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!”
He’s always been this bad, he just had enough people around him that sanitized everything we saw about him. There’s reports of teams at Tesla dedicated to keeping him out of the way. His Twitter was sane probably because it wasn’t actually him running it.
It truly is a case of he’s always been this bad, it’s just not being hidden anymore. I’m pretty sure he went off the rails during covid and stopped listening to anyone but himself. He’s shown glimpses of this through his career, most people just ignored it as eccentric billionaire though.
Just like Kanye appeared to fall off the deep end, musk also looks like it was sudden, when in fact it’s been a growing sentiment over the years.
Yeah, he was always that bad. There is a an excellent example in Eric Berger’s book about SpaceX early days(Lift off). I don’t remember the exact details, but there is a critical failure with one of the rockets, and Elon blames it on one of the best engineers. Later is found out it was not his fault, but Elon never apologised which just leaves vibes in the company.
And overall feel of reading the book that Elon treats everyone kinda bad, it is just not directly stated.
He made also a lot more money during this time period by pumping and dumping crypto. He went from being rich to having fuck you money, hence how he came to own twitter.
He didn’t make money off of crypto and already had an estimated 20+ billion dollars in wealth before 2020. Telsa stock price shot up from around $20 a share to $400 after the quantitative easing (ie. “the money printer”) of March 2020 where he saw his wealth go 20x by doing absolutely nothing (currently Tesla sits at more than 10x pre-Covid price).
Two things can be true. He is a billionaire because of his companies and he still pumped and dumped crypto and made even more money, because for these kind of people it’s never enough.
I’m not doubting his arrogance or stupidity but unless he’s doing it personally then laundering billions of dollars then the value of crypto that was held by Tesla was inconsequential relative to the value of his shares:
The company disclosed that it currently owns $218 million worth of digital assets after selling $963 million worth of bitcoin
(The rest being dogecoin)
I still think he used Russian bot farms to help hype his pump and dump, which would explain why the dude has had corespondences with Putin. Then he buys twitter under the guise of getting rid of the bots. Honestly if you look at it like that him paying 44 billion to destroy a company makes sense.
Thank you, I’m sick of the sycophants that pump and promote these right wing billionaires like they’re Tony Stark. These people ain’t geniuses, they just stole enough capital from people over the world to bribe politicians to do their bidding.
Kanye has bipolar that he stopped medicating though. Otherwise I agree
And honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk had some sort of condition he’s not being medicated for anymore. Or at least some kind of therapy that he stopped doing.
Nah, as someone said above, he just broke free from the people managing him and fits persona.
He probably should be on some medication and therapy, but I doubt he ever was.
Kanya may have bp, but he’s always been a douche.
BP is an explanation, not an excuse. OP is perplexed about how Musk is “suddenly” a jerk, which doesn’t have an easy explanation like BP. Kanye definitely seems to have gotten worse in the last few years, but I don’t know if the pro hitler thing was just well hidden before
That’s totally fair, and I didn’t mean imply that it was an excuse, just was saying that some people are just assholes regardless of mental illness.
I’m seriously so glad to see so many people who never fell for it here. The rich are not your damn friend, they are not here to help you.
All these rich people lost their minds during Covid because they were treated like common people.
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.
Then hired private investigators to stalk the guy to proof he’s a pedo. Real stand-up guy there.
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.
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.
Which sentences in that comment were false?
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
Buddy, you fell for the PR machine. Back in 2002 when Elmo was thinking about what to do with his ill gained money in order to
scam the us governmentmake more money he wanted to rely on a futuristic sort of image to raise capital. We came from the turn of the millennium but nothing futuristic had actually materialized. Mind you, not utopia futurism but more like rugged individualism dystopia futurism. Then in 2008 a movie came out, IronMan, starring Robert Downey Jr. And Musk thought that everyone liked that guy and if he presented himself that way—he owned a space launch company after all—then people would like him and he would be able to raise more money. Hence the hair implants (he was balding before) and Tesla self-driving (it was just electric cars before), and SpaceX to mars (originally it was just a fund sink to do something useful with all soviet era rockets), brain implants, etc. Along with it came a blitz PR campaign. The Muskrat didn’t have a significant public presence before 2010, no one knew who he was other than some eccentric billionaire who owned things nerds liked. Electric cars, and rockets. So he and a few publicists for hire pushed him hard into the public eye as the real life Tony Stark. That’s it.Cut to 6 years later, no more publicists. You see, he wanted more publicity, the way he acquired it was by inserting himself in any conversation he could. But as a any narcissist, Musk thinks himself perfect and incapable of any wrong doing, any fault is someone’s else and everyone are just dead weight dragging him down. So when he wanted to insert himself into the Thailand cave tragedy, Tesla’s PR, who doubled as his personal PR, told him please don’t. He called a guy a pedophile and fired the PR (“all the PR my companies need is me as their CEO”). He came from 6 years where everything he said was applauded by the public and anything he commanded was done. Then he
paid to bewas declared the richest man on earth. Nothing rubs the narcissist’s ego like being publicly acknowledge as what they think themselves to be. But this means all self-restrain was off and without any external constrains, his true self has come to be publicly known.Yup, this is exactly what happened.
