I get people are gonna say he was always this bad but I honestly don’t buy it.
While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors. The limited comments he did make on politics were pretty liberal, and usually specific to the environment. He was liked enough in heavily liberal circles to get multiple positive shoutouts. One of them was from freaking Star Trek, which as a sidenote inadvertently ended up aging like wine.
Modern Elon is absolutely unhinged. He seems to spend more time on Twitter making an ass of himself in ways you’d normally associate with a teenage edge lord. He’s an active and aggressive liability to his companies, both in terms of his persona and business decisions. He’s huge on politics to the point where he tried to interfere with the Russo-Ukraine war for a bit. A lot of times it feels like it’s a matter of time before he gets on stage with Kanye and starts trying to rap.
I think a combination of social media and covid broke him. I know Lemmy doesn’t think rich people are human, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. While they often have quirks, at the end of the day we’re all human. There are millions of people whose brains became fried due to culture war shit on social media post 2014. There’s no reason Elon would be immune to the same mechanisms that radicalize an average person.
You’re trying to blame his shift on social media and the pandemic, and you’re also claiming that the same thing happened to millions of other people for the same reasons, and I just haven’t seen any evidence to support that.
We can point to people acting like lunatics during the pandemic, of course, but if you want to claim that to pandemic caused them to become lunatics then you would have to look at how they behaved prior to it. And you can try to blame social media for how people see politics, but there again I don’t think the facts are on your side. Most people know that things your friend posts on Facebook may or may not be true. But many people, especially middle-aged and older people, believe that there’s a great deal of truth in the 24-hour news cycle that they see on television, when in reality that’s been highly tailored by the major news networks to make it seem like the sky is falling.
It has been remarked for a long time that many arrogant ultra rich people end up surrounding themselves by yes men, that insulation is created by their money and power, and over time their views grow unhinged because they don’t have contact with the real world or the general public. We know this happens often enough, and if I were speculating, I’d say the same thing happened here.
Look if you don’t think there’s any evidence to support social media and the pandemic leading to both a decline in mental health and radicalization, I don’t know what to tell you. Not only have there been like a million different articles on it, but this is patently obvious to the vast majority of people who lived through the entire thing.
This isn’t exclusively a middle aged man thing, a conservative thing, or even a political thing. A ton of people struggled enormously during the pandemic, sought solace in social media, and left with an extremely weird set of beliefs.
I’m sure I could find some of these sources, but I feel like I’d be trying to convince someone that the sky is blue. This is so abundantly obvious that you’ve either been living under an extremely large rock or are dead set on believing what you want to believe.
While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors.
Back then he still had his handler/business mommy Mary Beth Brown. She had basic control over his scheduling and publicity outreach since he started Tesla. In 2014 he canned her after she asked for a raise, he’s been handling his own pr and schedule ever since.
The problem with assuming that this is a recent change in personality is that it requires ignoring all his prior reported behaviour. It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.
No Elon did not become an asinine child overnight, he’s been that way the whole time. He just believes he’s now rich enough that he doesn’t have to pretend to be a different person. No JFK Jr did not become an insane person because he watched too much fox news, he’s literally been eating roadkill since he was a child.
All of these wealthy and powerful people have an entire system working for them dedicated to protecting their public image.
It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.
I similarly didn’t know how much of an asshole Steve Jobs was until listening to a podcast about his behavior. I had the same vague understanding of him everyone did (he’s regarded as a visionary, but was a micromanager and a perfectionist, etc).
PR firms and handlers do the devil’s work of making these monsters presentable to the public.
Some of the shit his daughter has said about him is fucking incredible- like weird sexual shit with her (I don’t think he was grooming her, he was just creepy as fuck) and just being cruel to her for no reason.
I get people are gonna say he was always this bad but I honestly don’t buy it.
While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors. The limited comments he did make on politics were pretty liberal, and usually specific to the environment. He was liked enough in heavily liberal circles to get multiple positive shoutouts. One of them was from freaking Star Trek, which as a sidenote inadvertently ended up aging like wine.
