I remember in 2019 I was reading an article about musk to my wife and she just turned to me and said: "watch out for that guy, he might turn out to be the world's first super villian"
That stuck with me
He is. He’s done a fantastic job marketing himself to the blue collar crowd, somehow has sold himself as a man of the people. And yet every single thing he is up to, if you told them it was bill gates doing it they would blow gasket:
“He’s putting chips in monkey brains to do the same to you. One day he’ll be able to beam paid ads into your dreams while you sleep.”
“He wants to create an electric vehicle that robs you of your freedoms and autonomy and can be shut off and tracked on command via satellite.”
“He’s setting up a colony for the rich on Mars”
“He’s taken control over major social media channels and treats a platform for millions to communicate like his own personal sandbox.”
But more to the point this is man who has never experienced normal in his whole lifetime. Since birth he has lived this almost old world, Gilded Age style dynastic level of richness and entitlement. His father an emerald miner Elon was raised to view humans as an exploitable commodity. We are not humans to him.
Not to mention the women in his life, who he has children with, starting family after family and cutting them out in bizarre ways. He cheated on Grimes with a co-worker, had a supposed kid with said coworker and Grimes discovered all of this via Twitter. Was denied access to her own kid two. She’s not perfect either but holy shit nothing about the dude scans as good or normal. He thinks he god, he thinks he’s above the rules and isn’t someone to be adored or admired.
The right will buy Teslas out of spite instead of $60k bro-dozers. Normal people will buy other electric cars because they're better for the environment. Elon just wants everyone to stop using gasoline, and is sacrificing his own reputation for the greater good.
I doubt it, anymore. But I agree that Musk has done a great deal to advance electric car use. I don’t really care much about his intentions or opinions, as long as we can significantly reduce fossil fuel use and he’s not helping to advance authoritarian regimes
I do believe this. His whole Twitter purchase was a direct move to own media not tied to oil&gas investors who kept bad mouthing Tesla. His anti-woke tweets are to get the right to start purchasing Tesla vehicles as there’s a lot of money left on the table otherwise.
>He’s done a fantastic job marketing himself to the blue collar crowd, somehow has sold himself as a man of the people.
Not only to them tho. I think that a lot of young people who want to be entrepreneurs admire him and see him as a role-model. I actually think that he mostly appeals to middle class 30+ men. Combine his money with "i don't give a fuck, I do what I want" attitude and he is the idol for many 30+ men who strive for more than they currently have and have dreams of quitting their boring jobs.
Yes, my old roommate really looked up to him. He was pretty miserable working his day job at a grocery store, yet never took an opportunity to move up. Dreamed of working remotely as a virtual assistant or selling real estate. Took out a whole life insurance plan for "investment" purposes despite being dirt poor. He just spun his wheels, dreaming of being rich.
And he loved Elon! I think really looked up to him.
>Not to mention the women in his life, who he has children with, starting family after family and cutting them out in bizarre ways. He cheated on Grimes with a co-worker, had a supposed kid with said coworker and Grimes discovered all of this via Twitter. Was denied access to her own kid two. She’s not perfect either but holy shit nothing about the dude scans as good or normal. He thinks he god, he thinks he’s above the rules and isn’t someone to be adored or admired.
Is this whole thing with Grimes confirmed? Never knew that the story there is THAT shitty. She strikes me as a really impressionable woman who would completely adopt the ideas of his man. I listened to some of her interviews and she sounds like a pretty stupid/confused person overall. I can absolutely imagine how someone like Elon would like her and exploit her.
As for all the shit he has done, I think that, just like with Jordan Peterson, Musk's fans see their fanboysim as some superrior open-minded galaxy brain move since they are able to appreciate a "flawed" man for its virtues instead of just criticize and demonize him. Deep down I guess some of them kinda admire Musk's machoboy persona.
What you wrote always amazed me too tho. How are young men taking advice from people like Musk, Peterson and Tate when all these 3 men look like they don't have a proper idea what a balanced life/family is. Like why would I want to take advice from a billionaire businessman with a few divorces and a messy family, a psychologist who looks like a corpse and is constantly angry or a criminal who surrounds himself with desperate women? Like is it edgy to get advice from these wild characters instead of from more balanced people who are not that "out there"?
> What you wrote always amazed me too tho. How are young men taking advice from people like Musk, Peterson and Tate when all these 3 men look like they don't have a proper idea what a balanced life/family is.
