Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

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Consultant32452

I have a different position, which is that I actively tolerate quite a lot of crappy behavior from great minds doing great things. Sure, when someone breaks the law, do whatever is normal when a person breaks that law. If he violated SEC regulations, okay the SEC will do whatever the SEC does. But I don't really care on an emotional level if some investors lost some money. And there's almost no manner of wrong-think or Twitter bullying or any other obnoxious but not illegal behavior that would upset me at all.

Have you ever noticed how many of the greatest actors/actresses are a bit on the crazy side? Genius and "craziness" tend to go hand in hand. I believe we'll all be better off if we tolerate quite a bit of craziness from geniuses. Better art, better science, better world.

Elon Musk is really not a genius or a great mind. Both his companies appear to need large amounts of government mandates & subsidies and constant injections of capital to stay afloat. Teslas are neat cars but their environmental benefits are questionable and far more expensive than other methods of carbon abatement. Landing rockets is cool but the jury is out on whether it's financially better than the disposable ones used by the rest of the industry.

Hi did however manage to push his people towards achieving what they did so far with Tesla and Space X. I guess that's also a big thing? Not genius but definitely something, although I'm sure everything came at a huge cost for the people involved. You just have to ask yourself if the result justifies it.

It's true, he might ultimately be unsuccessful at getting us off ICE vehicles or to Mars. But he's surely made a better go at it than anyone else. At this point his ultimate success or failure has no bearing to me on whether it's worthwhile to just ignore dumb things he might say on Twitter or otherwise. And he is almost certainly a genius in the technical sense of high IQ.

Funny thing is, it’s actually incredibly reasonable to compare this CEO to an eccentric actor/actress. It’s about all his theatrics have amounted to: entertainment.

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