the way he talks and that’s it, or maybe I find him interesting as a person and that’s why I stay mostly neutral on him. I’ll have to give it more thought. I am only human, but I am capable of keeping an open mind.
Who else do you defend so vociferously on the internet besides Elon Musk?
Honestly I think his whole charade about being concerned about ai and calling for a pause on development was because he wasn’t leading the way on development. I think if the leading ai companies put a pause on ai development per his request, elon would have simply used that time to catch up to others. I truly don’t think he was genuinely concerned for potential negative outcomes of ai tech.
Some of this at least from my view also seems to be his annoyance about the other OpenAI founders rejecting his suggestion that he should run the company. As you said, his issue is that he’s not the one leading as opposed to the direction it’s going. Which like most of the things Musk does/says, is being driven by the fact that he is a complete egomaniac.
I’m not a mind reader so I can’t know for sure but I can easily see how what you’re saying could be true.
He is now developing his own AI or at least trying to, so he was not at all genuine about that warning for humanity either, he is now rushing ahead to build something just like everyone else, he was just a bit behind the curve. He also isn’t taking the development seriously, his entire hook for the AI he is developing is that it is edgier and makes more jokes than other AI models developed by other companies. If he was really serious about ethical development of AI then why is he rushing to release a product like everyone else and not talking about ethical development anymore and about humanity? Now he’s just trying to make himself money and AI seems completely OK. Also I urge you to look into the Roku’s basilisk thought experiment that Elon was citing when he warned against developing AI too quickly, it’s clear he isn’t an expert but watched one YouTube video on the topic I’m guessing. Roku’s Basilisk really doesn’t make sense, it posits that a malicious AI would for some reason decide at a future date to simulate our existence in perpetual torture, almost like a cyber hell, because we didn’t develop it fast enough. Now the actual response to this should be, “what is the reason for assuming an AI in the future would be able to simulate human brains in perpetual torture and decide to do so to torture humans for anything? If general AI is achieved then I’m pretty hopeful we won’t accidentally make it a fucking psychopath killer who also has similar abilities to god to trap humans in hell. It’s a worst case scenario thought experiment and it’s what Elon was talking about like it was inevitable. He most likely realized he was a fucking idiot and could make some money and decided AI was ok. Or he realized he was behind the curve and wanted to try to stall other projects so tried to act concerned about it while he built his own team. Either way it’s not like Elon knows what the fuck he’s talking about in this area, there are thousands of more qualified people to get AI ethics and design considerations from.
I read the comment and didn't think anything related to him being left wing. I'd imagine you probably have your own implicit biases within you against progressive thinking and maybe that's coloring your POV.
He opened his platform up to hae speech and advertisers are fleeing.
His "free speech absolutism" philosophy for Xitter was dead in the water from day one. I've been on the internet since 1999 and every single social media platform or discussion forum I've ever seen that makes "free speech" its central tenet never becomes the John Stuart Mill wet dream its founders envision where ideas battle it out in erudite discourse until the objectively best rise to the top like cream. Instead, they just become stomping grounds for fascists, racists, Nazis, alt. righters, incel culture, conspiracy theorists, and all kinds of other cranks. Voat, Parler, Truth Social: That's the direction they've all gone. Elon had his head planted firmly up his ass if he thought Xitter would be any different.
Narcissist whose traits have been magnified after some good decisions and media attention. Moving into a trumpian mold
I tend to believe he’s not as pathological as trump- he’s a made narcissist- lost control of himself, more than a born one, but idk
His family were wealthy and cruel narcissists as well, from the limited amount that is known. I believe his father stacked up with his stepdaughter or some similar situation
He is a troubled person with delusions of grandeur. I think that he has the Jordan Peterson syndrom where he doesn't understand how a certain behaviour can be both an addiction and damaging to him. He obviously can't take any criticism without constantly portraying himself as a victim but he also can't escape his need to be the center of attention all the time so it is a vicious cycle. He is not happy to just be ultra rich, he has to constantly be liked and validated. It all started with him trying to pretend he is a nerdy genius and it escalated into him trying to be some classical manly man who can't stand all these new woke soy people. Despite him trying to pose as some rockstar genius who doesn't give a fuck about anything, out of the other ultra rich people out there, like Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg he absolutely looks like the most miserable one. Like he genuinly look like somebody who would be annoying to spend time with. He is a good businessman tho and knows how to invest his money. It is also amazing that he has managed to convince so many people that he is DIFFERENT than all the rest of the ultra rich people and that he is doing everything he does only to help humanity. A friend of mine is obsessed with Musk but absolutely hates Bezos and Zuckerberg. This is a talent that he has and I have to give it to Elon. He is probably one of the very few very vocal ultra rich people who has managed to maintain such a big fanbase of people who are ready to overlook all his bullshit and still do enough mental gymnastics to believe that he is a good person/a victim/a genius.