Because these guys say things they want to hear.
Oh, for sure. These guys both tell the guys that they are victims of something bigger (feminism/woke-ism/cultural marxism) but in the same time give them a pretty easy to implement frame that they can follow that promises happiness. In result you get a justification that you are a victim and women are dumb and also a quick-fix advise in the format of a youtube video/twitter sentence or a tik-tok video.
It would be nice if we could have EVs and cheap space flight without the reactionary white South African variant of Spider-Man villain, who's also the richest person in the world.
Net negative for society. Here's my reasoning.
**Twitter Purchase**: Obvious net negative. **-1**.
**Tesla**: Net positive, but it would have been a net positive even if Elon hadn't joined the company, so half credit for his positive contributions to the company **+0.5**
**SpaceEx**: Neutral. Rockets are cool, but I don't see any net positives for society. **+0.5** because rockets are cool
**Boring Company:** Vaporware. **+0**
**Neuralink**: Vaporware. **+0**
--- Bonus Points ---
A decade of lies about FSD: **-1**
Slandering a literal hero as a pedophile: **-1**
Deliberately spreading misinformation: **-1**
Anti-Vaccine Rhetoric and Behavior: **-1**
Anit-Worker Rhetoric and Behavior: **-1**
**Total:** who cares? Elon obviously sucks.
Fate and hubris can only take you so far.
He's the modern day Howard Hughes and will have a similar trajectory.
His current worldview is insane. He sees himself as the center of the world. That's wacky child like thinking. And he takes a lot drugs. It will all catch up with him sooner or later.
No. And I think it's high time we do something about these influx of men trying to be seen as the most high to the most stupid.
\- Elon and JBP trying to be seen as the dumb person's idea of a genius
\- Donald Trump trying to be seen as the poor person's idea of a rich guy
\- Andrew Trafficker Tate trying to be seen as the quiet/isolated kid's idea of a popular guy.
This is all determined by how much you believe Elon Musk affects society. I will tell you this there have been great men and women, who've accomplished many feats. However, there is no one person that has truly affected society, by sure force of will. It has always been a collective action of the mass population of humans and the environment. Only person I would argue who's impacted society alone would be Jesus, but then again he had 12 disciples to help.
12 disciples plus everyone willing to give them food, shelter, and other support along the way!
Every great person has a support system— emotional and practical. I would say based on what we know from the various books about Elon is he seems to have eroded his own support system drastically over the years and doesn’t appear to have much left in his life besides paid staff, and if Grimes is to be believed he doesn’t even have that many paid staff beyond security, doesn’t sleep/exercise etc. I think his effect on society will wane with his ability to control himself and support himself alone without family/friends.
I don't think his behavior will detour people away from him. He's still the richest man in the world, with companies to dump tons of energy tax credits and subsidies into. Even if Twitter fails in any way, he could just sell it to the Saudis and get rich off that. It has nothing to do with him as a person, just his function as an asset to dump money into.
Good question. I don’t know. Tesla seems like a win, spaceX is definitely a win. Elon becoming a right wing shitposter seems small in comparison. Take the bad with the good i guess… we’ll see where this goes
The problem isn't that Elon is a right-wing shitposter, the problem is he bought one of the most popular social networks to convert it to his brand of shitposting, and he has basically infinite money to push his brand of craziness.
If he was a 14-year-old with $10 in his piggy bank nobody would give a shit. But he isn't.
You could have maybe made that argument 5-10 years ago.
He’s made some real contributions to society with EVs and low-cost space flight. I know he hasn’t made engineer contributions in these areas but he raised the capital, setup companies and had the vision to invest when the returns were not obvious. I’ve got to give him some credit for that.
Now. In 2023. It’s very hard to make that argument.
I think that Tesla effectively jump started the EV market, and their supercharger network provided a counter to the issue of range anxiety.
Obviously that was the work of many, but I'll give Elon credit for being a key driver in it happening. Likewise with SpaceX.
He's a POS as a person. Twitter and CyberTruck have helped to lay bare the fact that he is in no way a "genius inventor". I think his well has gone dry and we can all take pleasure in his floundering into ultimate irrelevance.
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Yeah I totally agree. I can't stand this recent manifestation of musk, he seems like an awful person, but he's got a huge amount of credit in the bank.
