Elon Musk
Politics aside, what are your thoughts on Elon Musk? Hate him or love him? Let’s keep this rational. Go!
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Generational entreprenuer.
doin tricks on it
I know you hate his politics, but it's ok to recognize someone who has built multiple billion dollar companies.
This generation is making sure you can’t ever praise someone again apparently. No wonder there’s so much hatred and negativity online, you get made fun of for simply admiring someone. Would you say the same about athletes or musicians?
Sort of hard to separate the man from the mythologizing. Especially since he seems to be buying into his own hype more and more. He's clearly an exceptional businessman - he has an obvious and perhaps unmatched talent for finding great people and inspiring them to do great things. He has an enormous amount of self-confidence and a willingness to bet on his inspiration.
However, how do you extricate that from the image he's consciously built of himself as some sort of Tony Stark-esque genius? He's not that. His wealth and his influence come from the fact that people have bought that hype, which is why he's so wealthy - his companies are valued in ways which are simply absurd, and his constant lying is excused for some reason that almost any other business owner or CEO's wouldn't be. He breaks the law with impunity and gets away with it. He's constantly engaged in financial malpractice and skates by. I understand that in this country wealth is a ticket out of consequence for almost anything, but when you actually examine Mr Musk's record over the last decade or so it's pretty clear that he's lost sight of whatever vision he originally possessed. It's been more failure than success, with him making some pretty obvious attempts to hide that in ways that border on, and often are, outright criminal. Sometimes it's connected to his increasingly awful politics, but more it seems that he's gotten away with it for so long that he can't imagine he's beholden to any consequence for any action.
It's just a shame that the visionary who helped build some of the best, most exciting and innovative companies in the world in the first half of his career (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) has not only not followed through on that promise, but actively regressed in the opposite direction, apparently for the sole reason of servicing his ego.
Agree. I like the guy a lot and think he has achieved a lot but at the end of the day, he's not running all of those companies.....its just an image.....everyone knows that right?
I don't care if you are literally the smartest most innovative person on the planet. You simply run out of hours in the day to run several very different companies, DOGE, tweet constantly, manage a dozen kids, and play Diablo.
I think very, very few people understand this. I think most people believe Mr Musk is designing EVs, or writing equations on a whiteboard alongside all the literal rocket scientists at SpaceX. Really all he does is engage in some pretty blatant market manipulation of his various portfolio company's, though.
I mean, it was only a couple weeks ago that someone was on here crowing about how his acquisition of Twitter is now justified because it's valuation has reached $44b again... while conveniently ignoring the fact that that was because he merged it with xAI. Which also ignores the fact that he's been deliberately starving his other enterprises of vital chips to boost xAI. So basically he's robbing his partners and shareholders in every company in order to make his acquisition of Twitter (arguably the worst planned and executed business decision in modern history) look less embarrassing. And people buy it uncritically!
To be fair:
(1) he doesn't manage a dozen kids. He manages like 2 and the rest he has people take care of.
(2) Elon pays people to play Diablo for him.
While you give way too much credit to Elon for the positive things you associated him with, this is certainly a great overview
Look, I don't like Elon Musk. I don't like liars, I don't like braggarts, I don't like people who take credit for the achievements of others, I don't like people who use their wealth and position to bully those less fortunate, I don't like Nazis. Mr Musk is all those things and more.
But denying his accomplishments to focus solely on his many failures is equally disingenuous as focusing on his successes and ignoring the flameouts. I think anyone who judges Mr Musk without previous bias, and actually considers his track record, might actually come to the conclusion that his successes have been heavily, heavily outweighed by his failures (or turbocharged by the simple expedient of lying and getting away with it) without having to whitewash over the wins.
Why would you say he is servicing his ego? Did it ever occur to you that he has been actively attacked by the system long before he ever started discussing his opinions publicly? Hint, that is exactly what happened.
Deleted, site ate the response
What an unbelievably thoughtless comment, made in defense of someone who manifestly shouldn't need someone like you to throw aside all common sense to protect him. I mean, reading this for one single second makes it obvious how little you care about the truth or logic as long as you can defend whatever right wing troll (or in this case, actual Nazi) is your flavor of the month.
How in the world could anyone attack Mr Musk for an opinion he had not stated publicly? Right on its face, we can see how wrong you are.
