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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

I used to like Elon circa 2018 up until he started acting up (pedo guy, et al), but the main thing that soured my opinion of him lies in being -- don't know if this is the right word -- unhinged.

I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel. What I can't really tell is if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.

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I also used to like him or at least respected him a bit more, I think the best way I can put it is that he seems lost in his own sauce.

I remember listening to someone describe a conversation they had with him or where he was speaking, and he relayed that Elon was telling them that in his world he can't relate to people because to him its like everyone is a toddler mentally and he has to go down to their level....now, I just fully don't believe that, that sounds like the most contrived "I'm a genius peasants" story imaginable, something out of a movie.

This comes across in his public persona too. Elon's entire vibe is like a 14 year old who thinks they know everything and everyone else is stupid.

I agree but I'm also unsure if he's putting on that persona because his audience has reacted to it in a positive way. Flanderisation, I think they call it?

My mom called it "seeking negative attention"

Flanderisation is a little different -- generally applied to fictional characters, its when a single trait overrides every other aspect of your personality. Ned Flanders on the Simpsons is the inspiration for the term: a character initially created as a foil and mirror for Homer Simpson (kind, calm, and collected where Homer is typically brash, emotional, and chaotic) became a one-note character defined by his faith.

I guess you could kind of apply it to Musk in that he seems to revel in being something of a jerk, but (in the view of someone who's been very skeptical of Musk for a while) it's not an all-consuming thing.

That’s pretty evident with his technobabble. He uses just enough technical buzzwords that impress non-technical folks and acts like he is an expert in every topic he talks about.

Currently being in my x-th, and out of order rewatch, of DS9 I kind of blame Star Trek for that. Technobabble, check. Geniusus saving the day and universe, check. Moral superiority, check. Throw in some Tony Stark vibes and you have it. And social media influencing.

> Technobabble, check. Geniusus saving the day and universe, check. Moral superiority, check.

It's a shame that these are so often the takeaways from a show that is at its core about a group of people with different skillsets and backgrounds working together with mutual trust and respect to further a common goal.

I mentioned that it is my x-th tike watching DS9? I like Star Trek, there simply are some aspects that didn't age too well, or that I see differently now.

As a comparison, back the day I t liked Babylon 5 better. Tried watching it again and just couldn't the way I can always rewatch ST TNG, DS9 or even Voyager.

Apologies, I didn't mean that as a statement about you personally. I more meant to agree that those are aspects of Trek that many latch on to (while missing some of the healthier lessons).

Trek has a lot of those. Dax as a gender fluid character for example. Or Data being an artificial life form. The risk of the Federation becoming military dictatorship.

On the other hand there is the fact that Starfleet is the de-facto military junta, a morally fine one of course. Or moral high horse crap like the prime directive. The overall optimism is good so, and especially DS9 did a good job in showing the ambivalency that comes from ideals meeting real politics. E.g. the arc between Sisko and the Maquis, having Sisko side with, of all people, war criminal Dukat.

All Musk's plastic surgery and hair implants do make him look kinda weird like Odo.

Or he is slowly loosong his ability to keep a form for a lengthy period of time.

It's not that uncommon among people with Asperger-like traits, which Musk has publicly acknowledged in 2021.

Acknowledged or claimed?

Elon would be completely forgiven if his politics were more left-wing than they currently are.

Like Michael Avenatti?

Please cite examples to support this, er, rather extraordinary assertion. Which prominent left-wing figures have acted like Elon Musk and have been "completely forgiven"?

I don’t think they were stating it as in they had examples, they were extrapolating from other left leaning activities like BLM vs Insurrection. Similar aggressive approaches but only insurrection gets attention as bad.

BLM protested police brutality. Jan 6th wanted to stop / prevent a democratic election process. Seems like different things to me.

> Jan 6th wanted to stop / prevent a democratic election process.

And possibly abduct or murder congresspeople (thinking of the guy with clearly visible tie wrap restraints, or the republican that was telling where to find democrat members of congress)

And the violent parts of both were pretty roundly condemned?

These two are not comparable; you're trying to push an indefensible equivalence.

I'm struggling to understand what Elon Musk's crime actually is? Being successful? Having influence on the internet? Not following the narrow railroad tracks of a particular ideology?

I think it would just be different people complaining in that case.

(My impression of his politics is more that they’re anarchic then left/right, but I’m not excited enough by his words to listen beyond the presentations and random support for e.g. UBI).

That’s the thing though, you don’t have to seek attention or power. That’s not an Asperger trait. That’s the thing which really makes it inexcusable.

You can also be rich and relatively unknown, most rich people are. He chooses to be super public.

He uses that attention and focus in ways that benefit the world at large. Like helping build more ethical AI's, or getting people to Mars. There's nothing wrong with that IMHO.

My concern is he losing his focus. I know I get distracted from the work I am supposed to be doing (sometimes my paid job but even more so at home). I really should be finishing some home renovation work but there is that mail box I need to finish, and the 3D printed lid for a mouse trap, and the synthesizer I am thinking of building, oh wait there is an nice branch from the plum tree we trimmed that I could turn into a flute on the lathe...

Elon really needs to focus on the energy and transportation thing that he really is good at.

sorry to pick you up on this, and i’m unable to phrase this in such a way as to not sound inflammatory (again, apologies):

* which ethical AI would that be?

* how many people has elon sent to mars now?

elon has marketed an image to people, one of a tony stark-like figure, that might do or say the wrong thing at the time, but who truly wants to make everything better.

the reality is that, whilst perhaps not a conman (although i find my opinion of him leaning to that end more each day), he’s definitely just another profit-driven business man, with little to no regard of the people around him. and probably a sociopath.

bill gates has done (a lot) more for humanity. and i’m not particularly fond of him, either.

Can you elaborate on Musk being a conman? I don't follow the news these days.

Well there was that incident where he committed securities fraud by saying he's taking Tesla private at a certain amount.

There is something wrong instigating further extreme resource exhaustion to serve boyish Star Trek pipe dreams.

There’s absolutely no guarantee he’s on the right track. Humans expanding away from Earth is as likely as us being able to rewrite the speed of light.

There’s no rewriting the fundamentals of reality. One really bad day and Mars colony is wiped out. How much damage we do here before getting there is a real concern.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people consider some problems here on earth to be hopelessly intractable, but simultaneously consider a livable human colony on Mars to be not only achievable, but also not subject to the same supposedly intractable problems of today.

A Mars colony is merely an engineering problem. The intractable problems on Earth are stuck because millions of dollars don't want them solved.

What is it about Mars that would cause those same problems to collapse into mere engineering problems over there?

There really isn't a comparison between engineers figuring out how to build a sustainable biosphere on Mars, and the problems that we're presumably discussing on Earth, like climate change and pollution, which are political problems inasmuch as billion dollar business models are benefiting from them, and actively fighting your efforts to interfere.

I like how you try to extricate getting to Mars as it’s own thing despite the industrial effort to do so exacerbating climate problems that are political problems.

Please, go on. I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”

This is what I mean. Obsession and success with engineering has titillated people to the point of blind faith. Externalities do not exist in their conceptual void. It’s become akin to unfalsifiable religious belief.

> I like how you try to extricate getting to Mars as it’s own thing despite the industrial effort to do so exacerbating climate problems that are political problems.

If humanity doesn't spend the resources on spreading humanity throughout the universe, then the resources will be spent on disposable plastic toys that fill landfills. It's not as if an edenic utopia is being despoiled for this boondoggle. Our environment isn't in its precarious state because of too much space travel. We're debating over the disposition of a tiny fraction of our dwindling material resources, negligible in the grand scheme.

> I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”

If we have a limited period before climate doomsday, then we'd better get cracking on space travel before it's too late.

I don't think being rich is his end goal. His goal is to do great things, to advance humanity (in very specific ways), maybe having a great legacy. Being rich helps him achieve these goals, but so does building hype and being present in the media. Being rich and unknown isn't a great strategy to achieve his goals.

> Being rich helps him achieve these goals, but so does building hype and being present in the media.

Does it? I know literally nothing about the personality of the Wright brothers. Or Henry Ford. Or Thomas Edison. Their legacy is their inventions. Hype and media coverage are temporary at best. And unfortunately, Musk's hype and media presence tends to show him at his worst. I'm not sure whether Musk fans realize how many non-fans actually despise the guy. If anything, he's wrecking his legacy. Shut up and build stuff.

I mean, Thomas Edison may as well be a 200 year old Elon Musk. Practically all he did was be a hype man.

Ford was pretty similar from my reading.

Both men had early career success and worked harder than most at achieving their goals. But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.

I imagine Elon's legacy (should he be remembered) will not be his twitter shitposting, but electric cars and rocketry.

> But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.

Nobody remembers Ford's political activism. Apparently he ran for US Senate once and lost. Is there any reason to think that Ford's political activism had anything to do with the success of the Ford Motor Company?

Ford hyping cars is fine and expected. Ford hyping politics doesn't really seem to add anything. In fact, it appears that there were some antisemitic writings associated with Ford, there was a lawsuit and a consumer boycott, and he was forced to apologize.

A common fallacy is to assume that everything a successful person does in life contributes to their success. OJ Simpson was one of the greatest football running backs ever, and he was also a murderer. You might say, "if he wasn't a violent person, then he wouldn't have been a great running back", but somehow Barry Sanders managed not to murder anyone.

Edison and Ford had the small detail that the product they sold became widespread among the population very quickly.

They represented the last effort after standing on the shoulders of giants, basically being the person who got to sign off the quality of life improvement and reap the financial reward. It happens, could have been somebody else but in the end it was them.

mr.Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years and his product is nor widespread (only 1% of total number of global vehicles sold in FY21) nor revolutionary from a quality of life standpoint (at the end of the day it's a car and you can hardly tell the difference between Tesla EVs and MercedesEQS, iBMW, Toyota EVs etc....if anything the Quality Of life gap is towards the other automakers)

> at the end of the day it's a car and you can hardly tell the difference between Tesla EVs and MercedesEQS, iBMW, Toyota EVs etc..

I'll go a step further and I can hardly tell the difference between a Tesla and a used ICE car.

I have not enough karma to make the point above and not risking ending up underwater.

But the hell with it...I can always delete it.

I think people are taking crazy pills, they religiously follow this guy and his delusions about becoming a multiplanetary specie before the Sun becomes a red giant....5 billions years from now.

As they have such thoughts they have to walk through human feces and scenes from the Walking Dead...only with the homeless instead of zombies.

Stuff that would scare them to death if they saw it in a movie or compel them to pity if they happened in the background of a live news reportage from Ukraine.

Instead it's happening under their nose as they wonder if Mars is ambitious enough or we should aim directly for the Andromeda Galaxy.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

That's like saying a 1930 Ford Model A is not that different from a 1930 Cadillac. That doesn't mean that Ford didn't change the automobile industry in a historic way before 1930.

Where is Tesla's equivalent of the Model T, or Windows 95 or the Wright Brothers biplane, or the Montgolfier brothers hot air baloon?

The paradigm shift that gets to 95% marketshare before getting copied? Nowhere to be seen.

Tesla changed the way people feel about Tesla.

When people say they are not a car company they are right. They are a cult company. They sell cult. Of the techno-utopian kind.

Yes. Tesla changed the way people feel about Tesla.

Importantly, some of those people were in positions of influence at other auto manufacturers. So Tesla didn't have to capture 95% marketshare to change the industry.

I think that the blinding glamour of a Tesla has faded quite a bit. I think, 20 years on, we expect to see strong competition to them. The lane assist, the adaptive cruise control, the touch screen console... these are a bit boring now. Others have had them for a long time. Some probably had them before Tesla. Hopefully, several competitors will start offering 500 km range EVs. Tesla can still cult that advantage.

But the cult of Tesla scared established players. Everyone has scrambled to adapt since. And the public has been persuaded to keep the pressure on. Tesla represents an historic shift. I don't have to like them or buy them. But I recognize their place in history.

Alternative take, things like the space program; while there are some prominent names in there like Wernher von Braun and Louis Armstrong, the endeavour which changed human history was an endeavour by many people, not just a few individuals with Personalities. Same with other current endeavours like nuclear fusion and the LHC; I can't name any individual person behind those projects. They are a lot more selfless.

Meanwhile, there's great engineers working at both Tesla and SpaceX, but the only person you know is Elon.

Musk's bullshit endangers the valuable things he's doing.

If he wants to make Starship a reality, he needs permits and government contracts.

I met an African-American man about ten years ago who owned an excellent patent portfolio covering technology like this

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6695260

but he was the only black person I've ever met who hated Barack Obama. He was an extreme Republican, thought Democrats all worked for the anti-Christ, etc.

I figured there was no way he'd succeed at what he was trying to do because he'd need to make nice with the government no matter who the administration was. I haven't heard from him again.

I see Musk going down the same road. I can only imagine the last man is dying on Earth 1000 years from now and cursing: "If only Elon Musk didn't have to post that tweet we would have made it to Mars."

There’s absolutely no reason to believe he’s on the right track

No science says “yes rockets and spreading through the stars is definitely the future for humans.”

The odds he’s just exacerbating damaging industrial feedback loops and a worse mess for the future are much higher than successful Mars colonies and extrasolar expansion coming from his efforts

I can't buy this. He very clearly seems to relish public attention for its own sake. Otherwise we'd have to accept that his hyping of random crypto tokens (e.g. DOGE) is somehow indirectly connected to saving the world or advancing humanity.

As with all outputs from any neurodiversity or personality disorder, it's a reason not an excuse

> not that uncommon among people with Asperger-like traits

Lets get one thing straight. If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong. Its a spectrum, normally around social interaction, and not understanding, or being able to pick up on the slow of social information.

However for most high functioning people it is possible, with work, to mitigate those "negative" qualities.

It is not an excuse to be a dick. What Elon is doing is a choice. He is perfectly capable of interacting with people enough to have a series of relationships with people without making them feel like shit. I would therefore postulate that whilst he might be on the spectrum, he has worked hard to mitigate it.

What Elon is, is a rich school boy.

> the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong

No, it's actually because you don't think it's wrong in the first place.

I understand why people prefer to lie to protect other's emotions, or why people prefer being high-status rather than being right, but I disagree with that, I think it's wrong.

That's a false dichotomy - there is a whole range of options between 'lying to save someones feelings' and 'being rude'.

My 13 year old child reached this epiphany just this week (ADHD, not Aspergers). They told me "whenever I think about something, I am really interested in it but then I simply stop thinking about it and do something else." They were a little upset because they wanted to continue with those interesting activities. We had a nice long talk about reaching a maturity point where their active thoughts can control their impulses.

Yes, it is more complex than simply "mind over matter", but it's still an important development milestone.

(total tangent but i've had a couple moments like this with my kids. It's amazing to see, i love it)

> If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong.

Sometimes, you know it’s wrong, at least at some level, but are so fucking tired of masking all the time you just do it anyway.

> but are so fucking tired of masking all the time you just do it anyway.

I feel like "masking" is being used for "be polite". I didn't decide to be rude, I decided not to mask my disability.

That is bullshit.

People on the spectrum may have a harder time understanding what is rude, and that may give some passes when you don't realize it. But if you decide to ignore what you've learned is rude, you're just an ass.

"Being polite" is emotional labor, whether or not that labor takes the form of "masking" a disability. While of course we should be respectful of those we engage with, avoidance of emotional labor should always take precedence over shallow notions of politeness that have nothing to do with actual respect for others.

> "Being polite" is emotional labor,

And "going to bathroom and not pissing on the floor" is physical labor. Even more so if you are on crutches.

I completely disagree with your artificial distinction between "being respectful to others" and "politeness". Politeness is defined as being respectful to others

We all benefit from a more polite interaction. To refuse to be polite because it requires effort is just taking advantage of the system without paying it back.

> Lets get one thing straight. If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong.

This might be a nitpick, I wouldn't describe it as an "understanding" problem. Usually we understand that there are social cues and what they mean (at least in the mild cases). The difference is in the strength of that signal.

It's like as if people have a warning indicator when doing things socially inept. Most folks seem to have a loud klaxon "You are being an ass! Stop that!". With ASD, it's more like a quiet "check engine" light that's easy to overlook.

If you never experience the social pressure to actively look for that indicator light (see exhibit E.), you never really build strong social graces. Or, maybe you just don't give a damn about masking, too tired, just not interested.

> Or, maybe you just don't give a damn about masking, too tired, just not interested.

I strongly feel this is the case with not only Musk, but a lot of high ranking "leaders"; I believe that you need an amount of ruthlessness, of indifference, an ability to turn off your morals to be in that position and get even richer. I mean just look at how he fucks his staff over and expects them to work ridiculous hours, bragging about how much he works (the difference being he gets paid for every second he is alive, while staff only gets paid for contract hours).

> If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong.

completely untrue, nearly all autistic people I know including me are hyper-aware of social situations and specifically act in ways to avoid being a dick. this is a pop-psychology notion of autism.

Yeah, but that's because we spent our childhoods and young adulthoods dealing with the consequences of not understanding what we were doing wrong, and put effort into figuring out what we were doing wrong and fixing it.

Now, I don't think Musk never faced consequences when he was young, and never learned this stuff, but I do think he faces absolutely no consequences today, and is happy to not put in any effort.

Your last sentence resonates with me. I would add that he might consider different efforts he might make and determine that it wouldn't change the results. He might offend a different 2/3 of the audience and please a different 1/3 of the audience. So why exhaust yourself all the time when the outcome is arguably indistinguishable?

Somebody on the outside might see a big difference in result, say a 50% approval rating vs a 35% approval rating. But from the inside it can all look the same: "everybody hates me anyway" or "most people love me anyway".

