When I First Saw Elon Musk for Who He Really Is | Hacker News Reader

When I First Saw Elon Musk for Who He Really Is

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97 pointsAndrewDucker63 comments

I have bought three Tesla since they first came out. I love the cars, dispute imperfections they are still the best I have driven. But - I’m embarrassed to have any association, however remote. with Musk.

There were plenty of warning signs, but it’s wasn’t until Covid (“Silly, it’s just like a flu”) that I couldn’t look away any more. Since then his megalomania has only grown. Where does it end?

I find it interesting that just the flu was the one that opened your eyes. To me that's not the most black and white instance, because after all it could be that he actually believed it.

The one that first gave me pause to think was calling that diving guy a pedo. That's because, even if you believe it, you don't say it if you have millions of rabid followers, as that amounts to destroying someone's life without evidence. The fact he did that shows his questionable character, his beliefs aside.

After this instance I started paying attention and noticed something also mentioned in the article - he never bothers addressing negative claims, he just attacks the person making the claims. That's when my opinion of him went from bad character to bullshiter and bad character.

The thing that gets me is the way he propagates the idea that one person is responsible for his successes. There are many brilliant people and teams that work for his companies, but he doesn't promote them like they clearly deserve, instead wearing this persona of "of course I'm a bit weird, but I'm so amazing because I'm so successful at these things". To me this strikes me as narcissism/egocentrism, and I'm not surprised that he flew into a rage when the diver told him where to stick it because that seriously impacted on his ego.

While I agree with you, he's had plenty of help by media. I noticed a few years ago that headlines went the pattern of "Intel says", "Twitter says" and "Google says."

With Tesla, though, it was always "Elon Musk says..."

Media made a character out of him as much as his own Twitter feed did. Perhaps that was him playing the media fiddle perfectly. Perhaps they also wanted to craft a personal cult around someone, and he was just there at the right time.

That's because he's usually the one talking on Tesla's behalf. He tweets.

You are exactly right, both about how he deals with criticism, takes credit, and I should have caught on at the time (I didn’t - due to unrelated reasons).

It was apparent from very early on that I would never want to work for him. Later I have met ex-Tesla employees who confirmed my concerns (“you work on whatever is his most reason pet idea, dropping everything else”).

Same here, except just one Tesla. Breaking point for me was “pedo guy”. Elon is one of America’s premiere douchebags, against stiff competition.

I imagine there were many Jewish and Black Model-T Ford owners who felt the same way about Henry Ford.

Now he's up to "You think that is bad, wait until you see what [Bill Gates] has put in the vaccines."

I couldn't find that tweet. Can you?

The only reference to this that I could find was a few Indian news sites talking about it, like: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/bill-gates-poured-mi...

A statement like that is like catnip to most US media, so it would have blown up, and it hasn't, so...

Tweet was from a follower pretending to be Musk: https://twitter.com/andItoldyaso/status/1529228707793031168

Maybe I got fooled. It was in an article from some newspaper or website and they quoted it, maybe they were fooled by the follower's name too.

The article described Musk responding to a Breitbart article which speciously claims that Gates is funding millions of dollars of attacks on Musk though various "public benefit" companies with "What a dick move" [1]. So it seemed believable in that context.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1529224801579302912

Here is the article I was reading. This is what you get when you use the Google News app.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/bill-gates-poured-mi...

That is indeed the link I posted a few posts up. I guess that site isn't reliable, then.

People don't really take Elon at his word anyway. They lap up his mystical attitude towards starry eyed goals.

He appears to be a really science and tech oriented guy and he is technical but people dont come to hear it. His conversations in the public focus heavily on symbolic action, mysteries of the future and innovation and very little on analyzing fundamental technical challenges.

His presentations are like Steve Jobs with a focus on mysticism but the public takes Elon's technical and analytical ability for granted, like a protected trait. None of his fans really want to get into the nitty gritty and his PR strategy seems to be fine with that.

First I thought it's tesla.com, but it's a freaking anagram!

This guys been banging on about Tesla / Musk for years. See for example:

"What’s Wrong With Tesla? How Much Time Do You Have? By Edward Niedermeyer on February 5, 2010"

Meanwhile TSLA is about about 200x since then.

Haters gonna hate hate hate...

Is stock price the only valuable thing in life? Just to cite one element, the dispute over the painting plant. That won't have any impact on the stock price, it's too small a thing, but is illegally polluting irrelevant because the stock is going up?

Well, obviously not. It was just an illustration Tesla has done well in spite of Niedermeyer's very negative article.

Reading the article also makes the "When I First Saw Elon Musk for Who He Really Is" ... "On a beautiful day in May 2015"... shtick seem phony when he links an article he wrote on Musk's bad character in he wrote in 2009. (https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2009/03/tesla-descends-int...)

