> He's a talented motivational speaker
He IS? In what contexts? Because every time I see him speak, it's painful. His delivery is so stilted/awkward, that I think he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen.
He IS? In what contexts? Because every time I see him speak, it's painful. His delivery is so stilted/awkward, that I think he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen.
So someone can be very effective and charismatic while turning off a non-trivial percentage of the people: I've seen this in company executives a whole lot. The people that dislike the CEO will bounce quick, and in the end you end up with a workforce that is very loyal, via self-selection.
So is he a talented speaker? Just by by how many people react well to him, the answer is yes, regardless of how well he might convince you or me.
We're ready to forgive a lot if we suspect behind the awkwardness hides a genius. The trope of the distracted professor, the autistic savant is at least centuries old. He leans into every such trope, and he's very careful in cultivating an image of a "founder", of an "inventor" of an "engineer". Most people by now know he hasn't founded Tesla, or PayPal (was fired from it in fact), he hasn't engineered the SpaceX rockets (although he had a hand in those that blew up), and he in fact has no engineering degree despite claiming otherwise.
So I'd say all this means he's building this image very intentionally, and he's trying to turn his weaknesses into strengths. The more he stutters and repeats, the less we notice how much of what he says is kinda... vapid. Trump has some similar patterns by the way, you can ask him a specific question and he'll say he has great ways of answering that, some of the best people told him he has the best answers, his history of a businessman speaks about long experience providing great answers to all kinds of questions... and he won't answer your question in the end.
Trump and Musk are very different in some ways, but very similar in others.
From that point on we have a choice. Accept increasing chaos and corruption, or build up the missing guardrails we thought were there. However, from what I see, things aren't going strongly in the right direction as I see it, so far...
A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
Exactly. A significant number of people want to see "Iron Man" in him or that he is playing 5D chess and they will fill the gaps to rationalize that image they have made of him.
"I alone can fix it"
I’m wondering if my experience was only my experience, was Elon Musk surrounded by good marketers who made sure the right things were said 10 years ago but he somehow lost them along the way? Because he is definitely not the man with the mystique he used to have for me.
It's a bit like how in Big Brother and other reality shows people first try to show their best side, to show restraint. But over time, and with stress, despite all the cameras, despite the knowledge the world watches, you slowly revert to being yourself.
Hah, I'd never have considered the parallels between Big Brother and Twitter before but you're spot on here - even more so when you consider the existence of Celebrity Big Brother showing that celebrities are - of course - people who act like people do. Musk isn't the only famous person who's been unable to stop revealing who they are on Twitter, but he's certainly the one who's taken it the farthest.