What happened to Elon? A couple years ago he was pretty darn respected and had tesla and SpaceX beating the odds in two very difficult industries, and now he just feels like a dork.
He was a dork with some self-restraint, and several layers of people managing him, as he's effective at drawing capital and talent with bold promises (not covered by reality) and visions of the future. He was always a dorky con-man, but he was useful in that role. As long as people didn't see what he truly was.
What happened here is those layers kept getting new holes. By him becoming increasingly bolder posting on Twitter, and now by trying to run it without his trusty lieutenants. The stress of buying Twitter and it losing billions, unstoppably, is adding to his self-restraint fading away. This is Elon, himself.
Always was.
And... it's hard to believe this, but Twitter can change you, addict you to certain behaviors, even if you're a billionaire. He craves the likes, the retweets, the replies. Despite being the richest person, he's incredibly lonely. Everyone around him is fake, trying to stay afloat and maybe profit somehow from their proximity to Musk, or having no choice. He has no friends, no wife. And he has no connection with his children aside from couple of photo ops per year with "lil X".
Twitter is his social life. And Twitter wants circus. So he delivers.
The claim that he was managed by layers of people is simply false. Talk to any journalist who interacted with him. Musk has always been incredibly public and incredibly outspoken on anything he cared about.
Everybody on HN was worried, investor were not. CFO was not running the company, that is just more totally false information based on assumtion with no base behind it.
And anybody that thinks a CFO who has made millions leaving after 13 years is a major problem is just delusional.
This just more evidence that people literally lose their brain anytime Musk comes up.
Nothing. This is the person he has always been. He just always sent his rabid investors and lawyers to intimidate people into silence. It just stopped working once he started doing it to people who can actually pay a legal bill.
Nothing. The difference literally is that he started to talk about politics. Having followed SpaceX for a long time, Musk is milostly the same guy. The "pedo guy" thing was the first big turning point, the second big turning point was the free speech absolutism all that followed from that.
I think he ran out of good ideas. Electric vehicles and computer-controlled rockets would've happened eventually, but he had enough money and insight to light the fuses at the right time.
He found two bits of low-hanging fruit, picked them, and started taking random useless actions when he couldn't find more.
He bought into Tesla; he didn't come up with the ideas nor found it. SpaceX came at a time when NASA was investing in private companies to replace the shuttle program (and more). He didn't come up with any of the ideas there, either. As far as I can tell he hasn't invented anything of note.
I'm as annoyed/disappointed by his antics as anyone, but I think he does deserve credit for making two (three, if you count Starlink) very difficult industries happen. Electric cars were dead until Tesla, plenty of SpaceX competitors never made it (like Bezos's and Carmack's and the British one). Whether or not he "invented" these things, he made them an everyday reality the same way Steve Jobs made the smartphone an everyday reality.
I don't like Musk very much these days, but he did undeniably change the world not once but thrice.
I mean, comparatively, Bezos improved logistics, Gates made office software, and Jobs made a telephone. Are these notable "inventions"?
EVs were dead in the water for decades until Tesla. Space travel has stalled since the Cold War. Satellite internet... DirecTV was a joke that used dialup or DSL upstream.
A lot of industries are driven by the difficulties of operations, not necessarily innovations. He jumpstarted all three where even nation states could not.
To this day I can't get better satellite internet from any other company, all electric cars are still measured against Teslas (even though I'd prefer a Rivian or Subaru/Toyota myself), and SpaceX is the doing more launch development than the US, China, and Russia combined.
That doesn't make him a great inventor, perhaps, but it does make him a great something... businessman, organizer, dreamer perhaps?
No one's accusing him of singlehandedly advancing science or anything like that. But he did tackle three very difficult and capital and labor and logistics and legal problems and made them all a reality where many other companies and countries have tried and failed (and continue to lag behind). Those aren't trivial accomplishments and we'd be lucky to see any of them in a generation, much less all three from the same person. There is no guarantee another person could've done all that, not even a president.
> > EVs were dead in the water for decades until Tesla. Space travel has stalled since the Cold War. Satellite internet... DirecTV was a joke that used dialup or DSL upstream.
All these sectors are driven by politics and or military because there is no ROI via the legit avenues: consumers trying to improve their lives
The big push for EVs started under Obama and after many years and many billions of handouts people are still on the fence and you literally need to threat a mandate to stop ICE cars production in order for them to take EVs into consideration.
Musk is nothing without D.C. and as much as all the other guys on the Forbes 400 are still unsufferable assholes, you can’t claim the same for them.
