I cannot understand the Stan culture for Elon. I get it for the military guys who tell you to lift and make your bed. I get it for Joe Rogan. I get it for the MMA masculinity influencers. I get it for Trump and DeSantis. I do not get it for Elon.
Except... of course... it's not that simple. "First-principles" thinking is a nice buzzword and it's rooted in some truth, but it's an excuse for university engineering graduates to ignore real world problems and consequences, and jump to solutions that are certainly disruptive, but often disruptively bad, and rarely overall an improvement from the status quo. It's pure naivety, and as someone with a lot of self confidence from unearned privilege, it's something I'm constantly battling against inside myself. Can I really do a better job than experts? Probably not.
Is SpaceX much better than competitors? Yes, but not entirely because of first-principles thinking, there was a lot of winning the right contracts and clever business decisions from Gwynne Shotwell. Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price. What about Twitter? Well Musk dropped in to a working business to re-evaluate everything with that first-principles thinking and look where it's got him. He was naive. He didn't value the expertise of those actually doing the job for years, and he's effectively destroyed the business.
So yeah, I get why people like him, and in moderation I think those aspects are worthy of respect. However Musk doesn't do moderation, and so it just comes across as naive.
And yet, Tesla makes like 10x the profit of German car makers per vehicle sold [1].
The established car makers still, over a decade after the first Tesla rolled on the streets, haven't come close to realizing just how screwed they are... the biggest threat to Tesla isn't the established car makers, it's Chinese BYD.
Don't get me wrong: Musk is despicable as a person. But those working under him have truly created awesome things.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/elon-musks-guerilla-taktik...
At this point, I'm embarrassed to have done so, and seriously doubt even those accomplishments, which I now credit far more to the people around him accomplishing despite Elon rather than due to his influence (not that he deserves zero credit, but far less than he gets or wants).
Aside from the kind of recent entitled asshattery and actively promoting authoritarian propaganda while claiming it's all "centrist" (perhaps it is from an apartheid point of view..., what undid it for me was his public exchanges with Twitter engineers in late '22, just displaying brazed BS and ignorance while trying to belittle everyone. What a smug, ignorant, blustering, asshat, wasting everyone's time, all for his own inadequate ego.
A narcissist has two important parts. One is a desperate hunger for status. The other is a grandiose false self that they see as sufficient to justify their importance. Narcissists put amazing time and energy into constructing and performing the false self. If you've ever met one in person, they can be amazingly compelling.
But what if somebody has the same deep emotional hunger but lacks the ability to construct the false self? One path is developing a realistic sense of self and balanced emotions. But what if they don't?
My theory is that they are prone to attaching their identity to an existing narcissist. They become fans, even superfans. They adopt their opinions. They buy their products. They identify with the narcissist's public false self.
So I think Elon's stans are the ones who, if they were big boy narcissists, would have a false self like "Elon the billionaire playboy technoking". They see themselves as brilliant first-principles thinkers who can sweep into a room and by the sheer power of their genius make vast improvements over whatever the petty mortals previously present were doing.
There but for the grace of god go I, honestly.
Making spaceflight exciting again was huge and it must have taken an incredible engineering effort to get semi-reliable high-definition live streams from multiple angles on and around rockets.
And then Twitter brain.