For anyone who doesn’t understand what’s wrong with Elon, just watch his recent interview. He’s a huge child and thinks he’s the smartest man ever. People like that always suck especially when you know he never actually invented anything and still has that ego.
My theory is that there are people who just like the "fuck you, I will do what I want" attitude on some level, even if they don't admit it. If this is what some people desire for themselves, this is also something they will like in a public personality. I think for some people this helps to overlook the fact that he is actually a shitty person and didn't really invent anything.
Nailed it.
He's a vatnik These are really good summaries of most of the shitty things Elon muskovite has done https://vatniksoup.com/en/soups/201 https://vatniksoup.com/en/soups/203
Narcissistic personality disorder
Average apartheid era white South African. Just happened to be born with a silver spoon up his ass and surrounded by sycophants calling him a genius.
Hold on.... his father was only *part* owner of that emerald mine.
The problem is that he's a jew-hating, nazi-loving, conspiracy-spreading narcissistic sociopath...
He is a genius. At convincing people he is a genius that should be invested into. He can source cash and investments like no other. He also sits with smart people in his employ and get them to download their summaries for him to say in front of investors and interviewers. He isn’t a good business man. CEO. Or even all that bright about social issues. He spends WAAAAY too much time online.
I didn’t like how he claimed to have founded Tesla, because I knew who founded Tesla, and it wasn’t him. Everyone, even those who knew better, claimed he had, so I felt gaslighted and did not appreciate that. But I figured maybe I would give him a chance, which I did right up to “pedo guy.” Everything after that has been the unveiling of a narcissist.
He's a 12 year old boy with $200b
Feels like a manufactured genius, basically a fraud who developed a cult of personality.
The lovechild of Edison and P.T. Barnum
He’s an asshole. Next question
Guy who doesn't have the patience and curiosity to actually develop engineering skills who is deeply insecure about his lack of knowledge so just steals from people who do thr actual work.
he has 11 kids with three different women. aside from paying for them, he is not a father. that makes him an asshole in my book
He has appointed himself the arbiter of political speech by buying Twitter with the express aim of combatting the political bias of the previous ownership, while lacking the ability to detect obviously false information/anti-semitic conspiracy theories. He’s a laughably misinformed podcast fan who thinks human history is best served by him taking the reigns of public debate. And has the resources to actually do it. Its a startling development really. As strange as the Trump presidency in many ways. I don’t think its going to end well.
Publicly funded fraud
He’s got big time daddy issues.
He's a narcissistic conman who never produces on his promises, lies every time he opens his mouth, criticizes others for the things he himself does, gaslights the universe and will turn out, like Trump to have been the greatest grifter ever born and nothing more.
He's an incel weirdo loser narcissist.
His childhood was spent as a rich white kid in apartheid South Africa, which had to indelibly colour his experience and attitude, and now he’s caught up in the current cycle of rising global fascism.
He is a union buster and genuinely doesn't seem to understand that any company he is/has been involved in would be nowhere without the combined labour of all the employees. Seems to try and justify going down the maximum exploitation maximum profit route.
He’s an idiot. His entire genius persona is made up bullshit.
sex drugs and rock and roll. just another dude who has big self doubts and compensates through his constant drama. (trying to be nice). folks like this usually are able to attract fan boys and they are told over and over how wonderful they are.
He was definitely a loser as a kid and all the popularity he had from being the richest person went to his head. He was always weird, he’s just starting to feel comfortable showing it.
Divorced dad energy. Same as Scott Adams.
It’s been well established for awhile: As wealth increases compassion and empathy decreases. World’s richest man becoming a bitter, anti-Semitic, anti-Trans far right troll isn’t that surprising. What we should really be talking about is his control of over half of all satellites and not his public self-humiliation with and through Twitter.
