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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get Elon hate just the way I don’t get fanboyism and cult following. Neither side provides an objective and truthful representation of reality.

No single personality can be 100% perfect. Let’s not ignore pretty much the entire world changing revolution of EVs and reusable rocketry, while focusing on the guy’s public persona and how he behaves that’s apparent to us and project what he must be like in general. Seems deeply and profoundly unfair.

Why can’t someone have flaws which is ok to point out, but then ignore their accomplishments. Opposite also stands! Fanboys of Elon think he is some kind of a messiah to save the world from global collapse but turn a blind eye to his rather rude behavior?

It’s like populism has a reverse backside of the coin.

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IMO silent majority has pretty balanced view of him and just doesn’t care to participate in a holy war praising or hating on the guy. Social media and regular media bias towards the polar opinions, as with anything else.

History respects Edison, Jobs, Tesla, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Hughes for what the accomplished while acknowledging their individual flaws. I think Musk will be remember similarly. Depending how successful his ventures are over the coming century he might even be remembered more than any of them.

It's an interesting observation. Personally, when I look back at giants and read their biographies, I find the most interesting bits usually about how they were motivated, what drove them, how they overcame challenges and hopelessness, how they forged business relations - I think the least interesting part is their personal life and what they did to piss someone off or what they tweeted/told publicly. The latter is just typical soap opera of details that provide little value to me. The latest Steve Jobs movie primarily focused on the melodrama of his personal relationships and offered literally nothing about what made Apple succesful.

To me, Musk's flaws are much smaller than some of the others you mention. Namely: overly optimistic (some would say fraudulent but eh) timelines, a puerile sense of humor, and calling that diver a pedo.

Can I say, it's really refreshing to see your list of very apt comparisons to very smart and successful people. Many tech-heavy news sites (looking at you ArsTechnica) compare Musk to Newton and Einstein.

It in response to a post in which the author said they wanted to revisit joining Neuralink because hopefully now their culture is more in line with Musk’s public persona. And the post ended with praise for Musk’s projects.

That doesn’t read as “haters gonna hate” to me, but rather as a narrow criticism of just the one aspect of Musk’s businesses that was brought up.

> Let’s not ignore pretty much the entire world changing revolution of EVs

Elon sure did. He decided, apparently out of pure greed, to invest big into Bitcoin, driving the price up and with it increasing the carbon emissions of it, enough to quickly wipe out basically all carbon savings Tesla has worked to achieve for its entire company lifetime.

Bitcoin can be entirely powered by (renewably sourced) electricity.

Our current financial system cannot.

It can, and when it does, it destroys that energy, and forces other users to use polluting energy.

The environmental cost of Bitcoin is not that of the energy it uses, it is the cost of the dirtiest energy it forces others to use.

We should all be using nuclear anyway.

Even if we did, that is not non-polluting energy. Wasting it in massive amounts would still harm everyone.

Nuclear is definitely non-polluting energy.

Building the plant and mining the uranium, doing upkeep on the plant, and decommissioning it and processing the fuel are not non-polluting.

There is always pollution. Some forms of energy have more and some have less. It is never good to just waste energy, that will always cause excess pollution, no matter the type of energy used.

Ok, sure, but by that standard nuclear is by far the least polluting per watt.

Sure. But it still pollutes, and wasting the energy it produces is still harmful.

It doesn't matter how energy is produced, bitcoin will always be harmful.

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