I think people need a refresher course of the last 5 years or so. Because here’s the deal.
About 2017 to 2020, maybe 2021, the internet was a huge fucking fan of Elon. Including me. I LOVED Elon. Seemed like such a down to earth guy who genuinely wanted to help the human race and was super ambitious. Even if he was flawed. From what I remember, the general consensus was you either liked him, or you felt indifferent and just didn’t really care.
NOW that headspace has changed. Either you fucking hate him, or you do like him and get destroyed. Now, it took me about a year before I started to really dislike him the way the internet does. Because I felt like at the time the internet was doing what it always does. Blows shit outta proportion. That was, until I started seeing things change. Because starting about 2-3 years ago, there has been a massive ego fluctuation in Elon. His Twitter is not the same as it was back in 2019 for example. He was actually fairly level headed and would post the occasional meme. But it was always something amazing to do with Space X or Tesla. Okay, no harm there. NOW it’s full of nonsensical retarded tweets, dumbass memes left and right, tweets pretty much shitting on his own users…It’s a toxic fucking cesspool there. I mean this guy is at a point where he thinks rebranding a social media site that has been widely known to the public with one name, and one name only for YEARS, is a good idea. Let alone to rebrand it to a single fucking letter. Because why not? Kill your user base apparently.
What the hell happened to him? I understand why people dislike him now. As do I. But dude. How can someone fall from greatness like that? Being seen as the next Steve Jobs, flaws and all. To just a shadowy figure of himself? What made him go fucking insane and gain that huge ego?
To the people that would comment, “Well he’s always been like that he just shows it now”, I don’t believe it. When you have such massive egotistical and narcissistic traits, you could give two shits about showing it. He would’ve done so his whole career if he was like this. I’m not saying he NEVER had an ego, but it wasn’t anywhere fucking near the levels of where it is now.
“We were on the verge of greatness, we were THIS close!”
I think you are suffering from rose colored glasses syndrome. Elon has always been a horrible human, always will be a horrible human, and deserves the French Revolution treatment. Doing 1 good thing while simultaneously doing 1,000 horrible things doesn’t make you great.
Your thought that he was such a great guy just a few years ago, why do you think that? He made an electric car? He made rockets that can land themselves? He made an online only bank? What exactly did he do that made him so great? Cause he didn’t do any of that, he bought companies that already existied and were doing that. He had the capital to invest, so money made him great?
You want to know how great he of a person he was behind closed doors, it’s an easy metric. How many kids does he have, and by how many partners? Now, why do so many of those kids want nothing to do with him? Could it be casue he’s a horrible douche bag, and alwasy has been?
Instigating violence is against instance rules.
He was always an idiot, he had South African mine money to waste is the difference between him and the idiots you already know.
Musk got a lot of fans by driving the electric car revolution, but he really was always a d-bag. It just got excused or swept under the rug.
The first public crack in the armor really came in 2019 when he inserted himself in the Thailand cave rescue effort in the worst way. Then in 2020, he basically declared himself a public health expert and spread plenty of COVID misinformation.
But well before that, his first marriage was apparently pretty awful: https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/
He’s always believed that population collapse is a huge problem. He comes from a big family, and has lots of kids himself.
His management style is also pretty terrible: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-management-leadership-style-at-tesla-spacex-2022-4
The first public crack in the armor really came in 2019 when he inserted himself in the Thailand cave rescue effort in the worst way.
Let’s not gloss over the fact that he started calling people “pedos” for not liking his rescue idea.
Yeah, i was a fan of elon musk until that. real wtf moment. Then again, i never followed him on twitter, I only followed the news and development of Tesla and SpaceX.
Then hired private investigators to stalk the guy to proof he’s a pedo. Real stand-up guy there.
Just gotta clarify here.
A member of the Thai government request help from Elon/SpaceX. Elon responded with a viable solution in a few days by putting all his best people from SpaceX and Tesla on it, then sending them to Thailand with what they’d built. Then the cave-diver was asked about Elons proposal on national TV, and he said Elon should shove it up his arse.
The cave-diver was the one who started slinging insults unprovoked, which is why he lost the case.
The Thai government never asked for Elon’s help - he volunteered following a tweet by a twitter user who suggested that he help.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44779998
Also, his solution was never viable to begin with - the rescue organizers said straight away that the submersible would be useless in the cave environment.
Can someone point me to an overview of why the submersible would be useless in a cave environment?
Not going to go research for you, but from reading articles linked here it appears the issue with the submersible was fear that it would become trapped and really block everyone in the cave. Elon said he had an inflatable model to send first to prove it would fit but I doubt things ever got that far.
its a bulky box trying to scrape itself through a hole that someone was already stuck in
Yeah no you can’t just rewrite history like that we have the receipts.