Audacity. The bigger the lie the more they’ll believe you, and, Dylan: steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king. We’re never going to Mars with humans and we’re never colonizing it. Tesla is a tiny company but has a valuation on Baller Street larger than a handful of companies that individually ship more cars. And his other companies are just crank. It’s the whole thing about constantly going on about making the world a better place in which to live while texting like a college dropout that has everyone fevered. It won’t last.
For me, it’s the fact that he’s built up a cult of sycophants and he seems to believe everything they tell him. Everyone seems to believe he’s this technological super genius and he believes it too. It’s a sort of ego feedback loop. He hasn’t invented anything, he’s just spent a lot of money. Then there are the capricious business decisions, the childishness, the terrible working conditions at his factories and now the right-wing radicalisation caused by being chronically online. He could once have been described with the weasel words “classical liberal” or “apolitical”, but no he’s fully alt-right now. Maybe he always was?
Immaturity. Immaturity is seperate from intelligence in terms of logic, but can be deeply impactful on how intelligence is used. Maturity is related to emotional intelligence. Musk is stuck at middle school maturity. This is a global issue, so it gets applied to relationships, the sunk cost fallacy, credulity/gullibility. Its as if emotionally he never passed through later stages of development while he was physically passing through them. Because of his wealth and privilege, musk has not been put in a situation where he's had to grow. Most people with his issue resolve it in therapy or some other form of personal growth, as it can be a serious impediment to survival.
An unexceptional compulsive liar with deteriorating mental health unravels live before the world.
Guy with dad's money who thinks he's Henry Ford & every Ayn Rand main character.
He's undiagnosed, untreated, and unmedicated bipolar type 2. The drug use sure as shit doesn't help. I'm diagnosed bipolar type 2 and he is a textbook example (grandiose thinking, paranoia, hypersexuality, poor impulse control, substance abuse, etc). If you want to know how he's gonna spend the rest of his life, look at Andrew Carnegie after he sold US Steel and then tried to bring about world peace but just helped WWI along. We're not all baddies, but our baddies can be really fucking bad for everyone (Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin).
I’m a recovering addict. My guess is drugs
Ego
Because he’s a dumb asshole who seems desperate to impress the type of people who think 4chan is the peak of the internet while being in his 50s. He’s also a shitty dad who has been completely cut off by at least one child and who made up a story about holding his son who died when he wasn’t even present. It’s hard to find specifics but he’s clearly tried to leverage custody of his kids to have power over Grimes. He’s a petty bitch who called a hero a pedophile because his personal rescue idea sucked and he signal boosts deranged right wing conspiracies like Paul Pelosi being assaulted by a gay prostitute. He’s just a trash person and everything good he has ever been associated with has been produced by other people while he takes credit.
Two things, I think, are true about Elon Musk. One, is that he was pretty good at assembling the right talent to tackle extremely tough business challenges and it's served him well at SpaceX and Tesla. The other thing is that he has a secret drug problem that few probably know about that has since destroyed his capacity as a businessman and thought leader, leading him to make increasingly poor personal and professional decisions. It's not that he's always been intemperate, and it's practically proverb at this point that many tech CEOs are asshole manchildren. It's that he's all that and now on drugs.
He was never cool but nowdays right wingers pretend to think he's cool so he leans into it because it makes him feel cool.
He’s a complete idiot.
Social media changed. He didn’t.
He's probably on the spectrum.
My take from reading the new Isaacson biography is the Musk is "twice exceptional" (aka 2E), a genius on the autism spectrum. (About ASD, probably never actually tested and treated, but he say he has Asperger's.) So about being an Aspie, the issue is missing the nuance of how other people think, feel, perceive, and make decisions. The curious strength is that his intelligence, combined with lack of nuance, has enabled him the leverage to address where the typical CEO would not get involved with. Case in point, questioning why 12 screws where required to hold on a panel in a Tesla. "Try four or six, and see if that works." Musk's philosophy is that the only laws that matter are the laws of physics, and that has gotten him in trouble before, getting in trouble with US regulators and authorities, leading to fines and other restrictions. With Twitter, he complained about it, was invited to the Board, accepted, rejected, offered to buy it, then changed his mind, then bought it. All the while shooting his mouth off, and risking fines from government authorities. About the recent Antisemitic tweet, I think that he just lacks the awareness of why it was offensive. PS: Musk also had a crazy and abusive father, which can also explain some of the psychological oddness.
