Well, offering a woman a horse in exchange for a hand job isn’t something I would picture Fonzie doing.
When I first heard of him, I was hoping he would be a sort of ‘D D Harriman’ operator who
would get a real space program working. And for a while he seemed to do so: falcon actually works. And he seemed to be fairly clear and on-topic in early Spacex presentations.
But he seems to have lost focus. Buying Twitter seemed completely pointless?
He looks to me now like Howard Hughes: a person who did good work in his early years, but went off the rails into some sort of delusional sideline?
The kids do not think he is cool, for the subset of 9-13 year old kids I’ve interacted with over the last few years. Musk and Bezos were/are the butt of jokes. This is from kids who thought Tesla cars were cool.
4th graders were not reading long form interviews with them, or suggesting we’re in a new gilded age of robber barons. They’re certainly echoing things they’ve seen or heard, but making fun of these two resonate with them enough that the jokes are repeated and riffed on.
In many ways it is teen girls who are the arbiters of style and cool. They can be honest about things in a way that adults frequently are not. Often what teen girls choose to like is dismissed and belittled, and then it goes on to change the culture. Teen girls do not think Musk is cool.
Musk appears like he is really trying to impress 14 years boys, and there is pretty much nothing less cool than an 8th grader trying too hard to impress his peers.
He didn’t want to actually buy Twitter. The courts forced him to after he made a trolling offer (“hurhur, $54.20 has ‘420’ in it, am I cool now?”) that he tried to back out of afterwards. Ironically, it was trying to look cool that partially got him into the mess.
I’d vote for “Middle age man trying to make 14 year olds think he’s cool” as something worse though.
To use modern slang, he’s not cool; he’s “chuuni”. Somebody who is trying real, real hard to be cool and failing. Usually associated with teenagers, but like a lot of rich guys he’s never really grown up so it fits. In other words:
Cool and good, however, are not the same. Cool people are perceived to be more extraverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous, whereas good people are more conforming, traditional, secure, warm, agreeable, universalistic, conscientious, and calm. This pattern is stable across countries, which suggests that the meaning of cool has crystallized on a similar set of values and traits around the globe. We build on the results to advance a theory of the role that coolness plays in establishing social hierarchies and changing social and cultural practices and norms.
By my standards, no Musk is not cool. For one thing hes an incel edgelord. He’s also a malignant narcissist. Hes a fascist. Incels are guys who are enraged that they can’t get women to like them, which is the opposite of cool. Cool people have no problems dating.
I understand that cool and good aren’t the same thing according to this study. But to me one thing that makes someone cool is not caring about their popularity or other people’s opinions of them. Musk is the opposite, as someone with narcissistic traits he is desperate to be perceived a certain way. I guess this could tie into the autonomous thing they discussed. But Musk’s entire life has revolved around his public image, whether he was building it with advanced PR teams, or destroying it with his real personality.
As was said upthread, Musk is a middle aged billionaire desperately trying to be liked by 14 year old boys. Thats the opposite of cool, thats pathetic.
On the subject of self assurance, I do wonder what role that plays. Not caring what people think is cool, unless you do it wrong. The severely mentally ill and religious fanatics do not care about what other people think, and neither of them are cool.
He’s turned twitter into a GOP and neo-nazi propaganda machine. Tweaking your social media algorithms to help elect politicians that’ll cut your taxes or not regulate your industries isn’t pointless.
Musk is the opposite of cool, he is peak uncool. At every level of magnification, no matter how closely you look at him or how far away you zoom out, he is fractally pathetic. He does not know how to shave, how to wear a hair transplant, how to dress, he stinks, he is physically weak, his movements uncoördinated, he can’t dance, sing or whistle, he can’t sit straight on a chair or relaxed on a sofa, he can’t look people in the eye while talking to them, he broke his penis masturbating, he has bad breath and flat feet, he has no taste in clothes, women, cars, food, wine, music, books or shoes. He is not funny or witty. And he knows it.
No, really not: cool he ain’t.
He is pathologically desperate to be liked and those people are generally regarded as the most uncool people. He basically kept begging people to like him and think he was cool over the years. In fact I think his switch to MAGA was mostly because he needed to fulfill that need to be liked/loved/worshipped. He tried so hard to be liked by the cool kids – young hip liberals – with all of the electric car and the spaceship stuff. But the cool kids smelled the desperation and the immaturity and it kept them from fully embracing him.
