That's what many people think IT and our industry and our work is about, including the scammers, the cult-of-personality members, and much of the public.
First, while he was very confident, I don't know that I'd call him a megalomaniac. Second, he didn't encourage a cult of personality or manipulate it - he didn't spend his time inflaming it, encouraging it, toying with it; and he didn't use his power to troll and disrupt society.
Please look at all the crazy tweets he posted [1] in the last few years, he is a manipulator and a liar.
I do think Elon is a bit of a troll, and also that he is prone to saying things that he thinks are probably true without really verifying them fully.
I think that he says things on social media with approximately the same level of internal surety that you might apply to talking to a friend in a casual situation.
You might be quite willing to say to a friend “we are going to finish the X project in 6 months” without really calculating the odds of that actually happening, and without your friend calling you a liar in 6 months when that doesn’t happen.
Now you can argue that he should apply a larger degree of rigor when positing on social media because he is a famous person running a big company, and maybe so.
But he might also argue that why should he be held to a higher standard on Twitter than any random joe posting garbage to thier feed for friends to read?
Because he is an influential spokesman for one of the highest valued stock market traded companies in the world, and a throwaway comment can cost billions. I mean sure, if you're cynical enough you can pooh-pooh it as monopoly money for the 0.01%, but this same monopoly money fuckery caused the 2008 financial crisis. If he 'accidentally' crashes Tesla, that's hundreds of billions disappearing into thin air. Monopoly money, sure, but it'll drag down a lot of others - including things like pension funds.
Musk is relevant because of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and possibly a few other companies in the works. Maybe he gets some credit for PayPal too. Any one of those things would be sufficient to make his twitter personality a minor footnote in history.
He also calls people he disagrees with "pedos" and posts Hitler memes on twitter about vaccinations
Vast overstatement.
The only difference between Jobs and the others is that Jobs made more stuff that consumers like, and was more successful.
Humanity loves a successful megalomaniac. They just despise the also-rans.
He... does not seem like he would be as successful as he has been, to hear him talk.
I haven't researched him much if at all.
But I genuinely wonder how much of his success is simply the fact he had the seed capital and was utterly fearless. What important lesson do you learn about from following Elon Musk, other than "just keep going."
I feel like a part of it is a refusal to be accept anything other than a very thorough explanation of why something is the way it is. He's not going to accept someone saying "nah, can't do it that way" at face value no matter who tells him.
He has challenged a lot of assumptions, to his benefit
At the same time, he constantly seems to be teetering on the edge of destroying his whole enterprise. Jobs was more careful, less extreme.
Or maybe a digital politician? He's just talking about electric cars and space to fire up his base instead of abortion and guns. It's also why he seems to 'do' something real just often enough that people can't dismiss his intelligence entirely: His main projects are population management and public relations; the tech is just the 'flavor'.
Not to my knowledge, and in fact I remember Jobs as generally an honest, sincere person (among many other traits). Can you provide examples?
Consider, for example, Musk's personal attacks on people like Elizabeth Warren. IIRC, Jobs did nothing like it. Jobs also didn't compare the Canadian Prime Minister to Hitler, and much of the other endless attention-grabbing, disruptive behavior of Musk.
Not every person struggling with mental issues has psychopathy.
Psychopathy is more subtle than just the extremes that are popular in media. I'm far from the biggest Apple or Jobs hater, but I think there's a good chance that he'd fit the criteria for psychopathy.
The big question I haven't seen a good answer to yet is: why are CEOs so much more likely to be psychopaths? Does the power make them psychopaths? Are they attracted to the power of a CEO? Or do psychopaths actually make very effective CEOs? I have no idea.
Edit: spelling
Psychopats as "loving family man" do huge amounts of damage to members of their families. Yes, it is way more subtle then killing them with chainsaw. It is very real too.
Now we're dealing with Elizabeth Holmes et al, who just cargo cult off Jobs' legend.
Frauds have always been with us - charismatic frauds, even. That's generally how they defraud. How many times have people sold things like the Eiffel tower or various bridges around the world? How else did we get to Ponzi schemes and the MLMs that are the fallout (and technically totally not pyramid schemes)?
This is the excuse of frauds - to try to normalize it. The amount of fraud is something we can have a large impact on, just like other diseases, and the frauds are responsible for their behavior - there is no fate or destiny that makes them do it. They have free will and make choices to hurt others.
Currently, we aren't doing enough about fraud, and it's Orwellian to see people making efforts to normalize it.
If we don't acknowledge that it is a thing humans do and have done for a long time, our solutions will never be adequate (if that is possible). We really should be learning from the past and applying some of those lessons to the modern ways folks do fraud. Charisma has been intertwined with fraud for eons as well. If something is fairly common among fraudsters, then it benefits us to point this out.
