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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

Elon Derangement Syndrome is real, like the Trump equivalent.

It's worse. Elon was very well praised by the same people, Trump was never liked.

To be fair, it's possible that he changed, rather than that everyone who now hates him did.

Many people regard Elon as a hero or villain. I regard him as a tragedy: A great entrepreneur who wrecked his sanity due to drugs, genetics, and/or overwork.

If you read his ex-wife's account of their history together, and also the drama of what happened at PayPal etc... he was always kinda .. off.. and full of shit.

Then again, I often think that about myself. But I'm not a trillionaire.

It does sound like losing his first child at 10 weeks really messed him up. It definitely would do that to anybody.

What if insanity is required to be a great entrepreneur?

I guess if that’s how you have to make yourself feel better about the worlds first trillionaire and his success after success, have at it.

I don’t even understand what this comment is trying to imply

It's saying Elon is better than you because he's richer, and as we all know, capitalism is a meritocracy.

He seems like a pretty miserable guy though. Tons of pressure, no real friends, utterly and very visibly failed doge, almost universally despised completely of his own doing.

It's not him who's wrecked. It's just some poor souls who cant't stand how right he is while he expresses that with autistic crudeness.

Musk is the same guy he was 10 years ago, still working his ass off on visionary projects, beating rest of the world on those fronts. And we love him for that!

The thing is, it's difficult to tell what his opinions actually are when he's so committed to trolling and being crude. Even if you sussed them all out and agreed with them, he wouldn't be someone you'd want to emulate, just on the basis that he has a hard time articulating anything consistently. If it's the crudeness that you love, then I guess the opinions themselves take a back seat. But at that point you're just cheering for an agent of chaos, rather than having a consistent set of beliefs of your own.

Nope, I appreciate being unapologetically right. Instead of lying and causing other harms just to satisfy fee-fees.

  > cant't stand how right he is

That's.... convenient. No need to interrogate the stated reasons why someone you admire is not universally and uncritically beloved. I'll just ignore the reasons they themselves repeatedly give and instead assume they actually hate how correct he is about everything. Despite the things he was famously wrong about like COVID cases in 2020 going to 0 in a matter of weeks.

If you have to dig that far, you're not doing very well.

Being truth-seeking means you're willing to be wrong more times than your opponents, which do statements that say nothing instead. He takes an engineering approach to all problems, and yes that sometimes means painful iteration, but at least he has the _chance_ of arriving at truth and right solutions. We owe people that take that brunt this whole world.

Great entrepreneur is a bit of a far fetch. His own friends(?) didn't want him to be CEO of paypal back in the day.

He's just serving the profitable market niche of incompetent CEOs with golden parachutes

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