> Now, I don't think Musk never faced consequences when he was young, and never learned this stuff, but I do think he faces absolutely no consequences today, and is happy to not put in any effort.

my late step-father would say this person needs an "ass-whoopin"

I don't take anyone that uses the Asperger moniker seriously anymore; the guy was - in all likelihood - an eugenicist who picked out the "good" kind of autistic children and sent the "bad" ones off to get "euthanized"; see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5907291/.

Plus, it's often used as an excuse or a mark of honor; an excuse for unacceptable behaviour, and a mark of honor for being super smart and not like those Other Autists who struggle in their day to day.

The word has been besmirched by its namesake and the behaviour of those using it to distinguish themselves from "other" people with autism.

Musk has publicly said a lot of things that were BS for attention and sympathy

Let’s not act like our air gapped view of him through screens can provide an accurate diagnosis of real medical conditions

Do you know engineers? I’ve had this conversation I can’t count how many times in my life.

I do, I happen to be one, but I've never approached someone who wasn't an engineer like they have the mental capacity of a child (baring literal children). I can't play the cello, but I know music majors who can and they would struggle in Thermo. I don't see how anything but hubris can make someone see differently.

> I can't play the cello, but I know music majors who can and they would struggle in Thermo.

You can use thermo to build civilization, but you can't use a cello to do that!

> I don't see how anything but hubris can make someone see differently.

We don't know the context of this conversation with Musk. In "just between us engineers" conversations, there's plenty of hubris to go around. It's not just engineers, of course. Many of the highly educated professionals I know will express demeaning opinions about religious people or rural folks after a few drinks.

To be clear, I don't think being condescending is a virtue. But I don't see any reason to single Musk out for that specifically. I don't see him talking shit about how stupid everyone is, like many people do.

> You can use thermo to build civilization, but you can't use a cello to do that!

Depends on how you define “civilization”!

I definite it in terms of inventing air conditioning: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

Oh interesting, didn't realize civilization started in 1902.

> I don't see him talking shit about how stupid everyone is, like many people do.

That would Provo be because the attached attic sis related to belong musk not “everybody” and “many people”.

> baring literal children

Baring literal children isn't legal!

Good point but i think good engineers can be this way only in their field.

Yes, I am one and work with engineers. I had these doscussions, almost exclusively with the actually pretty bad engineers.

Indeed, it's hard for someone to be a good engineer unless they have some breadth of mind.

Good engineering is a team effort. Engineers unwilling to listen because of some self-percieved superiority complex are bad at that. And they hardly get any better.

I don't mean to defend snobishness, but it is possible to be in the top 10% of your field and dismiss anybody not in the top 30% of your field. That comes across as arrogant and dismissive to almost everybody because it is. But it doesn't mean you can't work in a team of equals.

Somebody like Anish Giri might be a very good sport and play a (very short) game of chess with me, but I doubt he would expect to learn anything from it. Of course, he probably wouldn't waste his time on me. Either way, he would still be a great asset to help somebody like Ian Nepomniachtchi prepare for a tournament.

Of course, being considerate and welcoming to everybody all the time is super awesome. Those who manage it have my respect whether they are perceived as the best in their field or not.

> it is possible to be in the top 10% of your field and dismiss anybody not in the top 30% of your field

This is how the 10% end up with 5 jobs in 8 years, watching those who they thought were beneath them rise up and take leadership positions because they're too much of a pain in the ass to work with.

It's a particular kind of intelligence. I'm actually in a relationship with somebody who tends to lean this direction. If you know what you're dealing with it's not too burdensome.

What's happening is, you have a person (Elon) of exceptional intelligence, so they can recognize a thing or concept and instantly follow it out to rational conclusions faster than the people around them, but they have not developed their intuitive side and don't respect the empty part, the unknown part, of the problem space.

It's like that halting problem thing: they become so accustomed to being able to see 'the answer' that they get blind to the mystery, the ambiguity of the non-answers and the areas where a real innovation will come from. They're not surprised by anything, or surprisable, so they become a specific kind of intelligent, very very quick and correct.

If you're a designer/inventor/artist type person you rely much more heavily on the non-answer spaces because those are where you work. That's not Elon. He has people for that, and takes the credit for their work, and impresses them so much with his ability to be quick that they go right along with it. In real terms they could not get their stuff done without him as that ringleader, figurehead, the 'Mr. Outside' there to impress the masses and get them to give him their money. It's a symbiotic relationship and Elon has done that over and over.

Don't look to Elon personally to have the revolutionary idea. However, if you show him one, he may well see where it leads way quicker than you do… and take it, and make a business out of it, and then hire you and have you doing it whilst taking a big cut of what you earn from it.

In this way Elon 'gets' capitalism as well and quickly as he gets everything else. He's definitely the man for late stage capitalism.

This is a pretty good observation IMO. I've always wondered why his timelines are so ridiculous. It jives with what you said because maybe he looks at current state and can follow it to the end state but misses the unknowns in-between. The devil is always in the details. But i would expect that of someone relatively new to the job of GettingThingsDone and Musk has been doing this for a long time. I can't get my head around why his timelines are so outside the realm of reality. Any date he gives i just mentally ignore because it's wildly unreliable.

His timelines are of the kond you get from clueless founders overpromising revolutionary products. It works, he gets all the funding he needs.

It feels like Elon Musk read that anecdote about how von Neumann spoke with three year-olds as equals, and somehow managed to conclude that the lesson was about expressions of superiority rather than about expressions of empathy.

The core difference is that von Neumann was a genius and did many, many things single handedly. I feel Musk is a businessman who would take credit for the work done by someone like von Neumann.

well given enough time who knows how history will judge Musk. Take Bill Gates, anyone working in tech in the 90s knows he's about as ruthless as you can possibly be. Now Gates is known as a saint as he tries to buy his way into heaven.

He seems to open up more when talking to people he considers "on his level" or at least deeply interested in what he is interested in. Take for example photographer and journalist Tim Dodd. Since Tim has a huge passion for rockets and actually wants to dig into the details of rocket engine cycles, manufacturing scale up - all the stuff Elon finds interesting - he really opens up.

That's actually pretty common among those "gifted with mild ASD/ADHD" types, they can't be assed to talk about anything that doesn't pique their interest. I struggled with it a lot until I learned to be more social with other folks' topics of discussion. I think Elon is the logical endpoint of what happens when you have zero pressure to socially accommodate.

It does seem like he's increasingly emboldened to act an ass since being crowned world's richest man.

I watched those interviews on his Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel.

Musk looked bored with Tim, was often evasive, gave the appearance of wanting to get away from a fanboy.

The few times he would "open up" it was more like a recitation from someone to a disinterested audience — or as though Musk's mind was somewhere else, not really engaged or focused on the interviewer.

EDIT: Skimming the two-part interview again, Musk seems to switch between seemingly being engaged to not. Maybe it is because the interview went on really long and appears to be uncut.

That's charitable. That was a really long interview/behind the scenes. I also interpreted it mostly as being tired (he normally works obscene hours and around this time he was particularly burning both ends).

I think it's telling that he didn't tell Tim to scram or he even got that close of a look at all. If he wanted to get away, he could have easily done so.

The disparity is even more obvious in the pressers when reporters ask typical reporter questions, vs when someone (often Tim, but there are others) asks something technical.

> The disparity is even more obvious in the pressers when reporters ask typical reporter questions, vs when someone (often Tim, but there are others) asks something technical.

Can you even imagine being Musk and running an EV company and a rocket company and having to field questions from your typical journalists? Like that Q from a journalist about why the new image of the black home at the center of our galaxy is so blurry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31353677.

one thing about that interview i've always wondered about. There was a part where Musk was talking about the heat shield and lamenting about progress and then watched some guy bang on a heating tile with their hands for about 10 seconds. After that, he picks up his phone to make a call then the interview cuts to a different scene entirely. I get the feeling that phone call was not a pleasant one and SpaceX asked it be removed from the footage.

Later on when he was giving that update at Starbase he mentioned the heat shield and thanked someone for a "robust" shield. I couldn't quite tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

not trying to make excuses but Musk mentioned at the end he was suffering from pretty bad back pain too. Back pain on your feet really sucks and can destroy a coherent thought.

Having said that, Musk is pretty much the worst communicator i've ever heard at the C suite level. I hope/pray he's better when talking to direct reports trying to get his crazy ass ideas and timelines done. Those poor poor people if he's not...

On the other hand, he says outright stupid things all the time and only if he gets into a topic you know a thing or two about, you realize how wrong he often is.

One thing that almost everybody on HN should be able to judge as completely wrong is his claim about "L5 autonomy very close / later this year" [1].

L5 autonomy is the equivalent of the halting problem. L5 is a goal that can't be achieved [2], just like no program can be written that determines if the input program will ever terminate. [3]

So what to make of this, if this apparently smart guy says entry-level stupid things?

[1]: https://electrek.co/2020/07/09/tesla-tsla-elon-musk-level-5-...

[2]: https://macdailynews.com/2019/01/07/waymo-ceo-level-5-fully-...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Edit: Because so many replies here about why I compare it to the Halting problem: That comparison is invalid as many of you pointed out. My reasoning was not in a strict mathematical sense, but more like this: even experienced humans can't drive in every condition. There are situations where you just need to stop. L5 autonomy will only work if we create AGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...), so that the system can observe itself and think about itself. An AGI might be possible (in the far future), whereas the Halting problem is mathematically impossible. Thanks for pointing this out.

I mean, he has a pretty clear financial incentive to say stuff like this given that he runs an auto manufacturer that heavily invests in vehicular automation.

Not saying he's right, but find me a company that doesn't polish their own turds, even just a little bit. Everyone trying to sell something is painting the best picture of their product possible.

There's polishing a turd, then there's calling a pile of shit a chocolate cake.

I really hope this becomes an actual idiom.

Yeah, but even this doesn't seem very thoughtful. He recently acknowledged his predictions around full self-driving were wrong, and said it was because he'd failed to appreciate that it would essentially require artificial general intelligence.

Then he claimed we'd have that solved by 2023.

Not sure what the upside is of being known for repeatedly making non-rational predictions and being wrong.

> Not sure what the upside is of being known for repeatedly making non-rational predictions and being wrong.

It can significantly move markets in the short term, which he seems to have become adept at doing over the last few years. And unfortunately, the stock market isn't really interested in long-term thinking, it's largely about breaking news and twitter rumors nowadays.

Well, he's definitely mastered market manipulation. I take your point there.

But, the degree of absurdity across predictions undermines even that strategy over time. I think he does himself a disservice here. He should get out of his own way and allow his actual achievements to speak louder than irrational predictions (and other distractions).

I totally agree, and that's the very definition of short-term thinking: doing what's best for today at tomorrow's expense.

L5 autonomy is a absolutely a long way off (if ever practially acheivable) and Elon is a bullshit artist, but I don't understand your comparison to the halting problem. Could you elaborate?

I interperate your comparison to the halting problem to mean that even if we ignore the feasability of a particular solution, it is literally an impossible problem to solve.

My understanding of L5 is driving without external human intervention. In one sense we already have the technology to do that - our brians. It would never be feasible (or ethical), but if we could put a human brain inside every tesla, wouldn't that achieve L5?

> In one sense we already have the technology to do that - our brians. It would never be feasible (or ethical), but if we could put a human brain inside every tesla, wouldn't that achieve L5?

It would achieve L5 of a sort, but people don't usually mean "L5 autonomy" in the sense of "capable of crashing the vehicle deliberately to protest the horror of their existence".

I think equating to the halting problem is silly, but the ISO levels are a bit of a mess.

* Level 5 is a vehicle that never needs a human to take over and can drive in "all conditions". Humans do not meet this driving standard.

* Level 4 is a vehicle, that within a set of vehicle-defined conditions can drive the vehicle without a human ever having to take over. It refuses to drive unless the conditions are met.

So a level 4 car could be a vehicle that can drive in a 1 block area of residential streets only... or something that can drive in way more conditions than I could safely attempt, but refuses to drive in say, whiteout blizzard conditions at night.

The difficulty of creating L5 autonomy and the provable impossibility of the halting problem are not comparable at all.

There is absolutely nothing fundamental that makes L5 autonomy impossible, while the halting problem is provably impossible, as normally formulated.

I don't know how close or far away L5 autonomy is, but it's definitely theoretically reachable, while the halting problem is always going to be impossible.

Halting problem comparison is silly, but L5 autonomy as defined ("all conditions") is probably not attainable.

A car that would complete all the trips I'm willing to complete, and some more, but refuses under some circumstances (e.g. whiteout blizzard conditions) would be a L4 vehicle under the ISO definition.

When we are actually have cars that sufficiently close to what humans can do in terms of range of condition, I suspect the level 5 definition will be updated to be more like:

Can drive in approximately the same set of conditions as a human (professional driver?), possibly being unwilling to drive in certain (seldom encountered) conditions where most humans would, but offset by being willing to drive in conditions few people would.

Importantly, the car must avoid completely giving up on driving mid trip (as opposed to deciding "too dangerous, turn around and go back at next opportunity"), unless conditions are comparable to those in which a human would give up mid trip (which are pretty limited, as humans seldom just stop and give up on the road unless the car is broken down, or fully stuck. At worst, in some really bad conditions, humans may pull other to wait for the storm/extreme-fog/etc to blow over.)

Or perhaps at that point we won't need the definition anymore. It becomes a bit arbitrary and market-y at that point. Assuming that we don't end up with a single vendor.

"My BMW still drove during the snows in February, but my neighbor's Tesla said it wouldn't drive 2 of the days." "Yah, but mine doesn't insist that the windows are perfectly clean and pristine before starting a trip!"

We probably should never have had level 5, but split L4 into a couple levels: heavily geofenced/restricted vs. relatively unlimited applicability with some restrictions.

Will never be achieved? Only if humanity dies ous quickly. If, literally, even the dumbest people can learn how to drive, I'm sure with enough time we'll be able to replicate that autonomously.

I know what the halting problem is and I had to study why it cannot work.

However, for L5, you just have a quote saying it doesn't work. We know it is mathematically possible for L5 to work because, well, humans perform at that level. We know that our vision, our ears, our hands and senses are enough input to solve the problem.

Do you have a direct connection between them or are you just using it as a metaphor for an unsolvable problem?

I needed a reminder, so I opened a new tab in Chromium and typed in 'the halting problem' and hit return and Chromium immediately crashed :)

Which is not only funny, it's exactly why the halting problem is so hard…

Humans actually don't perform at L5, we perform at a very high level of L4. (Still, the halting problem comparison is silly).

That Waymo CEO quote is about feasibility of fully autonomous driving in snow / rain. Seems unreasonable to even expect that. But I don't think it's as intractable as the halting problem. There's no formal proof against feasibility of L5.

But as far as Musk, yes he lies and isn't shy about it. It's shameless and overt. Perhaps he justifies it as being part of his job.

Hmm... While I don't see any evidence that L5 autonomous driving is near, I don't follow your argument that L5 is equivalent to the halting problem. Can you explain?

I am not convinced that L5 is fundamentally impossible (unless we posit that humans are also not L5 autonomous, which I suppose one could argue, as they are prone to driving errors). Granted I subscribe to Universality, and assume that humans are not capable of hyper-computation.

Elon has changed his tune (somewhat) about automated driving. He said in an interview that he now believes full auto-drive requires AGI.

Personally I think full auto-drive requires us to change to the roads to make them work for machines... but that's a different story.

I heard him say FSD will be fully functional by next year in the ted interview he did a few weeks ago.

I mean, they already ship it, don't they? How do their customers square these statements with what they were sold and can enable with the flick of a button?

Or is this FSD in the sense of "my car can drive itself home after dropping me off" type of thing?

I think he knows intellectually that a lot of his claims and predictions are bogus, but he also knows that his fanboys are all over it. Look at the amount of preorders for cars that - as it turns out - were years away still, if at all (thinking of the new roadster, pick-up truck and big trailer truck at the moment). Look at Tesla's stock which is based entirely on hype and less so on actual product, market share or financial results. Look at how many companies and universities around the world started developing a Hyperloop just because he mentioned it - I don't even know if there was like a grant for it or some other financial incentive.

Intellectually everyone can deduct that a long distance hyperloop is science fiction, ridiculously expensive, complicated, and will likely face long outages at any incident (see the channel tunnel, but like if it was 10-100x as long and a vacuum). But because Musk says it with Confidence, an army of fans jumps onto it.

Unfortunately you are doing the very thing that you accuse Musk of doing. L5 autonomy is not formalized (nor do I think it is able to be formalized) to the extent that would permit a rigorous proof showing it is isomorphic to the halting problem.

Your claim conflates a nebulous, squishy, human goal with a formally and rigorously proven mathematical problem. The only support offered is links to wikipedia and news articles, none of which help connect the two in an equally formal and rigorous fashion.

You make that he's a businessman who also tries to sell his product. We try to judge him as an engineer, but he's much more than that.

he says outright stupid things all the time and only if he gets into a topic you know a thing or two about, you realize how wrong he often is.

Recently he said "complexity and cost of a car is greater than that of a humanoid robot".

Let’s not diagnose him sympathetically without evidence

He’s posting his cold brew pics to Twitter. Caffeine is a psychoactive substance that can foster manic behavior. Lack of sleep can create cognitive stability issues. Been there with both.

Who knows if he’s taken other things here and there as Mr Private Plane bounces around socializing.

Despite Twitter, how much of Elon’s life we don’t see is significant.

He openly admitted to having (deprecated term) Asperger's syndrome on SNL.

> That's actually pretty common among those "gifted with mild ASD/ADHD" types, they can't be assed to talk about anything that doesn't pique their interest.

Despite people in tech conflating ASD/ADHD and using them as some kind of weird bragging right (and excuse for not considering others), I don't know that there is any public information about his having either condition.

> He seems to open up more when talking to people he considers "on his level" or at least deeply interested in what he is interested in.

That's just called childish behavior, and despite it's name it is common in a lot of adults, not just Musk.

But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them. That is basically how cults work.

