…yeah. I’m not seeing a “rightward shift” in my feed. If anything, I’m seeing a “whiteward shift.” I follow a lot of people from marginalized groups, and they’ve been replaced by generic liberal white activists LOL. Its like, the algorithm kinda knows what I like, and has decided to give me a very specific version of the sort of person it thinks I want to follow instead of the people I actually want to follow.
Drat! The last choice should have been:
Or he’s watching someone in the lavatory.
Those weren’t his employees. Two were ex employees, and of the other two, one was John Carmack and the other Bob Zubrin, neither of whom owe anything to Musk. Zubrin thinks very highly of himself and can be very abrasive. He doesn’t throw compliments around a lot.
I guess saying they are employees would be a ‘lie’, and that deserves a pitting of its own about how you lie like the other lying liars (in other words, the treatment I get). But I’m a little bigger than that, so I’ll just assume you didn’t read carefully, or perhaps you just scanned the cite looking for anything to justify your pre-formed conclusion.
In that thread there were links to more people who have worked with Musk. Every single one of them says he’s the smartest guy in the room. And of course there are results - he’s the richest or second richest man in the world, and he made his money not through real estate or investing or inheritance, but by tackling some of the hardest problems there are and solving them where others have failed.
But you go on believing that Musk is a moron who leans on everyone around him and then takes the credit. I understand reality can be difficult when it doesn’t line up with your desire to hate on people who don’t think like you do.
Eh, go find the shittiest restaurant in your neighborhood, then go to its yelp page.
I’m sure there will be at least a few 5 star reviews.
If the restaurant then puts those reviews in their advertising, does that mean those reviews are actually an accurate reflection of the quality of their service?
How about if there are no bad reviews?
Can you find me any quote from someone who has actually worked with Musk who says he’s actually dim and doesn’t know anything? Anyone who says he just lets others do the work and take credit?
I mean, anyone either than a tendentious partison on the left who has no first hand knowledge of the guy?
Really, you are asuming that no one who has worked for Musk has ever complained?
Did you think to spend 5 seconds on google before making such an assertion?
Here’s 5 seconds worth of effort, exactly 4.99999 seconds more than you deserve.
find more at
I didn’t say ‘complain’, I said ‘call him a moron who takes credit for others’ work’. The issue at hand is his intelligence and knowledge, not his morality.
Again, if I continually mischaracterized what others were saying like this, I’d be called a liar and pitted over it.
You do. And you are. Often.
Bottom line: twitter was being used as an effective mass communication tool for content providers to reach desired audiences and for audiences to find desired content providers. And yes, for some content providers, e.g. Trump to be shown the door.
The new model is twitter is a machine to push what Elmo wants pushed.
Okay, I’ll say it. Elon Musk is likely very, very smart; and there’s precious little evidence to the contrary.
There’s evidence that he’s a megalomaniac, that he fires people who disagree with him, that if he can’t fire them he calls them nasty names in public. There’s evidence that he’s delusional sometimes, and that other times he deliberately says untrue things to get a rise out of people. There’s evidence that he’s credulous and believes whatever feeds his ego. There’s evidence that he has a loose relationship with the truth, and doesn’t believe a promise is something that’s meant to be kept.
But I bet he can solve a Sudoku like a motherfucker.
If there were no bad reviews, I wouldn’t believe the Yelp listing. (And that is completely true – if I see a listing with nothing below 4 stars, I take it with a huge grain of salt).
But also, how about if Yelp had you agree to a non-disparage, non-disclosure agreement before you agreed to use their services to rate businesses?
They why does he NEVER sound like the smartest guy in the room? Like ever. Please, point me to any speech where Musk is talking on a technical issue and actually sounds like a genius and says truly profound things. I’ve never seen one. I’ve seen plenty where he sounds like a guy who likes to think he’s the smartest guy in the room.
Also, acquiring wealth is not proof of genius. See Trump, Donald J. This is one of the biggest non sequiturs of the right. The idea that if a person is wealthy they must be worthy. They have some special talent that the market has rewarded. Musk had his bacon saved by Peter Thiel at PayPal. No Thiel and Musk would be a nobody.
And again, for clarity, I do not think he’s a moron. I think he’s average, maybe a bit above average. But he doesn’t sound like any genius I’ve ever met or worked with. Go listen to some speeches given by world class scientists, and you’ll notice a massive difference between them and Musk.
As for sudokus, while I think he’s intelligent enough to do them, that’s not exactly a high bar.
On the other hand, I don’t think he has the mental discipline to actually be good at them. Becoming good at solving any sort of brain game puzzle requires not merely intelligence but the sort of focus and personal discipline that I have yet to see Musk exhibit, i.e. even geniuses get better with practice and he doesn’t seem to be the sort to repetitively practice.