But that pathological need to be liked/loved/worshipped was ultimately more important, and he saw that to be liked/loved/worshipped as a republican all you needed to do is “own the libs” and be a shitty person and they will follow you to the gates of hell and wait on your every word. So he started catering to them, where he started getting the feedback he so desperately needed.
That seems shallow. You’re probably thinking no, he went MAGA because of corruption and knowing he could use them to avoid regulations for his businesses, get corrupt contracts, etc. But for people who are stuck in an earlier stage of development because they never received love and validation that can be a powerful force that defines them their entire lives. If Fred Trump had maybe shown Donald a tiny bit of love we might not be in this whole mess. I think Elon would trade all the riches and his companies to be loved by more people. It seems obvious to me that that’s the biggest hole he’s trying to fill.
Psychologically, he’s basically still a child whose daddy never loved him and who probably didn’t make a lot of genuine friends as a kid. He had servants, and they probably didn’t genuinely liked him and pretended and he could tell. And billions of dollars and fame still haven’t been able to fill that hole. It’s sad and pathetic, which is the opposite of cool.
Musk didn’t buy Twitter with a deliberate plan to do this. He bought it, as @Jophiel noted, under order after making a dumb meme joke offer, got a bunch of investors and banks to front most of the money, and then after fiddling around with ways to turn it into a bank or a video streaming platform figured out that it is really only good for rapidly propagating memes and evoking outrage, and the people who get the most outraged are the ones who believe in baseless conspiracy theories. From there it was a short hop to going full on performative MAGA with his own special ‘dark edgelord’ branding, and after that realized (with Peter Thiel whispering in his ear) what political influence he could gain with the platform and a few hundred million dollars of his enormous pseudo-wealth. Gods, I hope he gets denaturalized and deported by Trump soon before he overdoses on whatever concoction of horse tranq, acid, and meth that is keeping him awake 22 hours of the day. Death’s too good for him.
So, the anti-Steve McQueen. Instead of the guy they beg to escape and allow himself to be caught to bring back details of the surrounding area, he’s the one guy in the camp they don’t clue into their escape scheme because he smells bad and won’t shut up about all of his previous ‘great escapes’ that are obvious desperate lies to impress.
Stranger
There was a time when he was on the periphery of my attention and the second/third hand reporting (largely by fans) I happened to encounter made him sound like some sort of tech genius philanthropist/innovator/futurist. I suppose that fits with ‘cool’.
But the more I learned, the more that impression faded and crumbled (it wasn’t a strong impression to begin, so it didn’t take much to break it down).
Musk wouldn’t be cool if you dropped him in liquid nitrogen.
I just deleted a similar reply. It wasn’t that long ago I still admired his what I guess we call his brand. SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla were super amazing. They’re landing the rockets?!? The Roadster in space is totally cool (and totally dorky). I know he is and was a figurehead and I’d shake my head at his silly remarks that were, from where I sit, pretty harmless.
But not anymore.
Yeah, I remember saying something like “How is this guy doing all that stuff, and yet he has no ambition to be a Bond-style supervillain?”
Turns out he did have pretty much that ambition, and I just didn’t know about it.
Agree w the thrust of the last few posts; no need for me to repeat the same ideas.
As to this:
That’s the difference between the suave self-assurance of James Bond or Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World
vs.
The social indifference of a Person of Wal*Mart or a religious harranguer.
Tbe former does not care that judgmental normies will tongue-cluck. The latter doesn’t even realize they might.
Really? The denizens of the Dope offering opinions on coolness? Folks, as a group we have many wonderful, admirable qualities, but arbiters of cool we are certainly not. No shade there, just fact.
They’re also missing other qualities that make someone “cool”. Likewise, you can have style but lack other qualities.
There are mentally ill people who are seen as stylish, etc and still seen by many as “cool”. Kanye, for example. You also have your religious fanatics with the style and charisma to be cool – they potentially become weird sex cult leaders and stuff.
I’m sure to wind up regretting this, but what?
I haven’t heard that particular rumor, but there’s a rumor with second-hand support that he had a botched penile implant.