Not trying to be rude, just curious—why are people so obsessed with Elon Musk, whether positively or negatively?
I don't see this kind of attention given to figures like Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, or Warren Buffett.
I don't see this kind of attention given to figures like Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, or Warren Buffett.
It was true before that, and that's because he likes being outrageous in a way that Bezos, Cook, and Buffett don't. We could obsess about them if they wanted it, but they don't seem to want it. They're not totally silent in public but they tend to avoid being especially obnoxious.
Musk bought the platform precisely so that he could amplify his own voice and opinions. It's no surprise that people pay attention.
There is a fascinating contrast between his successes, like Model 3, and subsequent failures in which he stopped listening and, apparently, started telling people around him to just make it work, as in Cybertruck.
I've also covered how the 787 project and the Boeing CEOs of that time are the origin of a lot of Boeing's trouble today, and how Jack Welch was an epic bullshitter, but Elon puts them in the shade for the number of fascinating examples. What's interesting about Tim Cook is how he can make large bets, lose some of them, like the Apple Car, and not create drama, but it's not as interesting as dead chimps and useless holes.
I’ve seen him retweet a false narrative from a local known guy deep in the Blood, Soil, Honour, and Loyalty scene, who has made headlines for posting the most vile content imaginable even going to camps in East-Europe to "train for the race war". And when people makes him aware, he doesn't care one bit.
But that’s not even the main problem. If he claims to be a free speech absolutist, why does Twitter overlook racial slurs and violent threats but deem the word 'cisgender' problematic?
Like “why don’t people give attention to these people for doing a thing they don’t do” is a weird take.
All three work hard to stay out of the public gaze.
For example, Tim Cook kept his sexuality under wraps for decades until he was outed in the media, Warren Buffett almost never criticized sitting officials and living in Omaha means he's out of the media gaze, and before Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO he was notoriously private about his personal life (and is more than making up for it post-CEO life and thus shielding Jassy)
Lots of billionaires are notoriously private - can you name the top 50 richest Americans without resorting to Wikipedia or Forbes?
He could have kept his mouth shut and enjoyed that reputation for the rest of his life, but he seems to crave being in the limelight and especially painting himself as some kind of hero standing up to orthodoxy. When he bought Twitter, a common comparison was to an alcoholic buying a bar and I think that’s really true. He’s thrown away billions on incredibly bad business decisions starting by locking himself into an agreement to pay twice as much as Twitter was worth, financed in a way which immediately created a huge cash flow problem, and promptly drove away enough advertisers to make the problems even worse.
Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, etc. would likely not have bought it in the first place but if they had, it wouldn’t have been amateur hour. They would have paid an appropriate amount, had a business plan which makes sense when sober, and above all they wouldn’t be spouting off in public giving people reasons to leave and linking it so heavily to the corporate brand. If Jeff Bezos was secretly an extreme Republican, he’d be talking in public about how taxes should be lower to help strengthen business or the other kinds of anodyne statements which are priced in for billionaires. If he wanted to funnel money to an extremist candidate or cause it’d be run through industry groups and PACs explicitly to avoid giving Amazon customers a reason to hesitate the next time they’re shopping. Tesla is getting slaughtered because a huge fraction of their prospective buyers have been forced to recognize that their money goes to someone with views they strongly oppose - the CEO of Toyota probably has beliefs I don’t share but I don’t know any of them and it’s not linked to the brand identity, whereas the number of people view a Tesla as a MAGA hat on wheels must be giving their marketing department daily stress headaches.
Tbh, I think this bit is aimed squarely at laypeople. Even people who only work on CRUD apps would likely raise an eyebrow at, say, the “print out your last 60 days of code for review” thing. His ‘hardcore engineering’ thing is blatantly absurd to anyone in the industry, but… maybe convincing to people who aren’t?