He openly admitted to having (deprecated term) Asperger's syndrome on SNL.

> That's just called childish behavior,

That's pretty judgy, IMHO.

> But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them.

True.

> That's pretty judgy, IMHO.

I punch up. Even if he has Aspergers, with his amount of wealth and power he doesn't get to escape my judgement.

> I also used to like him or at least respected him a bit more, I think the best way I can put it is that he seems lost in his own sauce.

Agreed. Musk has gone full Assange.

At least for Assange, one can say that being holed up for years in an embassy room and now having to face decades in an US prison (or even the death penalty!) isn't going to make anyone feel well.

I would have genuinely laughed out loud if someone said that to my face. My reaction would have been to give him a reality check - "My man, you may know some things, but definitely don't know it all!". Perhaps, also ask him - "Have you considered that some of those people considered talking to you as dealing with a toddler who thinks he knows it all?"

Then he laughs, turns away and talks to somebody else and leaves. He will still feel superior and not waste time.

See for instance https://youtu.be/ye8zcgxWMDc where he only stays as it's a major presse event (the guy buy his side was running for chancellor to succeed Merkel; and yeah the questions were "dumb" but with your questions you won't get a better response)

That'll definitely teach him a lesson, I'm sure it would make him reflect on his behaviour and will make him a changed man.

He's just a Steve Jobs who doesn't know to keep his worst traits hidden from the public eye.

More like tye worst version of Jobs before his firing from Apple. And not just hiding his worst traits, but also unable of keepong them in check.

How has he lost his sauce? He's actually delivering on his two major companies. He's shipping electric cars at an insane growth rate. He's doing what car companies had 100 years to do and still can't get right in the US. All the other electric car companies are basically vaporware VC money pits. He's also delivering on SpaceX. I get it, you don't like his politics or share his sense of humor but don't pretend like he's some unhinged twitter personality.

Tesla revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2022 was $18.756B, a 80.54% increase year-over-year.

Tesla revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2022 was $59.810B, a 74.73% increase year-over-year.

Tesla annual revenue for 2021 was $53.823B, a 70.67% increase from 2020.

Tesla annual revenue for 2020 was $31.536B, a 28.31% increase from 2019.

Tesla annual revenue for 2019 was $24.578B, a 14.52% increase from 2018.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/revenue

> he seems lost in his own sauce

I read this as a polite way of saying he's up his own arse, which seems accurate.

Sure he's arrogant but I wouldn't rank his accomplishments and person hood by tweets. He has an incredible record as an engineering manager and investor and to brush that off is just silly.

I will brush that off, because the character of our leadership matters. It would be a regrettable outcome if our next generation of leaders acts as boorishly as Elon Musk does. We want leaders who inspire others to be the best version of themselves, and that includes treating others with respect and care.

High on his own gas.

> I get it, you don't like his politics or share his sense of humor but don't pretend like he's some unhinged twitter personality.

He called Vernon Unsworth a "pedo guy" in a tweet after he rescued all of those kids in Thailand and criticized Musk's plan to build a small submarine to get them out. That wasn't a joke, it wasn't meant to elicit a humorous response, it was clearly meant to defame someone. Notice that accusing folks of pedophilia has become a pretty common tactic for the right nowadays.

Calling someone a pedo seems pretty unhinged for a billionaire responsible for running major companies, it honestly surprised me how Musk would spend his public energy saying that kind of stuff, and especially when you consider the power dynamics involved, it's hard to interpret his actions as anything other than driven by insecurity. But I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It's slang. Maybe not tasteful or obscure but it is just an insult. You ever have someone attack you and call them a name? It's pretty human. Someone's life isn't defined by an insult he used years ago. You need to get over it...

https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-pedo-guy-really-...

No. A person in Musk’s position should know better than to behave this way, and perhaps to even bounce drafts of his communications off a trusted confidant for feedback before hitting “send.” Heck, I do this myself a couple times a month, and I’m nowhere near his level of power and influence. It’s not like he can’t afford an army of comms people.

You know, it's funny to me how often the "just kidding, it's slang" argument gets used. You'd think someone as smart and talented as Musk would've figured somewhere along the way to actually say what they mean. Which strangely enough, he seems to do just fine most of the time. But you're right, it's all my fault and I should really get over it and be more empathetic towards the billionaires that can't seem to communicate clearly.

When you have tens of millions of Twitter followers and are an international celebrity, it's reasonable expect a modicum of care when making public statements about a private individual. I don't really care how that phrase would be interpreted at a private school in South Africa in the 1980s. What matters is how it can reasonably be expected to be interpreted by the millions upon millions of people who heard it as a result of Musk using it.

It doesn't really matter if this was intentional malice or reckless negligence. It was wildly, wildly unacceptable either way.

> You ever have someone attack you and call them a name?

No, I'm a mature adult. Sure, I'll disagree with someone. Hell, I'll even say things like, "that was a bigoted statement", but I will never make up an insult to avenge an attack. I work every day to prevent that behaviour in my kids. I'm not going to replicate it in my life.

It's also not up to you to decide when someone "needs to get over it."

Slang?! What is it slang for, pray tell?

Why are you springing to the defense of the richest person in the world? Are you hoping to get in his good graces or... something?

He didn’t just call him a pedo guy. Elon also emailed a bunch of journalists to make serious (and untrue) accusations that the guy was a “child rapist.”

My thoughts on this are that extremely smart, hard-charging people with heavy narcissistic traits are "constrained" in their earlier years by:

1. They still need to follow the basic rules of society, i.e. people haven't started "God-Emperor Elon" memes yet, so not every single person is going to bow down.

2. Before they've achieved amazing success, they aren't 100% confident in their other-wordly abilities. Now, given his success with PayPal, Tesla, and Space-X, it's easy for him to believe his own press.

Thus, Elon is now at the point where all of his negative traits are essentially allowed to "run wild" because they are constrained neither by society at large, nor his own doubts.

I still respect him, probably more every year.

I never liked him before and probably won't in the future. I doubt I'd like anybody who's literally dragging humanity into the future, but he is doing that.

Whether he's doing it right, or whether he's doing it well is an open question, but no other single person is to this degree shoving humanity forward this often and this much, as far as I know.

>if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich billionaire, to being the most richest person in the world (maybe ever?). And now a single utterance of his can shape markets or otherwise influence millions of people.

I think it would be difficult to go through the above and not come out the other end without it impacting your behaviors & world view. At a minimum, before he was this wealthy & influential he didn't have as much margin for error. A single bad decision might have tanked Tesla or SpaceX when they were getting started. It would have required Musk to be a lot more careful & deliberate. He also had to care a bit more (or at least pretend to care) about other people's thoughts/ideas etc. These days he can lose $1B in a twitter acquisition breakup fee and it barely matters. And he has enough "f*ck off" money (the amount required to tell someone to "f*ck off" with no significant consequences) to tell anyone to f*ck off. The need to adhere to social niceties is greatly reduced.

This is all on top of the fact that the average person's behavior is usually going to change at least a little as they get older.

All of which is to say that I think there's an excellent chance that he's grown into his current personality. If so, I think it's very possible that it's a mixture: He grew into where he is now, but the seeds were always there & his track in life has amplified or caused those seeds to take hold.

>He went from being wealthy growing up

This most definitely is false. Elon grew up middle class at best.

His dad was half owner of an emerald mine.

From wikipedia:

"The family was very wealthy in Elon's youth; Errol Musk once said, 'We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family

When people start using abstract measures to describe something easily quantifiable, it's usually because they're dissembling.

We have a pretty good idea what Errol's net worth is, and it's a couple million bucks.

The emerald mine in question was purchased for the equivalent of $40,000.

Imagine arguing that somebody didn’t have financial backing because his dad sold plane and bought emerald mine for half of profit (in country then known for black worker exploitation) for $40.000, and is worth couple millions at best.

This is how every discussion on Errol Musk's wealth goes.

Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth.

Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low.

Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.

But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual.

And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.

> Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.

There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble.

> Zambia, not South Africa

"You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.

A million dollars in 1970-1980 is worth around 3 to 7 million dollars now. 3 millions in that period is worth at least 10 millions right now. And there is decidedly not tens of millions of households in the US with that networth, let alone a single person.

To be clear, his net worth is a couple million dollars today.

As someone pointed out in another comment, "wealthy" does not mean "never having to work again". My life growing up would have been dramatically different if my parents had been worth even a low amount of millions, and the opportunities available to me would have been drastically higher.

In today's money it's the equivalent of about $150,000, and funded by selling a plane that sold for twice that amount. I would classify having enough disposable income to own a $300,000 plane & a net worth of a few million to be wealthy.

I should note that my working definition of "wealthy" doesn't mean they never have to work again, or don't have to work to maintain their desired lifestyle. Other people may have different benchmarks. As you said, abstract measures aren't easily quantified, and someone else's benchmark for wealthy may be higher.

> I would classify a net worth of a few million to be wealthy.

This describes many boomers that simply own a house.

>This describes most boomers and older GenXs.

It most assuredly does not.

The median net worth of the Baby Boomer generation in America is $1.2 million.

Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m because there are a lot of very rich boomers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-baby-boomer-net-wort...

> Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m

That's not mathematically logical. 'Average' can be used to describe mean, median or mode.

While average is more informal, it is the same as the mean, mathematically speaking. Some people may use it, well, informally, to represent other concepts, but the mathematical definition is quite clear.

Right. And the point here is that the original comment implied that most people in that age bracket had a net worth of $1.2 million.

So median is the relevant interpretation of average in that context. Your correction and interpretation are valid.

You’re right, I edited the comment shortly after posting it. Most boomers don’t have 3M in housing. But many do and owning a house on the coast is not considered remarkable.

This is some motivated accounting right here. You have no idea what debt financed either of those assets.

Couple million is still leagues above middle class

When we're discussing total net worth, a couple million dollars is decidedly middle class.

In the US, there are 13.6 million households with a net worth over $1 million when excluding their primary residence, out of a total of 126 million households.

Over 10% of households in the US, even when excluding the value of their home, have over a million dollars in assets.

So 10% is middle class? Shouldn’t it be 35+?

Besides that, Elon didn't inherit that wealth. He moved to Canada with little money, worked blue collar jobs and had student debt. That's what he started with. At Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer.

People WANT to believe a mythology that Elon started off rich to feel better about not accomplishing anything with their own equally or more privileged life. People that started with little themselves don't have this level of cognitive dissonance and see it more as an immigrant success story and inspiration.

> When he started Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer

What does this sentence mean, why’d he need a second computer? Parsing out the odd wording that means he could afford a computer

What’s with the second computer? It’s proper nerd sniped me this haha

One computer for development, one for a server. He couldn't afford a second so had to use his primary for both purposes.

Actually in fairness that does make sense given a bit of thought

He got a $28,000 loan from his father when starting Zip2.

The biggest privilege is having your family's security net, even if you don't use it. Musk has also had luck, being in the right time and place for the dot-com boom. Unlike a lot of people who grew up privileged, he's been a hustler with great business instincts. Unlike a lot of hustlers with great business instincts, he grew up privileged.

False, it was not when starting Zip2, it was a later funding round and the funding didn't depend on Errol's investment

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056

I looked for a source other than a tweet from Musk, who like many entrepreneurs is known to stretch the truth. Couldn’t find a definitive source, but it’s mentioned going as far back as the 90s according to Google, with not enough detail to say the exact timing but suggesting that it was crucial at the time. Of course, that’s also a hallmark of startup stories.

The loan came later and he was no more privileged than the average Canadian or American at the time. People who dismiss it as privilege are projecting envy, full stop.

And what are people who feel the need to defend the world’s richest person projecting?

Could the average American in 1995 give a $28,000 loan to his kid? Median net worth was ~$100,000 in today’s dollars. If ‘privilege’ has negative connotations for you, use ‘luck’ instead. I don’t think there’s any question that Musk made some of his own luck through hard work and intelligence, but we often observe the rich with survivorship bias because it would upset the social order if we stopped believing that hard work and intelligence are enough to become rich.

like anyone in developing countries and especially wealthy white South Africans do fit this bill rather well would hoard their actual private wealth in other jurisdictions. just because the company itself is worth nothing on paper doesn't mean they haven't pillaged the country resources for private gain like all the other wanna-be crooks and aspiring kleptocrats. [1][2]

There is a good reason why the family left SA the moment apartheid was abolished and why Elon Musk never went back since the end of apartheid.

Every entitled chuckle-duck born with a silver spoon in their mouth likes to launder their past to make them look self-made. Elon is no different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptopia

Well right now the highest value note in south Africa is worth about $13.

I'm sure many HN regulars have homes costing much more than a safe full of $13 notes.

I wouldn't be too confident that "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." is an amount of money that would actually make someone particularly wealthy by American standards without doing a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of and how much it had been worth at the time.

Why would anything right now be relevant to Elon growing up 40 years ago?

> and how much it had been worth at the time

Why assume that the safe was full of South African currency?

> a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of

There are too many unknowns: the currency, the denominations, the size of the safe. There is little point in speculating whether it was (or was not) a life-changing sum.

At the time the South African Rand was kept somewhat pegged to the US Dollar, and has an average value of R2/$.

According to others, that story is severely embellished:

https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...

Wikipedia is not a reliable source for every info in the world. I hope people realize that. It's funny that some people blindly trust what some unknown party has written on the net on any kind of subject.

Tertiary sources (e.g. encyclopedias) are inherently this way regardless of whether or not it is editable by nearly anyone. One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes, with mechanisms to mark problems with articles rather than deleting them. This ultimately leads to a degree of editorial transparency that is unmet by any other type of source of this kind.

Anyone who has tried to insert a true, but counter narrative, fact into a topical article know where the limits of your description are.

For any popular topic, there are self-appointed watchdogs who will revert edits in bad faith and argue with you on the Talk page until you give up and go away. There aren't enough admins to adjudicate all disputes, so what you're reading on a controversial topic is often the product of the most stubborn arguers.

That's how the sausage is made on WP.

> One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes,

This is a laughable statement. That's assuming the newspapers acting as sources are devoid of bias, while we clearly know that they are partisan in the own right: even stuff that the NYT is heavily biased and can't be seriously used as a reference for everything.

Crowd-sourcing is not a robust mechanism to prevent that from happening either. Just look at every controversial topic on Wikipedia, there is only one narrative that is accepted while the reality might be way more complex that what is portrayed in a paragraph.

We certainly don't and shouldn't blindly trust you, since all you're doing is attacking Wikipedia's reliability, instead of presenting any reliable facts or evidence or citations about the actual discussion topic himself, Elon Musk. Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more reliable than some random guy on the internet who doesn't have a point or any evidence, and has to resort to generically attacking Wikipedia instead.

Attacking the very idea that it's even possible to know the truth is what you do when the truth isn't on your side.

Wikipedia is great for many things, but I would steer clear of it for biographical information of prominent contemporary persons. It's very political and the amount of on-the-fly stealth editing that goes on the site should discredit it. Great for technical information or basic history. Avoid it like the plague anywhere it seeks to weigh in on "the current thing".

When you have to attack Wikipedia as being generically unreliable, instead of presenting some reliable facts and citations about the discussion topic that actually prove your point, you don't have a point.

Left bias is very prevalent: https://youtu.be/kiRgJYMw6YA

What facts would you believe? Elon himself tells a very different story:

https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...

It has been a long-standing complaint for awhile. In partricular, there appears to be a core group of editors that have displayed a blatant bias against Israel. Huge ommissions of information that only inflame anti-semitic passions and hinder real dialogue from occuring. There are other issues, but this one shows the limitations of wikipedia and how a narrow mindset can comandeer a few pages. Again, I like wikipedia, but it's only reliable for mundane issues.

https://aish.com/48964486/

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wikipedias-jewish-problem-pe...

Also, personal campaigns being carried out to smear people. Not a good look for a neutral non-partisan outfit. That's why I ignore bios about anyone as a rule on wiki.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-wikipedia-edi...

It's well documented that Elon was quite poor as a student in Canada/US.

He left South Africa at 17 with no money to speak of. He's estranged from his father for reasons no one talks about, which makes the father's possible wealth irrelevant.

And yet this "apartheid emerald mine fortune" is such a good story that it will keep being "internet true" forever.

Meh, whatever you think of the 'angle' of the NYTimes article, it was pretty clear from talking to his classmates that they were in a very wealthy area of Joberg.. his dad was successful in business (being part owner of at least one mineral mine) and was a local politician.

> Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.

> Mr. Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria and the coastal city of Durban. His suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen.

> “We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Mr. Musk’s during the two years he spent at Bryanston High School in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes.

They go onto say that Musk had black friends and left SA to avoid serving the apartheid government via mandatory military service.

Incorrect. Earlier on, his parents were well educated and had good jobs, and enough money that his father owned an airplane. This alone makes your "at best" remark highly inaccurate. At a minimum in Musk's early life he was very comfortably in the middle of the middle class, but I would class nearly any family with enough disposable income to have an airplane to be "wealthy". Your standards for this may vary, and I'm open to your definition of wealthy being much higher, but his family was far from poor.

On top of that, his father has claimes he sold the plane for the equivalent of about $300,000 in today's money and used some of it to purchase shares in gemstone mine, which then went on to make them even wealthier. This isn't independently confirmed. His father may have exaggerated. However others have said his family also own the largest house in the area, which sounds wealthy to me.

Elon has disputed some of this, but not offered details beyond merely disputing some of this. He said his parents have been supported financially for the last 20 years, but going back 20 years from when he made that statement would put it in the late 90's, so it is not incompatible with growing up wealthy even though he now supports his parents. Plenty of multi-millionaires would tell their parents, "Hey, if you don't want to you don't have to work anymore. I got this".