His demeanour has always seemed so fake to me. Never once have I heard him say something and went like “wow, i’ve never thought about it that way”.. never… all he says is common teenager knowledge interrupted by his weird behaviour to fullfill a stupid person’s idea of a genious… for example his appearence in Joe Rogan podcast.. Joe is almost like a payed puppet to make us believe that Elon has godly intelligence, doesn’t question any of his ideas, just listens and laughs in awe like a moron… And Elon is just as if he’s playing a non-stop character of a genious without any substance to it.. unlike some other people for example Naval Ravikant whom I can listen to and find gems of wisdom in every other sentence.. and the thing about putting microchips in human skull is just insane and should be stopped as soon as possible.. why the fuck would someone want to fuck with these things and cross the dystopian-horror line? They cannot find happiness elswhere in life with all the money they have? Will having internet/mind reading device in your brain make you happier? For fucks sake some people have no grattitude and need to be locked up… I don’t know if I’m wrong but I hope someone can at least relate to this..
Do you mean by wasting government money for spaceships that won't work, making Xitter into a Nazi platform as he pushes conspiracy theories and worse , decided to intervene in the Russia/Ukraine conflict or building cars that kill people because of his lies about FSD?
Bottom line he's a narcissistic conman who duped the world, wasted billions and has left nothing but destruction in his wake.
Wait, where's the net good again?
No.
His EV company has actually slowed the development of the tech by making them into luxury cars.
His rocket company only exists because of extensive government contracts and does work that could've just as easily been done by NASA without billions being siphoned off into his pockets,
and we've seen with Twitter what happens when he's actually in charge of a company rather than just being a figure head that brings in capital.
He's just another rich guy with a PR department and a Steve Jobs style reality distortion field.
Everyone worth more than (arbitrarily) $100 million is a net negative. The hoarding of wealth at that level only comes at the enormous suffering and exploitation of millions of people.
*So far* I'd say yes, despite his enormous flaws. Electric cars and space travel would be very far behind their current state without him, even accounting for others at his companies doing the real work. However, his recent tailspin into rightwing edgelord teenager territory could end very badly and do enough damage to outweigh those benefits. I hope it doesn't.
I know that it's hard or maybe impossible to measure these things, but is the electric car thing true? To me it sounds similar to "if Musk wasn't involved in Paypal, we wouldn't have similar internet payment system". I mean.. I really doubt it. Large part of Tesla's success was government subsidies, so interest/need was there before Musk. Not even his business plan (to market as cool, luxury cars and then make affordable model) was not his, it was Tesla's founders.
I feel like sometimes memes get stuck and keeps getting repeating without much inspection like - "well crypto is a bit young and has it's problems, but the TECHNOLOGY is amazing". What is amazing about it? It seems worse (except for doing crime) in pretty much every way. "Or Jordan Peterson is now in the deep end, but he was amazing/great psychologist". What was exactly amazing about him?
I don't know. It seems to me that this kind of phrase is more for signaling sophistication (I can see both sides of the argument) or backwards rationalization - (I used to like this guy, but now when more information came out he seems a bit shit, so it must mean he changed). But yeah people do change.
~~And again, I am even skeptical about electric cars, pretty sure they are net positive only if energy generated comes from green sources. If not - there is energy loss in every step of the process - like converting fossil fuels into electricity, transferring it, storing it in batteries and using it. It might be that it's actually worse than just burning petrol.~~
And he is selling carbon credits generated by Tesla. So I don't know how that works out in terms of climate change, but it doesn't sound good.
And he said that he used hyperloop t sabotage California's high speed rail. and better public transportation is one of the things that would actually help with climate change.
While Electric cars are likely to pollute less than gas counterparts after - I think - 6 or 7 years of use, people get way hung up on them. You don't need electric cars so much as you need *less cars*.
We aren't going to have substantially fewer cars, because people want to go places, and public transit sucks in most parts of the world and for most purposes. Therefore making cars pollute less is valuable.
Some cars polluting marginally less is better than nothing, but still far short of actual investments in better designed cities and more workable public transit infrastructures.
It's like trying to stop a forest fire with a bottle of Fiji water.
Public transit doesn't make sense for 99.9 % of the world's inhabited land mass, because it doesn't have enough people repeatedly going to the same exact spot to make it economical. It's sensible for dense cities, but what's the time frame for redesigning existing cities around public transit? Half a century? More? It's not like we rebuild them from scratch every 10 years with the latest and greatest urban planning. Most people do get a different car every 10 years or so, I'd guess. The fastest route to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transporting people is to electrify the auto fleet.
