Ever listen to a kid with a model car rattle off horsepower, 0-60 time, engine displacement, and other facts?
The child does not understand what that means, not really. They might know the dictionary definitions for those words, but the kid doesn’t have the context to understand what it means in a useful way. They just memorize the stats because they’re neat.
That’s what Elon is.
Elon is a trained programmer who doesn’t understand code. It’s painfully apparent he has no understanding of what he’s talking about once he starts talking on a subject you know intimately… Dude is actually an idiot. An absolute joke. His thinking is laughably superficial
He’s also pretty terrible with people, but he sold the “awkward nerd” persona very well. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about - but he knows how to make it seem like he just can’t properly express himself to a layman
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 days ago
No, he’s shown zero technical skills across his lifetime. He literally has no skill as a programmer or as an engineer
Have you ever seen a kid with a model car that can rattle off the horsepower and acceleration speed? That’s what Elon is. He doesn’t understand these things - he buys companies and learns the spec sheet because he’s a fanboy with too much money.
Elon couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. He couldn’t put together a model rocket with instructions on the box. What he can do is memorize a bunch of statistics he doesn’t understand on a fundamental level
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 days ago
While I have not reviewed a lot of Musk speak, let alone armed with enough to credibly review his commentary, but based on my own field and “respected technical leaders” that interview with customers and the press, with broad acknowledgement that they really know their stuff…
Most of them I’ve known can sound very confident and credible while saying completely incorrect stuff. No one tries to correct them because them being actually correct doesn’t add value and trying to fix that is more trouble than it’s worth much of the time. The people paying attention don’t know well enough to recognize they are wrong… usually…
Upon occasion my company throws one of these “geniuses” at a customer that actually knows what they are doing. Then I got to see our executive basically try to gaslight the audience when they challenged his competency. The sales people has to last minute pull in the actual technical people to try to repair our image after the customer interacted with the executive…
Now one would think, clearly, after such an embarrassment, surely the company learned to field the actual technical experts to deal with technical questions… But no, for every smart customer that is turned off by that executive, there’s 10 more clients that don’t know any better and respond so much better to his baseless confidence than actual competent discussion. Also, those 10 suckers will also get suckered into more high margin stuff versus the smart customer, that will be really good at getting the most cost effective products, with low margin and skipping the pointless addions.
theneverfox@pawb.social 1 day ago
That’s dead on. Great description, that’s exactly the dynamic he had with the public
The only difference is people who saw through the facade were happy to let him hype up good technologies… well, at least until we found out he’s always been a fascist at least
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yes, as long as you were on the side that benefits from success, it was better to leave things “simple” and not challenge the incorrect stuff out loud you aren’t going to “well actually…” the “expert” if it risks your job and/or the wrong stuff isn’t too important or too hard to overcome when the rubber meets the road.
Still, sitting in a room or otherwise being a party to a conversation where an executive is constantly being confidently incorrect constantly and still praised as a smart expert likely making 7 figures is maddening.