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Basically all of it? The Thai government didn’t ask him for help, a random user on twitter suggested he help. There’s no evidence the submersible was a viable solution, they would’ve had to run tests to ensure it wouldn’t become stuck in the cave itself and further trap the kids, which would’ve eaten up valuable rescue time even if the sub did ultimately prove capable. Vern Unsworth did not sling insults unprovoked, he called Musks PR stunt exactly what it was, a PR stunt. In any case it wasn’t why he lost the case, he lost the case because it was a jury trial between, as far as the public at the time was concerned, the “next steve jobs” and some guy who swims a lot or something.
Even then, Musks defense was weak af, it boiled down to “It was just a joke bro, I said sorry”(which he didn’t, he hired a PI to try and prove he was right) and “In south africa everyone says pedo, it’s an insult but it doesn’t actually mean pedophile”(which A. Should’ve invalidated his first defense, as an insult is not a joke, and B. Isn’t true, at best it was a slang insult used by shitty teens in his region of SA when he was a youth, and C. Isn’t what he meant. He doubled down and called unsworth a “child rapist” in an email to a Buzzfeed reporter)
The Thai government didn’t ask for help from Elon, he took it upon himself to send a team there and when experts told him his idea was stupid he got all pissy and called a guy a pedo. In fact the Thai government told him not to come and his idea was impractical and they had actual experts already working on a practical solution
the thai government never asked for his help, you know
Kompromat
There’s a lot of evidence that sufficient wealth can alienate people and change them in ways that are not good for themselves or society. The video is a bit long but it’s worth it.
I’ve heard about that kind of stuff before. I mean it’s obviously not healthy to be that obscenely rich and people like Musk would be my exhibit A.
Didn’t watch the whole video but heard a radio interview years ago whose specialty was dealing with rich people either being guilty about having a lot of money or acting like massive twats and wondering why they were so lonely.
Too much is obviously better than having not enough but money is a bad influence on people’s heads
He was over that threshold from day one of his existence.
What changed is he started becoming more public. He’s always been a shithead. There were mentions of him abusing his employees back when I was in grad school in 2012. People on the internet just fell for his mythos and just kept ignoring signs to the contrary until he just…kept…talking… and couldn’t be ignored anymore.
I think the shittiness was “forgivable” because he was doing cool stuff… omg, he’s disrupting the whole automotive industry! Omg, he’s disrupting the entire aerospace industry! It’s easy to forgive the underdog.
Elon is no longer the underdog.
I wouldn’t call it forgivable so much as no one was really reporting on it. No one was really reporting on Musk’s issues as an underdog.
true. And they really had the startup mentality, because they literally were startups. In general, startup mentality expects work long hours and sometimes not-quite-guaranteed pay because the people are driven by a vision, not a paycheque. So the shitty work environment is kinda par for the course in a small company dreaming of revolutionizing industries.
Maybe he’s #winning?
Oh man that’s a throwback. I actually have no idea what Sheen is doing now.
Charlie Sheen looks like a model citizen compared to the pricks of today.
With a glass of tiger’s blood or w/e Martin Sheen said?
Not sure why you’re surprised. Musk showed his true colors by hoarding wealth for his whole life.
But now you’re surprised he’s an asshole?
No good person has a billion dollars.
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Gates seems to be trying to make up for it with philanthropy. JKR also seemed to be doing okay until she, um, wasn’t.
I recommend the behind the bastard’s episode about bill gates. Especially how he showed down COVID vaccine distribution around the world and likely caused millions of deaths.
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He should have actually made a mech suit and became a super hero instead of what he actually has been doing.
Preferably a submersible mech suit.
Maybe he secretly loves mastodon but doesn’t want to admit it so he keeps making terrible changes and somehow people keep eating it up and buying twitter blue. He’s probably just dumb though
Huh? People always loved and hated him, I just think that with buying Twitter, both sides got way louder, and so we notice them more.
His greatest skill has been taking credit. He finally ran out of the accomplishments of others.
He had little to do with Tesla, aside from naming the models so they would spell S3XY and using shitty off-the-shelf components not designed for use in cars that are now failing in many vehicles. He literally bought the title of “founder” from the people that actually founded Tesla, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
SpaceX is the work of Tom Mueller (former TRW engineer), Gwynne Shotwell (former The Aerospace Corporation engineer), and Chris Thompson far more than Elon Musk.
