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Comment by llamaLord | Hacker News Reader

IMO - my theory is that 5 years ago Musk was successful enough that regular people in the tech industry admired him, but not so successful that most people who admired him realised he was substantially more successful than they were ever going to be.

These days though, it’s quite clear to the 250k a year tech-guy that, even though they’re making bank, they’re never going to be “Elon rich”, and so the jealousy disguised as virtue has come out in full swing.

Is he perfect? Of course he fucking isn’t… we work in tech, we all work with atleast one “brilliant ass-hole”… they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.

Elon is just the end of that bell-curve.

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> they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.

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.

> People like to think that but in my experience there are far more brilliant nice people than brilliant assholes

Yep 100%, this has been my experience too

And it takes some emotional evolution to realize that. I too once upon a time was the former, until I realized that such a person is the most annoying and unremarkable personality ever. I wouldn’t hang out with me 8 years ago, was kind of a grade A douche, and my code wasn’t great. But I made money, so I always thought the ends justified the means.

Alternatively, 5 years ago the reaction was "oh, the tesla/spacex guy? those are cool companies, guess he must be pretty cool", but since then he's made himself more of a celebrity which comes with much more visibility on those actions. As a result people are now judging based on actions they've heard about rather than the top line of a bio summary

I don’t think it’s jealousy. I think his politics are clearly making him “the bad guy”.

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.

There are a lot of people here very clearly articulating the issues they have with Musk - usually related to some bad tweets, but also more serious things like the sexual harassment - so there's no need to speculate that it's in any way related to his political leaning. Besides, it was only recently that he declared himself to be a supporter of the GOP, long after the tide of public opinion started to turn on him (and even perhaps because of it)

> he was substantially more successful than they were ever going to be.

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

Are you suggesting that being born into wealth negates a person from being successful in their own right?

Doesn’t negate, but it is such a huge boost that it is basically playing the tutorial vs on hard mode.

And regardless of wealth, Elon’s only actual contribution was paypal, which is.. well, paypal (I quite literally left some money in that because it was so scammy I couldn’t even rescue it by donation..), and funding tesla (not inventing anything!). The latter is pretty much impossible without some form of privilege.

Whose father _claims_ to own an emerald mine, for which there is no actual proof. Not to mention that it is well established that Musk does not have a good relationship with this father, so whatever wealth Musk Sr. may or may not have, doesn't help Elon. So what's your point other than trying to spread misinformation?

Yep, sure. We all know how humble Elon is and is absolutely not the type of person who would sell this “self-made men” image of himself to the public to look better? “He came to the US with a few hundreds dollars and everything is his accomplishment”…

Even if family wealth only helped him through insanely good relations to other people in the top 1%, it is still all that much more than you will likely ever achieve/get. And I frankly don’t buy this “daddy doesn’t love me” BS.

Five years ago was also before he showed his ass throwing around the term pedophile to describe people working on the Tham Luang cave rescue

This is preposterous, a tech worker is never going to be as wealthy as Elon in 2010, unless they starter thinking of themselves as a founder instead of a worker.

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.

So the 250k tech guy thought he could level up to the 20B elon musk, but once musk crossed over the 200B mark they got jealous?

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.

> the end of that bell-curve

A "bell end", if you will.

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