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).
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.)
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".
> 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it rare? We just had a president with similar traits
Those employees trapped on an island for months developing SpaceX rockets in miserable conditions did the work.
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.)
On the contrary, our world is practically made for those people to be successful. Psychopaths do great in unbridled capitalism.
I mean, you’ll alienate yourself from everyone, but you’ll be rich!
Source: My wife professionally studies personality disorders
So not sure what's your point. But I like the passive aggressive nature of your comment.
_money_
Anyone with enough billions can do what Elon has done.
2) Neither Boeing nor Ford have put a car into a trans-Martian Solar orbit, and they did start with billions
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.)
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.
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”.
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.
(Something something Romans: https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ).
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 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.
It sounds as if Musk and Twitter are a match made in heaven.
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.
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.
I'm Civil War he tries to kill the man who murdered his parents, for revenge, not justice.
Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
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