Also none of this is incompatible with Elon's own account of arriving in Canada with little money & ending up with student debt. It's possible Elon exaggerated but for these purposes I'll take him at his word. Because by his own account Elon didn't like Apartheid. His father also has a reputation of being quite an asshole. It would be perfectly understandable for him to "peace out" and go his own way, and it wouldn't change the fact that growing up his family was wealthy. In fact I know someone who did pretty much the same thing: Their father was terrorized the family in fear & abuse, but was extremely successful with a very expensive first house, another vacation home, etc. His father wanted him to continue in his (professional) footsteps but he wanted none of it, joined the military for the free education and after getting out went on to become extremely wealthy himself.

Most people who are into airplanes or boats scrounge by considerably to be able to afford one for leisure. Which is evident by the fact that he had to flip his hobby plane to fund a business purchase.

According to his father flipping the plane was only partly connected to funding the mine. He flipped the plane, and was only then offered the mine opportunity. He might have had ample funds for the mine regardless.

Either way, scrounging by to purchase a $300,000 luxury good (today's $ for the sell price of the plane) still qualifies a person as wealthy in my book, especially when taken together with owning the largest home in their area & his father's real estate & consulting business. It still means you had at least $300,000 in disposable income. Just because you choose to spend all of your disposable income on something like that doesn't mean you aren't wealthy.

A "middle class" South African with a Canadian passport in his back pocket acting as an escape hatch for when apartheid was close to collapsing.

That's a long way to says he's a bit of a dick.

Sometimes going the long way around is what's necessary.

not this time though

He's a divisive figure, and people who like him will tune out if someone doesn't like him, and people who don't like him will tune out when someone likes him.

So, I tried to walk the line without using judgmental language. My own opinion is that he's a complicated figure. I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him, how much of it is an act, and if it's truly him whether or not it's a representative small slice of him or not. I have a firm judgement on his his public persona, which I think makes him look like an asshole (the pedo guy stuff alone clinches that) but even if that's an accurate picture of him as a whole I still admire what he has accomplished.

I'm not entirely sure these two opposites should have the same weight. Being a decent human should be the default and just some minor steps into shitty behaviour should be enough to justify significant criticism of a person. Consider the following generalisation on a random someone's behaviour:

Someone is sexist against 50% of the people the interact with? They are sexist.

Someone is sexist against 20% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.

That someone is sexist against 5% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.

The person does not stop being sexist/shitty/$negative_trait just because they most of the time are not acting on it. They become nice when they stop altogether, or at least make clear effort to stop.

So, back to Elon, considering his recent praise of work/life balance and slave-like conditions in China, I see no reason to believe his nice side should be considered equally or more worthy of praise than his negative side be considered for criticism.

Something like sexism, racism, etc are in a different category than merely "shitty", I think.

Putting Musk aside, I'd have to know a little more about what you mean by $negative_trait to agree or not. Everyone has negative traits, everyone is occasionally shitty. Frequency certainly matters, but assuming it's not very regular than maybe it comes down to what you said about "clear effort to stop". You have to be self aware enough to recognize it when it happens and work on doing better.

He is a complicated man and I think that's how history will look back on him. If he really does put people on Mars, I think that is about as big an impact on the history of the human race as one can have.

Everybody is flawed at some level. Maybe when you get to a certain level of fame and/or wealth it just amplifies all the good and bad in you.

I mean look at all the other “big names” in tech… Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. These are highly flawed individuals.

Hell look at the entertainment industry… so many of the most famous successful people turn out to be hugely flawed. Take Jonny Depp for example—that dude has some major issues. Or to a much greater extent Bill Cosby. Cosby transformed TV in so many different incredibly positive ways and look how it ended…

Fame and wealth does some weird stuff to people.

> Fame and wealth does some weird stuff to people.

This is the crucial point. Power corrupts, a painful fact long established. Therefore, when the power and wealth of an individual grows, they deserve more scrutiny and criticism. You don't "give them a break because they're human". The self-preservation of society and freedom itself demands that we closely scrutinize the powerful. If you don't want to be scrutinized like that, then it's easy to avoid becoming a leader. It's a cliche, but with great power comes great responsibility, and Musk is still acting like a child half the time, egged on by a legion of equally childish fans.

> I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him

I say all we can judge someone is what they do. It's perfectly fine to judge Musk on his public persona. Unless you want to try to divine secret reasons for his public actions, but even that is judging him based on his public persona.

I'm not saying you need to naively believe what he says are his motivations. But his public persona is at least somewhat predictable.

Your one liner totally fails to embody what was said.

While failing to provide a historical account, it summed up the result quite concisely.

If you go back to the question that was being answered, you'll notice that the historical account was the point.

> if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

Yeah, no I agree with you. I would delete it if I could but the time has past. I guess I'm kind of a dick, too.

I like Kara Swisher's take on Musk:

"He’s obviously a visionary. I prefer dealing with him to others because he gives you genuine answers. He will call you back. He will have a beef with you when others run away because they’re cowardly. If he disagrees, he’ll be in your face, but at least he’s in your face. I’m perfectly fine with that. In a world where everybody’s making a lot of silly stuff, he’s not. Cars, rockets, solar, these are important things. He can’t be as silly or as fascist as people make him out to be. Maybe he does act like a stupid tech bro sometimes, but maybe he’s a little more complex than that? Thomas Edison was not a nice man. Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people — Steve Jobs, for example. The times we live in are so reductive that it’s really hard to be able to get our minds around a truly complex human being. And that’s what he is."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/kara-swisher-on-elon...

> Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people

Musk's not much of an inventor, though. Certainly, that's not why he's rich.

Part of the criticism of Musk is that the popular view of him is totally out of whack with what you get if you just look at what he does, and has done. He's not Tony Stark.

I think we need to distinguish between inventor (literally building new things themselves) vs executor (making stuff happen that would not have happened otherwise, or least not as quickly).

I think Elon falls much more into the second category, which I agree is not really like Tony Stark, but I think still provides a ton of value to society. I think there's a real argument to be made that he is the reason we have dropped cost per pound of payload to orbit by over half with reusable rockets, even if he himself didn't invent the functionality.

Oh, he deserves plenty of credit. He seems to be quite good at, at least, certain aspects of running a business, and happens to be interested in some fun and/or useful things, which is nice.

But he's not a super-genius, and given how flighty he can be, when he announces various Grand Visions, it's wise to take a wait-and-see approach. His big mouth probably ought to have landed him in quite a bit of legal trouble, too, except that it's so much harder for the justice system to deal with rich people than poor people.

It's not that he's uniquely awful among successful business dudes, since much of the above is true about many of them—his PR and superfans are just... grating.

Third category: Owner. Inventors invent things. Executors help them do so. Owners, the Edisons of the world, are the people with the property interest in the invention. They are the ones who get to deploy and use inventions within their business.

Which is why the Steve Jobs analogy might work better than Edison.

Henry Ford seems an apt comparison. "Industrialist and business magnate", from Wikipedia's Henry Ford article, seems to pretty much cover it. Though with less of a focus on making products affordable for the normal person (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a difference in priorities).

That still makes him a pretty big deal, of course.

Yeah, Musk, Ford, Jobs, and Edison are all a big deal regardless of their role in actually inventing technology. I think Jobs is the most appropriate analog because he also has a public perception as being the person who created the tech which isn't really accurate. I'm not sure Ford had that reputation and Edison was more hands on.

It is also probably worth nothing that they all had another trait in common. They were all notorious assholes for various reasons.

Yeah, sorry, should have included that in my other post, but I do agree that Jobs is a decent analog, too. Similar public profile, sort-of similar reputation, though Jobs wasn't as prone to strident, public bullshitting.

Edison wasn't necessarily an inventor either.

That said if you're a patron of inventors then you are an inventor. If you can manage the pain of failing and failing and failing, then in my book you're creative and a co-inventor.

Is he really a visionary? Because from what I can tell, he has roughly the same background reading science fiction and making extrapolations from current science to the future, and has made similar conclusions about the risks of not multi-homing humanity, and the challenge of building intelligent non-humans. That doesn't make him a visionary.

My conclusion instead is that Elon Musk is Chaos Titan; like the netflix chaos monkey, but basically just going around causing chaos by hyping up twitter and then causing massive swings with individual tweets.

I think that's a good question.

I don't mind Musk much either way and while I'm annoyed when he wants to let Trump back on Twitter after what I strongly believe was an attempt at a coup d'état, or him removing, say, the mobile charger in new Teslas I still like the products that his companies make and when he sits down and does an interview he says things that resonate with me.

So what makes someone a visionary? I mean I sit down and have a vision where Earth is a multi-planetary species, we build an outpost on the Moon within the next few years, and then Mars, and then mine asteroids. But is that all it takes? If so I think the word visionary is often either misapplied or is quite diluted. But if we take into account the need to execute on such visions, naturally, calling Musk a visionary makes more sense. Maybe we just don't have a great word (or one isn't immediately coming to mind) for someone who says "we should go to Mars, and I'm going to participate/lead in the creation of the entity that will do that".

He's obviously a finance guy.

Comparing him to Edison is appropriate I think, in both the good and bad ways that represents. I've also heard him compared with William C. Durant (Of GM circa 1910) which I think is also an appropriate comparison in both good and bad ways.

>Edison

I agree, and think of him in much the same was as I think of Edison. It's strange how polarizing a figure Musk is. It seems like a majority of people (or maybe a vocal minority) either want to attribute every single thing to his own personal genius, no help from others or good fortune. While others view everything he's accomplished as nothing more than luck born out on the backs of other people's labor. I don't know where the balance lies between those two extremes but I doubt that either one is very accurate.

Penelope Scott's "Rät" [1] touches on this in a way I adore -

    So fuck your tunnels, fuck your cars, fuck your rockets, fuck your cars again
    You promised you'd be Tesla, but you're just another Edison

Been listening to this song on repeat as my FAANG exit date approaches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI

John Carmack's take: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Kevin Watson's take, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:

"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."

Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:

"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."

Every person is a bit of a dick in one way or another. And people who have done high impact things in their lives will have greater opportunity to have made mistakes, no matter how good, ethical, or smart they are.

Most elite celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople simply put a lot of effort into pretending to be perfect, mostly out of vanity. They lie, hide, avoid all controversy, and employ teams of PR people to craft their public image using publicity stunts, bribery, philanthropy and all kinds of tricks that have been proven to work for thousands of years.

If Elon Musk followed the elite PR playbook, a lot more people would like him, probably a lot of the haters in this thread. Which says more about them than him.

Elon Musk offers a glimpse of what very powerful/successful, and basically good, people are often really like.

I'd argue that:

1. Anyone who completely denigrates and dismisses Elon Musk is a blind hater.

2. Anyone who claims he's without flaws is a fanboy with rose colored glasses on.

3. And only people who agree with his own assessment of himself, that he's a "mixed bag", are assessing him clearly and with intellectual honesty.

Exactly. Nobody is perfect and everybody has some deep dark skeletons in their closet. The mistake I think society makes is expecting celebrities / wealthy to be any different.

Do they have a responsibility to set a positive example? Absolutely. Is that always achievable? Turns out probably not.

I think society needs to learn to forgive. We got really good at canceling people, but we haven’t got very good at forgiveness. In the internet age where your entire life can be saved on the internet, it is important to realize people change, everybody makes mistakes (sometimes even very stupid ones) and people aren’t perfect.

I don’t know… I guess they say you should never meet your heroes. I think now that we can peek behind the curtain and often see the “actual person” we have to come to terms with the fact that under all the fancy dress and act, even the “highest” in society are ultimately the same flawed, imperfect humans as the rest of us.

None of us really know what the fuck we are doing… we are all making it up as we go along. Even the most successful amongst us.

I’m fine with forgiving most things, but not in the absence of any attempt at apology and recompense.

The “pedo guy” accusation was beyond the pale and, so far as I remember, Musk doubled down on it vs making any sincere attempt at an apology.

Yeah. I guess what I didn’t want to imply is we can’t be upset with their behavior. It’s okay to take serious issues with said behavior. It’s even okay to call out bad behavior

And yeah… the pedo guy thing was completely uncalled for.

Granted, a friend of mine who met him at a party around 2011 or 2012 in SF, her opinion of him was a "total dick"

I think he's fun, to be honest. Better than the other billionaires who made their money making everything worse.

Richest person ever? Not even close https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/954992/who-is-the-rich...

It's hard to compare people who lived under vastly different economic systems. I would also put people who were the leaders of their country into a different category: the line between what they own and what is part of the nation's wealth is very blurry. I think even for more recent private individuals like the Carnegies it's a little more complicated than taking assets multiplied by inflation rates. Spending power also comes into it, and you could use another measure like net worth as a % of GDP.

Musk may still fall short in those ways, which is why I made the "ever" a question. Poking around the internet a bit more-- your link & others-- it seems pretty likely. Then again I'm not sure there can really be a meaningful difference in wealth between anyone who was worth the equivalent of > $100B in todays money, however it's calculated. (Possibly you'd distinguish between money on paper vs. more tangible assets. Or some method of distinguishing Musk's wealth, a lot of which seems based on the speculative future value of Tesla than based in its current operations)

Yes, that article is doing some really weird comparisons. JD Rockfeller's net worth was no higher than $24B in modern inflation-adjusted dollars, but the article claims more than 10x that figure.

His bad decision (to migrate to Windows) at PayPal caused an engineering mutiny and led to the board firing him as CEO. So I think he has always been stubborn and impulsive.

I'd have to know more about it. Did he have any reason for moving to windows? If there was a sound business case then I wouldn't call it impulsive. Even if it was impulsive, I don't think it falls into the same category as what we see from him today.

My opinion is that he had no GOOD reason. He just knew the Windows dev stack and has a giant ego. But, I'm probably biased since he reminds me of managers/PMs I've worked with in my career that have weak opinions strongly held which affect me.

I think it's similar to how he has banned use of Kanban or other Toyota Production System principles at Tesla (which is the easy explanation for their poor build quality, see: U.S. car manufacturing 1970's).

Which is ironic, Tesla is running one of Toyotas former top tier factories outside of Japan. A joint venture with GM at that.

Oh yeah totally ironic. The factory where Toyota taught GM how to make cars reliably has completely regressed to a mess of scrap and tents. They even got rid of the railroad siding which seems crazy to me for a pro-environment company.

> He went from being wealthy growing up

He wasn't especially wealthy growing up, to be clear. Upper class yes, but no more "wealthy" than a successful silicon valley engineer's child.

I would generally consider upper class to be wealthy, of course it's not a very specific term, individual definitions are going to vary greatly. A successful SV engineer old enough to have kids can easily be worth a few $million. That seems wealthy to me, but it's a subjective measure. I guess you could survey a bunch of people to try & get consensus on it, and evaluate the benchmark from there.

Source that he was really wealthy growing up? People seem to say this all the time but he says he worked his way through college without any help from his dad: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211071324518531072

You added the "really". Otherwise I don't bother posting sources for every single thing that is easy to find online.

Elon disputes some accounts of his family's wealth, but also doesn't offer much else on the topic except that he arrived in Canada with little money and ended with student debt. This is not incompatible with growing up in a wealthy family. People peace-out from their family for all sorts of reasons, and Elon himself gives a great one when he said he didn't want to be a part of apartheid, and that his father was a terrible person. I know someone who did that because of a similar father issue: very wealthy family, and the person wanted no part of his father's help once he was old enough to leave home.

By the father's own account they owned a plane worth about $300,000 in today's money. That alone-- enough to have a luxury good of that value-- is enough to put someone down as wealthy to me.

To me this seems more like - with the stock market down Elon figures he can get a discount on Twitter and so will now try to renegotiate the price.

If you were buying a house, and had already made an offer and put down 3% earnest money with your offer, but then realized you could probably get 30% off the purchase price by backing out and offering again - would you?

Good point - A former colleague made an asking price offer on a house in 2007 that was rejected by the sellers. He bought the same house a year later from them for 70% of his original offer thanks to the Great Recession.

He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

I can't believe that so many people still haven't figured him out (which is also true for the previous American and current Russian presidents, who have similarly repulsive personalities).

> He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things like building reusable rockets or practical mass-market EV's. Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower. (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)

You should read Steve Jobs' biography for another example of someone with these characteristics.

Do read it on your iPhone for even more cognitive dissonance ;)

The characteristic is being able to see the talents of others and exploit them. Jobs was and Musk is great at that, although Musk is an actual [software] engineer.

Those employees trapped on an island for months developing SpaceX rockets in miserable conditions did the work.

I've always felt Musk's most unique ability was finding the right people to fill the right roles and somehow convince these people to come work 8 days a week for him.

He is definitely technical. Like, his engineers can explain stuff to him. That said, let's not extoll Musk as some super-brilliant mind. He is good, but not THAT good. He pissed off a lot of people at PayPal when he was aggressively pushing for Windows servers.

I was under the impression he was the money / marketing guy, I didn't realise he built or designed any rockets / EVs himself.

This! Amazes me everyone thinks he’s the brain behind the incredible technologies his companies create.

Even if this was true (nearly everyone who has studied Musk says that although he may not lead day to day engineering, he is gifted at figuring this stuff out)…

It is clearly non-trivial to rally a group of people, funding sources, and, er, marketing resources to accomplish what he has accomplished.

Evidence: nobody else has done it.

> Evidence: nobody else has done it.

Er... what? He's focussed his attention on some specific problems and made good progress solving them; people have been doing that for as long as there have been people.

Sure he's had great success and clearly does a lot of things well. He's not singular in that.

You need to watch this interview with Tim Dodd (the space YouTuber) and you'll realise in the first 15 minutes he really is an engineer https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but being good for humanity overall is not the same as being a good person to be around. He definitely did a lot of good for this world, but that doesn't mean that he's an easy person - quite to the contrary, to be this successful, you need to be very assertive and sure of yourself.

Look at Bill Gates for another example. His early business dealings are well known to be ruthless and he pushed MS at the cost of a lot of things, but now he uses his wealth mostly for good.

As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".

