No Stupid Questions

He’s always been this bad, he just had enough people around him that sanitized everything we saw about him. There’s reports of teams at Tesla dedicated to keeping him out of the way. His Twitter was sane probably because it wasn’t actually him running it.

It truly is a case of he’s always been this bad, it’s just not being hidden anymore. I’m pretty sure he went off the rails during covid and stopped listening to anyone but himself. He’s shown glimpses of this through his career, most people just ignored it as eccentric billionaire though.

Just like Kanye appeared to fall off the deep end, musk also looks like it was sudden, when in fact it’s been a growing sentiment over the years.

Musk got a lot of fans by driving the electric car revolution, but he really was always a d-bag. It just got excused or swept under the rug.

The first public crack in the armor really came in 2019 when he inserted himself in the Thailand cave rescue effort in the worst way. Then in 2020, he basically declared himself a public health expert and spread plenty of COVID misinformation.

But well before that, his first marriage was apparently pretty awful: https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/

He's always believed that population collapse is a huge problem. He comes from a big family, and has lots of kids himself.

His management style is also pretty terrible: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-management-leadership-style-at-tesla-spacex-2022-4

Buddy, you fell for the PR machine. Back in 2002 when Elmo was thinking about what to do with his ill gained money in order to ~~scam the us government~~ make more money he wanted to rely on a futuristic sort of image to raise capital. We came from the turn of the millennium but nothing futuristic had actually materialized. Mind you, not utopia futurism but more like rugged individualism dystopia futurism. Then in 2008 a movie came out, IronMan, starring Robert Downey Jr. And Musk thought that everyone liked that guy and if he presented himself that way—he owned a space launch company after all—then people would like him and he would be able to raise more money. Hence the hair implants (he was balding before) and Tesla self-driving (it was just electric cars before), and SpaceX to mars (originally it was just a fund sink to do something useful with all soviet era rockets), brain implants, etc. Along with it came a blitz PR campaign. The Muskrat didn't have a significant public presence before 2010, no one knew who he was other than some eccentric billionaire who owned things nerds liked. Electric cars, and rockets. So he and a few publicists for hire pushed him hard into the public eye as the real life Tony Stark. That's it.

Cut to 6 years later, no more publicists. You see, he wanted more publicity, the way he acquired it was by inserting himself in any conversation he could. But as a any narcissist, Musk thinks himself perfect and incapable of any wrong doing, any fault is someone's else and everyone are just dead weight dragging him down. So when he wanted to insert himself into the Thailand cave tragedy, Tesla's PR, who doubled as his personal PR, told him please don't. He called a guy a pedophile and fired the PR (“all the PR my companies need is me as their CEO”). He came from 6 years where everything he said was applauded by the public and anything he commanded was done. Then he ~~paid to be~~ was declared the richest man on earth. Nothing rubs the narcissist's ego like being publicly acknowledge as what they think themselves to be. But this means all self-restrain was off and without any external constrains, his true self has come to be publicly known.

His greatest skill has been taking credit. He finally ran out of the accomplishments of others.

He had little to do with Tesla, aside from naming the models so they would spell S3XY and using shitty off-the-shelf components not designed for use in cars that are now failing in many vehicles. He literally bought the title of "founder" from the people that actually founded Tesla, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

SpaceX is the work of Tom Mueller (former TRW engineer), Gwynne Shotwell (former The Aerospace Corporation engineer), and Chris Thompson far more than Elon Musk.

Go back further, and you find his family owned an emerald mine. Paypal was far and away more the work of Peter Thiel, who merged his business with Musk's online financial services company X.com (if you wonder where that came from). He got super rich selling out to eBay. His one business, Zip2, was just good luck selling it out also during the Dot Com bubble (I mean, seriously, it was bought for $305m by Compaq to help AltaVista). Essentially, the emerald mine funded Zip2, which he sold in 1999 to fund X.com, which became Paypal, which he sold in 2002. Since then, the millions he got from that sale funded SpaceX and Tesla.

And to be frank, he wants more power, and he saw how quickly Trump was able to manipulate people. So he dropped the mask and adopted Trump's modus operandi.

When was that cave-in in Asia where he proposed using a submarine to get them out, divers got them out instead, and he call the heroic divers pedophiles? That was the time I realized he was crazy.

He was always an idiot, he had South African mine money to waste is the difference between him and the idiots you already know.

