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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

Musk strikes me as a guy that keeps succeeding despite his bad ideas because the system is so rigged that getting wealthy off one good bet can sustain you forever. I mean, his track record this entire decade is proposterously stupid (cybertruck, twitter, everything he says on twitter, the CSAM and deepfake creation engine known as grok, DOGE, etc.). When his companies succeed, its mostly because the people he's hired treat him like a toddler they need to appease while keeping him out of the important things. To me he's not a positive example, he's an embarassment that demonstrates that being rich does not require insight or intelligence.

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Why is it that people focus on the negatives. I'm not going to pick apart the whole comment but World's first self-landing rocket ship and best selling electric car in the world are not figments of a "system is rigged that getting wealthy off one good bet can sustain you forever".

I focus on the negatives because they're so massive. Elon didn't even start Tesla, he was an investor that forced the founder out. I'll concede that SpaceX is a little better, but even then a lot of his ideas are profoundly stupid (while I think colonizing the solar system is worthwhile, doing it on Mars is very dumb. You'd need to build underground bunkers so people don't die of cancer from radiation, and there aren't that many useful natural resources there. The moon is much more useful from a practical standpoint of creating easier access to the rest of the solar system, and Titan makes a lot more sense for a sustainable colony. But Elon is a toddler so he just went "Mars!!")

Lets throw in a few more of Elon's failures, this time lets focus on the ones that are outright dangerous or killing people!

- In an accident, the Cybertruck has frequently trapped people inside the vehicle and caused them to burn to death when the batteries catch fire because they hid the manual release on the doors for aesthetic reasons, so people couldn't get out. Also the unbreakable glass means that people spent their final moments desperately trying to smash an unbreakable window while burning to death. People have died from this! It was totally predictable and preventable! https://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-woman-killed-cybertruck-cr...

- Fully self driving. Hasn't happened, and a lot of the danger is because he wanted to cheap out on lidar and brashly overpromised on its capabilities.

Lets also focus on some of the funny ones that came from his need for validation, like needing people to think he's a great gamer: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/20/elon-musk-stan... (why would any adult not involved in E-Sports even want to convince their peers they're great at gaming? Like, who cares?!)

Even when he has a good idea like Starlink he ruins it by awful about it (shutting it off for entities he disagrees with).

This guy should not be anyone's hero.

Hey thanks for the throrough response. I see your point, but I think anyone with their whole life on display would have plenty of failures to go with the successes. For FSD, I believe its done - see the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwMlAj1tpQg

It is true that most of us wouldn't look great under a microscope, but the way I see it Elon very obviously wants attention, and he very obviously wants to change the world in dramatic ways that he should be accountable for (whether positive or negative), so scrutiny is entirely fair.

The man's had failures and he's had successes. What did he do to you that you'd spend this much time and effort focusing on his failures instead of going out and building your own thing?

I am building my own things. But when someone is having a massively negative impact on society because they've bought way more influence than they really deserve, I think it's entirely fair to call them out on it. I mean, the dude bought twitter so he could shape online discourse. That's very worthy of scrutiny! Also the Musk fan club really needs a reality check.

> World's first self-landing rocket

The Buran, a soviet spaceplane very similar to the space shuttle, landed autonomously

Suspiciously similar. Also, it didn't land like a rocket.

You’ve cherry-picked two successful examples but ignored all his failures. He wasn’t even solely responsible for those two successes. He didn’t found Tesla. He didn’t even found PayPal. He’s not an aerospace engineer. The number one predictor of future wealth and success is starting with wealth to begin with.

I think he genuinely broke his brain during the Model 3 ramp up. They were in production hell for something like a year, and he hasn’t been quite right ever since. Maybe that was just the point at which he got rich enough to stop caring what other people think, though.

I think Musk actually wasn't in it for the money.

He made all the money first the silicon valley way (paypal) and then decided to actually make and sell non-software/ip things that physically exist. I think that is actually hard. And if successful very valuable.

Although making software isn't easy, I think there are lots of silicon valley types who create IP, but enter a super-competitive market. IP can be valuable, but it might be quick and easy to spool up a competitor and/or copy it.

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