The question is whether the damage these people made while accumulating wealth gets compensated by the good they did later. With Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller I don’t think so. With Gates I am not sure. Musk actually looks better. He has shaken up two industries that needed a good shake.

> With Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller I don’t think so. With Gates I am not sure

All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer. Nobody sheds a tear for the paper-millionaires, rightfully so. It's only their greed which didn't make them cashout before Standard Oil/Microsoft eventually outcompeted them delivering a better product to the consumer.

Same with Facebook v. Myspace and Google v. Yahoo. Nobody sheds a tear for the shareholders of Myspace and Yahoo. Rightfully so.

Musk is robbing taxpayers in the form of subsidies and tax credits for luxury vehicles which all end up parked in front of Bel Air mansions and 5th Avenue shops.

On top of that he already said that he'll never do philantropy

> All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer. Nobody sheds a tear for the paper-millionaires, rightfully so.

Well actually... Microsoft was almost broken up by the government for what it did to Netscape, until there was a change of US Presidential administration, after which Microsoft was given a wrist slap, and then 9/11 immediately hit, which made the issue disappear from public consciousness.

I'm not exaggerating here: the Department of Justice announced it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft in September 2001. See this article from the WSJ literally the day before 9/11: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000076767888491506

> Microsoft was almost broken up by the government for what it did to Netscape

It should have been given the medal of freedom instead...those crackpots at netscape wanted to charge people money for the browser.

Only former netscape shareholders could possibly defend Netscape.

Microsoft I will always defend, the decision by Gates and Ballmer to allow piracy enabled me and my family to always have the latest version of Windows/Word/Encarta/IE even though we were poor.

The Federal EV tax credit for Tesla was completely phased out in 2020.

“All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer”

Especially Carnegie made life miserable for tens of thousands of his workers. No amount of charity can make up for the amount of suffering he caused.

Exactly. In capitalism, if you want to become rich, successful and admired (purely selfless motivations), you usually end up being good for humanity as a byproduct.

That "usually" is doing a whoooooole lot of heavy lifting. Capitalism is the ultimate "fuck you, got mine" system, and only serves the good of society with heavy-handed intervention.

Assertiveness and being sure of yourself can almost be considered prerequisites to becoming that successful, sure I can buy that. Doing things like constantly posting juvenile and inflammatory stuff on Twitter (such as baselessly accusing people who you think have slighted you of being pedophiles), that I'm not as convinced points to traits that are as positive.

> As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".

I don't find that difficult at all. Yes, obviously literally every single person have good and bad characteristics and have done good and bad things. But as a human being I'm perfectly able to look at those things in aggregate and decide for myself if I think they tally up to someone being what I would personally consider a good or bad person.

> truly world-changing things

Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years. The past year was a very slow year for the car selling business except for luxury vehicles of course (which Tesla is). In 2021 Teslas accounted for approx. 1% of total global vehicles sales.

1% in 20 years. World-changing.

This can also be said about good-hearted people, most of them don't have world-changing achievements. It's said that the rate of psychopathy among CEOs is above the population average.

So not sure what's your point. But I like the passive aggressive nature of your comment.

> Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower.

On the contrary, our world is practically made for those people to be successful. Psychopaths do great in unbridled capitalism.

You should read some history books and find out how successful and effective they were in collectivist societies (eg. Nazi Germany, USSR) too.

> "truly world changing"

> That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things

Nobody should be surprised when a CEO acts like a jagoff, that's par for the course.

To wit, so quickly HN forgets about Jobs and his cult of personality. Ten years ago, it felt like half of the people on this forum had their lips so far up Jobs' sphincter that they could see the sunlight through his nostrils. Now it seems this adulation has found a new outlet.

It's a reminder that cult of personality is a virus which can attack anyone ranging from the successful full stack developer making 200k in the Bay area to the Iowa farmer trying to figure out who to vote for.

It's also a reminder that things can always become worse. At least Jobs managed to first put a phone in every pocket and only then got paid for it. Like Gates with PCs.

Also Jobs was paid a salary because his hubris got himself outed from Apple the first time around and his ownership was down to single digits.

Musk first sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla , he then managed to inflate a financial bubble to get paid upfront for work he'll never deliver.

It's the gilded age of frauds out there.

Actually narcissistic, manipulative, and low empathy people tend to do better in capitalist societies. It tends to be a benefit, rather than a hindrance, when it comes to finding professional success.

I mean, you’ll alienate yourself from everyone, but you’ll be rich!

Source: My wife professionally studies personality disorders

yup, and you know what his super power is?

_money_

Anyone with enough billions can do what Elon has done.

1) He didn’t start with billions

2) Neither Boeing nor Ford have put a car into a trans-Martian Solar orbit, and they did start with billions

Ford pioneered modern car manufacturing, and Boeing got stuff farthet out in space. Shooting a Tesla on a SpaceX rocket was just a publicity stunt. A genius one it seems.

> Boeing got stuff farthet out in space.

Despite which SLS is still not flying and Starliner is stuck in test flights and not human certified, despite both having been started a bit before SpaceX was being valued as high as $1.3 billion.

Similar with Ford: fantastic past! Yet the money from that past win didn’t let them do what Musk did.

QED, “billions” are not enough by themselves.

What was the gain from having a car in a trans-Martian orbit other than yet more space junk?

Judging by the difference between the funding rounds 2 months before the launch and the one 2 months after, it gained $3.4 billion.

I should have been more specific. The gain for humanity.

Other than a demonstration that the new experimental launch vehicle worked? Sure, shame nobody took him up on the offer a free launch, but I kinda understand why people didn’t want to risk its maiden flight.

(Something something Romans: https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ).

it was a demo flight for prospective customers. I don't think it was intended to do anything for humanity.

> Neither Boeing nor Ford have put a car into a trans-Martian Solar orbit

Good?

This reminds me of the scene from the film "Tin Cup" where he asks "You ever shoot par with a 7 iron?" and his rival replies "Hell Roy, it never even occurred to me to try." (The backstory being that Tin Cup and his caddy broke all of his other golf clubs in a childish argument.)

Boeing made the x-37, which is autonomously roving around space, and landing on its own.

Musk pointed a rocket at the sky and pressed play. In terms of difficulty, boosting a car into an extended orbit is trivial. Manoeuvring a "space plane" to intersect multiple satellites, grab them and return to earth, that is orders of magnitude harder.

Ford make cheap cars world wide at volume, and pioneered the production line.

as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time. I am rich because I joined the right start up and got bought out. yeah I worked hard, but not anywhere near hard enough to justify the money I got.

The same with musk.

> as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time.

Let me rephrase:

SpaceX was valued at less than one billion dollars when they launched the first Falcon 9 to orbit.

The total money raised in the investment rounds only exceeded $1 billion in 2015, after 13 launches.

Total raised from investors only exceeded $2 billion, enough to be called “billions” plural, in Jan 2019, which is just before SpaceX got Starhopper off the ground.

https://craft.co/spacex/funding-rounds

In comparison, the per-launch cost of the SLS is estimated to be “over $2 billion”, plus dev cost, and an Orion capsule would be extra.

SpaceX didn’t need billions to achieve impressive things, just for ridiculous things like “enable the colonisation of Mars”.

"narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, "

Is it rare? We just had a president with similar traits

Not an American, but what worthwhile things did the former president achieve for you? Our media painted him in a less-than-pleasant light.

Worthwhile things: stacking the Supreme Court with far-right justices & lowering taxes for the wealthy. These are massive successes for the party he represents (which is actually a minority of the country, unfortunately)

Simply achieving the office is what I was referring to

Not that impressive, but something our society needs to grapple with: how left hemisphere’s distorted view of reality is highly functional in our cuurent way of life and especially around capitalism.

Much of that is addressed in McGilchrist’s The Divided Brain.

I don’t think Musk is a bad person, but he is displaying like many "high functioning" people in our current economic and political systems, signs of lack of empathy, hyper materialist views, etc.

Unsurprisingly left hemisphere dominant people (who are unbalanced), can do very well in systems that are designed by the left hemisphere and reward everything the left hemisphere is about (control, supposed knowledge of how reality works or is, power, inflated sense of self and ideas of being "self made" etc.)

> (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)

I always find it so amusing when the best thing anyone can say about our previous White House occupant is what he DIDN'T do (and not for lack of trying!). As if a pet rock or farm animal couldn't have accomplished the same feat.

And completely ignoring that he was trying his damndest to provoke Iran into a war as late as early 2020, by ordering an airstrike on one of their generals.

Smart doesn't mean wise. Yes, he has pushed electric car and space market forward, but he talked about e-cars and going to Mars back when he was 14. He is literally a rich kid living out his teenage phantasies. Albeit successfully. He is still a tool.

It's precisely this narcissistic personality which some people love about him.

Personally I blame marvel movies. Many immature people think the world is a superhero flick and Elon Musk is a real-life Tony Stark: arrogant billionaire genius who is going to fix the world from his superlab.

Notably, Tony Stark nearly destroyed the world because he was an unelected oligarch who thought he knew better than everyone else...

IIRC, MCU Tony Stark was based on Musk.

Honestly I would rather blame some fans (Musk included) of great shows like Rick & Morty, IASIP, Breaking Bad or the Joker movie for mistaking protagonists/anti-heros/funny characters for people to emulate and completely missing the point.

If you cheer the part you're supposed to laugh at/feel sad for, I start to get a picture of what "dangerous" media could mean.

As a counterpoint to shows like the ones you list (where they revel in showing terrible, yet likable, characters doing terrible things), the show "Mythic Quest" flips and shows terrible characters struggling with trying to change within themselves, and how it's a slow, discontinuous process where it's possible to both backslide and recover.

Tony Stark had a strong sense of accountability/guilt though.

In the first movie he commits extrajudicial killings (maybe these are murders, maybe not) and then when leaving the scene almost kills a 'friendly' pilot, while laughing about it all with his buddy.

I'm Civil War he tries to kill the man who murdered his parents, for revenge, not justice.

And when Stark almost killed thr world through Ultron, after being traumatised by near death experience saving NYC, he continued his self righteousness and ran straight for the Sarcovia Accords as a counter balance.

If you look at the Avengers from a realistic perspective then they're a group of anarchistic, unhinged, uncontrollable vigilantes who resist any kind of oversight or procedures to reduce collateral damage.

They possesses supernatural abilities and incredible technologies and use them to... maintain American hegemony and the capitalist status quo. It's almost some Elysium type shit.

Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305

> narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

It sounds as if Musk and Twitter are a match made in heaven.

People love a charismatic narcissist though.

Isn’t that a tautology? Everyone likes charisma, don’t they?

No - I mean people often find narcissism charismatic.

Ah, understood. Thanks for the clarification! :)

Previous and the current presidents are far worse evil people. They first destroyed lives with meaningless lockdowns then pumped trillions of dollars which destroyed economy and impoverished people. Musk cannot even come close to these.

I find it fascinating when someone agrees with me about a person (e.g. the previous president being evil) but their list of reasons has none of the items on my long, long list of terrible actions and, instead, has only items from my "at least they did the following" list.

    He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, 
    dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, 
    unhinged.

    I can't believe that so many people still haven't 
    figured him out

Many of their fans love them precisely because of those "negative" qualities.

Best nickname I heard for him was "Phoney Stark".

We want to believe in the cool, if a bit unhinged, hero-engineer that builds all the cool stuff we were promised in all the sci-fi movies as kids but failed to materialize, such as Mars colonies and self-driving cars. A lot of that failure is due to some things being a ton harder in reality than fiction, but a lot is also due to a managerialist, short-term culture that no longer seems to be thinking big and taking risks. Musk is the avatar for those who want these cool things and kicks back against the prevailing culture - a real-life counterpart to the billionaire genius in the Marvel movies.

The problem is, of course, that Tony Stark is a fictional character and Musk is not. Not only has he been drinking his own kool aid of late, but he's not much of a hero either, rather a spoiled bully who punches down.

The dude built a rocket company, an automotive juggernaut, a brain implant research company, and a few other things. I wouldn't call these "phoney".

The dude did not, in fact, build those things. The dude was present for them in some capacity.

And Tesla is hardly a juggernaut, their cars have horrible build quality (speaking as someone who owns a Tesla) and are likely to face stiff competition in the next five years from companies that know how to actually build cars.

Tesla's market share is approximately 14%. They are impressive, innovative and might have a bright future but they aren't at the juggernaut stage yet. Their huge market cap and cultural share is because of their dominance in a small, previously ignored subset of the market that is expected to grow.

I have the distinct feeling that Elon's motives are genuine, that he genuinely believes he is on a mission to save humanity, and is genuinely convinced that he is the only one who is able to do it. The problem is the last point - he's developed something of a saviour complex, and has convinced himself that if what is at stake is important enough (reverse climate change, become interplanetary species, restore free speech) he somehow has a moral obligation to take it upon himself. Whereas earlier in his career financial constraints might have hemmed him in, not that he's the richest man in the world he's becoming tempted to use that power in an Emperor of the Universe fashion, attempting to fix everything he believes important. If he stuck to solving just one existential problem, such as electrifying transport, he'd probably be quite well respected in the long run. The richest man in the world, who already holds massive power, also buying up the "de facto town square" was never going to go down well. We need more people with Elon's vision, drive and determination, not one Elon with more and more power.

I agree with you on this and think his savior complex is likely compounded by things like the potential Twitter buyout. There are a lot of people who view Twitter as a extremist echo chamber and want to see it change, so they're treating Musk like Twitter's savior now. Anecdotally, I've seen as much support for Musk's actions accidentally destroying Twitter as 'fixing' it.

When I see how small of a subset of the population actively use Twitter, or have even posted once, compared to the political power it has, it's hard for me to argue we're better with it around.

The outsized influence of twitter largely has to do with the fact that basically every journalist, celebrity, politician, brand, influencer (original, pre-Instagram meaning of person on youtube/twitch/whatever who can accidentally/deliberately create trends just by wearing something or offhandedly mentioning something).

Having all of those people, plus pretty small proportion of "regular people", can make it really feel like everyone is on twitter. But the many of the heaviest "regular people" users are often actually those who are trying to promote some agenda, which can be one that is very not-representative of the public at large.

But this feeling of everyone being on there, means that if a small group of vocal participants who have an agenda can get something trending, especially if they can do with with only limited pushback from other groups, it makes it feel like something everyone cares about. Worse is that the algorithm tends to promote extreme views a lot because they get more interactions.

Now the influencers, politicians, celebrities, journalists, etc are not very much not immune to mistaking an artificially algorithmically inflated hot take by a tiny but vocal minority on twitter as representing a consensus of a huge group of regular people on twitter. The next thing you know, the current twitter outrage is on the news, and your favorite celebs are probably talking about it both on and off twitter.

This can cause people who never would have seen or interacted with the twitter controversy to become involved. Obviously if the news is talking about it, this is a big thing that a very sizable chink of the population is feeling, right? It could not possibly be not something initially stirred up by at most few hundred extremists of some form on Twitter, right? Wrong.

This makes much more sense than calling him a fraud and projecting one's envy onto him. Frauds don't build and they don't solve problems.

His fans are supporting the savior complex because he's virtually the only one who is actively making a better future in a significant way. While everything else is crumbling. They forgive the mistakes he makes given that context.

The highest upvoted comments in this thread are just that: jealous people who cannot believe they aren't successful but he is.

Success is measured by subtraction.

If Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, TheBoringScam etc. disappeared overnight, consumers quality of life would not be affected one bit. It's very similar to Ferrari or Tiffany&CO going under..it's meh. Contrast that with Exxon, Saudi Aramco, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, Costco, VW, Daimler...

There are unknown private companies such as Vitol selling 300bn dollars worth of products per year. Do you know Vitol? No? Well why would you...the CEO isn't constantly shitposting on twitter.

Musk is like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden etc. What you call success is what people who don't fall for cult of personality call "being a BS-seller". Convincing fans and supporters that they are some sort of hero against dark forces

Same here, for me I started to lose interest for him when he started to sell the boring company as a solution to traffic jams.

The solution already exists and it's called "public transport".

I suspect this might be due to being surrounded by people who are too impressed by him to called out an idea when it's not sound.

Then the memes, then the crypto tokens, then it just got all weird so I stopped listening.

I get the feeling he is a lifelong nerd with poor social skills, but after his success and wealth he is now perceived as an interesting person with high social status, and it just isn't in him to deal well with it.

He divorced his wife, starts dating actresses and musicians, the latter turns him on to smoking pot and he thinks to himself, "Hey, I'm now a cool guy who smokes pot. I need to show people I'm a cool guy who smokes pot" and goes on Joe Rogan and shows off his new coolness. Same thing with his twitter antics.

The first time I heard him speak was watching clips from his solar roof announcements. He had the charisma and presentation skills of a 4th grader giving a book report.

While you've described his behaviour quite accurately, I don't believe he's a fool. This could of course be due to the marketing buzz and fanboyism around him which I might have imbibed myself but I don't believe he's a fool.

Squaring his public behaviour with his presumed intelligence suggests that he's doing all this for some specific purpose. Either it's marketing to a certain contingent that he's interested in selling to. Perhaps it's brand building to help hiring or something else for one of his companies. His movie cameos, shitposts etc. all seem to be calculated to create a connection between him and a younger demographic. Or maybe, I'm over intellectualising and he's just drunk on his own image or power. Can't really say.

I don't particularly "like" the guy. But then again, I make it a point to try not to have an emotional opinion about any public figure. The default position is "ignore" and that's where I'm still at.

I started to become concerned about Elon when I read his 2017 interview with Rolling Stone[0]:

> I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence. Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters…

He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...

> He is one of the most brilliant men alive

I wonder where this notion started. Tesla was an existing company he bought and all the heavy lifting a SpaceX was done by other people. He made some good business calls, but I’d say a lot of his success stems from being at the right place, at the right time with the right wallet.

