It’s largely cope. Love him or hate him, insanely talented, hard-working, and intelligent.
Calling him a showman and conman is great way to posture superiority over the guy shooting rockets into space and hiring 100k+ people
Calling him a showman and conman is great way to posture superiority over the guy shooting rockets into space and hiring 100k+ people
We tolerate the characteristics because of the perceived value, but it would also be nice to highlight genuinely good people with significant accomplishments for being successful as well as kind.
What he has done that is bad and why people hate him:
- Called somebody something bad on twitter once.
- Twits dumb memes with dumb humor sometimes
- Twitted about cryptocurrencies. People claim this is market manipulation to enrich himself without any evidence.
- Twitter 'Funding secured'. People believe this is made up, however it was conclusively settled. And even if it was not fully secured, there is little question he could have found the money. So not sure why people are so angry about that.
That seems to be most of the criticism I read. If that is the worst thing, I don't know what people are so worked up about.
Some leftists are angry he doesn't support unions, but of course almost no rich person (and many non rich people don't either).
I assume you're talking about the time he called a diver (and actual hero) a pedophile. It went a bit further than that - he hired a private investigator who tried (and failed) to dig up dirt on the man.
He created a false narrative about what Musk and his team of engineers (literal rocket engineers) were doing. Musk and his engineers had coordinated with the actual rescue team and the Mini-Sub they build was according to specification from the diving team who suggested they were not sure if the youngest and smallest child could be rescued with the conventional method they were planning.
The media of course presented this as Musk comes in and advocates for his own method of saving everybody and the 'hero' was a guy who pushed himself into the cheap sensationalist media by attacking Musk. The sensationalist media of course simply ran with that and were just to happy to publish anything negative about Musk.
That was of course during a time when Tesla was having challenges scaling and the 'Musk is a total idiot' storyline was getting lots of clicks.
In all, sure, Musk did something stupid but he didn't start it. He had never said anything bad about either this guy or the diving team. He had in fact done the opposite and expressed that it was good that their alternative solution in the end wasn't required.
But I guess anybody who pushes himself into the media who to insult Musk must be a hero.
If you don't want to consider a man who was instrumental in saving the lives of 12 boys a hero that's fine, there are lots of other adjectives that I'm sure you can find and they're all far more flattering than the one Musk made of himself in that saga.
Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
> instrumental
There was a professional diving team that saved the children he was not himself doing it.
And even if he was pushing yourself into the media and making headlines by insulting somebody who tried to help is not really a good look. Specially because it was not constitutive (or respectful) critism. It was simply a guy who wanted attention and got it.
> Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
I'm not defending what Musk said. It was clearly a stupid thing to say.
But if the main critism of a guy who lead 2 important technology companies for decades is 'he got too angry at somebody who insulted him in the media' then that is a pretty lame reason to hate him so much.
Your defences and explanations are all irrelevant and rely on minimising it as "saying something bad" and "on Twitter". That isn't adding anything to the conversation.
It's his job as a diver, is it not?
Divers dive, saving people is something a (probably very small) subset of divers do.
That being said, it was never Elons job to help, nor was it his job to develop a non-working submarine for the task. Or to be insulted when someone stated so. He did it for the PR and the fame, when he got neither was pissed and started insulting and harassing people.
This is exactly what Musk himself had said, can you please provide any sources for many paragraphs of unsubstantiated claims you just made? :)
"We love green businesses, wouldn't it be great if we had more electric cars and could kill oil?"
"We love science, especially rocket scientists!"
"Twitter can ban anyone they like, 1st amendment only applies to government, get your own Twitter if you don't like it!"
Waaaaait, not like thaaaaat!
Stop the hypocrisy.
If we can get a massively successful revolutionary business like SpaceX without someone like Steve Jobs I'd love it. But so far the sample size is small and there aren't any countering examples. History has thus far shown that you need people with strong personality and drive with some amount of lack of empathy in order to create massive shifts in the course of humanity.
Also, SpaceX isn't done.