Remember folks, it's politics season. If it reads like a hit piece, ask yourself why someone would want this published now.

Normally, I’d agree. But on the other hand Musk has been working overtime the last few months to wreck his personal brand.

Which actions specifically do you think contributed the most here?

The Covid BS posts starting a couple of years ago. An especially harmful one was promoting HCQ as a cure-all for Covid.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1239650597906898947

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1239776019856461824?lang...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroq...

That's a bit unfair on HCQ. He just said maybe it was worth considering it back in Mar 2020 when there were no other treatments or vaccines and the studies on HCQ were unclear.

Yeah and there was a reasonable mechanism for considering it plausible (zinc ion affinity), unlike later touted miracle cures. It was very reasonable to ask “why isn’t this being studied more?”

(It turned out to be useless, but you need to actually do the study to find that out.)

Attempting to buy Twitter in order to (let's face it, there is no other reason) un-muzzle Trump. That alone would be enough to get 10,000 oppo researchers on his case.

And let me be clear. I do think Musk has a few screws loose and that was obvious back when he was trying to buy ICBMs from Russia. He is also absolutely responsible for the creation of the new space race and for every major car company having a great EV. In our current political climate it's become impossible to take the good with the bad. There is only space in public discourse for him to be a hero or a villain. We demand absolute ideological purity from our public figures these days and many folks on the left feel betrayed that he could be anything other a progressive champion.

Money, more than anything is an amplifier, and it has amplified a neuro-atypical man with an unbalanced ego and actual political opinions you might not agree with. He is a real person with massive accomplishments who has enough money to firmly grab the wheel on the ship of our country, not some cardboard cutout of good or evil.

Trump says he doesn’t want to be on Twitter, even if Elon let him back on. That possibility is just being used as a political scare tactic now.

Otherwise pretty spot on comment. Thanks.

I very much disagree that we should take what he says at face value. That has never been a good strategy for predicting his actions in the past.

I'm also not sure what I think of the Twitter purchase. It's been good fun to gag people I don't agree with so I don't have to listen to them, but whenever I get into a (self?)uncensored space I feel the anger and resentment boiling over all around me. I'm pretty sure we can't keep the Overton Window closed this tight for long.

I block early, block often. Keeps my feed manageable. But that's an entirely different thing than the company itself deplatforming people based on supposed "misinformation." Twitter banned doctors who suggested COVID was airborne in 2021, and public health professionals who called for universal mask wearing in 2020. Being able to voice counter-narrative or non-mainstream opinions is exactly how science and society progress, and how we keep our elected governments in check. If Twitter is indeed the "new public square"[1] then I think Elon has a solid argument for keeping it open to all as a free speech platform.

[1] I don't think this is true, btw. Twitter is a bubble, like Reddit and HN. It just happens to be a bubble that includes a bunch of politicians and world thought leaders. But only a quarter of US adults are on Twitter, and many of them use it for niche purposes too.

I prefer the version where this whole thing started with the elonjet kid wanting a Tesla to take the account down.

I'm sure everyone has their own place, but for me it was in general tiwtter, and the final straw was this:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144

Given the presidency of Trump, I don't see how anyone in good faith can say the right hasn't moved -- unless of course you believe the right was always as racist as Trump, the only difference is he said it out loud.

He claims to be "balanced", but I haven't heard him say anything negative about the right, or far-right, except generic statements.

A cartoon about the political center moving to the left? That’s destroying his personal brand?

(The far right has always been bad. They just used to be better at packaging it. Remember Nixon and Kissinger?)

That cartoon that Musk made famous is from Colin Wright, a blogger who considered himself a leftist until gender politics reared itself. Yet Musk and Wright both seemed to forget about the Tea Party revolution and how it morphed into the birther & then Trump 'movements'. His blog's title is 'Reality's Last Stand' - a title of bracing shamelessness considering its political roots. He's quite a fit for Musk, surely.

More like the area Party got co-opted by the same forces that would later give us birthers and Trump. But the Tea Party itself was actually started as more of a mainstream and sensible movement which gave us politicians like Justin Amash. Who, like this cartoon, suddenly found themselves out of alignment with their party. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have moved away from center: a trend since the creation of CSPAN, I would argue.

People have been talking and writing for years about all the awful shit Musk's done. If this is new information to you then you haven't been keeping up at all.

The article leads with Tesla using portable diesel generators to power superchargers on a holiday weekend to meet demand at an essential stopping point between LA and SF—essential because Teslas lack the range to make that trip without recharging. What were they supposed to do, strand their customers in the middle of the Central Valley because demand that weekend exceeded normal capacity? “Hahahaha enjoy Bakersfield, suckers!”

Elon has done some dumb and insensitive things, but this article is a hit piece.