While I don't disagree with you, there must be _some_ level of 'right place and time' involved with anyone who holds superlative accolades. Same can be said for the converse.

Yeah it's called being born wealthy, and then becoming a billionaire.

Yeah that's why Bezo's Blue Origin is doing so well compared to SpaceX.

You could say the same thing about Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison. Good luck convincing folks neither is a genius.

Indeed. But it’s well documented that both Jobs and Edison were shrewd businessmen first, rather than technical geniuses.

Geniuses at self-promotion and manipulating others, certainly. A world full of Jobses would be an unlivable dystopia. A world full of Wozniaks, now that would be interesting.

I think you might both be right, but never agree with each other, due to the trickiness of language. That is to say, depending on your definition of "genius" (and depending on the still not fully understood nature of genius), you might on the one hand agree that he qualifies as being a "genius", but isn't "one of the most brilliant men alive."

Setting aside any purely semantic disagreements (for example the fact that "one of the most brilliant men alive" is highly dependent on the number of other brilliant men around), I think part of what OP is arguing against is the implication that most people attribute a specific kind of genius to him (and OP should definitely step in to disagree with me here if I am mistaken). For example, most people may agree that Warren Buffet is a genius, but it's clear (to me at least), that they mean genius in a very different way in that context than when applied to Musk. The implication seems to strongly be that Musk is not merely a savvy businessman, but a "brilliant scientist" or "brilliant engineer" or something as well, something I think no one would assign to Buffet. Buffet bought Duracell, but no one believes he is key to battery technology. For the record, I am not arguing about whether Musk is or is not this kind of genius, just that Musk is a unique case in that the conversation exists on this axis, arguably much more so than even with Steve Jobs (who most people at best attribute "design genius" to, but will readily admit is not an "engineering genius", and in fact may even attribute the ability to see "past that" as one of his strengths). So I think the frustration I detect in this argument is that Musk seems to often be imagined in the same ranks as the actual Nikola Tesla perhaps, which they feel is unearned, and then the defense given is more appropriate for an Edison or Ford-esque "businessy crossover genius", vs. a description of direct technical accomplishments. Again, I am not arguing either way as to where he should be placed, just pointing out that I see a lot of this sort of "talking past each other", since "genius" colloquially implies something that doesn't make "Steve Jobs" immediately come to mind, vs. Einstein.

He's a classic visionary with the ability to manifest that vision in others with his words. His track record speaks for itself, likely because of his vision and willingness to risk. He likely has strong skills in seeing positive outcomes and cast them as truths into others. He will continue to succeed in business outcomes, until his vision falters.

Tesla was basically a fully government funded entity for the first decade of Musk's ownership. His greatest skill with Tesla lay in promoting it (and doing an even better job of promoting the myth of Tesla being hand built by himself alone) and in securing government benefits.

There was the direct half a billion dollars in loans the government gave Tesla after the financial crisis without which it would have collapsed. But even more so, the only reason Tesla could survive financially during the 2010s was a combination of government subsidies and government green credits which essentially had the likes of GM and Ford paying Tesla to build cars (so they could offset their credits).

What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.

> What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.

They kind of did have electric platforms that never sold well. They were probably of the mindset that nobody really wanted these cars, too niche of a market for them to participate in other than the most basic of compliance cars.

A lot of the legacy US automakers barely survived the financial crisis. In this time period they're very risk adverse. They've made a few EV versions of their cars previously for compliance reasons, but they never really sell well and don't actually make the company any money. To them, it made sense to focus on producing the cars they know how to make with good margins to pay back the bailout money.

Looking back we can say they should have probably bothered to make actually decent EVs and market the hell out of them instead of half-assed retrofits of existing cars with half-baked electric powertrains. But I dunno, if I'm in that board room in 2008-2009 and someone says "lets bet the farm on products that lose money and nobody likes" vs "lets keep building trucks and SUVs that are shown to print money and maybe we'll actually make it out of this economic disaster", there's a good chance I'd have picked the "lets print money" option. Its only seeing the EV market today a decade+ later that we see there really is a market for decent EVs, but at the time that market definitely had not been proven.

Also, by the end of 2008 gas prices had fallen back down to ~$1.60/gal. Cheap gas was in, hybrids were out. Even the Prius began to struggle in sales compared to trucks and SUVs. Its easy to see the value of an EV with gas being >$4 on average, its harder when gasoline is cheap.

It could be what drives him and if he goes to therapy it might ruin that, I believe this is a common reason why people like that don't go to therapy. I don't know if he needs therapy or not by the way.

Honestly going to sleep alone is awful. My SO is in another country right now and I think I understand why old people tend to die shortly after their partner does.

This is strong evidence that you can have it all financially and still be a miserable human. The most valuable skills are recognizing when you have "enough", and being content with keeping yourself company.

I started becoming concerned about peterth3 when I read his HN comment in 2022.

> He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.

He started diagnosing people online either without meeting them or knowing them personally. It's sad in some ways. I'm sure he's a decent engineer but he'd be 10x happier and more effective if he focused on himself and not trying to find fault in others.

dang, a personal attack…

I’ll leave. Peace

It was an ad lib, I simply swapped out Musk with your name and replaced relevant nouns.

Are you saying you can hurl personal insults, but others can't at you?

Here's why YTA:

!) OP says "[Elon Musk] is one of the most brilliant men alive" and suggests he would benefit from therapy. IMO this isn't really a personal insult towards Elon.

2) Your "ad lib" intentionally excluded the "brilliant man" part of OP's comment and replaces it with "decent engineer." This makes your comment a direct insult to OP. Implying that they're not a good engineer.

3) Elon Musk is a public figure. The richest man alive. Even if OP was insulting Elon, that is completely different from what you're doing. Criticizing people in power is good. Insulting strangers online is mean.

4) OP didn't even diagnose Elon with codependence, that was the Rolling Stone author. Suggesting someone could benefit from therapy is not a diagnosis.

5) Ironically OP rarely comments on HN while you're commenting several times a day. With lots of negative, argumentative, and judgemental comments.

"Personal attacks are not allowed on HN" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9683927

I think you would benefit from therapy since you seem to be too sensitive. Do you feel insulted by that?

Maybe GP shouldn't insult people if they don't have thick enough skin to be treated the same.

I don't care if you're famous or not, I'll give you the same tone as you give others.

But yes I can be an asshole, never claimed not to be. I can also be nice. They way I treat people depends on how they treat others.

Couldn't agree more. I think "unhinged" is the perfect descriptor. I like a lot of what he proposes and how he thinks (when he's not attention seeking), but I absolutely cannot stand the pathetic meme crap and shit-posting he does. Sadly, he also reminds me of the failed coup guy, but I honestly think he might be more dangerous. Because not only is he desperate for attention, he's also pretty clever. That's a bad combination and I fear old age Elon is going to be even more trouble...

> Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician

There are other similarities - impulsiveness in business, Twitter obsession, strong COVID downplaying...

The overall sentiment on HN is pretty clear from the replies here. And I agree with a lot of it, he seems to do and say a lot of things impulsively without thinking them through, that often tend to be dumb.

The one thing I respect though (and expect most people here won't) is that he appears to have the "nouveau riche" disrespect for the establishment, and doesn't feel he needs to kiss anyone's ass or play by the rules in a system that is already rigged for rich people. The fact that he has annoyed so many, especially elite/establishment figures, is a good thing. I'd much rather see him use his wealth to piss off the establishment than just to grow richer safely, which he could easily do. So maybe his annoying behavior is at least partially by design, and the fact that it bothers everyone is exactly what he wants, which I think deserves some respect.

What anti-establishment stuff has he done? All of the negative things I see people mention about him are just general asshole behaviour rather than things that annoy the establishment.

He's supporting free speech, while the establishment supports censoring the population.

Censorship is the tool of the establishment. Free speech gives power to the people. That's as anti-establishment as it gets.

Is he really though? You say this as if the twitter acquisition is over and done, and Free Speech has been saved by Musk doing......what exactly? So far we have so few details about what his plans for the platform are (or if he even has any) that everyone is free to project their own ideal outcome onto his actions. Let's wait a bit and see what happens before declaring him the savior of free speech.

He has multiple examples of using censorship himself to protect his companies. He denied a reviewer access to their vehicle, has stifled the speech of former employees of his companies, and has tried to silence a dissenter publishing publicly available data of his plane. You've fallen for the hype; Elon merely dresses himself in the flag of a free speech absolutist. He is exactly like the establishment in this regard: speech for me, but not for thee.

He has never advocated for removing speech from the public square or removing your right to hear speech. He didn't tell twitter to remove any account. He offered someone money (ie a private arrangement) to take it down and changed his mind. That's very different from forcibly revoking it and imposing censorship on the population.

You've fallen for a warped definition of free speech and censorship that is endlessly regurgitated by NPCs.

A world where Twitter is controlled by a self-interested Musk, while Facebook is basically aligned with the US political establishment, enables better dissemination of ideas than a world where Twitter and Facebook are both aligned with the establishment. Because Musk has notably different biases than the establishment, and either platform is sufficient for the purpose of giving nationally-relevant ideas adequate distribution.

(For this reason, in a world where Musk already controlled Twitter, I would oppose anything that increased his leverage w.r.t. Facebook, because yes, you're correct that Musk's biases are not harmless.)

This is exactly what people said that they liked about trump. Essentially he isn't polished and says stupid things, "just like regular people!"

Is this the new trend? Whenever a wealthy person turns out to be stupid, a certain group of people say "he's sticking it to the establishment"?

> Is this the new trend?

Just a recent wave of populists?

Attacking the government also gets you tons of attention and adoration since it's such an easy target. It's like making an airline food joke in the 90s.

Elon is acting like the weird kid in school who accidentally did something that kinda made him popular and thought he could do it over and over but everyone just got tired of it after the first couple times

Elon gets attention because he is doing absolutely astonishingly amazing things.

The appearance of indecisiveness and disorderliness is because he's doings things nobody has done before. And that's how that sort of thing looks.

I agree with this too. It's like everyone on this thread wants Elon to be a perfectly manicured fully formed opinion on everything and that he needs to be batting 1000. He's batting far beyond anyone else that's try to move the needle - don't forget that. I don't pretend that I agree with a lot of what Elon does but I recognize someone who is fundamentally changing the planet.

To the comments of him not wanting to talk to the press most of the time because it's boring ... do you guys know how boring talking to the press is? You get equal parts adoration and pot shots without actually gaining anything but trying to get a message threw. There are very few enlightening moments in dealing with press and podcasts and you are constantly guarded about some asinine sound byte taken out of context. It's not like the podcast/press corps are typically deeply knowledgeable and are going to bring up some new idea to help you out. It's about getting a message out to different groups of people and it is really boring/wearing if you don't like saying the same thing over and over again.

I guess the saying goes - haters are going to hate as is deeply visible on the thread.

I would add that not only is talking to the press boring it is fraught with risk. I would never talk to the press about anything unless forced.

> The appearance of indecisiveness and disorderliness is because he's doings things nobody has done before.

Indecisiveness and disorderliness are the least of his problems, at least as far as the public is concerned.

He's a bully and he's untrustworthy.

Well, if he was a sensitive soul he would have stopped what he was doing, long time ago. Just look at this thread.

Thank you FartyMcFarter for your judgment, hopefully we can all live up to your standards.

unhinged is absolutely the right word to describe him. Not just in terms of acting up, but also in terms of testing the boundaries of lawful behavior. A kind of behavior that can only be explained by the assumption that he thinks he is above the law (probably because he has a large number of fanboys and money). This is also similar to the behavior of the US politician that you are alluding to.

As Benedict Evans said, Elon breaks our mental model of productive people because he is a bullshitter who delivers.

Delivers? Hardly. Autonomous driving? Hyperloop? The tunnel thing?

Cheap space launches, fast satellite internet and arguably the car company that made EVs a commodity. He also invested a lot of money in the things you mentioned and, as far as I'm aware, none of those is canceled.

He promises a lot, but to say he didn't also achieve a lot would be lying.

I agree woth Tesla, it accelerated the EV market by a couple of years. Without a model considerably cheaper than 30k USD so Tesla is far from being a commodity.

Not sure how much cheaper SpaceX launches are for comparable payloads and orbits. I'd suspect they are, with e.g. Ariane developed for other thongs than LEO launches. As SpaceX isn't public wr don't have any reliable numbers. Based on some old leaked material, it is less than sure whether or not SpaceX is coonsiderably cheaper than the competition. Regardless, SpaceX is impressive.

If Starlink is actually sustainable and profitable has to be seen, it could as well just be a way to push SpaceX profitabiliy further down the road through a Starlink IPO. Now way to tell either way.

> Not sure how much cheaper SpaceX launches are for comparable payloads and orbits. I'd suspect they are, with e.g. Ariane developed for other thongs than LEO launches.

The direct competitor to SpaceX is the Space Launch System [0], with a cost of over two billion per launch. SpaceX charges below 100M$ [1] (and has cheaper options available [2]) and you can actually buy it right now (EDIT: although it's true that Ariane is in the same ballpark).

> If Starlink is actually sustainable and profitable has to be seen, it could as well just be a way to push SpaceX profitabiliy further down the road through a Starlink IPO. Now way to tell either way.

Whether a business can survive in the long term is never 100%. Still, you, as an average consumer, can order a satellite dish and get fast and mostly reliable internet for a reasonable-ish price right now. I'd say that checks as delivered.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

[1] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

[2] https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/

https://www.seradata.com/arianespace-lowers-ariane-5-launch-...

You forgot Ariane Space. And the 100 million ballpark numbet is for Ariane 5, a rocket initially developed for a European shuttle program and not commercial, cheap satelite launches.

Edit: Starlonk is cheaper than alternative satelite provoders. Whether or not this is selling dollars for cents is the question, one that cannot be answered by Starlonk's existence itself.

SLS is a new rocket and you are comparing its development cost to the launch cost of a SpaceX rocket without its R&D cost.

Ariane V, delta, and soyuz launches are all cheaper per kilogram than SpaceX.

> SLS is a new rocket and you are comparing its development cost to the launch cost of a SpaceX rocket without its R&D cost.

Look on Wikipedia, the sideboard quotes cost per launch as:

> Over US$2 billion excluding development (estimate)

I'm not aware of the pricing of Soyuz and Ariane V, though.

>> I'm not aware of the pricing of Soyuz and Ariane V, though.

Both of which are much more SpaceX alternatives than SLS.

You're "not sure" how much cheaper SpaceX launches are because you clearly and obviously didn't take 10 seconds to research before running your mouth. That info is readily available.

You're also understating Tesla's significance. No surprise, I guess.

Ariane 5 launches are getting close enough to SpaceX in some markets, and Ariane Space is much more open about actual numbers and finacials. Agreed so, these figures are readily available.

SpaceX isn't that much cheaper than Ariane. Satellite internet existed before Starlink. Electric cars existed before Tesla (of course) and many manufacturers offer more affordable EVs.

But it is cheaper?

He delivers a lot of announcements for future projects.

You can buy a Tesla, a Starlink connection, or a launch of your satellite on Falcon 9 if you need it and have enough money. These are real, existing, widely used products.

And you could buy a luxury car before Tesla, and you can choose your lixury EV from all konds of brands now. Satelite internet existed before, ground based fibre usually is the better solution in most cases, there is a reason satelite communication is expensive when done by everyone else. And the Russians, Ariane,... happily sold launches to anyone before SpaceX.

True, true, true, and yet not the entire story, because if all the previous products were better than those ones, those would have failed. There is a lot of automotive or space companies that have gone bankrupt and no one even remembers them anymore.

Innovation does not mean only "coming up with something never yet seen". This is rare. Innovation also means making things more streamlined, efficient, more widely available, more capable.

Starlink is a huge boon in places like Mariupol right now. Its capability matters, even though a random person from London can get cheaper service by fibre.

You can also for many years now preorder Cybertruck and Roadster which are just around the corner or pay $12k to turn your car into a robotaxi very soon I swear. How many years have they been about to use dojo? There's also just plain embarrassing stuff like Boring Company and that half thought out robot idea that he announced before they'd even started looking into it. He does have a few hits but I feel like recently he's just throwing stuff out there with no follow through at all just to keep up his image

This is actually a good argument, much better than the visceral hate shown in some other comments.

I don't get the irrational hate or the irrational love. He's a flawed, perhaps deeply flawed, billionaire who has been involved in some cool things, some not so cool but profitable things and some flops.

Oh, come on. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX.

I mean, I don't think he's Tony Stark either, but stop cherry picking.

That's the point though. He is very far from perfect and has as much of a record for highly ambitious projects failing altogether as he does for them succeeding. On the positive side, his ratio of successes to failures probably beats out most people, and his failures probably haven't done too much societal harm (especially compared to the good done by his successes).

But it's still not a good idea to treat any of his announcements or ideas as anything near a sure thing. His bullshitting still has a fairly high chance of turning out as bullshit.

But this could be said of any successful person:

"Steve Jobs delivers? Ha! The Lisa, Apple III, Pixar Computer, Next Computer. Checkmate!"

Unpredictable rewards create obsession, it all tracks. He’d probably be less popular if he actually delivered 100%

More background if you’ve not come across intermittent reinforcement

https://www.nirandfar.com/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them...

As of today, some Ukrainians are alive (and some Russians dead) because of Starlink. Not a small feat, to substantially influence the progress of a major war between European powers. Few businesses aside from manufacturers of weapons can claim something like that.

I'm not immediately clear why the guy shouldn't have personal moonshot projects, pursued alongside more conventionally realistic ideas?

He delivers very little of what he promises.

Most of his ideas aren't even something anyone should deliver. Hyperloop and Boring Company are terrible ideas.

Meanwhile everything else is over-promise/under-deliver.

If I measured by the standards I have for myself, then I would agree he overpromises and underdelivers.

