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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk is the Preston Tucker of our time — seems to get hammered from all sides while trying to break the status quo. I have no information to comment on the validity of any allegations, but it seems like Musk is continually under attack. I was a moderate Musk fan before, but now I am really hoping for his success. It seems to me that if you are pissing off everyone, you’re doing something right.

I highly recommend watching the Coppola film “Tucker, A Man and His Dream.”

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It's also notable that TSLA has a very large community of short interests. That kind of money can drive all sorts of stories in the press...

Yes but short interest is still dwarfed by traditional long positions. All the money wrapped up into long positions can also drive press.

Tesla has one of the largest communities of shorts, and a normal community of longs.

Yes but that large community of shorts is still much smaller than the normal community of longs.

The source of being pissed of now is higher then usual injury rates. It is good that such a thing pisses everyone off.

Valuing mans dream and ambitions over people he hurts on a way is wrong ethics. People who cancel on dreams when they are causing damage are superior.

You cannot just throw platitudes around like they mean anything. This is not about "pissing everyone off", those are allegations against real damage being done to undeserving people.

> Elon Musk is the Preston Tucker of our time — seems to get hammered from all sides while trying to break the status quo. I have no information to comment on the validity of any allegations, but it seems like Musk is continually under attack. I was a moderate Musk fan before, but now I am really hoping for his success. It seems to me that if you are pissing off everyone, you’re doing something right.

Maybe you should read about the allegations? He's under attack for abusing his workers. This is a good reason to be pissed off, and a good reason _not_ to hope for his success.

> investigation

That's an important word, since it does not mean that he is convicted of doing so. If investigation immediately meant guilt, the world would be a very different place.

That is true, though there are still a large number of workers who have really been injured while working there. That is a fact.

The allegations about public, verified data? That's called evidence.

To be fair, this particular investigation alleges that Tesla has underreported workplace-related injuries by classifying them as minor or unrelated personal issues; Tesla argues that it does not misclassify injuries. The integrity of the public data (what Tesla is required to report) is in question, so I don't know if we can call it "verified", other than in the official sense (i.e. we know what Tesla has officially reported).

If everybody hates you, you are NOT doing something right. If everybody loves you, then you're doing it right, and in fact you barely even have to do anything because everybody's helping you.

Listen up, kids! Always do what everyone else is doing, never make anyone mad, always choose the popular path.

It seems like everything worth doing nowadays results in someone hating you.

I'm not talking high school here, I'm talking about real life. Popularity and conformity are orthogonal. In the early stages of doing something, they can be somewhat opposed, so you'd be partly right in that case. But you push through that and don't complain, and wait and see what people think whom you've actually managed to help.

The most worthy path is the one that helps the most people. Not coincidentally, each of those people you've helped, becomes a supporter of yours, in some capacity. You become popular. So the worthy path ends up being the popular path.

That doesn't mean the popular path is always the worthy path. People can become popular for really stupid reasons and without really helping anybody. I actually think Musk is such a person; I literally don't think any of his projects are "worth doing" and you are just gonna have to grant me my opinion there. So if I'm not impressed with his outlandish narcissistic persecution-fantasy of extremist groups being out to get him, it's not because he's doing something worth doing, it's because he's NOT.

"It seems like everything worth doing nowadays results in someone hating you."

No, not in the least. Especially when the things that make people mad, in this case, treating your workers horribly, are entirely avoidable.

In this day and age it more like if you are doing anything of significance you will have people who hate you.

Or it means nothing, it just means you're doing something, good or bad.

Agreed, the best way not to get criticism is do nothing.

People who got it wrong will still hate you because you got it right and they got it wrong. So they will try to convince other people that you got it wrong not them. Its not always black and white.

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