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Coincidence?
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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A member of my extended family loves Tesla and SpaceX and thinks Musk is a genius. It's frustrating because he's a very smart, generous, and chill family member...but then there's his Musk fan boy thing. I do my best to ignore it and focus on his good traits.
It’s easy to forget that Musk was seen as an “IRL” iron man not that long ago. He was buying tech companies, taking credit for their accomplishments, and making seemingly credible promises of colonizing Mars in the near future.
It all went to shit with Twitter. Musk exposed himself as a guy born with the silverest of silver spoons who failed upward all his life on the backs of the work of his betters who he never paid properly. That’s where all the extra money came from.
ehh, he exposed himself earlier. I was a huge fan until the whole "accusing the diver of being a pedo because of how he looked", and from there Musk went downhill, quickly.
Glad someone else remembers this, all because ppl didn't like his "personal mini sub for every one of the trapped children" idea...meanwhile the guy he insulted literally saved every single one of them one by one.
There actually were brave men who saved the kids for real, none of which were involved in any way with the childish Musk name calling BS. Those men's names are John Volanthen, Richard Stanton, Jason Mallinson, Chris Jewell, Richard Harris, and Craig Challen and they are heros and they don't deserve to have their bravery credited to anyone else no matter how childish some random billionaire is.
That was basically the first hint I saw of what a dipshit Musk is/was, just because the guy criticized his water coffin idea. Before that though, I knew virtually nothing about Musk apart from Iron Man and whatever random news pieces were getting pushed out. He smoked weed! He made a flamethrower! They shot a car into space! The letters for the cars spell S3XY! In retrospect though and knowing what we know about him now, it just shows what an immature child he is.
Yeah that was the first time I had to do a second glance at one of his comments. The scuba thing really sent him down a dark path lol
A huge fan of government sunsidies, or false promises? He did manage to hire engineers to save him in some cases
Reminds me of Jobs and Wozniak. Jobs was a toxic jerk who was very good at taking credit for the genius of Wozniak and others. Jobs had some brains and talent, but he was mostly just a whip cracker and ruthless self promoter. His pedestal has always annoyed me. Musk is similar and probably worse.
Definitely worse. Jobs is dead, Musk is not.
One of the many truths we’ve really learned over the past few years is that it’s easier to con someone than it is to convince them they’ve been conned. In fact, it’s easier to keep conning them, over and over, than it is to convince them they’ve been conned. That’s what Musk does. That’s what Trump does. They also benefit from the tendency of people to believe there’s a close association between material success and ability, or success and intelligence, or success and moral standing. It’s a modernized version of the divine right of kings.
I don’t think the analogy to Jobs is great though. I never knew Jobs, but I know several people who knew him and worked with him. The consensus opinion among them seems to be that Jobs had a dysfunction like a lot of people in the industry do. He had poor control over a relatively short temper. He was also aware of it and worked to overcome it, but like we know about people with cognitive dysfunctions, it’s not something you can just will your way out of. We depend on our brains to tell us when something is going wrong, and so when the brain is the thing that’s going wrong, it can be pretty bad at that job.
What Jobs did have was an intuitive grasp of the relationship between a person and technology. He saw that there was more to it than a beige box that people worked or played on. He saw a way of creating an impression of a personal connection between a person and a personalizable but inanimate object in a way that few people have achieved before or since. Yes, Jobs could be a whole bag of dicks, but from all accounts that’s when he was at his least effective.
But at the end of the day, before Jobs was hired back as CEO to rescue Apple, things had gone to shit because they had started to think of themselves as just a computer manufacturer. There was no vision for an iMac, an iPod, or an iPhone. He got it wrong sometimes, too. The Lisa was as big a disaster as the Edsel. Ping was a disaster. The original Maps was a disaster. The job of the CEO - Jobs’ job if you will - is to provide vision and direction, and to get it right.
That wasn’t what Woz was good at. He is intelligent and a creative thinker. He is a tinkerer and a hacker. He can be a bit of a tech bro, but he has a genuine love for technology and understanding. I hope he fully recovers from his recent minor stroke and that they can take measures to prevent any sequelae.
That was longer than I intended. The short version is that Jobs was more like Miranda Priestly from the Devil Wears Prada and Musk is more like Michael Scott would be if he had a couple of hundred billion dollars but lacked the moral framework that made his character likable.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I'm not saying Jobs deserves zero credit. Woz himself respected the man, so who am I to disagree. As you pointed out, he had some visionary traits. I just think he's highly overrated, and his contributions, while significant, could have been provided by many others. He just wasn't the magic unicorn he was lauded as, IMO.