What changed is he started becoming more public. He's always been a shithead. There were mentions of him abusing his employees back when I was in grad school in 2012. People on the internet just fell for his mythos and just kept ignoring signs to the contrary until he just...kept...talking.. and couldn't be ignored anymore.

He's always been like this.

https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/

That's the story of his first wife Justine. What kind of normal person would ever tell his girlfriend that "I'm the alpha in this relationship?"

To the people that would comment, “Well he’s always been like that he just shows it now”, I don’t believe it.

Then you're never going to believe the real answer. A lot of us have been hating on Musk (and Peter Thiel, don't sleep on that monster) since the Paypal days. But Elon made it easier for us to buy things, then he bought an electric car company, and suddenly everyone thought he was the damn tech messiah.

He didn't change. You just got older and now recognise him for the childish idiot he is.

He called divers, who tried to rescue children, pedophiles because they wouldn't use his shitty gear. That was in 2018.

Sorry dude, he was Paypal mafia. He has never been anything but a rich kid playing with money - it has just been a very congenial environment for the already rich for some time. I know it's hard to accept that you were just colossally taken in by a huckster, but that is really what happened.

I was at first excited when he talked about Mars, but now that I know he can’t even run a social media platform I definitely wouldn’t wanna trust him with my life

Elon had a PR team. A really good PR team, that made him seem like real-life Tony Stark. His PR team was so good that Elon himself started to believe in their lies, so he got rid of them. Now we see his real self.

His lies caught up to him. From his ridiculous tunnels, his crypto pump and dump scam, his robotaxis, to taking humanity to Mars. The lies just collapsed and revealed they were empty promises all along. Hell, even his solar panels were a trick, and the goddamn truck. Not to mention the FSD that will never really work as promised because the tech just isn’t there.

I read an article saying that he was always like this but he had handlers in earlier companies to keep his crazy from affecting the business. With Twitter, he has direct access to everything, and years of thinking he was the smartest person in the room while everyone managed him have led to this.

I think you are suffering from rose colored glasses syndrome. Elon has always been a horrible human, always will be a horrible human, and deserves all the criticism he gets. Doing 1 good thing while simultaneously doing 1,000 horrible things doesn’t make you great.

Your thought that he was such a great guy just a few years ago, why do you think that? He made an electric car? He made rockets that can land themselves? He made an online only bank? What exactly did he do that made him so great? Cause he didn't invent any of that, he didn't have the original ideas, or come up with the original concepts, he just bought them. All he did, is use his inherited wealth to fund investments, that he then used profits from to fund other investments. He bought companies that already existed. He had the capital to invest. So it sounds like you are saying that money made him great?

You want to know how great of a person he was behind closed doors? It’s an easy metric to quantify. How many kids does he have, and by how many partners? Now, why do so many of those kids or partners want nothing to do with him? Could it be cause he’s always been a horrible douche bag, and always has been?

He was really down to earth when he accused one of the Thai cave rescuers of being pedophile and doubled down on it.

As an aside note, I don't like when OP's don't interact with the posts they make. Especially on posts like this it would have really interesting to gain more insight on where he was coming from or if the replies are making sense in his mind.

I'm probably reading too much into this, there are many reasons not to reply, but when I see a popular post that has 0 replies by OP I feel there's dishonesty.

Not sure why you're surprised. Musk showed his true colors by hoarding wealth for his whole life.

But now you're surprised he's an asshole?

No good person has a billion dollars.

I don't think he ever was a great person, but social media also has the power to radicalize people. It doesn't matter if you are rich or smart or anything, using too much social media exposes you to being radicalized, in any direction

He is the next Steve Jobs. Go read the official autobiography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson to understand how it's more true now than ever. Spoiler: Steve Jobs was a crazy narcissistic piece of shit.

You don't believe someone that's a narcissist and egocentric as all hell can't also be smart about thier public image? You should reconsider, because that's pretty much what happened. And he isn't the only one. Personally, I've always lived by a simple golden rule:

All those billionaires that wanna convince you that they're "cool and not like the other billionaires", they ever pull a Jimmy Carter and build houses for the poor, becoming a lecturer at a university, or do any other humanitarian work that requires them to physically bust thier ass working hard like the rest of us? No? Then they're no different.

If you don't wanna take the overwhelming documented evidence that shows he was always like that and didn't magically become unhinged one day tho, by all means, believe what you want.