Go back further, and you find his family owned an emerald mine. Paypal was far and away more the work of Peter Thiel, who merged his business with Musk’s online financial services company X.com (if you wonder where that came from). He got super rich selling out to eBay. His one business, Zip2, was just good luck selling it out also during the Dot Com bubble (I mean, seriously, it was bought for $305m by Compaq to help AltaVista). Essentially, the emerald mine funded Zip2, which he sold in 1999 to fund X.com, which became Paypal, which he sold in 2002. Since then, the millions he got from that sale funded SpaceX and Tesla.
And to be frank, he wants more power, and he saw how quickly Trump was able to manipulate people. So he dropped the mask and adopted Trump’s modus operandi.
Elon Musk is Repeating his Mistakes
Interesting recap of his earlier years.
He literally bought the title of “founder”
You’re being too nice. He bullied them in court for the title.
This feels like historical revisionism.
Musk bought Tesla before it had ever released a car, and now it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. There was no such thing as a consumer electric car when he took over Tesla. A few years later, I started seeing these weird cars slipping quietly past in Seattle. And at this point, Teslas are all over the place, and you see all kinds of electric cars. I’m not at all convinced that the major car companies would ever have made that shift without pressure from Tesla.
Musk obviously didn’t design & build the rockets that SpaceX uses, but he found the people capable of building those rockets and gave them funding. There were many companies competing to build the first private spacecraft (and many, many more people laughing at the idea that private spacecraft were even possible), and the best any of them managed was to shoot a couple tourists juuust out of the atmosphere–and that was with Jeff Bezos’ money. Meanwhile SpaceX drove the Russians right out of the space game.
He’s not some genius scientist, but holy shit what a track record. But if his talent was finding other talented people capable of solving nigh-impossible problems and throwing money at them…well, it’s a huge shame we’ve lost that.
His family did have a mine in South Africa, and benefited from Apartheid. But my understanding is that he cut ties with his father and left with nothing.
The guy has gone right off the deep end, and become profoundly unlikable, and all evidence is that he was always pretty much an asshole. What he’s doing to Twitter would be a tragedy if Twitter wasn’t already kind of a nightmare. But despite that, I think the world is better off for Musk’s efforts.
I mean, so far. I don’t know what he’s gonna do next. If he runs for president or something, he may yet tip the scale in the other direction.
I’m no fan of Musk, but I really want to know what you consider success if the things you listed don’t qualify?
By your yardstick you and everyone on this forum are complete failures.
I don’t think the commenter is saying/said Elon isn’t successful. What the commenter is saying is that Elon is successful at funding other people ideas and then taking credit for them as his own. Essentially, it would be like the producer of a small movie that becomes a huge hit taking credit for the entire movie despite having very little to do with it. Didn’t write it, didn’t direct it, didn’t cast it, didn’t market it, etc etc etc.
The flip side is along the lines of what you are saying. That movie may have gotten made without that producer, and may have been just as big a hit without them ever touching it…but we’ll never know because that producer recognized the potential and funded it and is now permanently tied to it. And, because they produced it, they made a shit load of money as well. You can’t say that producer isn’t a successful one, even if they also somehow deluded themselves into think they are the world’s best director, writer, casting director etc at the same time.
Not even funding others ideas. Got lucky once in an era of speculative markets that were insanely overinflated, then managed to get lucky a second time, and then has rode buying other people’s projects and making them worse ever since.
I mean they are successes, but they didn’t happen because Musk is a business genius. They are successes because musk was born with a golden spoon up his ass and then was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Where other people did the actual work.
The biggest correlation with “success” in the US is the wealth of your family. Musk proves this point.
You’re reading something he didn’t write. Nowhere in there did he say he wasn’t successful.
He is, however, clearly making a point that the success is in spite of Elon’s contributions and not because of them, which I agree with.
Saying other people’s work is yours isn’t a major accomplishment.
What the people he’s stealing credit from did are the accomplishments.
I read today that a lot of US conservatives used to hate him because he was pro-electric car, to the point where places in the US actually banned sales of Teslas. I do wonder if his lean to the right wasn’t, at least initially, partly a way of winning them over to his business interests.
Regardless, I still agree with the consensus here: he has always been both a moron and a dick, and his previous success, like most things in life, is best explained by luck.
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Besides what other users mentioned, we should also consider that the internet has a tendency to polarise discourses.
Without that polarisation, I believe that Elon Musk would go from “some rich and annoying weirdo, with a bunch of stupid ideas and a few decent ones” to “some rich and annoying weirdo, with a bunch of stupid ideas”. The overall opinion about him would decay, but by no means as much as we’ve seen - because it wouldn’t start so good to begin with.
Who he really was all along started to shine through the PR bullshit. He did not change, we just got to start seeing the truth.