Comparing Musk to a billionaire Michael Scott is gold. And I agree with the point that Jobs was smart and Musk is a dumbass.
Now if only there was a shred of regard for rajadharma to go along with it... :(
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Jobs' biggest sin in terms of the public was charging too much for Apple products. Musk has done a lot worse.
You can appreciate what the actual talent at Tesla and SpaceX have accomplished while still seeing Musk as a horrible person. It's just too bad supporting either company puts money in his pocket.
Yeah musk has very little to do with the accomplishments of Tesla or SpaceX. He provides the money. It’s the incredibly skilled workers of said companies that are making things happen. We can absolutely champion removing musk from every position he holds while pushing forward the ideas that space exploration and EVs are good things.
At the same time, we should push for:
space exploration to be about the search for knowledge and for making a better life for all of humanity based on the resources available in space, instead of building off-planet bunkers for billionaires once their climate change profits run out of steam
EVs to be efficient, affordable to everyone, and generally more environmentally friendly than any fossil fuel vehicle. This will require significant research into battery technology and production processes. Time for car manufacturers to start spending all those profits they have. The strikes are a good start
X/Twitter to fail. No bailouts, no buyouts. Let elon lose the 40 Billion he spent on it. For those that supposedly champion capitalism, this should be a win win in demonstrating what the market does when you are no longer competitive.
The only way to do that is to buy more shares than Elon owns. Let's buy more stocks and usurp him!
Yes, absolutely. Unfortunately it's quite traditional only to tolerate markets as long as we're happy with their behavior. The moment a market starts worrying or upsetting us is never "oh man, maybe this 'markets' thing isn't all it's cracked up to be", it's "obviously some regulation or policy is ruining this market, or it would never do this thing i don't like".
So we're stuck with the lose-lose-lose of:
keeping markets, their volatility, and all the shit that comes with that
giving up the fringe benefit of markets redistributing wealth when they collapse
denying anyone a chance to see clearly what it means to trust markets to manage our economy for us.
Spacex is tough.. Musk can choke on a bag of dicks but spacex is doing some cool stuff that I'm excited about, but I've always been a space and rocket nerd.
See that's my problem with all this. SpaceX and Tesla aren't successful because of Elon Musk. they are successful in spite of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk just puts money in big things. Elon Musk only cares about Elon Musk. Not even money. Elon Musk cares more about Elon Musk than money.
First competitor to Public sector contracts for space flight? Elon Musk can see Elon Musks name on it. First mass produced electric car on the road and in garages? Elon Musk gets to see Elon Musk associated with it. Twitter? Elon Musk gets to be famous even more for tanking a $44b social media company with little to no effort.
I disagree. Elon put a lot of effort into tanking Twitter. All he had to do to keep it from tanking (as bad as it did) was make no effort.
I have a coworker like this. He's always been a big fan of Joe Rogan, which was simply a harmless hobby five years ago, but now means that he gets sucked into some very dangerous ideas. He's a great guy to work with though.
I had an old coworker try and convince me I didn't need high blood pressure meds because of Rogan. "You just need to exercise and take vitamins". Yea. I'm going to listen to a podcaster more than my personal doctor that has examined me sixteen million times.
They aren't wrong that these things can help. But there are other people just prone to things and need extra assistance.
There are so many people that just don't keep up with the news or are in a bubble so they don't see any other perspectives. And I get that. It's really hard to escape the bubble.
Assuming they regularly use the English-language internet, I feel like it's less they don't keep up with it and more they're willfully blind to it. They would have to either go out of their way to avoid it or assume every article that casts him in a bad light is from jealous competitors in industries he's iNnOvAtInG in.
I don't give a shit about Musk at all and have never actually seeked out news about him yet it's basically impossible to not see headlines about his latest bullshit antic if you're just casually on the English speaking internet, so I really doubt there are that many people who are just "out of the loop" unless they're not a native English speaker or rarely use the internet at all.
Is it possible they're actually really into the science, or is it unmistakably fanboyism?
I question this too. I love SpaceX, and Tesla has definitely made great progress. In just a few years spacex has made scientific revolutions that would take NASA and ESA decades. Don't get me wrong, I hate the capitalism part. They definitely need government controls and incentives to keep "enshitification" for profit at bay. But the company seems to be doing a positive good so far, without a doubt. That said, I hate Elon Musk as a person. He pours money into great ideas, but only because he's a narcissist who wants to see his name on it. SpaceX has prospered in spite of him.