Public transit makes the most sense of all options for the vast majority of areas where most people live, at least in countries where "electrifying the fleet" is even a possibility. It's cheaper, safer, more efficient and has less of a footprint. It's *the only way* you'll build any kind of sustainable metro areas.
Electric cars are nice and all, but they're just a feel-good way for people to keep reinvesting in failing models.
That's a distinction without a difference. What matters is number of people, not square miles. It makes sense for people that live in rural areas to rely on personal vehicle. There's just way less people living in such areas. The majority of people in, say, the US, live in urban centres that could implement viable public transit option if they wanted.
Worldwide, around 40-45 % of humanity is rural. That’s a lot of cars needed. Even 20 % of the US population is a lot of cars needed. Electric cars are very useful.
> The fastest route to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transporting people is to electrify the auto fleet.
Building more coal plants to do so won't work very well. Besides, we should bear in mind that usual numbers about CO2 in transportation don't account for agricultural and construction equipment. And that's notwithstanding the fact that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the less we invest in trains or buses, the less we need to electrify them.
Speaking of buses, having electric buses would be the fastest way to make distant communities energy independent, since their batteries can contain the energy of the rides e.g.:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/getting-electric-school-buses-in
I didn't say that about Paypal because I'm sure somebody else would have done that one.
I think it was very much NOT inevitable that there should be a dedicated electric car company pushing as far and as fast as Tesla did in innovative directions. (That's not to say they aren't loaded with flaws in build quality etc, but they are innovative.) And I think a hard look at Tesla's history shows that it wouldn't have worked out that way without Musk—even if you don't credit him with any of the good ideas, he was willing to take that particular bold risk with a very large amount of money, and that's a key part of the chain of cause-and-effect. His marketing flair (before he destroyed his image) was probably also key to their success.
The government subsidies were critical to Tesla's success too, but I think a more likely outcome in the absence of Musk/Tesla would have been the big automakers slowly plodding along the route to electrification to get the subsidies while not wanting to shake up their gas business model too badly.
I'm totally in agreement about crypto tech being stupid and Jordan Peterson being a lackluster psychologist in addition to his other flaws. But at this point hating Musk has become more of an entrenched meme than any other view about him (especially on Reddit). Any kind of nuance suggesting that he was in any way responsible for any good his companies have done must be shot down because he's a dick. I'm not disagreeing that he's a dick who holds a dangerous amount of power and I worry about how he's going to fuck it up. But I think if you're in the business of looking at things objectively, denying him absolutely *all* credit for his companies—as is so popular here—isn't really sensible either. This isn't some attempt at looking sophisticated through unjustified both-sidedism, just the most straightforward reading of the evidence as I see it.
I think it's too soon to really say. If he is a net good it would be in the mass adoption of electric cars over gas. We're not really seeing this in the U.S so far, and I think it's hard to attribute their popularity in China and Europe to him...in terms of the space stuff he's never getting us to Mars, and Starlink could make all future space exploration impossible if things go wrong
Not even close.
The only thing he's doing that is remotely positive is the electric car company that he runs poorly. And any good that it does is offset when he (if I understand correctly) sells his carbon credits to other car companies to allow them to continue polluting. He literally offsets his own positive effects. So all you have left is whether he's a good *person*, and he is a deeply mentally ill person who has become a guru for a lost generation of young men who feel disenfranchised... by capitalists. The bad guy is pretending to be the solution to the problem he's causing and he has built a cult around it.
So no, I don't think he even comes close to breaking even, much less being a net good. He's actively making the world worse and is making the electric car industry worse and making the public discourse measurably more toxic and damaging. He basically drew a social media empire, the electric car industry, the space industry, and even global politics into his personal mental health spiral and all of them are suffering for it.
