Goodbye, Elon | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye, Elon

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19 pointskirubakaran21 comments

I guess i'm jaded, but I find it hard to relate to this kind of hero worship -- maybe i'm just from a different era or region or whatever but i'd find it personally embarrassing as an adult to talk about my broken-heart that was caused by the actions of some distant hero figure, if i had one. (Maybe Knuth counts..)

if author is here, really -- I don't say this to try to be rude to you or anyone else with a similar reaction; I just don't get it. It's simply unsurprising to me that a person in that position would act ruthlessly -- that's exactly how they got to that point, no?

>Elon entered the stage in his early 30s with the creation of Tesla and SpaceX (haters be damned, those are his companies).

aside : Elon by no means entered the stage in his 30s, unless you're referring to your own attention towards him. Maybe that's the difference -- I remember PayPal Mafia Musk and all those smug twenty-something interviews, maybe that flavors my view.

I found it really hard to get through the article because I simply can't imagine fawning over someone like that. It's creepy to start with, but when the fawning is over such a ridiculous manbaby it's even weirder.

I guess it's hard for some people to come to grasp that intelligent tech people may hold different views on life than the current zeitgeist. It doesn't make them evil. It used to be that people who thought differently were respected for making other people think harder. Now you just label them evil or if you're trying to be charitable write a long essay psychoanalyzing them.

> doesn't make them evil

The author doesn’t say evil. He says Elon’s lost, broken, unhelpful, wasteful, shameful and spiteful. None of that is as reductive as evil.

elon is not evil in the same way a lawnmower chewing off your leg isn't evil. Don't ascribe emotion, nuance, wisdom, or really any sort of normal human behavior to him.

If you don’t ascribe any sort of normal human behavior to him then it seems that you don’t understand humanity.

Totally agree, he's accomplished big things and has a ton of inspiring qualities, but once you get that powerful picking fights and trolling starts to feel like punching down and harms people's lives and doesn't seem like a reasonable way to behave regardless of politics.

You think Elon is punching down when he’s commenting and picking fights with politicians? Politicians are one of the most powerful people in the world.

I remember Elon accusing a rescue worker of pedophilia and then doubling down on his claim by elaborating on his reasons for believing that rescue worker specifically has sex with underaged Thai boys. Elon is willing to truly destroy people for offending him on social media.

I'm sure he will be so distraught to hear this.

Same boat. Was so inspired and on board, even recently. I see what others say about him but it didn’t effect me, even as practically every colleague I know complained. I am no longer a supporter in my heart.

My rationale is personal, suddenly. Those things stack up but I saw something specific that made me lose trust in what matters to me, thought I dont think it matters to most people. I want him to succeed so Im not a hater, I want him to push ahead for humanity if he will, with SpaceX, Tesla, the mind pong monkey, the bots.. I still haven't come to terms with reconciling that I wouldnt of thought it could be true, but I saw it myself in real time....manipulating information on twitter. I submitted a thread here about it with screenshots.

I feel bad for the author and young people in general. In the age of TikTok it is pretty much impossible for most kids to be well informed.

It's not impossible. Just don't get your news from Tik tok.

There's always been a tik tok equivalent, every other generation managed. It's seems to be older people that can't filter the new media.

Its amazing how people do not make the same fuss for Murdoch owning a significant part of the media or Bezos buying WaPo and starting to shill for the defense industry etc. Not that CNN et al are different - its just that their majority shareholders are hidden behind more layers of investment.

They do, just not here.

"better to test the legal system and ultimately waste a ton of money buying a failing company, because people on it are using it to call you names."

This is such a bad interpretation of what happened, its akin to functinoal illiteracy.

I am sure he'd be so devastated, he'd move it to the other trouser leg.

> poking at the establishment in the wrong ways

Ummm, why’s that a bad thing?

The article reads like a pathetic cry baby rant honestly. Author seems to want someone to do certain things certain way and not do certain things because he thinks certain things are somehow more valuable for him than others.

surely there's greater things to aim for in the world than shitposting on twitter

So I deeply respect the accomplishments of SpaceX. As much as SpaceX depends on government handouts (like all of Elon's companies), launch contracts are so often "cost plus" contracts so there's really no economic incentive to create a reusable launch system. I understand how SpaceX led to hero worship. It's really hard to gel SpaceX with everything else Elon has done however because he's basically failed upwards his entire career otherwise:

1. The myth of being self-made. Elon's father owned an emerald mine in Zambia and family money launched his career;

2. Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. It was rescued by a government loan based on a claim of funding he didn't actually have. He used securing that loan to get the funding. That's basically fraud;

3. Elon is incredibly thin-skinned, to the point of calling one of the Thailand cave rescuers a "pedo guy" for insulting his submarine. He won the defamation suit by bsaically lying that this was South African slang [2]. He went further and hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on the guy [3];

4. More thin-skinned ego: his attempt to rewrite history as founding or creating Tesla. He bought in;

5. Tesla (and SolarCity) basically only exist by government largesse through EV subsidies and carbon credits;

6. When SolarCity failed, owing a bunch of money to SpaceX, Elon bailed it out by Tesla buying SolarCity;

7. Cybertruck anyone?

8. Teslas aren't actually great as cars. For example, the motors for seat adjustment are so unreliable that a software update was pushed to limit your ability to adjust them due to the inevitable failure this would cause;

9. Using Twitter to engage in securities fraud;

10. Elon was fired from Paypal;

11. Elon bordered on being a COVID and vaccine denier and reopened his Tesla factory in violation of public health directives, which caused hundreds of cases;

12. His politics are predictably awful;

13. He basically bought Twitter as a result of going down the alt-right rabbit hole and impulsively entered a $44 billion deal he couldn't back out of because the other side had way better lawyers and/or (I suspect this is also true) he didn't listen to his own lawyers;

14. He really has no choice now but to cut costs and hope to sell the business to get out of it in the next few years. In doing so, he's destroying confidence in tdhe platform for users and advertisers, going so far as to claim activists are destroying "free speech" [4].

15. Elon is getting his ass eaten on Twitter over everything going on and predictably can't handle it due to being a thin-skinned egomaniac, for example (allegedly) "bricking" AOC's account [5].

16. As further evidence of his awful politics, he tweeted (and quickly deleted) a link to a conspiracy site pushing a right-wing conspiracy that the home invasion and attack on Paul Pelosi was in fact a feud between gay lovers [6].

I'm honestly glad many people are waking up to just how cringe and annoying Elon Musk actually is.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911072/tesla-seat-contr...

[3]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-unswo...

[4]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-advertisers-m...

[5]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-04/alexandria-ocasio-cor...

[6]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-paul-pelosi-tweets-li...

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