Zuck and Bezos for example built their companies not on D.C. but AT&T. It’s a big difference and consumers benefit from this
What's wrong with that? Rocketry and airplanes and the internet and railroads and nuclear power etc. all started with government and military uses and investments, but so?
The federal government gives out money for lots of things, but they fail often (rural broadband? functional healthcare? prisons? education?).
Arguably the government acts as a research incubator for new sectors, and I'm glad he turned them into functional everyday businesses that consumers can afford (well, except SpaceX).
Zuck and Bezos also built off government research and funds... the transportation and communication networks. So what?
> > Zuck and Bezos also built off government research and funds... the transportation and communication networks. So what?
Nope. AT&T built on top of governmental transportation and communication network,
Zuck built on top of AT&T , his billions are less tainted because they are further removed
from the horrendous practice of pointing guns at taxpayers heads to finance the centrally planned economic project du jour such as the Apollo rockets or the LHC or the Bubble telescope which won’t ever yield anything for the poor shmucks who financed it
At the risk of sounding repetitive, I have to point out that it's not about what he innovated or invented, but his ability to organize capital and labor behind these projects where others couldn't.
You keep saying anyone could've, but the fact is they didn't and still don't. Armadillo, Blue Origin, Virgin, NASA, all gave up or remain bit players. None of them invented rockets, any could've hired engineers, but SpaceX is the only one that actually made all that happen. And on automotive front, the big car markers are STILL playing catchup.
No one is saying Musk is a great inventor, or even an inventor at all. Just that he successfully organized others into worthwhile projects.
It's not hero worship, it's giving credit where it's due. Compare Musk to someone like Trump or Ellison or Zuckerberg or your average crypto bro founder. He's contributed far more to society by taking huge risks in industries that others had already given up on. Not every rich asshole does that.
That’s not at all a given. To bootstrap mass production of electric cars requires a lot of risk, it was by no means certain it would pan out.
Now that it’s a given the rest of the car manufacturers are racing to keep up.
Same can be said with reusable rockets - why weren’t anyone else pursuing this? I think I know the answer(weak leadership from ULA etc).
solardev summarized my opinion of Musk pretty well.
I don't know enough about the space industry. SpaceX did introduce some pretty significant advances. But EVs: yeah they would have happened - eventually.
Big car makers sat on their asses (concerning EVs), and would have kept doing so for another 5..10y or longer.
Tesla took the lead, broke that market wide open, scaled up battery production enormously (which also served other applications like grid storage), and forced car makers to get in on the game or be left behind.
Those car makers would have produced EVs on their own. On their timeline.
But Musk kickstarted that market on his timeline. Years sooner than would have happened otherwise. Debate how many years all you want. But net effect is an enormous benefit to society.
Personally, I think it may come down to stress / pressure. Musk has worked hard, for a long time. Maybe he didn't get enough sleep. Or didn't get laid (often enough, anyway :-). NOT saying he did, but if it turns out he's been popping pills or snorting coke, I would be neither surprised nor hold it against him (or even care, tbh).
Regardless, such pressure tends to bring up the darker side in people. But who am I to tell Musk he needs a vacation?
Fun fact: bought a pack of 70 Li-ions recently (21700) for use on my boat. These were manufactured and/or designed by Samsung... for Tesla. I didn't buy them 'cause Tesla fanboy. They're not even the chemistry I preferred. But I got 'em because they worked out to the lowest price per Wh stored (in my case, ~800 Wh total for just over €100). Tesla-initiated economies of scale.
And in the meanwhile, there's now global internet access thx to StarLink.
Like him or not, feel free to think he's a lunatic or an asshole, but Elon Musk has pushed humanity forward.
Musk and JB were walking to AC Peopulsion about creating a car company based on their tech. The CEO of AC Peopulsion told them another valley company had just started with the same plan.
Tesla found no investors and were a half dead garage company.
Musk deciding to finance Tesla and have JB be the CTO is quite a bit different then just buying in.
The difficulty in building an EV company was never the initial prototpye as anybody who has studied this space knows.
Tesla was an utter shitshow until Musk took over the CEO and the company since then has been incredibly successful.
Its baffling that look at that and then dismiss it because he didnt start the company in a garage.
And your history of SpaceX is even worse. i don't even know where you got that nonsense. You timeline is off byany years at least. The DoD was looking at responsive launch at the time and that was far more relevant then NASA. But the DoD outside of a little student sat didn't book any flights.