Compared to the marketing bluster I see from the old aerospace companies and greenwashing from older car companies, however, he’s a spectacular breath of fresh air with his honesty, openness, and willingness to say things have a less than 100% chance of success.

And I say that despite agreeing with you about Hyperloop and TBC.

I have no evidence but was thinking about his work schedule, which by his own omission is insane, and he is running multiple companies. Along with his outspoken nature and need to insult people publicly makes me wonder if he is using some amphetamine or similar. Erratic behavior seems to be a side effect that comes with all that energy. Again, no evidence just throwing it out there

I just listen to the space stuff and tune everything else out.

Same here. SpaceX does impressive work. The rest of Elon's companies? Not so much for me.

He's such a polarizing figure folks can't seem to detach the worthwhile things he's done from all his other flaws. Elon isn't particularly impressive as an engineer or scientist, but incredibly impressive as a product and business person. Realize that he's a brand, and try not to fall for the marketing.

Influencer attention seeking has broken people brains. The troll is fed, and for some there is an infinite loop of getting attention from certain acts leading to more extreme acts.

Its just a prank bro.

Is it not possible that Elon is acting in a perfectly rational way based on information that has come to light during diligence? Or am I missing something more subtle between the lines? It seems at least possible that Elon or Twitter’s board or both hold inaccurate views about how valuable Twitter actually is…

No? Have you seen his communication style? It's not one of a person acting "perfectly rational".

Seems a lot of what drives Musk is a need to feel that he's smarter than everyone else, even (or especially) if he suspects it may not be true. So he takes the position that the minions of the world are unworthy burdens to him. This includes governments, other organizations and anything/anyone he perceives is attempting to regulate or otherwise "constrain" him.

There's an obvious immaturity there too, wherein he responds to any criticism, hint that he may be wrong, or regulatory effort with the equivalent of a childish "you're just stupid!"

His battles with the SEC are a classic example, and it would be on-brand if this Twitter deal was as much about thumbing the eye of regulators as anything else. His announcement today had at one point caused a 20% dip in Twitter's pre-market price and 5% bump for Tesla's. The entire ride has been an exercise in manipulation.

So, I've wondered at times if a lot of this superiority act is really just deep insecurity, and he needs the world to constantly reassure him that he's as smart as he needs them to believe he is. When you look at the attention-seeking behavior you mentioned, it definitely aligns.

You've got it wrong - the tumbling today was because Twitter was artificially inflated and being held on the hopes of a deal. As soon as the market tanked, the price of twitter still held out hope on a deal. Elon isn't about to pay full freight in a sinking macroeconomic environment.

In terms of his behavior you speak of - could be right, could be wrong. I don't think he needs the reinforcement at this point. He's already proved himself - he now just needs to keep executing. My concern is that he doesn't have the energy, focus and clarity of thought to make it happen.

Also I do have legit concerns on the mental health of our older twitter guys (> 50 ) as I have noticed there has been a lot of trolling poor behavior in that crowd and a turn to the hard right. Maybe it's the social validation needed at a later age?

>the tumbling today was because Twitter was artificially inflated and being held on the hopes of a deal

We're saying the same thing. Yes, the deal itself inflated the price. But, Musk announcing today that the deal was on hold pending proof of the fake account numbers contributed to the steep pull back. Musk did not have to make the announcement publicly, and he knew what would happen when he did.

Now, guess what happens to the price when he comes out next week and says the numbers he sought were proven to his satisfaction.

He's been playing a deal-on, deal-off game from the start and the stock has responded accordingly. He has a history of enjoying that market manipulation power, including on the crypto side.

He's been slapped for it by the SEC for his other companies, and has made no secret about his disdain for that fact.

>He's already proved himself

Insecurity is frequently not rooted in reality. Musk knows he's a smart guy, but the kind of insecurity I'm talking about may never be quenchable.

Fair point about the deal on deal off. I would have to say though, he probably wants the deal to go through but not at the current market prices. Whats the quote - 'all's fair in love and war'?

True about security. Maybe that insecurity is the force that has driven him to actually achieve what he has accomplished. Sometimes your greatest asset can be your largest liability. Let's hope it stays on the asset side - for all of our sakes.

True. Could very well be that insecurity has driven him. That's probably fairly common. For instance, imposter syndrome is a very real thing and I know that my fight against it has propelled me.

The problem, of course, is that it can also create toxicity. And, Musk being a very powerful man can make that a dangerous thing. I think that's what you're alluding to.

My biggest concern is his apparent belief that his power and "contributions to society" mean he should be beyond accountability or should be able to decide which rules apply to him. That's the stuff of dystopian future sci-fi.

In fact, it concerns me when people believe they should be able to unilaterally decide what rules apply to anyone.

Agree - absolute power corrupts absolutely. Everyone is accountable and no one is above reproach. He probably is living on a huge power surge right now which might make him feel invincible (as power does) - it would be a classic time to make a misstep.

Hope his ego comes back to earth and he can keep executing. Will keep watching.

I agree with the overall sentiment of your comment in principle, but I'm actually not rooting for Musk to keep executing. I've seen enough of him to be deeply concerned about what he'd do with even more power.

There’s been a huge stock market crash since he first initiated the buyout. It would have been unhinged if he didn’t try to renegotiate the price or otherwise pull out.

It can be argued that the whole idea of Musk buying Twitter is unhinged, but it doesn’t seem much different to Bezos buying WaPo, it’s simply on a larger scale. Media companies provide good political power/$ value to billionaires.

Why are we so obsessed with loving or hating him.

Both amount to celebrity worship. We enable the drama which feeds off both the love AND the hate.

I posit that mature intelligent people don't care about Elon.

Our rallying for or railing against him, is an expression of our own narcissism, as if our individual opinions of him change literally anything in the world.

People need to grow up and focus on their own lives and changing things within their power.

musk is kinda the closet thing to a celebrity there is in the tech scene

I very much agree with all you said, but it's also a way to find likeminded people.

If I discuss with somebody and they agree with me that Musk is a conman and a cult leader, chances are they have the same mental framework around other broader things such as how SV has become a hotspot for cults.

How maybe it's time to get out of such hotspot for cults, how maybe the template for success isn't inflating a financial bubble such as Tesla but going old school like Microsoft, without raising any money, going straight to building products and attack Goliath without fear like they did with IBM, not in the press but in the marketplace.

I mostly agree with this, and would add that thoughts on Elon make a great Rorschach test (and a less great but still interesting test on what bits of misinformation have stuck to a person). But I disagree with the "enlightened disinterested middle" prescription. A mature intelligent person can love and hate and be disinterested in things (and people), too, and regardless of how other people think (or don't think) about the thing or person. There's an old copypasta going around again that implicitly makes this point at least for liking -- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/if-x-has-a-million-fans-im-on... -- a mature intelligent person should be able to have their likes and dislikes be mostly independent of what others think. (My own bias is somewhat contrarian, I notice myself irrationally starting to like something less if it becomes more popular. Sometimes I can justify it more rationally by saying that popularity changed the thing -- our opinions are part of our brains and thus are part of the world and can indeed sometimes affect the world even beyond our brains, effects are more likely when more brains share opinions -- and I like the thing it became less, or even actively dislike it, without having to diminish my liking of what used to be. Sometimes I realize I'm being irrational, notice my feelings aren't what I want them to be, and attempt to correct them (sometimes towards disinterest!). Sometimes I don't care. But the correct thing is not necessarily disinterest, nor a more extreme stance I once thought which was abandoning my likes and other emotions altogether.)

I think what’s worst is how boring he is in all these shenanigans. Peter Thiel invents a method to sue your business out of existence. Evil, yes, but also smart. Musk? Calls people he doesn’t like pedophiles. Like some schoolchild, or Republican House candidate.

And Musks politics are similar: dumb, but also dumb in exactly the same half-informed wannabe libertarian 20-year old American guy way as half the people on Reddit.

It’s really rather strange, because Musk isn’t anywhere close to normal in many other ways, and good ways, too. Making five or six businesses work, some at the same time, with only two or three duds along the way, is far ahead of anyone else and can almost claim statistical significance.

He is the kind of person one has to maintain complex opinions about.

He didn't create the first mass market modern EV (that was Nissan), but he did what the rest of the auto industry could have but refused to do: Reverse the polarity of the desirability of EVs.

His views on metropolitan public transit and car facilitated sprawl are backward, but I doubt most traditional auto executives think any differently (just look at the amazing metro system in the Detroit area! /s), they just don't voice it as openly.

He has tons of money and power but feels little accountability to anyone, not even his shareholders, much less any community, country, or society.

You might say that's great, that it frees him to think "outside the box". That is true, but societal obligations are not all bad - they ground a wealthy and powerful person in the reality of people who have far less power than them, and temper some of the blindness brought on by their narcissism.

I have similar feelings as you do about Elon, and take anything he says with a grain of salt. But, he’s in some (not all!) aspects the world’s most successful company leader, and he got there with exactly this behavior. Evolutionary pressures in our society and markets seem to favor this behavior (also keeping in mind the last US president).

Musk is the best, or at least among the best, marketers currently alive. That's it. Let's not make more out of this than it is.

I agree, and Elon seems to know - he closed Tesla's PR department a while back to (re)gain full message control.

That's a pretty big deal though, since businesses usually run on marketing, and not on raw engineering prowess. Without great marketing, you can't even attract great engineers.

Some people argue that the Nazis were as successful as they were due to propaganda (my final thesis at school was about Goebbels) - a sibling of marketing. Marketing rules the world.

>> Evolutionary pressures in our society and markets seem to favor this behavior (also keeping in mind the last US president).

Trump was the first president since the 80’s/early 90’s not to get a second term. Acting like an asshole only gets you so far maybe until people grow tired of it.

Bring an a*hole got T his first term, being an idiot lost him his second. And, I'd argue, all the terms until his death after the second one.

Putin is another example. Being a ruthless, smart sociopath got him all his power, being an idiot once lost him almost everything.

What has Putin lost?

His influence on Western politics? A big chunk of the Russian economy? Finnland joining NATO? His ability to divide NATO countries? That list is quite long.

I’m not sure he had any of those to lose (nor that, eg, Finland joining NATO is assured) — except the economy one, where the ruble is faring better than the dollar.

The ruble currently trades stronger against the US dollar than September 2021.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RUB=X/

The situation is still in progress, but if Russia can get out of this mess with just loss of Donbass, Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet, they would have to gratulate themselves for unexpected salvation. That would be akin to the Russo-Japanese war, where their diplomats were able pull off a much more reasonable peace than one would expect from the actual war result.

The worst case scenario is a civil war like the one that followed their military collapse in WWI. Only with nukes in the mix. Yuck.

What makes you think that is the likely outcome?

The attrition of Russian military equipment is very high and they are in no position to replenish it fast enough.

At the same time, the Ukrainians are receiving enormous amounts of high tech equipment from a coalition of states that, taken together, is about 30 times as rich as Russia and much more technologically capable.

The Russians already had to abandon their Kiev push and now are retreating from the Kharkiv region, unable to take a city located mere 25 miles from their own border and next to the major Russian military hub of Belgorod.

Three or four months of further attrition warfare like that and they will have nothing left to deploy into battle.

And you aren’t concerned about Ukrainian troop losses or equipment losses?

Nor the unrest in the US about spending $50B+ in foreign aid while (literally) letting US babies starve?

Nor the inflation and supply shortages caused by lack of Ukrainian and Russia supplies to the West/abroad?

Nor our allies turning against us — eg, Saudi Arabia and Mexico challenging US foreign policy or the massive decrease in support between votes in the UN?

And you believe that Ukraine and it’s backers can sustain another 3-4 months of this combat? — and then muster the forces to expel Russia from Donbas and Crimea?

The Ukrainians will definitely take some losses, but nations defending themselves from an attack have higher motivation to bear them. Plus, the worst danger for Ukraine - indiscriminate shelling of cities such as Kyiv and Kharkhiv, where a lot of civilians live - has receded with the failure of both Russian offensives. Russia does not have enough missiles to turn entire metropolitan areas into rubble, and conventional artillery can only shoot so far.

Americans usually do not riot over money spent on the armed forces, otherwise the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns would have led to a country collapse back home - both were an order of magnitude more expensive. I would even say that Americans are, of all the Western nations, the most complacent about high military spending.

Inflation and supply shortages are a real thing, yes. Definitely worrisome. But if Russia can be knocked down from their imperial madness for some decades, I'll buy it. Things look a lot different from behind the former Iron Curtain, where I am from; being under Russian yoke for decades will make you say "Never Again". Of all the tyrannies of Central Europe, only the Nazis were worse than the rule of the Kremlin.

I do not particularly care about Saudi Arabia (IMHO it is not our ally, but a major source of terrorism and extremism, exporting Wahhabist and Salafist ideology by the truckload) nor Mexico. (What reason would Mexico even have to join any pro-Russian coalition?) UN is generally a corrupt sham where the most useless diplomats and politicians of the world are disposed of.

Yes, I think that both Ukraine and its backers are by now invested enough that they will persist until they break the capability of Russia to engage in war. European land wars are like that and always have been. Americans may view things differently, because their wars are usually fought abroad. For Europe, war is an unpleasant, but historically familiar phenomenon, and countries generally only surrender if they really cannot fight anymore.

Which is the state I expect Russia to reach sooner. Their logistics are abysmal, their industry isn't in a state to support such attrition, and there isn't a single industrially developed country on Earth willing to throw material support behind them. They can get Eritrea to vote with them in the UN, but Eritrea won't supply them with tanks and planes.

And the only major power that was their hope, China, does not look willing to shackle itself to the corpse of a dying empire.

Huh, I see many of those points as the opposite.

I guess we’ll have to see in a few months.

I appreciate the detailed answers!

No, he didn't "get there" with this behavior. Elon's unstable erratic mini-Trump phase is relatively recent. Tesla and SpaceX were well-established on their current paths well before then.

The thing with Elon is that he has no respect for rules. This is what makes his companies successful. His company will zag when everybody zigs, because he will say “zigging is stupid, and only an idiot would do it that way”, after which he will be mocked by all the zigging rule-followers, and ultimately either be proven right, or dead-wrong.

This lack of respect of rules brought him to the top, and somewhere along the way he seems to have forgotten how to turn it off. So now he does whatever he wants whenever he wants and who cares about the consequences because why should he follow someone else’s rules? This greatly offends many people, while simultaneously attracting a fan club who love his rogue character.

He was always like this, from what I remember. Then again, I was put off of him back in the 90s because it was just kind of embarrassing to watch someone who was (at the time) 2-3x my age be so desperate for validation.

Elon was bullied pretty heavily, and I think he clung to the nerds as his social savior in response, but he still doesn't have the self-confidence/spine to let his ideas stand on their own. It's kind of sad: He basically has a parasocial relationship with the geek/nerd community (and probably the rationalists too) and he thinks it's real, but it can't be when Elon brings his resources to bear whenever he's losing an argument.

The only reason Elon looks superhuman to so many people is by comparison to our worthless decadent elite. He's a decent engineer with a strong work ethic and resources who actually does do things, making him look like a comic book superhero. That's because the rest of his class is mostly jacking off on yachts, sponsoring bullshit politics of various flavors, posturing at glorified overpriced TED sessions (Davos etc.), or running companies whose products and market they don't understand full of people who have meetings to discuss the meeting schedule.

If our elite really were a meritocracy Elon would be average among his peers, if that.

It all makes sense if you assume he’s a dumb guy who got rich by accident.

Elon Musk did this recent keynote for the FT. "Future of the Car: Elon Musk Keynote Interview" https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc

Said he will have full FSD in the next 6 months: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107

Will be landing uncrewed Starship on Mars in 3 to 5 years: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=2444

Most ironic of all is the talk about Tunnels: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=4000

It was a shame that the FT, with a London based journalist, forgot to ask the question if he has ever heard about this Sci-Fi tunnel transport system called the London Metro :-)

I mostly agree with you. Just to play devil's advocate though, I wonder if this is just an artifact of him being overly open / verbose. In other words, I suspect that all this stuff would normally happen behind closed doors anyway during due diligence. Similarly if you look at his performance in Tesla / SpaceX is terms of hard metrics I guess he's doing pretty well even though he might be talking about self driving being a year away all the time.

Isn’t trying to reprice a shrewd move at this point? The market has taken a huge hit since he made his move and the options for Twitter haven’t exactly improved.

I absolutely agree. He will save himself $5-15 billion depending on the new offer price, a total no brainer. A big short selling hedge fund came out 4 days ago and laid this exact scenario out on the table https://hindenburgresearch.com/twitter/

No. A shrewd move would have been to not do a fumbling hostile takeover. Everyone knows that tech stocks traditionally take a hit when the fed raises rates. He could have done this in a slower and more traditional way instead of attempting the largest leveraged buyout in history on a whim.

Now he has to work with a ton of contractual and legal issues, up to and including twitter being able to force him to go through with the deal, unless he can find clear evidence of fraud in their user numbers.

This is exactly what Charlie Munger said when asked why he and Buffett invested in BYD and not in Tesla. He said Elon was a certified genius and a lose cannon. (That was before TSLA did 20x. And also well before Musk teased them about their love of moats and candy.)

He does not look indecisive :), to the contrary seems to be jumping to action without bothering much about consequences. For example, why make acquisition bid without checking on spam accounts first? IIRC his offer letter to the Twitter did not carry this condition about spam bots.

> he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly.

Think of it as simulated annealing [1].

Usually finds pretty decent extrema

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

Parag Agrawal warned us all more than a month ago, "There will be distractions ahead…"

https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1513354622466867201

Some years ago a friend suggested someone should make a browser extension that replaces the text of every Elon Musk tweet with “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!” and I made a quick MVP: https://gist.github.com/cyco130/d96f678d41fd7acfe4ac6c4e01d2...

Edit: Alas, it doesn't work anymore. Updates are welcome. Edit2: Updated!