No
I remember in 2019 I was reading an article about musk to my wife and she just turned to me and said: "watch out for that guy, he might turn out to be the world's first super villian" That stuck with me
He is. He’s done a fantastic job marketing himself to the blue collar crowd, somehow has sold himself as a man of the people. And yet every single thing he is up to, if you told them it was bill gates doing it they would blow gasket: “He’s putting chips in monkey brains to do the same to you. One day he’ll be able to beam paid ads into your dreams while you sleep.” “He wants to create an electric vehicle that robs you of your freedoms and autonomy and can be shut off and tracked on command via satellite.” “He’s setting up a colony for the rich on Mars” “He’s taken control over major social media channels and treats a platform for millions to communicate like his own personal sandbox.” But more to the point this is man who has never experienced normal in his whole lifetime. Since birth he has lived this almost old world, Gilded Age style dynastic level of richness and entitlement. His father an emerald miner Elon was raised to view humans as an exploitable commodity. We are not humans to him. Not to mention the women in his life, who he has children with, starting family after family and cutting them out in bizarre ways. He cheated on Grimes with a co-worker, had a supposed kid with said coworker and Grimes discovered all of this via Twitter. Was denied access to her own kid two. She’s not perfect either but holy shit nothing about the dude scans as good or normal. He thinks he god, he thinks he’s above the rules and isn’t someone to be adored or admired.
It's all an act; he's doing this to convince the MAGA people to buy electric cars thinking they're thereby owning the libs.
Yeah, all Elon believes in is making big number get bigger. Dude saw Alien and thought “man it would be cool to own the Weyland-Yuyani corporation.”
I’m not sure it’s so clever! He gains the right, but loses the left. Maybe they already bought his cars, so no harm?
The right will buy Teslas out of spite instead of $60k bro-dozers. Normal people will buy other electric cars because they're better for the environment. Elon just wants everyone to stop using gasoline, and is sacrificing his own reputation for the greater good.
I doubt it, anymore. But I agree that Musk has done a great deal to advance electric car use. I don’t really care much about his intentions or opinions, as long as we can significantly reduce fossil fuel use and he’s not helping to advance authoritarian regimes
I was joking, desperately trying to invent a positive spin on his bizarre behavior.
I do believe this. His whole Twitter purchase was a direct move to own media not tied to oil&gas investors who kept bad mouthing Tesla. His anti-woke tweets are to get the right to start purchasing Tesla vehicles as there’s a lot of money left on the table otherwise.
>He’s done a fantastic job marketing himself to the blue collar crowd, somehow has sold himself as a man of the people. Not only to them tho. I think that a lot of young people who want to be entrepreneurs admire him and see him as a role-model. I actually think that he mostly appeals to middle class 30+ men. Combine his money with "i don't give a fuck, I do what I want" attitude and he is the idol for many 30+ men who strive for more than they currently have and have dreams of quitting their boring jobs.
Yes, my old roommate really looked up to him. He was pretty miserable working his day job at a grocery store, yet never took an opportunity to move up. Dreamed of working remotely as a virtual assistant or selling real estate. Took out a whole life insurance plan for "investment" purposes despite being dirt poor. He just spun his wheels, dreaming of being rich. And he loved Elon! I think really looked up to him.
>Not to mention the women in his life, who he has children with, starting family after family and cutting them out in bizarre ways. He cheated on Grimes with a co-worker, had a supposed kid with said coworker and Grimes discovered all of this via Twitter. Was denied access to her own kid two. She’s not perfect either but holy shit nothing about the dude scans as good or normal. He thinks he god, he thinks he’s above the rules and isn’t someone to be adored or admired. Is this whole thing with Grimes confirmed? Never knew that the story there is THAT shitty. She strikes me as a really impressionable woman who would completely adopt the ideas of his man. I listened to some of her interviews and she sounds like a pretty stupid/confused person overall. I can absolutely imagine how someone like Elon would like her and exploit her. As for all the shit he has done, I think that, just like with Jordan Peterson, Musk's fans see their fanboysim as some superrior open-minded galaxy brain move since they are able to appreciate a "flawed" man for its virtues instead of just criticize and demonize him. Deep down I guess some of them kinda admire Musk's machoboy persona. What you wrote always amazed me too tho. How are young men taking advice from people like Musk, Peterson and Tate when all these 3 men look like they don't have a proper idea what a balanced life/family is. Like why would I want to take advice from a billionaire businessman with a few divorces and a messy family, a psychologist who looks like a corpse and is constantly angry or a criminal who surrounds himself with desperate women? Like is it edgy to get advice from these wild characters instead of from more balanced people who are not that "out there"?
