Comment on who's gonna tell him?
baatliwala@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Oh man I miss the time when I thought this man was actually gonna be like the next Tony Stark.
If you read his reddit AmA he sounded like a pretty cool dude who wanted to advance science.
Yeah he had quite a few people in the geek / tech world that liked him or at least were indifferent. Then he started losing his shit quickly followed by getting all MAGA political.
He probably would have been happier had he not gone all Nazi, or if he always was that way, at least kept it to himself.
Now he is sad everyone hates him lol.
I think the first time people (like me) started realising how he truly was when he called one of those Thailand rescue divers a pedophile. He went fully mask off in barely any time after that.
I think that may have been shortly after he and Grimes got together so likely she introduced him to more drugs than whatever he was already taking.
Drugs don’t make people racist pieces of shit.
Yeah, his whole idea of sending a submarine to rescue the kids, then going completely berserk with pedophile accusations was the wake up call for me. Before that, almost the entire coverage of him over Ars Technica was positive
Like a micro sub seemed like an interesting idea but losing his mind when experts said it was not going to work… yeah not a good look.
Yeah, that was the incident that really made me look back on his previous action with fresh eyes and reconsider my opinion of him.
Like you said, it went downhill fast after that
I think he’s more like Notch and Rowling, they had a fuck ton of money, the ability to never be told no, some pre existing regressive ideas, and got addicted to the internet as it became a hellscape. These people were each just as isolated as the friendless 4channer in their mom’s basement, just in a different way, and they were just as in need of therapy.
What we know from Vivian Wilson and her mom is that both paint a believable picture of Musk pre extreme wealth. A tenacious man who always wanted more and was wracked by insecurity. He insisted on sex selective ivf to ensure he only had sons and he punished his daughter when she failed to be sufficiently masculine. He relentlessly pursued and wooed his first wife, but dumped her basically immediately upon striking it rich. When combined with his childhood abuse, current behavior, and emotional neediness in everything he does, I’m comfortable using a framework of NPD to understand him (yeah it’s an armchair diagnosis so take it as a proposed model, not a diagnosis). Within that framework the worst thing for his mental health was to become rich, famous, and terminally online. His inability to take criticism and his response to lash out at it publicly and permanently is one of his big reasons for his rightward shift as it came while he was being criticized by the left for his treatment of workers.
Watching NazYe spiral that quickly was kinda amusing in one of those ‘cant look away from the accident’ moments.
For me, it was his personal life. He was famous so I looked him up. He didn’t treat his relationships well. It honestly looked like he used them until he could “upgrade.”
same moment for me. I thought he was super cool for starting an all electric car company, having the potential to start another space race and advance science, bringing together some engineers to quickly build a rescue submersible, but the pedophile comment totally broke the enchantment
He didn’t even start Tesla he just bought it out right as they had sorted the tech but hit a wall in building manufacturing capacity.
Looks like that was in 2018. Hadn’t heard of that. The first hint for me was in 2019 when planning to build a Tesla plant in Germany’s black forest. Cant act like you are helping the environment with electric cars when you destroy it to create said cars…
Yeah, pretty sure that was after he fired his media team and we started seeing what he was really like.
For me it was shoving a bunch of Teslas in a hole in Las Vegas and calling it a “hyperloop”
It seemed more sudden and severe than just “oh some people didn’t not like him and then things changed”.
I didn’t know much about him really but he seemed to be investing in tech that could really shape the future, which I thought was “progressive”. Like when the first Tesla hit the market “big oil” had been suppressing the EV industry forever and putting your money behind something like that was bold and progressive.
Now he’s a Nazi supporting conservative nutty governments all over the world.
I think he had a great PR team and then one day just went off script forever.
Yeah, I was one of those. I actually thought he was a cool dude. Especially his “I’ll do something I thought of this morning, no idea if it works maybe it’ll cost me billions lol” attitude is something I almost admired. I was also kinda happy when he bought twitter because I really thought the platform would improve.
But yeah, I then noticed the platform would not improve and when he went into politics, I lost every ounce of respect I had for the dude. Now I’d like to see him running headfirst into a chainsaw.
You were a late adopter. I think by the time he bought Twitter his political views and craziness were already known. For most people it was around the rescue diver pedophile tweet that most people realized. (As another reply also mentioned.)
I never even heard of that ever happening lmao. I was just reading about him every now and then, not keeping a log about everything he did.
I was also kinda happy when he bought twitter because I really thought the platform would improve.
I was with you up to this point. You must have been extremely naive or completely uninformed.
More uninformed. I wasn’t keeping tabs in everything he did, and european media didn’t report that much about him.
Yeah, and all he had to do to maintain that image was keep his mouth shut and let the pr people talk for him, but no that wasn’t good enough for his ego.
He probably thought, “I could do their job!” and fired them to save money.
I wonder what this timeline would be like if he had accepted that his submarine idea was naive despite the good intentions and just paid to have a nice setup with comfortable tents and catered food for the divers and kids as they got out of the cave (plus their families). Instead of attacking the guy and showing the world who he was, kicking off a cycle of him lashing out at his falling popularity, resulting in it falling even more, then more lashing out, etc.
Even if he was like that the whole time, he might have kept his mask on instead of leaning into it, probably would have never made that offer for Twitter, might have tried to appear neutral instead of joining Trump’s campaign.
Though hard to say because the self-driving bs and cybertruck would have still happened and might have kicked off that cycle anyways.
if he was the person to do that he probably wouldn’t have been the person to put himself in the position he was in. The ruthlessness and amorality is what floated him to the top.
