Elon Musk
Your thoughts?
Somewhere stuck between
“this man is legendary and I’m blessed to walk the earth alongside him”
And
“Who tf does this guy think he is?”
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my thoughts: why do so many grown men have such a penchant for thinking about elon musk? he attracts a weird amount of voyeurism
The man is like a walking advertisement for his companies. I think there things to admire for sure but it’s weird how people have a hard on for him.
It's because he posts memes and regularly replies to randos on Twitter. Makes people feel like he's one of them.
I don't like him as a person, but I do love Tesla and SpaceX
Let the record show that I’ve been gay for Elon Musk for many years, back when he was known as a Democrat hyper focused on climate change. The guy has been a Chad for 25 years.
Drive a Model 3 for 30 minutes and you’ll see why grown men get weak in the knees.
In fairness he seeks it out - its not a one way street. Unlike celebs, its also impactful to markets. Also, really the same can be said about any person of interest - its just human nature. Asking why him makes it seem as though he is in fact special, when the real question is why does anyone care about anyone that's not a friend/family.
I'd like to pull on this thread a bit, because you bring up a good point here. I think there's a continuum of care, which is why I chose my words to be "have a penchant for thinking about elon musk" rather than why does anyone care about anybody.
now back to a higher level, separate from the elon thing, and this will get a bit weird so bear with me. one profound realization I had (probably during a "trip") was that we all arrive to our place in life through a lot of randomness and chance. if a small set of circumstances would've been different, I could have wound up in a very different place. if I had the same intellect, physical body, and work ethic, but was born into a dalit family in kashmir, I would most certainly not be where I am today. if instead of working and loving us, my mother was a crackwhore who didn't care and I had no stability, it would've been a different go for me. so when I say I love my fellow man, it's because I see a bit of myself in everybody. if things had turned out differently, I could have been someone else, good or bad. now, it doesn't mean I lay awake at night lamenting other's circumstances, just saying that this mindset has helped me be more humble and compassionate I think, time will tell.
so in summary, I still wonder why so many people (mostly young men) have a penchant for thinking about elon musk. I do care about elon but not any more than I "care" about other humans that I do not know personally. however, I spend very little to no time thinking about elon
I think anyone who throws around their "clout" (some type of fame) and has either (i) a divisive personality or (ii) a big personality attract attention. Beyonce with 15-40 year old females (generalizing), Trump (everyone), Lebron (moreso than Jordan since he has a bigger personality), Kardashians.
Elon for white collar male professionals - has wealth, throws it around, big/divisive personality, does what he wants publicly (moreso than a Gates or Buffet for example)
Western world has an almost total lack of positive role models for men.
Musk is a rare exception.
He's extremely successful despite continuous shortcomings. He's the epitome of fuck you money+fuck you technology+fuck you power. He does and says what he wants in an era that has the CEO of JP Morgan talking about latinx, while everyone else lives under terror of saying something wrong.
100% true. Western society these days does everything it can to demonize masculine qualities of aggression / drive. Elon is a man who gives no shits about this and has the money / power / influence to do what he wants which enrages liberals like nothing else
That's what Elon Musk wants though. And he's good at it.
Noise marketing at its finest. We'll never be able to get him out of our heads and hence the world cannot forget his goals..
He's pretty shrewed politically being able to attract son much attention himself and his companies with just a Tweet.
from the cambridge dictionary. virtue signaling is "an attempt to show other people that you are a good person, for example by expressing opinions that will be acceptable to them, especially on social media"
I was not attempting to show people I'm a good person, I was asking a question
I was not expressing an opinion that will be acceptable to others (quite the contrary as it's evident that I'm more alone in my lack of an opinion about elon)
I don't have social media
so no, I don't believe that was virtue signaling. nice meme though
why do so many grown men have such a penchant for thinking about elon musk?
Elon Musk is part of 'The Spectacle' now...