I lost all respect for him when he seriously posited that life is a simulation.

The foundation of Musk's wealth, above all else, is that he operates as a one-man marketing machine. The funding for all of his ventures depends on Musk. The magnet for ravenous, loyal, intelligent nerds (and thus, the ability to eventually deliver on his promises!) is powered by Musk. The ability for any of his ventures to cover a failure to deliver with a PR/controversy storm -- yup, it depends on Musk.

I like your comparison with Big T. He is, in some sense, a sleeker and more savvy Trump. Trump does have a similar psychic energy to Elon, but he's an older model. He came from the TV world. Now, the TV world was pretty powerful -- it got DT elected president! But Americans are not living in the TV world this century; they're living in the social media world.

This is the origin of the Twitter thing. It's not about Twitter's profit, or free speech, or anything as lofty as that. Here's what happened with Twitter:

Trump got elected based, in part, on his statements on Twitter. Around the same time, Elon was astroturfing Reddit, Twitter, etc. to build the hype machine that eventually became the $1T social media product, Tesla.

Elon, consciously or not, came to realize that simply by his statements on Twitter, could manipulate the world to his whim. He fired the entire corporate PR team at Tesla. He realizes, why do I need a PR team? I can shape the narrative just as well with my social media account!

Then, BOOM! Trump gets banned from Twitter, and immediately disappears completely from discussion. Just like that, in the blink of an eye -- erased from public imagination. Do you remember how quickly this happened? He was black holed from the public imagination in a couple days. As soon as the trending hashtag disappeared, Trump was gone.

Elon saw this happen. He made the connection between his valuations and his Twitter account. And remember, at this point, Elon's compensation is basically tied entirely to the stock price. He realizes that leaving his podium on someone else's property is a mortal risk. And... here we are.

Twitter is pretty stupid not to have banned Elon as soon as he left the slightest hint of acquisition.

Musk does not come from a scientific or technical lineage: his father wasn't a geotechnical engineer, a computer programmer, or a physicist. He was a chiropractor. A chiropractor! This is the essence of Elon. He is the greatest influencer of our time.

> I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly.

All agents have two modes: exploiting and exploring

Indecisive and disorderly are the qualities of exploring.

I wonder how different I would be if what I did was highly successful and I had the money to do what I want / indulge myself at my whim... I worry it wouldn't be pretty...

This + the bro cult around him on Twitter certainly make him hard to stomach sometimes. But still, when I see he is on a podcast or some other media it is usually worth the listen.

I think he’s always been like that to an extent. In his biography there are stories of him staying up all night and re-writing everyone’s code in his earlier days.

> indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel.

Why is it disorderly to not want to acquire a company that may be lying about their figures?

I think the word that might fit better than unhinged is 'capricious' - given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behaviour.

dang can we flagkill this entire thread? The thread is mainly unsubstantiated character attacks with no supporting arguments.

I’m not a fan of Elon, would never buy a Tesla. But Vernon Unsworth was worse in the whole incident. He started the whole argument. Elon was asked for help. He tried to help. Vernon threw his toys out of the cot. Elon responded like a child. Vernon sued and got laughed out of court.

There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Elon. The ‘pedo guy’ thing isn’t one of them.

To add details, Elon's sub prototype seemed fine, and his team worked with Thai authorities to evaluate its use to resolve the incident. It was deemed they didn't have enough time (given the constraints) to actually finish it, and diving was a more practical option given the entirety of the situation.

Thai authorities told Elon as such, boys in the cave were already saved by the time he brought over the sub, and everything was fine.

Then that one specific diver comes out of nowhere and tweets that it was all just a PR stunt and that Elon could "shove that sub up where it hurts". While Elon's response was an immature retort, it is a bit disingenuous how people seem to imply that he lashed out at the diver out of nowhere with that insult just because his sub wasnt used for the incident. That wasn't an issue at all, and he took the rejection from Thai authorities just fine. It was one of the divers that decided to throw this random insult at him, and Elon's retort (no matter how appropriate or inappropriate it was) was just a "one-up" response. Immature and inappropriate response, sure. But let's not act as if he decided to lash out on some innocent guy out of nowhere.

Direct quote[0]: "Just as I didn’t literally mean he was a pedophile, I’m sure he didn’t literally mean shoving a sub up my a--".

0. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/elon-...

It would sure be ironic if he followed the genius-to-madman trajectory of Nikola Tesla.

It amazes me how easily you cast aspersions onto someone you don't even know. To go so far to accuse someone who leads massive innovations and organizations and still has enough time to share his thoughts on Twitter as someone who's "disorderly".

What would we say of you, if your life were so public?

Isn't the deal on hold because the price might be too high for a bunch of spam accounts? If so, I'm not sure what you're on about.

Sounds reasonable to confirm the actual number of spam accounts before spending 44 billion. Likewise I double check the service history of used cars too.

Do you think it is reasonable to do your due diligence after you made an offer?

How do you know what due diligence was done and what new information might have come up? If the company misrepresented its users to Musk during negotiations that wouldn't be very reasonable.

I obviously don't know the details, but knowing the number of actual users on Twitter is probably the most important factor to base an offer on? He's not exactly new on Twitter, so if Twitter claims 5% bots he just accepts that? I find that extremely unlikely, unless he had another motive.

>How do you know what due diligence was done and what new information might have come up?

Based on the "Funding secured" or "Pedo guy" nonsense revealed in court documents, I have a pretty good idea how much due diligence was done prior to the offer: zero.

This would be more akin to the inspection period when buying a house.

The threat of the deal blowing up with so much on the line is what holds Twitter’s feet to the fire.

I've been involved in a couple of due diligence processes that were part of the conditions of the formal offer.

You don't open your books to a competitor or in a hostile takeover situation.

that's how it works in the bussiness world. you first make an offer, and then it enters the due diligence phase when information is shared and these matters are investigated.

Isn't that something he should've done before making an offer? It's not like he just discovered that bots are a thing.

You think Twitter would be that open to let someone dig that deep into their IP before a purchase?

It was pretty much a hostile take over ... quite sure they didn't let him come in and "kick the tires" on their user data.

then...maybe he shouldn't have made the offer?

This happens all the time. Literally. Sometimes you can kick the tires if you have a letter of intent, sometimes the offer is conditional on passing a due diligence.

No, you make closing contingent on certain parameters. Twitter execs aren't going to drop their panties for inspection unless there's a good chance the deal might close.

Yes. Like when you make an offer on a house but then your inspector finds a crack in the ceiling and you back out because the bank promised you 3.5% with no points and nothing down but when the paperwork is done you’ve got a 6% interest rate with $10,000 in fees, property tax assessment tripled, your parents who were going to help out suddenly don’t want to gift you $75,000 for the down payment, there was a murder 2 blocks away and the housing market just collapsed so paying 100% over the asking price (which was already twice what it’s worth) doesn’t sound a good idea.

In other words, have you seen what tech stocks have done in the last week?

Elon doesn’t have the money to buy Twitter, and his lenders are getting nervous that it’s a bad investment for a juvenile prank.

The word you're looking for is eccentric.

> unhinged

I have this speculative theory that Elon Musk's public behavior is a complex long term ruse. I suspect his odd behavior is intentionally designed to get other to underestimate him. Consider it a mental form of the drunken fist martial arts style [1], where a fighter will use unpredictable body movements to confuse the opponent.

I use the word "theory" intentionally. I have explainable reasons for how I formed this theory. But now is not the place for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_boxing

I’m a fan of Tesla, SpaceX, etc. but I think Elon has been acting a little off lately. It feels like he started acting like any other rich guy who is more concerned about his own money than anything else.

If Trump is reelected this year, Republicans can thank Elon. He’s campaigning against democrats, wants Trump to be back on Twitter, said banning Trump was morally wrong (I guess letting the incitements of violence, lies about election fraud while committing the fraud himself, was morally acceptable to Elon).

Same. It was the saga of the media talking about poor working conditions and safety at Tesla, then his response by making an anti-media media site, then the fallout from that, then his decision to use those trapped kids as an opportunity to publicly virtue-signal by "building a rescue submarine", and his infantile tantrum when he was told that wasn't useful.

If Elon Musk had shut the fuck up in 2010 I'd probably be calling for statues to be built of him.

You dislike someone who built multiple pioneering tech companies because of mean tweets and a vague resemblance to Trump’s demeanor? Being a bit of a blow hard isn’t exactly unusual among CEOs of multibillion companies! Does anyone remember Steve Jobs?

Heck, narcissism is currency in Silicon Valley. I don’t know what else I’d call the whole “we’re changing the world through Ad Tech” shtick.

He doesn't just write mean tweets. He broadcasts to an audience of 90 million people that a cave diver who was critical of him (correctly so, as it turned out) is a pedophile. He attempts to get a lawyer fired from a firm working with his companies because she happened to work at SEC on enforcement cases related to his companies. None of this is news to you, which is why I'm wondering why you would be so glib.

The main thing that soured my opinion is that he supported Bitcoin and other crypto. The environmental damage from crypto is larger than the environmental savings for all electric cars. Elon Musk went from being one of the best things to happen to the planet to someone doing less than nothing for it.

The problem is reward this kind of behavior. Trump became president by be the most outlandish buffoon. Kanye is a billionaire for his antics. It's all free advertising for their brands. Probably 100s of millions of dollars worth of free advertising.

He seems to know his limits in the public. He throws low blows to US politicians, but if he has nothing but good to say about China or Xi Jinping he stays silent. He likes to punch down. That's a behavior Twitter and his supporters rewards. He is the second most effective Twitter user after Trump. It's indecent and disgusting behavior but it works.

His business process is to try many things and fail a lot, nothing wrong with that as long as some of them succeed. He jumps into very hard challenges, then fails or iterates until there is success. His full automation of of Tesla factories with robots attempt cost Tesla several years, but Tesla is still success.

His marketing is full of bullshit. He he has at least 4 vaporware announcements for each real product. For example, that dancing robot man and self-driving cars “Next Year” every year since 2014.

Do you realize that the Russians are literally threatening him openly because of the Ukrainian Starlink operation? The Kremlin mob has a lot of assassinations behind it, so their threat is absolutely credible, not a random brain fart on the Internet.

>The Kremlin mob has a lot of assassinations behind it,

Only against former Russians or Russians. Russia throws lots of empty threats, but has not threatened Musk personally.

Angering Xi and China can affect his business, so he shuts up like a good boy.

Yeah, the supposed free speech absolutist, cowtowing to Communists. Who Elon doesn't talk about is more interesting than the punching down he always does.

One thing I really like about this new Elon is, while he is liberal, he's more real. There are a lot of liberals playing a part - like towing the liberal line. However a lot of ACTUAL liberals in person might be like, shit let's stop abortion or lets stop illegal immigration or lets cheer black people but I don't want everyone on TV to be black (I'm not saying all of them - but real people have actual opinions like that). There's too much focus on hyper liberalism or LEFTism right now and I rather think the word is not unhinged it's REAL. Same REAL that elected Trump.

In the United States there is very little leftism. If you think there is, point to any major party etc that is advocating to dismantle the existing power hierarchy and transfer ownership of the means of production to workers. The most "radical" mainstream advocacy we typically see is around reform, which really isn't radical at all.

It's true that there are pockets of leftist activism here and there, but said activists have very little power or influence. There's no communist bogeyman waiting round the corner to redistribute your wealth (or whatever else it is that people imagine communism to be).

It's important to reiterate that liberal and progressive are not synonyms for leftism. Advocating for social change in and of itself is not leftism. More Black people on TV isn't leftism, and the notion is quite absurd, especially since it's far from true that everyone on TV is Black now.

The reason this is so important IMO is that we can't have productive discussions about social and political issues if we don't understand the basic terms and concepts under discussion.

As to Musk, I don't know what to think. He's certainly made some good business decisions, but he also goes off the deep end on occasion. I don't think calling him liberal really makes much sense. When you're one of the richest people in the world, your world view is undoubtedly much different than that of an average person.

And just in general the labels "liberal" and "conservative" aren't very meaningful, especially in that most people could be considered either depending on which issue you're looking at. And when you look at how people actually live and what they prioritize, the lines become even blurrier.

> Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.

Elon Musk isn't an attention seeker and never has been. I don't get how people make this argument. Every chance he gets, he redirects praise to the people of his companies.

> Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician

Take it easy on Biden. Many geriatric patients act strangely because their sense of self awareness has faded with age.

Funny how many smear articles against him are going on. Because he wants to stop online censorship of conservatives.

How many here would do what they consider right knowing they will be vilified for it.

>Funny how many smear articles against him are going on.

He was The Left's darling, now he's The Right's darling.

Personally, I think he made a mistake. I feel like Elon wants to be liked, but the celebrity/media left are now going to have their go at him.

I can't vouch for everyone supposedly writing smear articles/commenting on Musk but my own problem is that there is a public cost to his antics like "Going private" , "just bought 9% of TWTR" , "won't buy TWTR" etc. There's a reason SEC has rules around these. If Musk had done it once, you could call it eccentric or just plain stupid. If there's a pattern to it, perhaps his intentions aren't really to save the world or even noble. I'd trust someone who is openly greedy than someone who claims to do virtuous things while doing shady things.

> don't know if this is the right word -- unhinged

[my bad misunderstood what unhinged means.]

That is not a clinically recognised term.

Some doctors do give that diagnostic.

anymore.

That is quite misleading as it has been. It is part of the ASD in these days [1, 2].

[1]: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/5855/asperger-syn...

[2]: Mirkovic B, Gérardin P (April 2019). "Asperger's syndrome: What to consider?". L'Encéphale. 45 (2): 169–174. doi:10.1016/j.encep.2018.11.005. PMID 30736970. S2CID 73452546. "Asperger's syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is part of the large family of autism spectrum disorders."

To be fair, it was a distinct diagnosis from autism until relatively recently. It was "absorbed" into autism in DSM 4 or 5.

So if he was diagnosed with Asperger's in the past, he would now be considered to be on the autism spectrum.

It's now considered a autism spectrum disorder, but you could literally have received an "Asperger's Syndrome" diagnosis in the past 10 years.

It IS a "clinically recognized term" in the sense that if you went to a mental health professional and said "I have Asperger's Syndrome" they might say politely "we don't call it that anymore" but it is very unlikely they would rudely say "I don't know what that is, it is not a clinically recognized term."

>He said that he has Aspergers.

People are often looking for explanations for their personalities or interests. Look at how many people claim to be "on the spectrum" on HN underneath any article on the topic.

I've known many people with spectrum disorders. Some were difficult to work with and you make accommodations. A few were assholes.

Universally, the assholes with spectrum disorders used their diagnosis to get away with abusive behaviour and, in two cases, sexual harassment.

Most people go to some lengths to ensure that their health doesn't present in such a way that it needs to be an excuse for their behaviour. Especially in autistic communities. A certain amount of masking seems to be a requirement to function as a responsible adult.

I and lots of my friends have that or equivalent diagnoses. It doesn't make you unhinged.

If you've met one person with Aspbergers, you've met one person with Aspbergers?

What does this even mean? Meeting one person with Asperger's who is not unhinged is sufficient to show that not all people with Asperger's are unhinged.

I wish people would stop excusing bad behavior with "oh they're autistic". It just makes us autistic people look bad by association.

He's autistic and a genius. That combination is typically misunderstood and derided in their time.

When there is distance he'll be able to be viewed with a dispassionate lens. Historians and future generations will put the mistakes in their proper context as they benefit from sustainable transport, reusable rocket ships and free speech in the public square.

> He's autistic and a genius. That combination is typically misunderstood and derided in their time.

Going to call bullshit on that one, because it's an easy way to discount all the downright shitty crap he's done.

I think it is amazing what Musk has accomplished, and if you look throughout history most hard-charging folks that get shit done tend to have a ton of narcissistic traits and are not really folks you'd want to be friends with. Both Newton and Edison were legendary assholes. Many of "... The Great" leaders throughout history achieved their "greatness" by mass murder.

So it's not incongruous at all to call out Elon for being a giant narcissistic, lying dickhead, and to also be in awe of his accomplishments.

Unhinged? It is possible, that Musk didn't expect the twitter deal to become as politicised, as it did. Maybe he just got afraid of getting into the center of politics in the US. For example the state is a major customer, and they could just stop buying launch services from SpaceX for example, as the president might not agree with the politics of Mr Musk.

I mean look at Bezos, he got into a fight with Trump, and the pentagon preferred Azure to AWS, all of a sudden. Yeah, and a year later that deal got cancelled too, by the next administration [1]. I mean Musk has a lot of business with Uncle Sam, he really can't play his own game, in terms of politics.

I mean, i mean, they really have a lot of 'leverage' with Musk, to begin with. I would guess that Musk would be looking for a way out of the twitter deal, in order to protect his business. Also the economy is going into a recession, therefore his deals with the various governments are going to be much more important. Look, there is even talk of Musk building an e-tank with a German firm, Rheinmetall [2]

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pentagon-terminates-controvers...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDe7OGpPodM

After this war, Musk is probably in no danger of losing federal contracts just because of his free speech politics.

The Russians knocked out the entire Ukrainian SATCOM infrastructure at the start of the war, plus quite a few stations elsewhere in Europe; AFAIK none of them went online again. Electronic warfare at its finest. Once this happened, Starlink was used as a drop-in substitute and defeated all Russian attempts to knock it out too. The Ukrainians coordinate their artillery, drones etc. over Starlink and the Russians can ... gnash their teeth.

This is an impressive capability and it gives the U.S. a huge advantage in any potential future military conflict with a near-peer power. Advantages like that aren't discarded just because of random culture war flare-ups.

Interesting perspective. Actually the US government payed for the service:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl...

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/spacex-ukraine-elon-musk-...

They did, which actually indicates that they find value in it already in its embryonal phase. (The necessary satellite constellation is far from complete right now.)

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