If his popularity is due to what he posts on twitter it would appear that a large proportion of the human race are deranged morons.
Twitter is very popular with a few niche groups: Journalists and people in tech for example. The former is influenced by Elon's antics on Twitter and end up writing news stories or making documentaries [1] about him. People learn about Musk through these respectable publications. The latter group spreads the gospel of Elon's TED talks and press conferences to their friends and family. Being subject matter experts, they're more likely to be believed.
Previously the coverage was mostly positive, but Musk's antics on Twitter have caused both the former and some of the latter to turn slightly negative from what I can tell. For example, it's now a common joke that Elon's wealth is partially due to being born wealthy. His family owned emerald mines. I didn't notice that in the popular consciousness until very recently. Phoney Starks is also making it's way into popular usage.
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/video/NYT-Presents/100000008464087/t...
If owning some natural resource like a mine or two was all it took to become a trailblazing entrepreneur who played a key role in Paypal/Tesla/SpaceX then Musk wouldn't be as popular as he is with many because there would be so many more like him around.
Musk is clearly an extraordinary individual even if he sometimes acts like a dickhead and had a small boost from owning emerald mines. But like I mentioned above if owning a profitable mine of some type was all it took to be an entrepreneur at Musk's level we would be drowning in them and he wouldn't be such a big deal in the first place.
But in the case of Twitter, Musk clearly seems to be in the wrong here legally.
I don't have an opinion on how big being born wealthy plays in his success. Just curious though -- how many profitable mines do you think are in operation and how many people do you think own them as a percentage of total global population?
You can own a gold mine in the California mountains and come out of it with nothing but debt. It would sound like you're rich in the newspaper stories, though.
Who has time for ascertaining the facts when there are politically derived narratives to promote.
Think farms, family businesses, real estate empires, even just well known doctors or other professionals.
Elon Musks family were comfortably upper middle class but really nothing special in terms of wealth. There would be hundreds of thousands of American families as rich alone.
So you have a small sample size - extremely wealthy people. Then you cut that down massively again - those people who also want to run businesses. Then a bunch of other things to narrow the pool lol. But then, finally, you cut it down to "and then the ones who succeed".
I don't think, at that point, the numbers are going to be behind you.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211054942192119808?s=21...
That meant he had a readily available set of investors, advisors, and partners. That ranged from Greg Kouri, pivotal in forming Zip2 and X.com, to Roelof Botha. Roelof is the grandson of Pik Botha, the last apartheid South African foreign minister who had built up extensive connections amongst the US elite.
Success is so much easier when you go to knock on doors and find them already opened for you.
Interestingly though, it was Elon who said his family owned an emerald mine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes...
That was a Forbes interview in 2014.
The relevant section:
> JC: How do you handle fear?
> EM: Company death – not succeeding with the company – causes me a lot more stress than physical danger. But I’ve been in physical danger before. The funny thing is I’ve not actually been that nervous. In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
Who knows what happened between when he was 15 and 17 to his family wealth that made him essentially penniless in a foreign country.
Edit:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375212880790913025
This is where Elon says he arrived in Canada with only ~2500 CAD.
He went to Canada and could rely on his family network.
His estrangement from his father.
Today, you just buy a bunch of likes / retweets to perform the same astroturfing on a larger scale. Bonus points if you "meme" it and "go viral". You want all those people out there to be spreading your message at no cost to you.
A little bit of astroturfing goes a long way. People want to feel as part of a community. So a bit of fake-generated content and fake-interest helps at seeding the crowd and popularity.
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Stage magicians still do this today for entertainment purposes, rather than illegitimately hawking fake snake oil. Its a very good bit of entertainment. It does take some practice but once you get the technique, its quite repeatable.
Turns out that human psychology / group dynamics are in fact, predictable and consistent.
Whether or not this makes most of us deranged morons or not is in the eye of the beholder.
They like the 'vibe' and that's that.
They may not specifically clue into the mapping of 'vaccine hesitation / conspiracy' to 'health outcomes', they might just view it as 'opinion' - which it is of course, but most responsible people understand the 'dots have to be connected'.
I think it's a bit part of the reason why a place like HN won't grasp populism: we are almost by definition 'anti populist' by our very outlook.
Even smart young people are usually busy with school, partying, social things, they don't all have time to parse all of the shifting nonsense, and those that do are more often than not trapped down rabbit holes, I think searching for 'an identity' more than they realize it.
This is populism. We (the crowd) make decisions on rough statements, headlines, a few words here and there, prejudices, assumptions etc.. Some of use a bit smarter than others, almost none of us see our blindspots.