They were not personal gambles. He was not risking anything he couldn’t afford to lose. If he had lost, he would not ever find himself living in the street. He was born with a safety net that most people couldn’t dream of. Don’t give me that shit about his one-bedroom apartment. That’s truly dishonest framing.
He is hated not because he succeeded in a couple of businesses, but because of how he succeeds in being a truly vile human being, how he gleefully tolerates harm to his workers, how he seeks to destabilise our country and damage democracy, how he lies and preens in public, how he trolls the world and destabilises markets, how he thumbs his nose at securities law, how he boasts about engineering coups (although unlikely in that case he had anything to do with it, he wanted to give the impression he did), how he uses his global platform to defame ordinary people who are just doing their jobs. How he wastes public time and money with his monumentally stupid mass transit ideas.
And the businesses he succeeded in: meh. Someone else would have eventually come around to do it. Electronic payments? Electric cars? Enough effort and incentive going on in the world that someone else would have gotten there too. Indeed, anyone else would have been preferable as the head of a large, dangerous industrial facility. I would gladly exchange the existence of every single thing he has accomplished for the gift of his nonexistence. Because someone else will be able to do the same thing without being a employee-mutilating and public-danger dick about it.
And that’s not even to mention his revoltingly vile personal life, which for some cosmic joke of a reason we keep in having to learn about.
We would lose nothing of value by erasing Musk from existence and gain much more besides. He is a self-absorbed, endlessly self-promoting troll whose misdeeds outweighs his accomplishments by so much that the scale is toppled over.
If you pay the eight bucks are you then free to parody Elon?
I have to admit that I hadn’t thought of the possibility of hostile foreign entities taking advantage of advertiser and user boycotts to fill the void. Hopefully we twitter users can find an alternative and more welcoming platform soon.
I can’t help but notice how you skipped over the part where he wanted to replace trains with vacuum tunnels, or his self-driving cars that keep trying to run over pedestrians, or his automated semi-trucks that would require a battery so heavy they couldn’t possibly carry any cargo, or build a single-lane highway underground with no way out if something goes wrong, or where he abused and killed a bunch of monkeys trying to wire computer chips into their brains, or the “unbreakable” windshield he threw a rock through in front of a live audience, or when he said 11 years ago that he’d have a colony on Mars within 10 years, or his submarine that would’ve drowned a bunch of children, or his declaring that covid would go away by the end of April 2020, or the fact that his cars keep catching fire on their own.
Elon isn’t a genius or a revolutionary, he hasn’t invented anything himself, the only thing he brings to the table is money, and he’s too blinded by ego to realize that he got lucky a few times, in spite of himself.
Yes, of course. Because he would then just be harming himself instead of the rest of the eight billion people who have to suffer the very real consequences of his insatiable ego.
I initially deleted my account when Elon took over, but reactivated it a few days later so I could better keep tabs on what was going on on the inside. I never actually tweet anyway, so I think I’ll change my display name as well and see what happens.
Who needs to save the world when we’ve got a perfectly good Mars that nobody’s using, right? Better yet, there are no governments there, so no pesky laws to get in the way of getting as much work as possible out of the serfs! And if they get any ideas about unionizing or asking for a raise or getting more than two days off per month or being fed three times a day and getting fresh fruit and grains instead of Soylent Green seven days a week, all you have to do is vent the habitation pod into the Martian atmosphere and the next spaceship full of indentees can take their place as soon as they take care of the corpse-wrangling!
He gambled his entire net worth. No, like a lot of people who come from at least middle-upper class to upper class families, he was in no danger of starving. But he was in danger of losing everything he had earned to date. Of course he took personal gambles.
No one else had succeeded doing those things. You seriously think Musk deserves no credit for Tesla and Paypl? And I notice you didn’t mention SpaceX - the company that revolutionized spaceflight and beat numerous aerospace giants and governments in the process. And he did it while the ‘old space’ types said what he was doing was folly and would fail. Even other entrepreneurs were scared of landing rockets and looked to other cost-saving measures like air launch. If he had just donr that one thing, he would be one of the most important figures of the century.
Hey, where’s that liberal tolerance for alternative lifestyles? I guess it’s situational, huh? I don’t give a rat’s ass for what he does in private so long as everyone is a consenting adult.
All of those things are stupid. Visionaries are like that - they have some really bad ideas along with the good ones. Nikola Tesla wanted to beam power around the world through the air. Stupid idea, but it doesn’t negate the good stuff he did.
I’ve said plenty on this board about how stupid Hyperloop is. And Musk is well kmown for his crazy timelines that get missed. But do you know who else misses big deadlines? Everyone else.
Hey, did you hear that Boeing’s Starliner is delayed again? This time until at least April 2023. Boeing and SpaceX got their contracts to fly astronauts to the ISS at the same time. Boeing was given 1.2 billion more than SpaceX, because supposedly Boeing brought more to the table. Well, SpaceX delivered and has been flying astronauts to the ISS for a long time now, and Boeing has so far failed. SpaceX was recently given seven flights Boeing should have gotten, but they can’t execute.
Any idea how many years behind schedule SLS is? Blue Origin missed its deadline to provide BE-4 engines to ULA by two years.
In the meantime, SpaceX is flying more than double the anount of payload into orbit than every other rocket program in the world combined. And saving taxpayers billions of dollars in the process.
Just think of how much better they could be doing if their CEO wasn’t batshit insane, then.
Musk didn’t even get involved with Paypal until two years after it started, and they owe their success to having been bought out by eBay, which happened after Musk was fired.
The point is that the fellow billionaire you are trying to push your goods off onto is going to demand scrutiny. Musk himself tried to demand such measures, but unfortunately for him he waited until after he committed to the deal.