Invention is just a strange term, are we only consider the guy by himself sits in a lab and figures out some new thing an inventor? Musk is not that. But that doesn't make what he did less impressive.
The companies he has built, and has lead are certaintly innovative.
Having spent way too many years online talking about this stuff, it's hilarious how Engineers constantly discredit anyone at these companies that didn't code/invent the thing entirely by themselves. Bill Gates just bought MS-DOS, Steve Jobs just marketed Wozniak's invention, etc.
I think people are unfair to Elon and color his past actions with the taint of his present ones.
Tesla and SpaceX are massive achievements. The space industry was basically dead for years and electric cars were considered a joke or toy.
Elon doesn't do everything, and he often unfairly overshadows his team, but he is great at getting attention (from investors and customers) and he's gifted at optimizing manufacturing processes. I'm really impressed with how he speaks about assembly lines in particular and the relentless drive for simplicity. I'm less impressed by the empty promises, but he does inspire many with his vision.
The problem is when he leaves his lane and assumes his success in one domain translates to all domains. He's hardly the first successful person to lose their mind when they reach the top. We often talk about how inequality is bad for the average person but for me, it's shocking to see what it does to the people at the top too. Soaring at that height they leave reality far below.
Intelligent people paying close attention have almost never respected him, or they at least realised he was wildly overrated. Elon fell in love with the limelight and inevitably his true character is becoming exposed, very publicly.
He's the same, his public perception changed when he went against some aspects of the pandemic response. Now things that would have brought him praise are ignored and the weird things that would have been ignored or considered quirky are amplified with a negative wash on them.
Oh he had plenty of spotlight time. He's just been slowly descending into nonsense.
My theory is: he's surrounding himself by people who put him on a pedestal and will therefore only be yes-men. In such a situation I imagine that you lose track of what's a reasonable way of thinking, and possibly remove the few remaining sensible people out of your life because they tend to disagree with you.
Maybe he had PR people handling all his communication before, and after the whole crypto/doge and stock manipulation allegations they decided to step away so as to not get incriminated or otherwise caught up in the investigations?
Musk has admitted to having Asperger's, which in itself isn't that big of a deal - but they (people with Asperger's) can become quite obsessed with things. Some of the social aspects can also be lacking, which in turn can be mistaken for narcissism.
He knows he's smart, he has a burning passion for what he does, and he's probably been surrounded by sycophants for decades now.
You're being downvoted for a reply with literally nothing of any substance.
More specifically, it's because the reply is completely vacuous and utterly devoid of intellect as demonstrated by hyper-fixating on the current physical state of Elon. Nothing about this is useful.
It's not an exaggeration to say taking a crap is more beneficial to society than such commentary.
> taking a crap is more beneficial to society than such commentary
I was literally just pointing out some very simple observations and you left a hugely hateful comment.
Fascinating to see how Elon Musk stirs up such strong emotions in people.
Seems like this touched a nerve for you to take the time to leave such a long hateful comment instead of just moving on to the next comment..
so clearly there's something of substance here.
Please. Elon is just some guy who lucked into billions and talks too much for his own good.
He isn’t an engineer, he isn’t a scientist, he’s just some guy with a huge cult following selling a brand to crypto bros, finance bros, “entrepreneurs” and “influencers” with a supposed rags to riches story despite the fact that his own father said they had a stake at an emerald mine.
Elon’s big mouth got the better of him again, proving he’s nothing special.
Only a moron would get into a dick measuring contest with a guy with years of proper martial arts training and challenge him while being totally untrained.
> Zuckerberg revealed on Sunday on Threads — part of his Meta social media catalog — that he is no longer going to try and book a fight with the Twitter owner until Musk starts to take things more seriously.
> “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on,” Zuckerberg stated. “I offered a real date. Dana White offered to make this a legit competition for charity. Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead.
That Musk success is luck is just beyond fucking stupid. Like at some point one has to be able to look beyond personal dislike. But I guess some people just can't get over that.
What you assert his success to is just complete nonsense. Like, i cant even fatherm how somebody can believe that crap.
Do you honestly 2 million Teslas will be sold this year and its all to cult followers and crypto bros? Do you have any clue how the car market work?
Currently the DoD, NASA and ESA relies on SpaceX. Literally the 2 of the 3 largest space agencies on relay on him. But I guess those are all crypto bros too.
You seriously sound about as deranged as the most pro-Musk crypyo bro.