Oh i had almost forgotten the submarine lash out, but you are right that it all started there more or less.
What a downward spiral.
It’s where it started for me but there was already signs that I only noticed afterwards when people started to kivk the dirt.
The rumor is he had PR people (which he fired at some point) probably doing stuff like this for him with exactly this goal to make him look like Tony Stark or a pretty cool dude who wants to advance science.
one of the most retroactively embarrassing moments in my life is in like 2015 or '16 I was doing some dumb team-building thing for some school-adjacent activity, and the task was to create a “new Mount Rushmore,” basically as a group nominate four people who are doing good and important work in the world. I suggested musk. at the time most people there hadn’t heard of him, so I gave a little spiel about how he was the “founder” (which I thought was true at the time) of PayPal, Tesla (which people were just becoming aware of), and SpaceX. every time I remember it I cringe and hope nobody else does. although most other people in the group suggested Beyonce as someone doing “important work for humanity” so idk if they have much of a leg to stand on to criticize my choice
It’s fine. He has potential, and he really did move fast and break things to make Tesla what it was. I don’t think EVs would be where they are today without him.
The pedophile thing really was the turning point. It was possible to see before then, but it wasn’t even the event itself that did it. He just changed fast around that time period. Whether his views changed or he just started revealing and acting on them much more is debatable.
He ditched his handlers and PR team. He never had potential. He had a team covering up what a meddling moronic piece of shit he is. Thing is, he’s also a fat piggy bank.
His money had gotten things done because smarter people around him have been able to use it to advance tech from time to time, but he always takes credit in some way.
He has done nothing but throw around his daddy’s money.
That’s it.
Period.
He didn’t “become shitty”.
He threw away the people covering it up.
every time I remember it I cringe and hope nobody else does.
Haha you wish!
A lot of peole are thinking back to that enthusiastic spiel as the first time they heard of Musk. Then they say something like “man, I had no idea at the time that u/arctanthrope was an alt-right lunatic, seemed so normal”.
(Just kidding)
In my peer group u/arctanthrope always comes up when we discuss Elmo, twitter, spaceX or pedo stuff - now I finally know why!
I really appreciated him around that same era, as he seemed to be the only rich person actually showing any real care or action to try to do something about climate change. Up until him every rich person and every politician seemed to be actively dismissing climate change as a concern. It feels like around 10 years ago was when political discourse finally stopped trying to argue whether or not climate change is real and instead shifted to trying to argue that any actions to prevent climate change were unrealistic or futile
Remember, Musk was building up an electric car company, a home battery company and a solar roofing company through the 2010s. Plus he was pushing for cool space stuff. We were going to have a colony on mars by 2020! Incredible!
It was the whole hyperloop thing that killed it for me. It quickly became apparent as his Las Vegas “hyperloop” was just Teslas in a tunnel that he was full of shit and it put his other lies and half-truths into perspective. Honestly his antics over the last couple of years have killed my interest in space flight. I fucking loved watching rocket launch live streams. I stayed up until 2am to watch the Artemis launch. And now I just can’t bring myself to get excited.
I appreciate that he brought Tesla to profitability and Tesla proved to other automakers and consumers that electric cars are viable and cool. I appreciate that SpaceX has completely changed the rocket industry for the better and now every rocket program worth it’s salt in the world is trying to replicate the Falcon 9 rocket boosters. But that’s all I’ll give him. He didn’t do the work, he just funded it, and I appreciate that he did fund it when nobody else would but that’s it.
one of the vocally pro-nazi people I still have on Facebook did a paper at university on “Elon Musk: a case for transformational leadership” and has that posted on his company website. he also has clippy as his fb pp, and his profile tag line or whatever has “I am devoted to the well being of the people”
it’s an interesting mix of beliefs
mind you this guy is Canadian. he’s gradually been becoming more and more right-wing because he has been radicalized by his view of the left through mainstream media. however when it became clear that he was pro-Nazi was when he posted about how the people who were calling Nazis Nazis have blood on their hand for Good’s murder and that it was entirely clear it was justified self-defense
I think of him more like the next John McAfee.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but McAfee must have been at least somewhat skilled in the past, no? That doesn’t sound much like Musk.
I guess there is one way he could become the next McAfee…
McAfee was a perfectly competent programmer in the 80s and 90s. I think by the time most people heard of him he had already fried the part of his brain responsible for programming with copious amounts of every drug.
I’d still take him over Musk any day.
Coming at it with next to no knowledge, but i was under the impression that McAfee was more of a self-parody. Like he was just fucking around but never actually had delusions of grandeur or anything.
Elon is very skilled. Some of his great skills, just off the top of my head; riding the shit out of every coat tail, failing upwards, shooting himself in his bulletproof foot, looking like a complete dweeb/asshat to most of the world almost as much as the potus, and so much more! He’s truly remarkable… -ly foolish.
One only needs to watch John McAfee’s uninstalling McAfee Antivirus video (NSFW) to realize how much of a legend he was.
LGR did a wonderful retrospective when he announced his candidacy for US president. Dude seriously lived life to its fullest and made tons of questionable decisions
Musk thinks he is Tony Stark but he is really Justin Hammer.
Dollar General Justin Hammer maybe…
tamal3@lemmy.world 12 minutes ago
A really amazing sixth grade math teacher I worked with had a life-size poster of Elon Musk taped to the back of her door 10 years ago. Not so much these days…