What happened is that Mr Musk was criticized by some random people on Twitter, and instead of being an adult and (a) accepting that their right to speech was as hallowed as his and just dealing with it or (b) not fucking using social media, he decided to buy the entire company, lighting tens of billions of dollars on fire in the process, so that he could mold an entire social media platform into one in which no one could say mean things about him. Which is one of the many reasons he's increasingly a figure of ridicule and dislike instead of being hailed as a business genius.
I think he's a brilliant genius who has rotted his brain over time with ketamine.
He's absolutely as Tony Stark-type a genius as you're likely to find outside a comic book, are you kidding me? Man founded and scaled like half a dozen 1+bl companies (2 of which are 100+bl), that doesn't happen by accident. It's just lib delusions when they try to deny objective fact because they don't like his politics. Nearly everything he touches turns out to be good in the long run
That said, do I like the guy personally or want to be close friends with him? Absolutely not. He's been a net positive for the world, but I don't want him anywhere near me in terms of a personal friendship. Too much chaos
Good meme
Ah, which were those? He did not found PayPal, he did not found Tesla. He did found SpaceX/Starlink. Moreover, he's not actually doing the science or engineering at any of these firms, which is why he isn't Tony Stark. Of those, the two major successes of Tesla and SpaceX are largely, though not entirely, due to him subsisting on government handouts.
And "everything he touches turns out good"? Except for Twitter, I suppose. Or the Boring Company. Or SolarCity. Or Neuralink.
He founded and/or scaled TWO billion dollar plus companies. SolarCity hardly counts - the man could take a dump and pay a billion dollars for it and claim he founded a billion dollar company, which ironically is basically the story of SolarCity.
He didn't found Tesla but he turned it into what it is. Ray Kroc didn't found McDonald's either but it would still be a shack in San Bernardino without him.
DOGE is serving a purpose – Look at the rising national debt levels. The U.S. has surpassed $34T in national debt, and their debt-to-GDP ratio is around 120% (one of the highest levels in U.S history).
The interest on the debt alone is surpassing spending on defense or Medicare….
What does any of this have to do with DOGE? Spend one fucking second thinking before wasting everyone else's time.
Maybe some of that number is because of Mr Trump's frequent tax and cash giveaways? Maybe most of the deficit is related to spending that DOGE and Mr Trump aren't even pretending to touch? Wow, DOGE saved like $10b over the next five years, what an accomplishment!
Stop pretending conservatives are even remotely concerned with the national debt or the deficit. Democrats want to spend more money, and raise taxes to pay for it. Republicans want to cut taxes, spend more money, and blame Democrats. The party of fiscal responsibility has long since shifted to the left, ever since Bush got hosed for suggesting a change to an entitlement. The only real solution to the deficit/rising debt is an increase in taxes.
Ah yes, the "we don't have a spending problem we have an income problem" crowd has entered the chat.
I wonder what private vs public(all levels) pensions historic analysis would show.
I wonder what private vs public employment analysis would show.
I wonder how many new departments have been created over the last 50 years.
Nah. We just need more taxes.
DOGE says on its website that it has saved $160 billion. Let's charitably assume that that's accurate.
Total US federal spending is over $6 trillion a year. So DOGE has, at best, cut federal spending by 2%.
The more likely scenario is that DOGE has cut federal spending by less than half of what it says it has. And that those "savings" have come with a reduction in services that will need to be replaced somehow. Plus let's not forget that the IRS cuts have likely resulted in less tax revenue being collected. So DOGE has in all likelihood ended up costing us money.
I just hate that he made Tesla’s image so political. I would love to get a Model Y but hesitate because some crazies might key the car or smash the windows.
Wow, who would have guessed that buying products made by a Nazi might actually come back to bite you in the ass!
I mostly agree with your Musk assessment, but it's so hard to take anyone throwing the "Nazi" term left and right seriously. American people have no idea who Nazis were and it shows in that term usage.
I put a much higher weight on ethics and character than I do on IQ, business acumen and wealth. I will leave it at that.
He’s a clown. A rich clown. But still a clown.
The guy literally lies about something as small as being good at videogames lmfao. He has to be one of the most insecure people on the planet which is just a case study in how money can’t buy your way out of being a miserable person.