Maybe I’m the odd one out but I can’t take any “take” seriously when people can’t just use names. I’ve seen “Elaine” and now “Elmo” and “Muskrat”.
Look at WhatASave Dave over here, simping for Space Karen and trying to claim the moral high ground at the same time.
He didn’t defend Musk at all. He was just commenting on the style of the conversation. But trying to come up with a new school-ground insult for someone every thread is admittedly immature and makes it really hard to follow the conversation if you’re not terminally online. It’s like everyone is trying to copy Donald Trump now.
Humor is dead.
I really like your narratization of the events, for me it had to do with him always being shitty but people always turning a blind eye because they fall into grand futuristic schemes instead of recognizing the union busting, sex scandal fiend may be a piece of shit.
Also a factor you didn’t mention was his fall into the alt right which has gained ire from most people over the internet (aside from right wing echo chambers or his twitter clique)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The biggest correlation with “success” in the US is the wealth of your family. Musk proves this point.
He was always an idiot, he had South African mine money to waste is the difference between him and the idiots you already know.
When was that cave-in in Asia where he proposed using a submarine to get them out, divers got them out instead, and he call the heroic divers pedophiles? That was the time I realized he was crazy.
Yeah, that was 2018 and I feel like opinions have gone steadily downhill since then.
That’s when it clicked for me too. Now knowing about the hyperloop existing just to kill a public transport bill, it’s infuriating that I didn’t see it before. He played us good for a looong while.
Didn’t he specifically call the diver who died in the rescue attempt a pedo? Could be misremembering
No, he called someone a pedo when they declined his offer of a custom submarine because it wasn’t practical. But it wasn’t the guy who drowned.
I don’t remember any of them dying.
Had to look up his name, it was Saman Kunan who was a former Thai navy seal; he was lining the cave route with oxygen bottles when ironically he ran out and fell unconscious and died.
I was wrong though, it was actually one of the British cave divers working on the rescue that his pedo comment was directed towards.
Oh! I forgot about that death. Very sad. Yeah, different guy but same rescue.
I believe a diver who was a member of the Vietnamese Marines died.
2018, 5 years ago. Here’s a great documentary about it (with only one sentence mentioning the narcissist).
Feels like a lot longer ago than 2 years ago… wait.
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.
He’s always been like this.
https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/
That’s the story of his first wife Justine. What kind of normal person would ever tell his girlfriend that “I’m the alpha in this relationship?”
If you have to tell somebody you’re the alpha, then you’re definitely not the alpha.
Yeah, he was never Tony Stark. He’s been consistently spouting shit his entire career, and a lot of people failed to see it.
To the people that would comment, “Well he’s always been like that he just shows it now”, I don’t believe it.
Then you’re never going to believe the real answer. A lot of us have been hating on Musk (and Peter Thiel, don’t sleep on that monster) since the Paypal days. But Elon made it easier for us to buy things, then he bought an electric car company, and suddenly everyone thought he was the damn tech messiah.
Yeah, totally in agreement. Dude was always a horrible, dumb, asshole.
I mean, he wanted to blow a nuke up in the atmosphere of mars, to change said atmosphere to be habitable to humans.
He also overrode engineers on Tesla’s autonomous driving, and forced them to only use cameras, and zero sensors (like every other manufacturer knows doesn’t work)
He bought twitter for far too much, and we are witnessing him kill it slowly.
I could really go on and on. He’s always been a moron, and a horrible person. I really don’t understand why anyone ever thought otherwise.