Modern Elon is absolutely unhinged. He seems to spend more time on Twitter making an ass of himself in ways you’d normally associate with a teenage edge lord. He’s an active and aggressive liability to his companies, both in terms of his persona and business decisions. He’s huge on politics to the point where he tried to interfere with the Russo-Ukraine war for a bit. A lot of times it feels like it’s a matter of time before he gets on stage with Kanye and starts trying to rap.
I think a combination of social media and covid broke him. I know Lemmy doesn’t think rich people are human, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. While they often have quirks, at the end of the day we’re all human. There are millions of people whose brains became fried due to culture war shit on social media post 2014. There’s no reason Elon would be immune to the same mechanisms that radicalize an average person.
You’re trying to blame his shift on social media and the pandemic, and you’re also claiming that the same thing happened to millions of other people for the same reasons, and I just haven’t seen any evidence to support that.
We can point to people acting like lunatics during the pandemic, of course, but if you want to claim that to pandemic caused them to become lunatics then you would have to look at how they behaved prior to it. And you can try to blame social media for how people see politics, but there again I don’t think the facts are on your side. Most people know that things your friend posts on Facebook may or may not be true. But many people, especially middle-aged and older people, believe that there’s a great deal of truth in the 24-hour news cycle that they see on television, when in reality that’s been highly tailored by the major news networks to make it seem like the sky is falling.
It has been remarked for a long time that many arrogant ultra rich people end up surrounding themselves by yes men, that insulation is created by their money and power, and over time their views grow unhinged because they don’t have contact with the real world or the general public. We know this happens often enough, and if I were speculating, I’d say the same thing happened here.
Look if you don’t think there’s any evidence to support social media and the pandemic leading to both a decline in mental health and radicalization, I don’t know what to tell you. Not only have there been like a million different articles on it, but this is patently obvious to the vast majority of people who lived through the entire thing.
This isn’t exclusively a middle aged man thing, a conservative thing, or even a political thing. A ton of people struggled enormously during the pandemic, sought solace in social media, and left with an extremely weird set of beliefs.
I’m sure I could find some of these sources, but I feel like I’d be trying to convince someone that the sky is blue. This is so abundantly obvious that you’ve either been living under an extremely large rock or are dead set on believing what you want to believe.
Back then he still had his handler/business mommy Mary Beth Brown. She had basic control over his scheduling and publicity outreach since he started Tesla. In 2014 he canned her after she asked for a raise, he’s been handling his own pr and schedule ever since.
The problem with assuming that this is a recent change in personality is that it requires ignoring all his prior reported behaviour. It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.
No Elon did not become an asinine child overnight, he’s been that way the whole time. He just believes he’s now rich enough that he doesn’t have to pretend to be a different person. No JFK Jr did not become an insane person because he watched too much fox news, he’s literally been eating roadkill since he was a child.
All of these wealthy and powerful people have an entire system working for them dedicated to protecting their public image.
I similarly didn’t know how much of an asshole Steve Jobs was until listening to a podcast about his behavior. I had the same vague understanding of him everyone did (he’s regarded as a visionary, but was a micromanager and a perfectionist, etc).
PR firms and handlers do the devil’s work of making these monsters presentable to the public.
Some of the shit his daughter has said about him is fucking incredible- like weird sexual shit with her (I don’t think he was grooming her, he was just creepy as fuck) and just being cruel to her for no reason.
Combo of info at these two sites:
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/lisa-brennanjobs-powerful-memoir-sparks-backlash-against-apple-cofounder-father/news-story/a23b93b757ccab850737a1a5fcf98d76
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-133000491.html
Also, and this isn’t anywhere near as bad but it just… ick. He used to wash his feet in the toilet. Seriously.
I don’t know if you came up with this but god damn lol.
If they do this then we’ll know for sure the writers are stealing our ideas for content