(1) Horrible father, except to X who he brings around with him everywhere (2) Great storyteller (3) Exceptional fundraiser (4) Best talent finder on Earth (5) Deeply insecure and wants people to like him because he's conquered capitalism and now he just wants to be cool (6) Someone who hates free speech - cooperated with governments and Turkey & India to suppress X accounts of political rivals of the incumbent political parties (7) Trump's father
Politics aside? He is a literal Nazi and supports the AFD.
A ketamine induced maniac who gutted the american gov and did irreplaceable damage.
Not to mention the blatant corruption of gutting all agencies that oversee Tesla and giving him government contracts.
It is genuinely impossible to believe anything you say when you say he is “a literal nazi”. I think it’s time to reread your history on the nazis and report back how he’s a literal nazi
Well, as a German, I get pissed anyways, cuz even here people use that term without any thoughts behind. I wanna vommit even more, when I see other people randomly use this term for anything far right, when their country and situation has absolutely nothing in common with the Nazi regime and their crimes.
Its so ignorant to use this term for evrything...
If someone does a "Nazi Salute", supports a party led by the granddaughter of a Nazi General that uses terms like "The great replacement" and retweets Nick Fuentes & Co they are probably a Nazi? I mean what else do u have to do?
Like I want to be charitable to him but if someone does the salute of the party and then adds on all the supporting evidence isnt it more probable than not? Given he is also a heavy drug user?
I guess "literal" isnt the correct word as he is not a 1940's German who is comitting genocide. But I guess a better word is he sure pretends like it and tries to imitate them.
I've listened to the Alice Weidel's speeches and in fact they are pretty much for deregulation. The complete opposite of having a high level of control over the means of production.
It is really easy to have an opinion of Elon without touching his politics. The following is based on publicly available information (ie - legal proceedings, news reports, etc) and on the significant number of people I talk to on a regular basis who work at Elon's companies and with Elon directly.
(1) Elon only does one thing better than the typical person. Elon is one of the best in the history of the world at getting people to pay attention. There are very few, if any, people that are at Elon's level in regards to getting people to pay attention.
I also want to be very clear about this. This is not saying that Elon is good at marketing. Marketing is much more than just getting people to pay attention.
(2) Elon is not a smart person. If we want to be as charitable to Elon as possible, he is of about average intelligence. This one is harder to articulate without just relying on example so I know this won't be particularly satisfying commentary, least of all because I myself think there must be a more rigorous way of articulating this. One example of Elon's average intelligence is how Elon completely broke down when asked in the Twitter Space by a Twitter engineer if when Elon said they'd do a total rewrite if Elon meant they'd keep the existing scaffolding or to get a bunch of engineers to start from a blank whiteboard. Elon couldn't explain what he meant when he said a total rewrite. He was just relying on a buzzword, got caught not knowing what he was talking about, and then lashed out emotionally. That's not how intelligent people act. That's what someone who is trying to act smarter than they actually are does.
A good summarization of this point is a good adaptation of the First They Came For... poem.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. You don't need to be like von Neumann to be good at business (although that certainly helps). But Elon gets treated by many people as if he is a von Neumann when Elon just is not.
(3) Elon does not actually do most of the work that he often gets credit for doing. Elon is generally layers removed from where the actual work he is attributed as doing actually gets done. He is managing the manager. You see this when people say how great an entrepreneur Elon is but can't actually articulate what specific work Elon himself actually does. It is all a bunch of gesturing to the existence of projects and the status of those projects, not statements about the actual work itself.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this. This is how organizations work. Elon should be seen as the manager of the manager of the people who do the work. But that's not what Elon gets credited for by many. Elon is treated as if he is actually doing the work when he doesn't. Many people towards the top of organizations are like this. This is far from something that only applies to Elon. Elon is not unique in this. This is just a phenomenon that applies to him.
This is not to say that Elon never does any of the actual work. There are times that he does. Most of the time he does, his contributions are a net negative (ie - Cybertruck design, the PayPal server fiasco, etc). But he does sometimes genuinely add value too (ie - identifying that Spacex can launch rockets at a cheaper price than the Russians).
This is a long way of saying that Elon does not do most the work he is attributed with as doing and the little he actually does is more often a negative to the actual operations itself.
Del
I think it's hard to deny he's objectively smart, but he also has the EQ of a retard
What specifically does Elon do that demonstrates he is "objectively smart?"
Really smart, has built insane businesses multiple times...but increasingly wacky, and not in a good way.
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