I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. I’ve heard silly things like - he doesn’t do anything, it’s all his employees or board or assistant - but reading the history that’s obviously false.
It does seem some people can’t cope with the idea that someone is often an asshat is also brilliant. And I’m afraid it’s true with Musk.
It's also worth keeping in mind that super smart people can say and do lots of really dumb things. Smart != wise.
I doubt it. He was born into money and was lucky enough to make some excellent purchasing decisions. His various talks and arguments on the internet show him to be fairly stupid in my opinion. I've heard tell that his successful businesses are mainly successful when the staff learn how to manage Musk and prevent his dumbest ideas.
Basically: he's extremely rich
Working hard and being very good at negotiating compensation packages and picking the right companies/products to be involved with (and a bit of luck) are all sufficient for exorbitant wealth though.
E.g. there are plenty of people just as smart as Bezos who didn't hitch their wagon to the "sell something easy on the web" idea at the right time
It was sufficiently awful, at first I couldn't even believe he'd done it. When I internalised that he was the kind of person to do that, it made it much easier to see his other flaws.
He meticulously worked on his image for decades.
>According to Fergus, the character was inspired by an amalgam of real people — but none so much as Elon Musk.
Basically: yes, Musk is just like Stark. Half as smart as he thinks he is, has main-character syndrome and/or narcissism.
I have a hypothesis that the Hedonic Treadmill[1] can cause actual harm to the human brain; I suspect that over time, in certain brains, extreme wealth erodes the reward centers such that some rich people can't help but be miserable, flailing for ever-elusive life satisfaction. It seems like a fairly serious bug in human software.
Yes.
People's true nature reveals once they stop caring about money.
To be fair, he was really good at faking.
I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive.
Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races.
Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia.
I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank.
You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome.
"politics":
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Beyond the veracity of those numbers, it is a political decision whether or not the US should be spending $150B on foreigners or Americans.
And from what I remember, we weren't supposed to force others to follow our morals.
Yes, Harvard and The Lancet are just wildly political.
>Beyond the veracity of those numbers ...
In addition to being incompetent slouches.
Unfortunately, we can multiply any given figure by 0.01 and still get something that amounts to mass murder.
>... it is a political decision whether or not the US should be spending $150B on foreigners or Americans.
A proper political decision wouldn't have involved an abrupt rug pull on a bipartisan program that's been operating for the better part of a century.
There's this thing called continuity that's usually taken very seriously. Especially when hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives are hanging in the balance.
This doesn't mean I can't admire NASA, that I have to dismiss the Hoover Dam, that I think every act by Obama or Bush was heinous.
Likewise, I can look at Falcon 9/Heavy, at the progress with Starship, and applaud.
But.
His "Paint is Black" video, and what he claimed about it, was a lie. He himself is pretty awful, and already fits amongst the others you list given the revealed preferences shown by Grok, and by his reactions to criticism of Grok's behaviour.
The bonus-target market-cap of 8 trillion only makes sense with a very optimistic view of the AI Tesla's developing for both FSD and Optimus, and by "very optimistic" I mean "FSD turns them into a monopoly supplier of cars worldwide; or both FSD and Optimus together displace a significant fraction of the US low-skill jobs market while also getting a monopoly on industrial robots and a monopoly on cars in just the USA". It's the kind of thing I expect we'll be putting into history lessons next to Enron and Dutch Tulips, with laws passed to prevent whatever investigators find out to be the key mechanism behind it.
Even with SpaceX, it's impressive, but not because it actually hits Musk's goals, rather because everyone else in space is "over optimistic" about their schedules even harder than Telsa is.
I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well:
"Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security."
I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-t...
Also, didn't Musk publicly quit Trump's advisory councils over exiting the Paris Agreement back in 2017? Why does that rift not qualify for your "separating politics" hypothesis?
Not OP ... but it would be consistent with observations. It is a party that admires lying and rewards it.
If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.
Musk was even then a polarising figure, but given Tesla was arguably more “American” than even the self-proclaimed traditional American car companies, it seemed a weird, self-defeating, perhaps emotional, position for the administration to take.
I don't know either really, I'm just reporting remembered second-hand sources.
So, why were Ford, GM and Stellantis there but Tesla wasn't? Because Tesla was already making EVs only, because none of its workforce is a part of UAW (due to Tesla being anti-union) and because this EO had no impact on Tesla's workforce what so ever. Elon being butthurt about it doesn't change the fact that it would've made zero sense to have Tesla there.
You don't have to take my word for it, Jen Psaki directly addressed this at a press briefing:
> Asked if Tesla being a nonunion company was the reason it wasn’t included Thursday, Psaki replied, “Well, these are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/tesla-snub-white...
(The quote sounds simply like "we excluded Tesla because they are anti-union"...)
He did not leaned a little right. He had the same political opinions, but less of narcissist rage over not being admired.
Somewhere along the road he devolved into a petty and weird character, and then went off the deep end into full spectrum alt-right weirdness.
He is the same type of talented hype man as Jobs was, with the same sort of reality distortion field. Otherwise SpaceX reusable wouldn't have happened. And even Jensen Huang was supremely impressed how fast xAI built up data centers.
But there's also definitely been a change. He publicly endorsed Democrat candidates on numerous occasions, including against normie business-friendly Republicans. Think his metamorphosis in actual unfiltered views is best shifted from the "I absolutely support trans but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare" to his current campaigns...