It's funny, you claim that I am misattributing Musk's success, and at the same time you are misattributing the success of a company bought by Elon and carried by people who bought into the idea into long hours of work with little pay, bad conditions, and lots of racism [1,2] while being overvalued[3] and whose self-anointed CEO is under investigation for market manipulation and insider trading [4].
I want to draw attention to your own language, here:
> Currently the DoD, NASA and ESA relies on SpaceX. Literally the 2 of the 3 largest space agencies on relay on him.
In particular the pronoun. The space agencies do not rely on "him", they rely on SpaceX and the people working there, not specifically on Musk. Musk is not doing any engineering, designing, science, or manufacturing.
What Elon is doing is selling an idea through his brand which attracts the people who do the actual work.
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> That Musk success is luck is just beyond fucking stupid.
Notice that I didn't attribute his success to sheer dumb luck. I was rather particular in my language. Being born into money opens many doors for you. Just from an immigration standpoint, he could at any point immigrate to the US because he could "invest" in some company and earn a visa to stay. He had a Canadian citizenship by birth, born into a family of immense wealth.
Those things already put him in 3rd base and enable him to do more.
He never had to deal with immigration issues or green-card lotteries or anything of this nature while people who were smarter, or better engineers, or whatever else are battling immigration processes.
He was literally born at the right time and had the money to be an adult with money in the dot-com era.
Just from the sheer number of people who were in that position - and many were - somebody had to land to the top. That's kinda how sampling works, even if the chance is very low, given enough samples it happens, and if you are dealing in ordinals; then for any number of people a 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc must exist.
I didn't attribute everything to sheer luck, and your fanboyism shows.
Musk may not be an engineer or a scientist, but he certainly knew how to cultivate a brand and inspire people. He has severely tarnished said brand over the last few years, e.g. calling a diver a peadophile out of nowhere, the whole twitter fiasco, everything related to market manipulation and insider trading...
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As for concerns over jealousy; even if I was a billionaire my life wouldn't change. I am paid multiple times over what I need. My work is just 10h of meetings, the other 30 hours or so of programming I would do for free. I mean, I program for free at my down time any way...
Most importantly, I have great relationships with my family and friends, and we are all healthy and thriving. I could never imagine my children cutting me off their lives, and there's no amount of money, or fame or any other ephemeral or fleeting desires that can ever be worth losing that.
That it's just luck you win 50 dice rolls in a row, calling them each time. Maybe he knows something you don't, if you can't see it. Pretty clearly beyond luck at this point.
It's like a weird defense mechanism because you're jealous. "He's just a crypto bro."
What I find hilarious is people's inability to grasp probability and sample sizes.
I don't think he won 50 dice rolls in a row, not remotely close actually. The first win was the time and place he was born into, his father had a stake at an emerald mine and he was right on cue for the dot com era, he had Canadian citizenship by birth, and his immigration to the US was trivial, he had the connections and the money.
One does not need 50 dice rolls to get there; a single roll of the dice has insane consequences, ask all the people from China or India playing the visa and green-card lottery because they happened to be born in China or India.
I never said he's just a crypto-bro either, you are just in denial. I said he's some guy who played crypto-bros and investment bros like a fiddle. He sold a brand, is currently facing market manipulation and insider trading investigations [1], and pumped a crypto coin (ie something totally unregulated). He had the money in the first place in there, and he had the influence. If you have no morality, you need to be a moron not to do that given that you can do it.
I mean you are replying to me as I am the person who made the parent comment, btw he already replied to this comment, I just want to say that I have big doubts that he is jealous of not being Elon Musk, he has a lot of money but he is insufferable, he is divorced three times and right now I don't think he has a partner, I don't see any reasonable person who could envy him.
The problem is not being gay (so random) or a womanizer but just miserable, the reason why I found funny that you accused a random HN user of being jealous of Elon Musk when there is nothing really worth being him, if he somehow care having literally billions of dollars then there are billionaires that lives much happier life.
Also I don't know how you get downvoted in this days old thread but that's kinda funny.
The point is that you somehow got offended by the parent comment that doubts Elon Musk actual intelligence and you used as an argument that he is jealous.
It's such a bad argument that I can't get over it I'm sorry ahah
>no one cares, I think, lol
Well someone cared enough to downvote you
>maybe you're projecting? are you depressed..?
It's just Elon Musk living alone after having destroyed three marriages, I cannot thrive to come close to that, he's on a special dimensional plane that I cannot project to.
Edit: I forgot the other argument, he's the richest man in the world
