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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

What caused the flip for you?

I'm also a flipped used-to-be-fan. What did it for me was the diving accident behavior and anti-union/overworking sentiment that made me despise him.

Thanks for sharing.

I dont thing the diving accident behavior is something I would fault anyone for. In an emotional time-critical situation he was asked to help. They (Tesla etc) tried to come up with an idea and work on it. Someone else from the actual team became very explicit in his dismissal, Elon responded in kind. Should he have taken the high-road, yes, but considering the situation, people do misspeak. To then say everything after that taints his character forever is just implausible and shows an emotional disconnect itself.

He called one of the divers a pedo, is that what you refer to when you say he misspoke?

"misspeak"

He called the diver a pedophile, hired a private investigator to study him and claimed to Buzzfeed in an email("off the record") that he has evidence of the diver being a rapist and buying his wife, or something to that effect.

All of those were invented lies, but he also won the defamation lawsuit against him, because he's rich and he can do whatever he wants with no consequences.

Oh yeah, he also flew to Thailand for a photo op with the military, showcasing his idiotic submarine while kids were dying in that cave.

He's a narcissistic asshole at best, a sociopath at worst.

I dislike Elon as well. But the diving incident is not something I dislike him for. It was simply an emotional response when that guy insulted his efforts. There's plenty of reasons to hate Elon but this ain't it.

He called the guy a pedo, hired an investigator to look into him, and claimed he was a rapist who bought his wife. There is no defending that. Elon is a massive piece of shit.

I'm not defending anything. Expecting perfection from another person is the problem here. Elon is a person with his own defects. Most people seem to think that someone in the spotlights should be free from flaws and humanity. And if they aren't they should be hated.

I hate this kind of response so much because it downplays the gravity of what Musk tried to do. He literally tried to ruin someone's entire life because he had his ego challenged and wanted to do so with the most grave fallacious accusations you could possibly make. He never apologized or even attempted to fix his mistake. Though given you seem to have a history of defending Musk, I'm guessing you are in fact trying to defend him.

For me it was the tweets on COVID

But even things like the tesla tunnels, and being against public transportation.

Marketing the Auto Pilot. Self driving taxis by 2018 or whatever.

Everyone involved with programming or science in general should have called that a scam from the very begging and I'm still mystified that everyone bought it.

Yeah I definitely called BS on that one from early on. I was surprised at how convinced people were that actual "Full Self Driving" was right around the corner, but it seemed to almost 100% correlate with how much of a Musk fan the individual was, regardless of how much actual programming/ML knowledge they had.

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