The point of that anecdote was the company lying about making battery swaps available.

That was the pretext for the anecdote. It was mentioned briefly and then forgotten.

> Remember folks, it's politics season. If it reads like a hit piece, ask yourself why someone would want this published now.

Because Elon Musk has been particularly noisy and attention-seeking lately, with the Twitter acquisition drama?

Hardly any more than usual.

>> Because Elon Musk has been particularly noisy and attention-seeking lately, with the Twitter acquisition drama?

> Hardly any more than usual.

No, it is definitely more than usual, or at least it's different in a notable way.

This is such a typical greeny thing. They’d rather tear down anyone who is trying to help because they don’t do it in a perfectly green all the time way regardless of the economic realities. They are simply not driven by goals and outcomes, instead just riding a moral high horse while not actually caring if the world burns down around them. They are actually worse for the environment in every way.

Tesla has struggled to survive as a company economically and the author would prefer the company fail than have to use a little diesel power along the way.

The tone of the article is enough to immediately make you doubt the veracity of the author of the article. The writing drips of sarcasm and vitriol. The comment about unmuzzling Trump as the reason he wants to spend tens of billions of dollars is complete conjecture and to be frank insulting to the intelligence of the reader. If the author is trying to convince anyone who doesn’t already hate Elon Musk, they failed miserably.

I agree that the author failed, but really only in one regard, he didn't call it a cult of personality. Its really just a weird eco-BS-cult that has taken the gap left by traditional religion and inserted itself as part of people's personalities and belief systems, that when attacked for the obvious house of cards that they are, will always jump to defend dear leader at all costs, lest they admit to themselves they were fooled. But hey at least you're in good company. @teslacharts

"On a beautiful day in May 2015, I drove the 13 hours from my home in Portland, Oregon, to Harris Ranch, California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. At the time, Tesla was touting a battery swap station that could send Tesla drivers on their way in a fully powered vehicle in less than the time it takes to fill up a car with gas. Overtaken by curiosity, I had decided to spend a long Memorial Day weekend in California’s Central Valley to see if Elon Musk’s latest bit of dream weaving could stand up to reality.

There, amid the pervasive stench of cow droppings from a nearby feedlot, I discovered that Tesla’s battery swap station was not in fact being made available to owners who regularly drove between California’s two largest cities. Instead, the company was running diesel generators to power additional Superchargers (the kind that take 30 to 60 minutes to recharge a battery) to handle the holiday rush, their exhaust mingling with the unmistakable smell of bullshit.

That one decision to go and find the truth underlying Elon Musk’s promises, rather than just take his word for it, changed my life in ways I never could have anticipated. Now, seven long and often lonely years later, the world seems to be understanding what I learned from the experience: Once you stop taking Musk at his word, his heroic popular image evaporates and a far darker reality begins to reveal itself"

I made the same discovery when I read the Tesla powerwall patents. A bunch of 18650 batteries and nothing more.

I honestly fail to see the issue. Running diesel generators to handle peak demand may not be the greenest move but it was likely the best move before they could come up with a better solution. Should they have left users stranded because they couldn't charge ?

What did you expect from Tesla powerwall ? It's another use of the same battery tech they had in their cars allowing them to use the same supply to build two products. Most of the added value of the powerwall is in the software and the battery management, not in the form-factor of the batteries. I suppose most home batteries are just repackaging batteries used in other industries.

At that time, Tesla claimed to be running battery swap stations, and was receiving massive subsidies from California for it. The entire point of the story is that the battery swaps were not being used even in situations where they would make the most sense, and the alternative was expensive and based on fossile fuels.

The implication is that Tesla was committing fraud, taking the subsidies and not in providing the promised service in exchange.

Battery swap stations still have to charge the batteries being swapped. If diesel was needed for charging the cars, it would have been needed for those too.

The battery swap station was offered to a small subset of owners. From what they claim, the reviews weren't overly positive.

TBH, I prefer charging the battery while in the car over a system like that in general.

Change nothing until you create perfect conditions. No partial steps of experiments allowed. Remember the first car with its 500 mile autonomy, air-conditioned and with Bluetooth for mobile phones invented centuries later. The golden age!

what else could it be, 18650s are the best of battery tech we have ...

18650 is not a battery tech in itself, it's mainly just a form factor.

The revolutionary battery tech which they so generously "open sourced" the patents for.

18650 is just the cell though. What Tesla brought to the table was their battery babysitting tech. Let’s not pretend Tesla hasn’t given us some excellent engineering.

Can you link me to those patents then, because I didn't see them at the time. all I read was that they tested 4 types of batteries, and picked the best one, then wired them up. You had to buy the other equipment seperately to plug them in to your home solar. There was nothing of value in the patents at the time they released the Powerwall.

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