Oh, and should we mention that he tried to cosplay as a poor person, who started these multibillion dollar companies from nothing (this one is kinda disputed, but the only source that claims that he really was broke is musk himself)
He basically had enough competent ppl around him realizing they had to have babysitters to distract him or he’ll fuck shit up. I think it was tesla that had literal ppl designated to make him feel like everything was his idea and his ideas were good and being implemented
Using nukes to help terraform Mars isn’t unreasonable. It’s going to take thousands of years anyway. At that point the radiation won’t be a problem anymore. Cosmic radiation will always be a way bigger problem in Mars anyway.
This is also not a Musk plan. Actual scientists came up with it, he just co-opted it.
Of course it’s still hotly debated if it would be a good idea or even work, but it’s not totally crazy, like some of his other ideas.
I dunno. I’m able to drive based on vision alone. I don’t see why a computer can’t do the same thing.
Probably could, if there were better computers to parse the images. But due to the fact that there’s not a computer as good as the brain is at moving physical body through space, you need to use other tools at the moment.
Can you provide evidence of you hating on Musk since the PayPal days?
If I remembered my Digg account, there’s probably at least some comments about his hair transplant ca. 2000. Not really proof, but I’m sure you’d b able to read the contempt.
He didn’t change. You just got older and now recognise him for the childish idiot he is.
He called divers, who tried to rescue children, pedophiles because they wouldn’t use his shitty gear. That was in 2018.
Well, he got in a feud with one specific diver who called him a rich idiot or something, and insinuated that he was a pedophile.
It was cringey as hell, but the kind of thing people could forgive as a lapse in judgement. These days he does more embarrassing things pretty much daily.
His lies caught up to him. From his ridiculous tunnels, his crypto pump and dump scam, his robotaxis, to taking humanity to Mars. The lies just collapsed and revealed they were empty promises all along. Hell, even his solar panels were a trick, and the goddamn truck. Not to mention the FSD that will never really work as promised because the tech just isn’t there.
Taking humanity to Mars is an illusion? How do you figure?
We’ve got a perfectly good planet right there under our feet and we’re failing rather spectacularly at keeping it functional, so as things currently stand the idea we could go to a dead planet and somehow turn it livable is, at the very best, dubious.
If you are interested in the topic, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame have a book coming on this very subject: https://www.acityonmars.com/.
You see any people on Mars? You see any planned, manned missions to Mars? Even NASA is saying maybe late 2030s.
In the time frame Musk said he’d do it, certainly an illusion. Eventually we’ll get there, but not soon. Maybe not even in our lifetime.
hahaha, I know. I, for one, never liked him, but I can see most people did for a long time.
I read an article saying that he was always like this but he had handlers in earlier companies to keep his crazy from affecting the business. With Twitter, he has direct access to everything, and years of thinking he was the smartest person in the room while everyone managed him have led to this.
Sorry dude, he was Paypal mafia. He has never been anything but a rich kid playing with money - it has just been a very congenial environment for the already rich for some time. I know it’s hard to accept that you were just colossally taken in by a huckster, but that is really what happened.
He fired his PR handler in like '17 or '18. That person probably couldn’t have ever been paid enough money, and this is probably a bigger mistake for him than spending 44 billies on twitter.
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I was at first excited when he talked about Mars, but now that I know he can’t even run a social media platform I definitely wouldn’t wanna trust him with my life
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I don’t think we can do anything at all to make Earth as uninhabitable to life as Mars.
And as for terraforming Mars, all we have to do is do what we’re doing here: Warm it with CO2 emissions. All it takes is a little atmospheric thickening to vaporize its glaciers of dry ice and already spawn a few surface brine lakes using its existing water table (the underground hypersaline ice partially melts each summer), then just get a bunch of comets to burn up in its atmosphere for the oceans and put an artificial magnetic field at its Lagrange point and turn all that atmospheric CO2 into oxygen with giant vats of cyanobacteria (which are what naturally terraformed Earth billions of years ago)
And we can terraform Venus using future tech we might develop to reverse climate change here, like giant orbital parasols, reflective dust and carbon capture
Come, join the adventure to Planet X!
I am sure people will follow and not call it Mars anymore.
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 all the criticism he gets. 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 invent any of that, he didn’t have the original ideas, or come up with the original concepts, he just bought them. All he did, is use his inherited wealth to fund investments, that he then used profits from to fund other investments. He bought companies that already existed. He had the capital to invest. So it sounds like you are saying that money made him great?
You want to know how great of a person he was behind closed doors? It’s an easy metric to quantify. How many kids does he have, and by how many partners? Now, why do so many of those kids or partners want nothing to do with him? Could it be cause he’s always been a horrible douche bag, and always has been?
