I can’t imagine anyone that has decent prospects would agree to go back to Tesla after getting canned with those kinds of wild swings in decision making.

  • HubertManne@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    I mean he was not so incompetent at one point. not sure what year exactly it was but he lost it at some point.

    • Pechente@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      I read in another thread that a lot of people agreed Elon lost it when he called that diver of the rescue team for kids trapped in a cave in Thailand a pedo. I mean wtf. If I remember correctly he never apologized and defended his insult. That’s completely unacceptable.

      • ElusiveClarity@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        That definitely opened my eyes. Also, a lot of rich people lost their minds during COVID because they were briefly treated like the rest of us.

      • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Yeah. That’s when we noticed it publicly. I was pretty online at that time period and Elon was well regarded before that. There were the his family wealth issues and the whole ousting Tesla founders and calling himself one or whatever that whole thing was.but they seemed like an alright side effect of genuis at the time…

      • HubertManne@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        Certainly sometime before that and the purchase of X but at one point with tesla, spaceX, and solar/battery stuff he seemed to be going somewhere. even the boring company. It was around or post hyperloop. I think he needed an excuse for the boring company and then I dunno somehow lost it with it being impractical.

        • machinin@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          The solar/battery stuff was just him saving an almost bankrupt company his cousins had. SpaceX and Tesla had both invested in the company, and he would have lost the money and like faced regulatory scrutiny had it went under.

          Hyperloop was his effort to disrupt California’s high-speed rail plans.

        • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Hyperloop? The failed project he pushed just to make sure other possible projects that would just work would not be done? Yeah, he was better back then… not.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Not only did he never apologize, he paid for investigation in the hopes that the diver randomly turned out to be a pedo and vindicating him. Then when that failed, he tried to play it off as “of that’s just a common south African generic insult, no one takes it literally”, with no one banking him up on that one.

      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        That’s just Elon being petty and he was attacked first.

        It was his trans daughter coming out and disowning him when shit started spiraling into the right wing must save the world from wokeness.

        There’s a big difference in being petty or vindictive or an asshole and this anti wokeness stuff which is going to cause great harm to society.

        He always had the asshole/ petty thing going if you followed him before.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Also, I bet if we ever saw those 2 reconcile their relationship, we’d see a change in his public persona.

          I’m not holding my breath on that one though.

    • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      He just became more public and we know him better. He’s always been the same.

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Nah, I have been in meetings with him before. While he was an asshole that I hated due to the way he treated my customer, he was really smart and spoke very lucidly and concisely. He had a vision and was doing everything he could to achieve it.

        Nowadays it’s like he has no coherent vision and is just doing whatever wild shit comes to his head. I think when he went from “barely a billionaire who spent it all and nearly went bankrupt” to “holy shit printing billions” then all guardrails came off and he let himself go free.

        • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          He got rich enough everyone said yes and or smiles. He lost the ability to have people be critical of him and never found someone to aid him.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            That’s a good point. Back in the day if he was leading a big brand to a cliff, others intervened and kicked him out and had the side effect of saving his reputation. Notably, it’s probable his leadership would have destroyed PayPal, but others took the reigns away from him. So when Tesla pretty much made his name, folks simply noted his early leadership at PayPal and retconned attributing him with the crazy success, despite PayPal originally outcompeting the online payment company he was a part of, getting the leadership briefly nearly tanking it, and getting kicked out allowing it to flourish.

    • CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      He’s always been incompetent. He was fired from PayPal for that very reason. He’s used his parents emerald business money to fabricate a career. He’s paid his way into being the engineer he clearly idolized but couldn’t actually earn himself. He bought Tesla, he bought Twitter, the “HyperLoop” was a hundred year old idea called a vac-train. Even the biggest selling point for SpaceX, were just plans NASA had decades ago but the technology didn’t exist at the time to pull it off. I mean the Boring Company… we’ve been successfully digging subway tunnels for a long time… the London Underground opened in 1863. New York had theirs in 1904. Elon in 2018 debuted a claustrophobic tunnel that was less than 2 miles long…

      If it wasn’t for daddy’s money, he would have been a nobody. But he bought his way into some sort of ‘relevance’ and has conned a lot of people who don’t understand science out of a lot of money. His greatest accomplishment is being a great conman.

    • Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      He fired his PR team a few years ago. That’s been the difference.

      He said plenty of dumb shit prior with people cleaning it up. One of my favorites was probably 10 years ago now. He claimed Model 3 assembly line automation would move so fast they’d have to worry about wind resistance.

      My friends and co-workers still laugh about that one now. It’s such an absurd “business” mentality of go fast = good. So go crazy fast = more good. With a technology that doesn’t exist and kinda doesn’t need to. It makes more sense to increase system capacity (multiple lines) when you’re chasing throughput like that. But what makes even more sense is accurately forecasting your production so you don’t have to slap a full car together in 30 minutes to keep up with demand.

    • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io
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      7 months ago

      What I heard when he first started turding Twitter, is that there was a decent team of execs and managers at Tesla that were able to manage him and keep him from mucking things up too much.

      It makes to me that now he’s gotten a taste of being Head Twit, he’s used to there not being a team running interference for him and is just barreling through with all his cockamamie bullshit.