Not helpful.
why wasn't it helpful? you asked for my thoughts, I gave my thoughts. if it wasn't what you wanted to hear, OK. still doesn't address my thought of why you give a shit about elon unless you work for tesla, own the stock in a big way, are in his family, or doing a capital markets transaction for him
He didn't respond to you, he responded to the original post
Elon
As a person I don't like him but the man is a legend. What he did with running Tesla and SpaceX into the organizations they are today (simultaneously running them too!) is nothing short of extraordinary. Can't help but respect that
Also the one personality trait I like of his (aside from sheer grit & raw intelligence) is his refusal to apologize & completely speak his mind in an era where people are afraid to step a single foot out of line because the idiotic mob might attack them. His proposal to turn Twitter into a free-speech platform is great, really hope he ends up taking the company home
Dude doesn’t want to turn it into a free speech platform. He wants to silence his critics, which is quite frankly very smart. Buying Twitter was an obvious next move for him. It is the only remaining place where people can find information contrary to the fake Tony Stark-Genius persona that he needs to maintain his cult and power over politicians and would-be regulators. Owning a social media platform would immediately elevate him to head of a nuclear country level power. Elon has always been Logan Roy, in the good ways and the bad.
This statement is utterly asinine and actually totally detached from the truth. Twitter is a huge censorship engine. For Musk the last straw was Twitter banning the Babylon Bee, a satire site, for a joke about a public official. Your deranged musings are totally divorced from reality.
I don't know a ton about those companies, but... has he done anything all that great? He's a fantastic hype man and seems really good at selling the idea of something... but my understanding is that Tesla is barely profitable and wouldn't be profitable at all if it was selling carbon emission credits to bigger car companies. The value of Tesla stock is completely divorced from any realistic value - it's a meme stock. Is SpaceX profitable? Will it ever be? I'm asking genuinely, because I know even less about that. Is it viable only because decades of conservatives gutting funding for public agencies has made it more palatable to pay a private company to do what, in years past, NASA would have performed in house? That's been the pattern in other parts of federal government, so I assume it has some truth here.
Elon Musk seems like a person who is really good at convincing people that he's a visionary genius, and is a a great promoter. Maybe he really is a visionary genius... but he never seems to persevere to create anything when the cards don't all fall his way. He was a big proponent of the Hyperloop, but when public funding for that wasn't forthcoming he seems to have done his best to scrub it from our collective memories and abandon it.
He doesn't respond well to even reasoned criticism. The basis of the product Tesla has built was engineered, developed, and overseen by people other than Musk. The current hype around Tesla is self-evidently overheated. All of which is a long way from saying the man is an idiot, or should be overly criticized for faults which other successful executives possess... but he is treated like the second coming and I've never been quite sure why.
Lmao, you need to update your critique of Tesla—this isn’t 2017. Tesla is highly profitable and has been profitable aside from carbon credits for over a year. Other than totally transforming transportation (by making electric cars inevitable) and saving the moribund American space program and co-founding PayPal, yeah, Musk is just a hype machine.
Hyperloop btw is an open source idea. It was never Musk’s—he popularized it and it’s in the public domain for various companies to work on.
Elon quit Trump's advisory board because he left the Paris climate agreement, an agreement that is both neoliberal and globalist.
there's nothing liberal about not destroying the planet. it's just common sense. however, encouraging kids to be gay and change genders by waving rainbow flags at them and helping them in life if they switch - that's a different topic.
why THE FUCK do you have to bring politics into everything, you know what you sound like? someone gay who is obsessed with putting the fact that he's gay in everyones faces(p.s. i do not hate anyone who is gay, it's just an analogy) who has absolutely nothing else to do and has made his whole personality all about politics and nothing else and must bring it into each and every conversation he has ON A FINANCE FORUM, why dont you fuck off to r/politics and mingle with the retarded 14 year olds on there?
“Globohomo” 💀
As it is now, Twitter is one of the worst organizations in the world. It's an absolute cesspool. And it has enormous power to control speech. I see absolutely no negatives to Musk buying it out because it can only go up and improve
I had 0 followers on Twitter and had a rando account to follow some people. I think I made 1 comment a month. Some petty fascist at Twitter banned me for saying that trans people are mentally ill. That’s it.
Maybe you don’t agree with that opinion, but a person in a male body who believes he’s a woman has some sort of psychological issue. The idea that a person who castrates himself to form his body into his idea of himself is fully mentally sound is bizarre. But you can’t hold perfectly sane beliefs and operate on Twitter.
Makes sense.
If you asked me, I think they should just be left alone and allowed the freedom to do what they want. Just like any other marginalized group.
I also believe that you should be allowed to voice your opinion freely.
Mentally ill or not, homophobic or not, we all live one time, so unless your psychological flaws are detrimentally impacting the freedom and lives of other people who are currently on this earth, you should be able to do whatever you want.