The issue is the amount of fraud, obviously. My point is that people keep trying to downplay it and normalize it, including, IMHO, the comments in this thread. My perception is that the amount is much higher now than even the recent past, and that it's normalized and even celebrated by some.
And who’s to say keeping quiet even correlates with high performance? Intel’s CEO seems to stay out of the news but is otherwise a denthead. NVidia’s CEO is well-spoken and still beats predictions every year. It seems like we’re judging books by their covers here.
Good point about the many who are not insane. I mean that the prevelance of the fraud is very high.
I was not at all talking about the financial performance of their companies.
> post-truth, frauds, and mass manipulation
Some of this is new and some of it isn't. The internet wrecked traditional news and helped replace it with clickbait propaganda, but papers have always been happy to participate in propaganda they liked (Daily Mail "hurrah for the blackshirts" passim). It does feel that since about 2010 it's really escalated and everyone is joining some sort of cult now.
That is survivor bias. I have worked with such people and they destroy companies and make employee life miserable. It is impossible to get anything done in the company that does not help the megalomaniac ego. And they usually sabotage efforts that benefit the company but not themselves. It looks cool in movies and from far away, up close it is a train wreck.
megalomania /ˌmɛɡ(ə)lə(ʊ)ˈmeɪnɪə/ noun: megalomania. obsession with the exercise of power. delusion about one's own power or importance (typically as a symptom of manic or paranoid disorder)
Excellent point in itself - I should have used that word, maybe in addition to megalomania, in the comment that started this subthread.
> We went from Steve Jobs.. to .. cults of personality
Didn't Jobs have a cult of personality? I remember that was talked about quite a lot back then.
I also don't see these scams as "our industry". I'm not in bitcoin and NFTs. This is old fashioned scammers moving to the new medium that we created.
It's not us. It doesn't look like us, and I doubt anyone would mistake it for us, but it might be something we enabled.
Internet was going to be the ultimate democratising tool. Everybody would have access to all information at any time. Anyone could publish anything. Gone are the gatekeepers of old. But it turns out "anyone" includes scammers, manipulators, propagandists, hate-mongers, conspiracy-spreaders and other liars, and now it's become really hard for a lot of people to distinguish lies from truth.
Turns out everybody has access to all misinformation.
We did. I know I wrestle fairly regularly with my complicity in the modern state of affairs, and I'm (by objective standards) one of the least culpable. I think our biggest mistakes were being too welcoming (so much of the early Web's optimism came from outcasts finding social support for the first time that we defaulted to no social protections) and being too passive. Too many of us were willing to sit on our hands because surely somebody would say something eventually, right? And for a lot of nerds, the social acceptance being offered overrode any of their other concerns.
We benefit enormously from the success of the IT revolution; we also get responsibility for the problems. We also have responsibility because we can do something - if not us, than who? I feel like we are acting like bystanders watching someone get assaulted, and doing nothing.
To give an idea of the enormous power we have, I just spoke to someone who didn't know Windows and Microsoft Office collected data on users, and thought that Signal (which they learned about from me) was being taken over by TikTok. This person has post-graduate degrees and is strongly oriented toward doing the right thing for their community, but how can they act with that level of information?
This does not get talked about enough, and it encapsulates much of what's gone wrong inn SV over the past 20 years.
More precisely, it's how products are announced rather than how they are marketed.
After developing it in secret and making the industry partnerships required to make it a success, Jobs came on stage with a prototype iPhone, ran it trough its paces, said "This will be on sale nationwide in six months." and he delivered. No one really doubted that Apple would deliver.
Compare that to Elon Musk's announcement of the Tesla Robot. He announced the specs and literally had some guy in spandex dance around dressed up like a robot. (I'm not hating on Musk here, just using him to illustrate a larger trend)
I think the media became so enthralled with Apple's big spectacle announcements that they (or perhaps all of us) forgot that the spectacle is supposed to be about something.
Whether we are talking about EVs, tech, ICOs, or DAOs, we've somehow reached a point where the attention is received and the money is made by announcing rather than delivering.
And if that's the case, why do all the hard work required to actually deliver?
No, this is human nature. There have always been liars, cheats, and a conman ready to take advantage of others. What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
I think it's odd to try to normalize evil. There have always been been wars and starvation, so what? Do you mean that we have no power over our own society? That it's ok because it's happened before? Either seems bizarre to me - obviously false and why would someone want to normalize it?
Also, the IT industry wasn't like this 10 years ago.
> What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
The latter smees to be far ahead of the former. As people who study disinformation point out: You can post a lie much faster than someone can post the truth.
As for me, I write software that keeps people's data safe and software that fights human traffickers and terrorists. I'm feeling good about what I do for a living. Our industry may broadly be far more scummy, but there are points of light still and I try my best to work for people that make the world better.