If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world, I think you’d forgive them for pissing on your doorstep once or twice a year.

Edit: ok I just saw someone call him “Elongated Muskrat” so now there is someone who is mad at him in the thread :-)

I think you've hit on more here. I think Musk has become associated with Trump. I think that might be because Trump is the champion of the losers of globalisation, and Musk is also a hero to those people because (a) he has created a lot of manufacturing jobs and (b) is creating a sense of patriotic pride in some of his achievements... just see SpaceX staff chanting "USA USA". I'm not criticising anyone, just drawing a connection.

So I think after reading these posts and talking to others, that Musk is hated because he is part of the war between left and right. To praise Musk is to praise Trumpism, and to hate Musk is to show you are against Trump.

It’s pretty clear he leans right so that makes him an enemy of a lot of people automatically.

If he leaned left, nobody would care. Hell, they’d probably encourage it.

Yeah, no. He was that much richer even at birth, whose father owns an emerald mine?!

People like to think that but in my experience there are far more brilliant nice people than brilliant assholes. This is the mythos antisocial engineers tell themselves to justify their poor social skills.

A "bell end", if you will.

Personally, I thought he was a cool guy building a revolutionary car.

But once I saw his hour long talk on how he was going to build a Mars colony, the fact that he was actually a Tesla investor - not a founder(the super fast LI ion lotus had already been demonstrated to him when he invested) and his absurd claims about AGI - I realized he was completely out of his mind. I have been skeptical of his personality since 2014, even as I held TSLA shares.

Yes he is able to manage and productionize probably the best car on the road right now and maximize Tesla shareholder value, but he is a shell of a person beyond that.

I will admit to having a few feelings of jealousy of the founders I know who have done far far better than o have on the game of building big companies, but that is also mixed with happiness for them.

With Musk, it's different. It's sadness and disappointment, to see someone throw away so much goodwill and be such a horrible person. Some of this is the media becoming adversarial with tech, while at the same time profiting off the hype bubble that the media itself created for Musk. But I view him as a lost man that needs a better support network and a slightly better filter so that he stops looking so foolish all the time.

There’s no way Russia loses this war if it doesn’t escalate beyond local conflict. The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering, not lines on maps from 2015.

Stopping recurring monthly donations of something very expensive is also not “blackmail”.

>According to whom?

I found that time he called a diver who was trying to save those kids a pedophile to be pretty revealing. Also, calling himself "Lorde Edge" was pretty awful. I suppose if you're asking "who has the right to tell him not to say that?" the answer is "no one", but I find it hard to respect the guy when he acts so childishly.

(Thanks also to whoever un-downed me, as it is from genuinely wanting to understand).

The last link is paywalled, but I doubt that is really his motive. It sounds silly. There was plenty of outspoken criticism against that highspeed rail link without a Musk conspiracy theory. He gave an interview on the BBC where he was similarly bemused by how poor our high speed efforts were, and his criticism was fair.

I'm not sure we can see incidents in very large organisations as indicative of the character of the CEO. For sure he is ultimately to answer for them, and has a responsibility to sort them out, but Tesla employees about 100 000 people and in any sample of people that large you'll have some horrible ones.

Someone else told me about the harassment suit today, now that is directly attributable to Musk and awful. Are there other such incidents?

Still, doesn't seem to explain the sheer hatred for the man. I do have a different theory about that having spoken to others, which I'll post elsewhere...