You could say that about any of the social media giants.
You could say that about any of the social media giants.
You could say that about any of the social media giants.
What if it doesn't though? If you place no moderations on speech whatsoever, doesn't the platform end up devolving into something that is 4chan esque? How could such a platform be monetizable, becuase, as I understand it, most of the company's revenue comes in the form of ads. Companies obvi don't want to post their content on a site associated with the unfiltered thoughts from the lowest common denominator of society (far left / right). Seems like an overly ambitious goal which will ruin the company. Maybe I'm too pessimistic...
Twitter is already a cesspool (as mentioned). It’s full of hate, racism, etc. The only thing Twitter really moderates is conservative political speech. So I just don’t see how it can get worse.
Musk said he wants to verify all users, which would get rid of the bots. Apparently some crazy number of posts (like 20% or something) are bots designed by Russia and China that are sophisticated enough to debate issues—they’re specifically designed to create dissension. That would transform the platform.
I've looked at a ton of eCommerce/DTC and have yet to see a single company spend heavy on Twitter.
I have seen heavy spend on just about every other platform you can think of. But not a single real amount of Twitter spend.
Says all you need to know about their ad platform. It really is strangely bad.
Elon Musk by DDG and Gunna is a banger.
Shit trash
I take that back. It’s mid
I own a Tesla, so I think he is a good guy and would do wonders for Twitter.
Yeah I agree. I saw Twitter is pulling a poison pill strategy so not sure what’s going to happen next.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/04/15/tech/twitter-elon-musk-poison-pill/i…
Huge fan. He's doing what I believe a multi-billionaire should do. Government's being a bitch about web infrastructure? Fuck you I'll make a satellite internet company. Government won't keep the space program moving? Fuck you I'll build my own rockets. Liberals and authoritarian foreign regimes taking ownership of one of the main digital public squares? Fuck you I'll buy the whole thing and make speech on it truly free.
I would love to see a return of the corporate raiders with all these mega-billionaires starting to throw their weight around. Let them fight.
Agreed with this. He's an ultra powerful oligarch using his power purely for the good of humanity. The rest of his class are largely evil parasites or those floating around trying to maximize their pile of money.
I'm not naïve enough to think he's doing anything purely for the good of humanity. Like you said, he's an oligarch. But he's the most populist oligarch I've come across and I'll take my allies where I can find them, quite happily when they're also one of the richest in the world.
Most billionaires are "evil parasites"? Wtf? Are you a socialist or something?
why did it stop in the first place though?
Leverage ratios came down due to regulation and corporate boards came up with various defenses like the poison pill. Plus the rise of PE made it difficult for an individual of even substantial wealth (1B+) to compete on the same level as some of the mega firms that pioneered the practice like KKR who now have tens or hundreds of billions at their disposal. Opportunity universe shrinks with competition and regulation, but Elon has >$200B so he can "flex on the poors" in the rest of the billionaire class by comparison.
This got me way more fired up than I’d like to admit. I’m going to go have a beer now after reading this
He's basically the pinnacle of weaponized autism, so no surprise that the current generation adores him.
I mean, if literally creating the electric car industry and salvaging the flailing American space program is weaponizing autism then sign me the fuck up.
autists can be very productive if directed in the right way. I don't think it's bad btw, it's just a point on a social spectrum. not everybody has to be talking all the time and brown-nosing to please others.
my favorite African American
Haha, is this a reference to something?
He's South African and moved to the US, making him a literal "African-American".
He's my second favorite, behind Oscar Pistorius
Have to appreciate another straight shooter, huh?
Don't personally know the guy so I can't comment on him as a person, but I like Musk because he makes me think about capitalism as a means of creating value while also placing shackles on visionaries / world-changers.
It is clear that Musk is setting out to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, including transportation, clean energy sources, and sustainable space travel. For all we know, these companies may prolong global warming or provide an alternative home for humans. But Musk's aspirational world in which his products created by his companies dominate has faced perilous financial ruin a number of times, and may yet continue to face others.
In theory, capitalism is a great mechanism for allocating capital to high-value ideas, and by extension, entrepreneurs, who create this value. However, Musk’s questionable decision-making in this area and clear pattern of operating at the brink of bankruptcy may indicate one of two inconsistencies Musk has with capitalism.