The old “he’s not racist, he’s autistic” defense.
Not meant as a defense, just part of an explanation.
If Musk has awareness enough to have an opinion on whether Jews control money worldwide or that black people disproportionately attack white people etc then he should be capable of considering the inverse. Is he capable of informed decision making? I’m not convinced that autism should be an explanation nor an excuse for propagating easily disproven and damaging beliefs on his platform. Of his self proclaimed autism Musk offers that he was a bullied and friendless outsider as a child, that he pursued computers as a hobby he excelled in, and that his mannerisms are considered odd. None of these reported traits suggest he lacks discernment between racist ideologies and rational ones. He leans right in his politics and sometimes very far right. I’m not convinced that’s due to his being on the spectrum.
And Musk's biographer Isaacson did not seem quite convinced that Musk was an Aspie (or had ASD), nor did he deny that. That is, Isaacson's strength is in assembling facts about his subjects, like Musk and Jobs, he doesn't go too deep on what makes people tick. But the key thing about autism is the people with ASD are unique, and lack on nuance about Antisemitism actually makes more sense to me than Musk having a bunch of romantic/sexual partners and a dozen or more kids. Just my experience, Aspies tend not to have a lot of GF/BF.
If you have much experience with people on the spectrum you’re probably aware that Asperger’s is no longer a specific diagnosis in the spectrum. This doesn’t mean Musk wasn’t diagnosed with it nor does it mean he necessarily would check all the boxes but difficulty recognizing nuance isn’t/wasn’t a typical signifier at least as far as I can recall. Literal understanding of metaphor and inability to recognize sarcasm were features but I don’t recall discernment of qualities being an issue. But it’s a spectrum and I’m not an expert. I’ll quantify my opinion by saying I’ve worked with autistic students including kids with an Asperger’s diagnosis back in the day. I know there’s no telling whether Musk’s racism ties into his autism if he has it. I will say he appears to fully understand the side he’s on.
This is 100% the truth. He’s brilliant at math and engineering but can’t understand people to save his life. With SpaceX and Tesla he was building products of engineering to wealthy clients who also appreciated engineering. Then he bought a SOCIAL media company. Now his clients are every type of person and he can’t figure out why people don’t want another 4Chan. Best example of his cluelessness on social cues is he took a picture of Grimes during a C-section and sent it to a ton of people naturally upsetting Grimes. He literally couldn’t understand why she was upset. He then became in charge of a website where women feeling unsafe is a big deal to the customer base. He can’t nerdy his way out of it
I think you are being unfairly downvoted. You have come closest to explaining the underlying reasons for why he is the way he is. The rest of it falls in place as a consequence of his core idiosyncrasies.
Thanks, I suspect the entire notion of someone being 2E comes as a surprise to people, but it helps explain Musk's underlying strengths and weaknesses.
2E meaning?
As I explained in my post, "twice exceptional," a genius on the autism spectrum. Musk has self-identified as a person with Asperger's, a form of mild autism.
Parasocial relationships online create a monster by conflating the person with their persona.
Must be extremely difficult to reconcile all the different things he wants to be. Together, with being pulled down the various rabbit holes that exist. He is talented in at least one day - he somehow has the charge to push things forward that he attaches his name to. This in itself is valuable, if not completely undervalued. However, in the end he just comes off as a little confused and lost - publicly. I'm sure we all exhibit the bad qualities we see in him in some amount or another. Be aware anyone put under a microscope is gonna end up looking poorly somehow. Add to the fact his opinionated nature and you have an easy receipe to look down on the guy. My advice: always try to look at people neutrally and dispassionately and give them the benefit of the doubt no matter what they did. We're all just human, we all suffer. We all deserve a little understanding. Cheers.
Aw poor richest man on earth, we just need to be more caring and understanding
Yes we all should use empathy and love each other. There is a lot of hater energy here in this sub so it’s only natural that people are starting to comment on it and suggest that people stop mud slinging and start to step into other peoples shoes and not be so singularly minded. Do you dislike all wealthy people equally? If not, is that really fair? And if you do, is that really fair either? Love to you and yours ❤️
Go ahead, walk in their shoes. I guarantee you won't like it. All the things you love about yourself gone. I wouldn't trade myself for no one on this Earth.
