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Comment by jiwidi | Hacker News Reader

It is fun to see the fall of Musk, I don't know anyone who defends him at this point, everyone I know (myself included) have changed how we think of him since he acquired twitter. He has become an egocentric man with need for acceptance.

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I'll defend him, he's done great work at SpaceX and Tesla, and I hope he can somehow accept that he's failed at Twitter/X and move back to doing great work at Tesla/SpaceX. I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, he's got too much money, but people can do great things and not necessarily have admirable character overall or only have admirable traits in certain contexts.

Edit: I'm ejecting this thread, Musk discourse is so divorced from rational conversation, the hatred (and admiration) is too overpowering for too many.

Hope Musk ever takes a company public again. The anti-Musk aura means there’s decent odds of a far-below-real valuation in the public markets.

Can you explain to those who never saw anything in him, what you originally saw in him, and what changed?

I originally thought he seemed alright, when Tesla and SpaceX started to look like viable companies doing good and interesting stuff.

Then he started fucking around with trying to fool the financial system by pumping and dumping stocks/cryptocurrencies, and started calling people pedophiles randomly and I'm guessing it was somewhere there I started to see him differently.

That was 4 years ago, long time before he buy Twitter.

I think the early years of Tesla (around the Model S release) were peak Musk in my mind. It was nice to see someone pursuing a technology that would reduce the need for fossil fuels. He was also not yet posting constantly, so his public image mostly stemmed from the companies he was involved in.

> He has become an egocentric man with need for acceptance.

Everyone has a need for acceptance and is driven by their ego. I think Musk's issues may lie a bit beyond those.

Wanting to see the failure of one of the few people who have made lasting important contributions to humanity, and inspires millions of builders to achieve big things, is a sad way to live life. It's frankly anti-progress and anti-humanity.

Inspired or hired? You make it sound like he has sacrificed everything and gave us perfect electric vehicles out of the goodness of his heart, when he's just a guy selling products with famously questionable build quality. And while he simultaneously puts dumb gimmicky things in his vehicles like "Gaming consoles" to jack up the price, he trolls other companies trying to make electric vehicles affordable so we can actually impact the planet and not just build toy cars for the few people that can afford them.

I don't understand the tendency to portray Elon Musk like a civil rights leader.

What I see is a man who has done some great things, but who seems to be having some mental health issues that are getting worse over time. If he isn’t already, I hope he gets some help.

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