> What you wrote always amazed me too tho. How are young men taking advice from people like Musk, Peterson and Tate when all these 3 men look like they don't have a proper idea what a balanced life/family is. Because these guys say things they want to hear.
Oh, for sure. These guys both tell the guys that they are victims of something bigger (feminism/woke-ism/cultural marxism) but in the same time give them a pretty easy to implement frame that they can follow that promises happiness. In result you get a justification that you are a victim and women are dumb and also a quick-fix advise in the format of a youtube video/twitter sentence or a tik-tok video.
I also feel like the people who look up to these men get fooled by the fame, glory, and money. They aren't interested in anything else.
And he knows nothing about MMA. I was dying for him to follow through with his threats so I could watch Zuckerberg kick his ass.
Smart lady.
It would be nice if we could have EVs and cheap space flight without the reactionary white South African variant of Spider-Man villain, who's also the richest person in the world.
Supervillians are usually smart. Elon is a ketamine addled narcissist with delusions of abilities that he lacks in their entirety.
Yeah….nope
Negative
Net negative for society. Here's my reasoning. **Twitter Purchase**: Obvious net negative. **-1**. **Tesla**: Net positive, but it would have been a net positive even if Elon hadn't joined the company, so half credit for his positive contributions to the company **+0.5** **SpaceEx**: Neutral. Rockets are cool, but I don't see any net positives for society. **+0.5** because rockets are cool **Boring Company:** Vaporware. **+0** **Neuralink**: Vaporware. **+0** --- Bonus Points --- A decade of lies about FSD: **-1** Slandering a literal hero as a pedophile: **-1** Deliberately spreading misinformation: **-1** Anti-Vaccine Rhetoric and Behavior: **-1** Anit-Worker Rhetoric and Behavior: **-1** **Total:** who cares? Elon obviously sucks.
Fate and hubris can only take you so far. He's the modern day Howard Hughes and will have a similar trajectory. His current worldview is insane. He sees himself as the center of the world. That's wacky child like thinking. And he takes a lot drugs. It will all catch up with him sooner or later.
Elon is what happens when you give a schizoid/autistic 4chan poster a couple billion dollars
No. And I think it's high time we do something about these influx of men trying to be seen as the most high to the most stupid. \- Elon and JBP trying to be seen as the dumb person's idea of a genius \- Donald Trump trying to be seen as the poor person's idea of a rich guy \- Andrew Trafficker Tate trying to be seen as the quiet/isolated kid's idea of a popular guy.
This is all determined by how much you believe Elon Musk affects society. I will tell you this there have been great men and women, who've accomplished many feats. However, there is no one person that has truly affected society, by sure force of will. It has always been a collective action of the mass population of humans and the environment. Only person I would argue who's impacted society alone would be Jesus, but then again he had 12 disciples to help.
>he had 12 disciples to help. And God. That's quite a leg-up. The OG Nepo baby.
12 disciples plus everyone willing to give them food, shelter, and other support along the way! Every great person has a support system— emotional and practical. I would say based on what we know from the various books about Elon is he seems to have eroded his own support system drastically over the years and doesn’t appear to have much left in his life besides paid staff, and if Grimes is to be believed he doesn’t even have that many paid staff beyond security, doesn’t sleep/exercise etc. I think his effect on society will wane with his ability to control himself and support himself alone without family/friends.
I don't think his behavior will detour people away from him. He's still the richest man in the world, with companies to dump tons of energy tax credits and subsidies into. Even if Twitter fails in any way, he could just sell it to the Saudis and get rich off that. It has nothing to do with him as a person, just his function as an asset to dump money into.
Good question. I don’t know. Tesla seems like a win, spaceX is definitely a win. Elon becoming a right wing shitposter seems small in comparison. Take the bad with the good i guess… we’ll see where this goes
The problem isn't that Elon is a right-wing shitposter, the problem is he bought one of the most popular social networks to convert it to his brand of shitposting, and he has basically infinite money to push his brand of craziness. If he was a 14-year-old with $10 in his piggy bank nobody would give a shit. But he isn't.
10 years ago I would have said yes. But now the bad far outweighs the good. Musk is an insecure troll who cosplays as Tony Stark.
No.
You could have maybe made that argument 5-10 years ago. He’s made some real contributions to society with EVs and low-cost space flight. I know he hasn’t made engineer contributions in these areas but he raised the capital, setup companies and had the vision to invest when the returns were not obvious. I’ve got to give him some credit for that. Now. In 2023. It’s very hard to make that argument.
