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Comment by MPSimmons | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Elon's trajectory has been absolutely unbelievable since 2019 or so. Talk about a guy who cratered his whole reputation. It's a shame.

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What changed is he took the mask off. He was always the sleaze that he is today, but a lot of us were fooled into believing he wanted to do something good.

I think the vast majority of people that operate at that level of success have a similar mask, but they’re more successful in managing it.

What caused Elon to lose his ability to manage it is subject for debate, I personally believe he discovered drugs in 2019 and the rest is history.

He brought good things due to high-conviction bold moves though, like democratizing EVs, reusable rockets, and most of all, actual internet in airplanes.

Is it accurate to say Tesla democratized EVs? The Roadster came out in 2008 but was over $100k. Over its lifetime they only sold around 2500. It was always a rich person's car.

The first 21st century EV in the US that was aimed at a more mainstream mass market was the Nissan Leaf which launched in late 2010, and in the first year sold 4x as many units Tesla Roadster's lifetime sales.

Tesla took a significant step toward an EV for the less rich with the Model S in 2012. It was still a lot more expensive than a Leaf (about 80%ish more for a base Model S) but way less than the Roadster.

The Leaf was the world's best selling EV in 2011-2014 and 2016, and in 2020 was the first to reach 500k sales.

It wasn't until 2017 with the model 3 that Tesla had a car that, like the Leaf, was priced in the range typical middle class families could afford. That's when they took off, and they caught up and passed Leaf in cumulative sales in early 2021.

Yes, credit where credit is due, he achieved a lot, and was instrumental in both SpaceX and the whole EV transition.

He just took a wrong turn and seems hell bent on staying on it.

- he most certainly did not democratize EVs, although he said the plan all along was to make cheap EVs it wasn’t until other car companies started “democratizing” EVs that his had was forced (and delayed)

- we had internet (and still do) in planes that have nothing to do with starlink

His contact with Epstein began in 2012.

What changed is that he doesn't have a publicist filtering his nonsense anymore.

> What changed is he took the mask off.

I think long-term drug use changed his brain and turned him bad.

Looks like ketamine therapy worked (I’m no shaming)?

I don't agree after reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Elon. It's deeply unfortunate that the book is already a few years old, I'd love and buy the hell out of a 2nd edition that is updated with the last few years.

Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.

Googling a little, he was a dem:

>Having reportedly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Musk even voiced his pro-Dems alignment in 2022 when he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he had “strongly supported Obama for President” in 2007.

I think he turned after Tesla was snubbed at Biden's 2021 EV summit because although it was the US's largest EV maker it wasn't unionized and Biden was in with the unions.

I can sort of see that being annoying.

He supports Trump now, so I really doubt free speech is important to him.

Free speech erosion under Biden... can you elaborate?

Nothing productive will come out of this conversation.

There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).

Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.

The number of media outlets that spiked the laptop story is shameful.

There really isn’t a good excuse.

The administration put pressure on tech companies to make them censor people for "disinformation". For example:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

Remind me who was president in 2020..

Fair, that one wasn't a good example for this.

Though IMHO it's not just a Biden problem, it's a "everybody in power" problem. They just can't seem to resist (ab)using their power to shape the conversation and censor their opponents. It's also not new, it's been happening for hundreds of years at least. But it did get a lot more brazen under Biden IMHO with Twitter/Facebook etc and admin officials telling private companies what to censor (err, "moderate").

Damn it's really an infringement on our rights that they cracked down on people yelling "fire" in a crowded theater

This is your regularly mandated PSA that the quote about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" comes from Schenck v US, which used that analogy to justify why the government could ban people from protesting the draft in WW1. It is not good law anymore, and has been fully superseded since the Brandenburg v Ohio case which limited the exemption to "imminent lawless action."

Oh well when you put it that way, I guess it's good that kids are dying of measles again.

Read the links. It wasn't just that. People from the administration were actively talking with social media companies and telling them to take stuff down. At some points they even demanded it.

andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?

twitters own lawyers argue against this reading in 2023, see page 11 onwards:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.38...

They didn't. Fbi told Facebook etc to be on the lookout for Russia pushing stories to influence elections etc, they didn't ask them to do anything specific. Bidens campaign did ask Twitter to remove nudes of his son, which already broke Twitters own rules. This is why the twitterfiles were a nothing burger.

2018 (tham luang cave rescue) is when the cracks really started showing up, so the trajectory was probably set a while earlier.

The tendency was probably always there given the serial lying about self driving started circa 2015, or the weird ego trip of ousting the founders and getting himself called co-founder, but if we’re looking for a point event the removal of his long time PA in 2014 still stands out to me.

He really managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Really? What was it you liked about him before, but not now?

The man lead an electric car company and a reusable rocket company to succes. What is not to like?

And yet he's only about 500B richer than the second richest person in the world:

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

So? I’d much rather be one of the lesser billionaires and still have my reputation, scruples, and dignity.

What did he do specifically to crater his reputation?

Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.

Two very public Nazi salutes without any attempt to deny it afterwards will certainly crater anyone's reputation. It's not really politics, but more a question of humanity, but then people don't become billionaires without having a contempt for others and a desire to underpay and mistreat everyone you come into contact with.

He did deny it multiple times on Twitter/X. Probably your news source of choice is the one which omitted this fact.

I think it probably did look a bit that way and maybe he did it for engagement, maybe he intended to create controversy or maybe it was none of these things. In any case, it wasn't an actual Nazi salute.

> He did deny it multiple times on Twitter/X

That's interesting - have you got a link?

Dude did a Nazi salute and made a speech in support of the neonazi party in Gernany.

I think we got a few steps beyond "reasonable beliefs".

I mean, perhaps it is reasonable for you, but then we will find very little common ground.

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