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!”
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.