Hacker News Reader

Comment by 7373737373 | Hacker News Reader

I wish he'd just present as his awkward true self, instead of this prerecorded, fake cringefest, something Musk doesn't shy away from

View on HN

Yeah but his "true self" isn't exactly something 99.99% of people enjoy. He's a robotic tool. Looks to me like he signed up for a "how to appear more human 101" course and now gesticulates with his hands non-stop.

Musk isn't a great rhetorician, and many people don't like his personality either. But some like him nonetheless, they empathize with him and see beyond that, because they see some of the drives and desires behind the unusual facade. I'm sure Zuckerberg signed up for such courses, but I don't think it's comfortable for him, or his audience either. Ignorance is bliss, forcing oneself to be hyperaware of ones own appearance, gestures and statements to please others seems wrong. Who enjoys such a lie?

Yeah Musk isn't exactly Rico Suave, but Zuckerberg is downright revolting to most people. He's robotic and comes off as an alien playing a human.

He’s certainly determined whatever his true self is, it’s not good for business.

It’s amazing how no one can be frank with him. “Look mark, the CEO doesn’t have to be the presenter. I’m sorry but you just can’t be the face of the company, it’s bad for business. Please, move aside, and get a normal person haircut”.

I wouldn't rule out that he could even be liked, if he didn't obviously pretend to be someone he is not

I'm one degree away from Mark. I dated someone who was an early employee at Facebook for a little while - all I can really say without revealing who they are. I just know they know Zuck, Cook, and a few others personally.

They told me that when Facebook's (or maybe it was Instagram's...) stories came out with video support, Zuck posted a super bizarre video introducing it, being the first one and all. And I guess it was just him awkwardly staring into the camera, not really saying anything. Almost like someone who thinks it's a photo but it's a video instead - though he was fully aware it was a video. His wife was in the background waving and stuff too.

The person I was seeing I guess texted him and said something to the effect of "hey this is super awkward, maybe you should re-post it with you talking about it", which I guess Zuck did.

So it's my impression that he's not exactly surrounded by yes-men, but instead that he's not really in touch with the social aspect of running one of the largest social networks on earth and how people really behave. I know a lot of people say it's autism but as far as I was told it's not - he's just strange.

This is hearsay of course, but I'm pretty confident that I was told the truth given who it was that I talked to about all this.

He's lived a different life than nearly anyone else. Certainly so caught up in his responsibilities to Facebook that he's been unable to grow and change and branch out and fail, and be rejected and forced to reinvent or repurpose himself the way most people do. It's impossible to imagine what my life would be like or how my perspective would be different if I was caught in a bubble of a project I started in my late teens turning into a near trillion dollar success that only grew and grew from the moment I started on it.

I think him being rejected by most people drove him to do what he does

I was involved in a startup project the first couple years of college. We didn’t know anything about what we were doing so it languished in development hell and is still in it as far as I know, with a new crop of kids. I can’t imagine being stuck in that mindset, there’s a lot of maturing that happens when you have a boss and need to work with a team and he’s always been the head of this college project that’s worth a trillion dollars now. Doesn’t sound healthy at all

I think he is very perceptive when it comes to the logic and desires behind social interaction, like making personal attributes such as relationship status in Facebook explicitly public early on, and this because he could see and consider these things from the outside. He's different, but he should be proud of it, because without being different, he wouldn't have achieved what he did. The Trump network will show what happens when a different kind of personality has centralized control over a social network, in many a sense, it could be much worse.

> Zuck posted a super bizarre video introducing it, being the first one and all. And I guess it was just him awkwardly staring into the camera, not really saying anything. Almost like someone who thinks it's a photo but it's a video instead - though he was fully aware it was a video. His wife was in the background waving and stuff too.

Maybe that was the point. People scrolling think it's just a selfie but then you realize his wife is moving in the background!

That's not how it was described - it wasn't anything clever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com