In the first case, we can suppose that Musk does not value wealth creation, and thus the capitalist structure of investors rewarding Musk through equity appreciation is not a primary motivator. This thought experiment would lead investors to question his decision-making and could force stricter governance structures on him in order to incentivize Musk to take certain actions.
In the second case, Musk has identified species-threatening problems that transcend the capitalist system. In this case, should we even want Musk to operate within the confines of capitalism through quarterly earnings and private investors? Or do we think that his products can solve existential problems that a concerted, intergovernmental financing structure should enable the future development of his company's products?
In either case, given the fact that Musk’s case has the potential to be so fundamentally important to so many global interests, I wonder if traditional paths to financing and performance measuring under our current capitalist system are inadequate?
He makes anti-capitalists mad because he has done more for the world as a capitalist than a socialist regime ever did
Although he does take government handouts, I appreciate his anti-government sentiment. He's a true American, even though his tweets are probably marketing ploys and he's playing us. I'll willingly get played as long as it means people start to be American again
You make a great point.
I admire your love for America. I think deep down I share the same sentiments.
What are your thoughts on the cruel parts of American History? Maybe without them, we wouldn’t be as great of a country today, or is it just forget them because they never really mattered.
Maybe just live in the fucking present and stop trying to make excuses? Idk. All thoughts that have crossed my mind.
The entire world was formed in cruelty. The United States isn’t unique for its cruelties. It is unique for its liberties, restraint of government power, and opportunity it served to people. It is unique for being a credal nation rather than a nation founded for a genetic tribe. Black Americans are the richest black people on Earth, which says a lot about a country that is derided as racist from its origins until today.
xxx
People who do not like Elon Musk envy his ability to dedicate his life to his craft. Too many wishy washy motherfuckers in todays society. Oh I wanna try this I wanna try that. Do something for a few years, run into some tough times, give up and move on to something else. Time wasters. Unable to make a decision and die on that hill. Grass is greener on the other side types.
True, some people’s perspective on success is different than others. Enjoy your 20s they say. You dont want to be consumed by work they say. I am not in that camp. I admire those who are decisive, and never change from it. I admire those who offer their entire lives as sacrifice to their decision that was made. I admire the ones who are willing to sleep in the factory for 3 years.
Fuck being average.
It helps that his first venture PayPal made him wealthy very young. It’s very difficult to accumulate enough wealth to pursue big ideas, which is why few people do.
As an aside, it’s ironic that PayPal is owned and managed by leftist censorious asses today.
What is 'leftist' about the people who own a billion dollar fintech company? Musk has fired people who disagree with him, does that make him a commie too?
Elite response.
What’s your big dream?
Wont dare share such a thing on a forum like this. Not because my big dream is so prestige but just because i dont live in the metaverse. I chase them in reality.
Musk will be remembered as history's greatest Ponzi scheme artist.
No one in history has been loved more for delivering so little.
This is an insane comment that is fully detached from reality. Musk took over Tesla as it was failing and single-handedly created a viable electric vehicle industry. He spent nearly his entire PayPal wealth to finance a project that was almost certain to fail and not only succeeded as a company but transformed the future of transportation. Before Musk’s Tesla, electric cars were derided as slow, ugly, and effeminate vehicles that no rational person would drive.
You're adorable. But you don't understand the scope of the assets & funds he's been given. All the funds that this knucklehead has generated have really returned very little as a whole. He likes big announcements but sure doesn't deliver much.
Not to mention literally bringing space flight back to the US. Man's done so much.
Musk is the single greatest American alive today.
I think that no matter what we think of his character, the fact that this mofo is literally trying to send humans to Mars against all odds makes me root for him.
He has this thing where he is not only driven by money and profit extraction (it's probably a factor obviously), or trying to invent a need we weren't even aware of.
He truly tries to solve extremely challenging problems in all of his projects and he took some pretty crazy financial risks along the way (Teslta, SpaceX, Starlink, neuralink and so on...)
You compare that to that reptilian drone like Zuckerberg who is just trying to extract as much $$$ and squeeze our attention to the point of mental health issues and can't help but have some admiration.
Despite how much money he has, I think he genuinely does not care about poon (even though he can get any type/variety he wants).
His ex’s are both far more attractive than Grimes. Not really sure what happened to him.
Whatever you do in life please do not name your kid XAE-12
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