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 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.