That may all well be true. But I think the point is that the total package produces results that are – to put it as charitably as possible – highly unpredictable, as we’ve seen with Twitter. One might also note, in terms of what Elmo’s genius has allegedly accomplished, that Tesla has around 6,000 employees, a high proportion of whom are technical contributors such as engineers. There are over 300 engineers said to be working on Autopilot alone. Meanwhile SpaceX has nearly 10,000 employees, over 25% of whom are certified engineers. These thousands of bright engineers are not idle. They are not sitting on their asses waiting for Elmo to tell them what to do and how to do it.
The idea that Elmo has done everything in Tesla and SpaceX virtually alone is an outrageous mythology that he likes to promulgate, and it’s helped along by the well-publicized fact that he’s an obsessive micromanaging meddler. The fact that he likes to roll up his sleeves and (try to) do technical grunt work whenever it strikes his fancy is by no means necessarily a positive, and I’d bet that it’s something many of his senior engineers wish he would stop doing. I’d bet that most of them dread the moment that Elmo comes through the door and starts “helping”.
I believe you are very likely correct with this. And I think Cybertruck shows that increasingly nobody wants to say no to Musk, and so they end up with that montrosity.
I would have thought that most of those engineers were sitting around stumped and confused at how to make any progress, waiting for Musk to come in and solve some equations for them.
Interesting that the company of his we know least about (SpaceX) is the one everyone considers is doing the best.
Let’s hear from another person who knows Musk well, Jim Cantrell. He was one of the first rocket engineers Musk hired for SpaceX. He has no need to puff up Musk, as he left SpaceX early on because he didn’t believe Musk could make it work. He now admits he was wrong.
Cantrell had been surrounded by rocket scientists and other brilliant people for 20 years before Musk came along, and he says Musk is the smartest person he’s ever known. I’ll take his opinion over the haters here basing their fact-less opinions on their dislike of him personally, mostly over political differences.
Of course Musk has flaws. He has Aspergers, and isn’t very good with public speaking. He is demanding of people around him, is not very considerate at times, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He speaks without a filter, which gets him into trouble.
As an engineer, he is a ‘big picture’ guy, and that has the flaw that complex things often look much easier from 20,000 feet than they do when you dive into the details. His lack of a filter sometimes causes him to blurt out delivery dates or predictions before he’s really done a deep dive into those details. That makes him chronically over-optimistic about his timelines and there are plenty of examples of his promising things that don’t happen on time, or at all.
Jim Cantrell says that one of his strongest features is that he simply doesn’t accept failure, but the flipside of that is that he doesn’t necessarily recognize when something will fail, or underestimates the difficulty of a problem at first.
The jury on Twitter is still out. Maybe he’ll transform it into something much better, or maybe he’ll alienate everyone and run it into the ground. But fortunes have been lost by people betting against Musk.
One new Twitter feature I just saw: The ability to ‘tip’ people by transferring money to them. Twitter doesn’t take a cut. This is a way for people to monetize content without having to reach the high standards for monetization at Youtube or elsewhere. It could open the door to selling products or services through Twitter. Musk hinted at this when he first took over, intending to eventually make Twitter a payment processor as well, like Paypal. Follow a link to Amazon, and if you buy something you could have your Twitter account deducted. Read a paywalled article, and Twitter makes a micropayment on your behalf. That sort of thing, Twitter could become a micropayment broker, solving the micropayment problem.
Don’t assume Twitter will be the same as it was, or have the same focus. He may be mutating it into something very different. We’ll see.
Yeah, he seems like a completely honest person who would never tell a falsehood about a billionaire to curry their favour.
I’m not impressed with quotes from people that may have any number of reasons to compliment Musk, especially given what we know about his personality. I’m not going to speculate on why they may or may not want to say what they’re saying (for example, a former engineer might not want to be blacklisted in the engineering world). People used to say Donald Trump was a great businessman, despite evidence to the contrary.
I’m interested in evidence. The evidence that we have is that he isn’t:
- Failed at PayPal. Fired as CEO because his ideas were bad, and his leadership inadequate.
- Proposed building a submarine too big for a hole. When called out on it, called the person a pedophile.
- “Invented” the subway, but worse.
- Has the emergency escape access in the rear seat under the rug.
- Cybertruck.
- Twitter.
- Removed the lidar from the Tesla for FSD. It remains to be seen whether this was good or bad idea, but so far based on the progress of FSD it seems like it was a bad idea.
Genius is not having some vague 20,000 feet in the sky idea. Ideas are everywhere. Anybody can pluck an idea from the air. That’s the easy part. I have a list of research ideas that would take me two full lifetimes to work on. Genius is an a high-level of ability at something. You cannot say he’s a genius engineer because he has some 20,000 feet in the sky idea. That’s silly. Heck, but those standards half the undergrads I teach AI are geniuses because they want envision strong AI. Ooooooo. Impressive. Any clown can say “I think we should make strong AI.” This does not a genius make. Other than PR, I’ve never seen Musk exhibit any kind genius-level ability.
Again, I want evidence. Not quotes.