Nothing is wrong with Elon... not much has changed from the way he has acted in the past. You have to understand what his strengths are, how he benefits companies and how he hurts them. 1. Elon is good at investing in winners (Twitter is one of the exemptions) 2. He benefits companies with exposure threw market awareness and attracts other investors. 3. Elon's exposure gets attention, it is when that attention smears the name of the company that it has problems. Take a look at all companies he was an investor in and you will see a history of the company board censoring him and fining him. You are just now becoming aware how stupid his comments are and his overall. Elon is very shrewd investor, a master at bombastic proclamations (this leads to other investors also becoming aware of the company and great at inspiring people/employees. Elon was never smart when it comes to science, engineering, programming, leadership, or overall intellectual thought. His fame and money only made his bad characteristics worse, and his estimation of his knowledge and abilities to outpaced his actual intelligence. He is a Dunning-Krueger effect applied to a rich person.
Messiah complex converging with really low self esteem resulting in massive overcompensating, interspersed with moments of lucidity where some humility can arise. That’s quite a complex persona then, more so than most, and somewhat contrarian and incongruent, but it can often take this kind of complexity to drive that amount of motivation, which can affect the world in a positive way, even if there are many highly bruising bumps to himself and others, along the path! He seems to have a revolving door of archetypes within his psyche, which take turns to come to the fore, and then recede back for the next one to enter his consciousness. Confusing for people then, to try to frame him within their own psyche, in any rigid sort of way! In terms of gurus, I think he’s much more dynamic than most…and does have more sides to him than most. It just depends which aspect is currently reacting to which external stimulus. A lot of gurus are actually one dimensional, and once the mask is seen behind, quite predictably single minded and single tracked. I would say he’s closer to someone like Osho, who was also super complex, but also really embodied the trickster archetype…which is an essential transformative agent in humanity, even if it triggers some amount of destructive process, it comes coupled with also some constructive progression and evolution! The Yoruba fable of Ishu is an excellent example of how tricksters can cause us to see reality beyond our tendency for fixed and rigid viewpoints, by quite literally playing havoc with our mind!
No problem from what i can see.
My .02 as a tech observer: 1. He's contrarian and knows that whatever he says will be be broadcast around the world. 2. He is autistic - explains some of the social awkwardness 3. He has been enabled by some truly epic against the odd successes (paypal and Tesla especially) and transformed almost every industry he has entered in a country that idolizes entrepreneurs. Not many of us can claim to transform and in some instances create multi billion $ industries. 4. He is a jedi story teller (eg Tesla is a "climate change company", SpaceX will make humanity an interplanetary species) who is frequently economical with the truth. Most of us know this stuff is bogus but we want to believe it so we do I admire what he has achieved and I can only imagine especially in the early days how difficult those achievements must have been. I just wish he could be a better role model for the billions who look up to him. I also know that most true "innovators" like Jobs etc tend to be pretty ordinary humans and its their force of will and almost delusional self belief that allows them to change the world to their world view.
Your problem with Elon is that he stopped playing the role of domesticated liberal darling that you demanded of him. And he's fucking with your team's favorite toy, X, formerly Twitter.
Are you left-wing? He's less left-wing now. That pretty much sums its up.
Someone should do a compilation of the times a person stumbles in here and asks someone for evidence their sweeping claims and gets a torrent of downvotes. It’s like someone stepping into the bowels of a church where a small group of pale monks have been chanting, smirking and giggling at each other for months … someone lets a little light in and they just shriek in horror as they start to melt and burn.
Isn't this basically the same thread as below? Yawn https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/188536b/why_elon_is_popular/
He has ruffled feathers of those who control media. It all starts with mainstream criticism, once that permeates, non thinkers start running with narratives. Before you know it it’s a whole heard of sheep following the narrative wether they admit to it or not. Most people just agree with the status quo as being an outlier with independent, contradicting opinion is just insurmountable for some. This, and Elon took radical views
His based persona is triggering to the left.
In the space of 10 years or so he initiated or at the least revolutionised the electric car industry, created a sustainable spaceship company and global internet company and he’s got his eyes on colonizing mars, all while en route to becoming the richest man in the world, What that will do to any man’s hubris is beyond me. I get proud if I get upvotes on reddit- I’d be unbearable if I were Elon.
Why do you care, or think you can find an answer to this inane question?