I think people need a refresher course of the last 5 years or so. Because here’s the deal.
About 2017 to 2020, maybe 2021, the internet was a huge fucking fan of Elon. Including me. I LOVED Elon. Seemed like such a down to earth guy who genuinely wanted to help the human race and was super ambitious. Even if he was flawed. From what I remember, the general consensus was you either liked him, or you felt indifferent and just didn’t really care.
NOW that headspace has changed. Either you fucking hate him, or you do like him and get destroyed. Now, it took me about a year before I started to really dislike him the way the internet does. Because I felt like at the time the internet was doing what it always does. Blows shit outta proportion. That was, until I started seeing things change. Because starting about 2-3 years ago, there has been a massive ego fluctuation in Elon. His Twitter is not the same as it was back in 2019 for example. He was actually fairly level headed and would post the occasional meme. But it was always something amazing to do with Space X or Tesla. Okay, no harm there. NOW it’s full of nonsensical retarded tweets, dumbass memes left and right, tweets pretty much shitting on his own users…It’s a toxic fucking cesspool there. I mean this guy is at a point where he thinks rebranding a social media site that has been widely known to the public with one name, and one name only for YEARS, is a good idea. Let alone to rebrand it to a single fucking letter. Because why not? Kill your user base apparently.
What the hell happened to him? I understand why people dislike him now. As do I. But dude. How can someone fall from greatness like that? Being seen as the next Steve Jobs, flaws and all. To just a shadowy figure of himself? What made him go fucking insane and gain that huge ego?
To the people that would comment, “Well he’s always been like that he just shows it now”, I don’t believe it. When you have such massive egotistical and narcissistic traits, you could give two shits about showing it. He would’ve done so his whole career if he was like this. I’m not saying he NEVER had an ego, but it wasn’t anywhere fucking near the levels of where it is now.
“We were on the verge of greatness, we were THIS close!”
His greatest skill has been taking credit. He finally ran out of the accomplishments of others.
He had little to do with Tesla, aside from naming the models so they would spell S3XY and using shitty off-the-shelf components not designed for use in cars that are now failing in many vehicles. He literally bought the title of “founder” from the people that actually founded Tesla, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
SpaceX is the work of Tom Mueller (former TRW engineer), Gwynne Shotwell (former The Aerospace Corporation engineer), and Chris Thompson far more than Elon Musk.
Go back further, and you find his family owned an emerald mine. Paypal was far and away more the work of Peter Thiel, who merged his business with Musk’s online financial services company X.com (if you wonder where that came from). He got super rich selling out to eBay. His one business, Zip2, was just good luck selling it out also during the Dot Com bubble (I mean, seriously, it was bought for $305m by Compaq to help AltaVista). Essentially, the emerald mine funded Zip2, which he sold in 1999 to fund X.com, which became Paypal, which he sold in 2002. Since then, the millions he got from that sale funded SpaceX and Tesla.
And to be frank, he wants more power, and he saw how quickly Trump was able to manipulate people. So he dropped the mask and adopted Trump’s modus operandi.
Elon Musk is Repeating his Mistakes
Interesting recap of his earlier years.
You’re being too nice. He bullied them in court for the title.
This feels like historical revisionism.
Musk bought Tesla before it had ever released a car, and now it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. There was no such thing as a consumer electric car when he took over Tesla. A few years later, I started seeing these weird cars slipping quietly past in Seattle. And at this point, Teslas are all over the place, and you see all kinds of electric cars. I’m not at all convinced that the major car companies would ever have made that shift without pressure from Tesla.
Musk obviously didn’t design & build the rockets that SpaceX uses, but he found the people capable of building those rockets and gave them funding. There were many companies competing to build the first private spacecraft (and many, many more people laughing at the idea that private spacecraft were even possible), and the best any of them managed was to shoot a couple tourists juuust out of the atmosphere–and that was with Jeff Bezos’ money. Meanwhile SpaceX drove the Russians right out of the space game.
He’s not some genius scientist, but holy shit what a track record. But if his talent was finding other talented people capable of solving nigh-impossible problems and throwing money at them…well, it’s a huge shame we’ve lost that.
His family did have a mine in South Africa, and benefited from Apartheid. But my understanding is that he cut ties with his father and left with nothing.
The guy has gone right off the deep end, and become profoundly unlikable, and all evidence is that he was always pretty much an asshole. What he’s doing to Twitter would be a tragedy if Twitter wasn’t already kind of a nightmare. But despite that, I think the world is better off for Musk’s efforts.
I mean, so far. I don’t know what he’s gonna do next. If he runs for president or something, he may yet tip the scale in the other direction.
I’m no fan of Musk, but I really want to know what you consider success if the things you listed don’t qualify?
By your yardstick you and everyone on this forum are complete failures.
You’re reading something he didn’t write. Nowhere in there did he say he wasn’t successful.
He is, however, clearly making a point that the success is in spite of Elon’s contributions and not because of them, which I agree with.
I mean they are successes, but they didn’t happen because Musk is a business genius. They are successes because musk was born with a golden spoon up his ass and then was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Where other people did the actual work.
Saying other people’s work is yours isn’t a major accomplishment.
What the people he’s stealing credit from did are the accomplishments.
I don’t think the commenter is saying/said Elon isn’t successful. What the commenter is saying is that Elon is successful at funding other people ideas and then taking credit for them as his own. Essentially, it would be like the producer of a small movie that becomes a huge hit taking credit for the entire movie despite having very little to do with it. Didn’t write it, didn’t direct it, didn’t cast it, didn’t market it, etc etc etc.
The flip side is along the lines of what you are saying. That movie may have gotten made without that producer, and may have been just as big a hit without them ever touching it…but we’ll never know because that producer recognized the potential and funded it and is now permanently tied to it. And, because they produced it, they made a shit load of money as well. You can’t say that producer isn’t a successful one, even if they also somehow deluded themselves into think they are the world’s best director, writer, casting director etc at the same time.
Not even funding others ideas. Got lucky once in an era of speculative markets that were insanely overinflated, then managed to get lucky a second time, and then has rode buying other people’s projects and making them worse ever since.
The biggest correlation with “success” in the US is the wealth of your family. Musk proves this point.