this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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[–] ram@bookwormstory.social 35 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Elon too, while misguided, wants to do good

There's no reason to believe this.

But look at how his dad has treated him growing up

An explanation as to why someone's a bad person doesn't make them less bad.

Plus I’m pretty sure he’s neurodivergent.

He's autistic. Most autistic people aren't narcissistic megalomaniacs, and if they are, they should be called out for it.

If anybody wants to get him to see the error of his ways, more abusive language is certainly not going to help.

A moot point, he will not accept anything but the yes men he grew up around and lived the last 52 years being applauded by.

He’s being pushed into a corner and in his mind he sees a world that is increasingly broken by vile people who don’t understand him or his vision for improving the world.

I do understand his vision, and the vision is broken and harmful.

Elon has in fact done a lot of good for the world, but he needs people he trust to keep his feet on the ground.

He has? Like his racially segregated factories? Or the monkeys he experiments on the brains of?

That can’t be achieved by chastising him, but by praising the things he does well and getting him to spend more time among “normal” people and good role models

This is ineffective with people in such a power position.

In the meantime though, to protect the world from powerful broken men, we need regulation to keep them fenced off.

Agreed.

Ultimately, Elon Musk is a genuinely harmful and bad person, who is both uncritically malicious to those who dare criticize him, and is incredibly foolish at every endeavour he involves himself in. "His" successes come as a result of people he hired walling him off in his companies so that he continues to invest in technologies while being blind to any important part of production he might find interesting enough to meddle in.

Your take on him is one I can empathize with, and I even held myself for a while, but at the end of the day, it's a benefit of the doubt he expressly does not deserve.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

Yeah I want to believe everyone including him is actively a moral actor trying to make the best world they can, but I know better. His motivations aren’t subtle. He desperately wants to be admired and seen as cool and smart. That’s fine when handled responsibly, but he isn’t. He left his wife once he became rich. He went on a crusade against trans people when his daughter came out as trans and said she hates billionaires. He’s become 4chan because when he says shitty right wing bullshit they praise him. He’s probably still seeing himself as a bullied nerd getting picked on by people cooler than him, or maybe he sees it as he’s getting his nerds revenge. But either way, it’s clear he’s more concerned with being the underdog hero of his favorite type of story than building a world worth living in.