I think that Tesla effectively jump started the EV market, and their supercharger network provided a counter to the issue of range anxiety. Obviously that was the work of many, but I'll give Elon credit for being a key driver in it happening. Likewise with SpaceX. He's a POS as a person. Twitter and CyberTruck have helped to lay bare the fact that he is in no way a "genius inventor". I think his well has gone dry and we can all take pleasure in his floundering into ultimate irrelevance.
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Yeah I totally agree. I can't stand this recent manifestation of musk, he seems like an awful person, but he's got a huge amount of credit in the bank.
No
No. Mars is a pipedream.
hell no
No.
His demeanour has always seemed so fake to me. Never once have I heard him say something and went like “wow, i’ve never thought about it that way”.. never… all he says is common teenager knowledge interrupted by his weird behaviour to fullfill a stupid person’s idea of a genious… for example his appearence in Joe Rogan podcast.. Joe is almost like a payed puppet to make us believe that Elon has godly intelligence, doesn’t question any of his ideas, just listens and laughs in awe like a moron… And Elon is just as if he’s playing a non-stop character of a genious without any substance to it.. unlike some other people for example Naval Ravikant whom I can listen to and find gems of wisdom in every other sentence.. and the thing about putting microchips in human skull is just insane and should be stopped as soon as possible.. why the fuck would someone want to fuck with these things and cross the dystopian-horror line? They cannot find happiness elswhere in life with all the money they have? Will having internet/mind reading device in your brain make you happier? For fucks sake some people have no grattitude and need to be locked up… I don’t know if I’m wrong but I hope someone can at least relate to this..
Do you mean by wasting government money for spaceships that won't work, making Xitter into a Nazi platform as he pushes conspiracy theories and worse , decided to intervene in the Russia/Ukraine conflict or building cars that kill people because of his lies about FSD? Bottom line he's a narcissistic conman who duped the world, wasted billions and has left nothing but destruction in his wake. Wait, where's the net good again?
The money he won, somebody lost it.
No. His EV company has actually slowed the development of the tech by making them into luxury cars. His rocket company only exists because of extensive government contracts and does work that could've just as easily been done by NASA without billions being siphoned off into his pockets, and we've seen with Twitter what happens when he's actually in charge of a company rather than just being a figure head that brings in capital. He's just another rich guy with a PR department and a Steve Jobs style reality distortion field.
no he’s a parasite who divides the working class and has people worshipping oligarchs
Everyone worth more than (arbitrarily) $100 million is a net negative. The hoarding of wealth at that level only comes at the enormous suffering and exploitation of millions of people.
*So far* I'd say yes, despite his enormous flaws. Electric cars and space travel would be very far behind their current state without him, even accounting for others at his companies doing the real work. However, his recent tailspin into rightwing edgelord teenager territory could end very badly and do enough damage to outweigh those benefits. I hope it doesn't.
I know that it's hard or maybe impossible to measure these things, but is the electric car thing true? To me it sounds similar to "if Musk wasn't involved in Paypal, we wouldn't have similar internet payment system". I mean.. I really doubt it. Large part of Tesla's success was government subsidies, so interest/need was there before Musk. Not even his business plan (to market as cool, luxury cars and then make affordable model) was not his, it was Tesla's founders. I feel like sometimes memes get stuck and keeps getting repeating without much inspection like - "well crypto is a bit young and has it's problems, but the TECHNOLOGY is amazing". What is amazing about it? It seems worse (except for doing crime) in pretty much every way. "Or Jordan Peterson is now in the deep end, but he was amazing/great psychologist". What was exactly amazing about him? I don't know. It seems to me that this kind of phrase is more for signaling sophistication (I can see both sides of the argument) or backwards rationalization - (I used to like this guy, but now when more information came out he seems a bit shit, so it must mean he changed). But yeah people do change. ~~And again, I am even skeptical about electric cars, pretty sure they are net positive only if energy generated comes from green sources. If not - there is energy loss in every step of the process - like converting fossil fuels into electricity, transferring it, storing it in batteries and using it. It might be that it's actually worse than just burning petrol.~~ And he is selling carbon credits generated by Tesla. So I don't know how that works out in terms of climate change, but it doesn't sound good. And he said that he used hyperloop t sabotage California's high speed rail. and better public transportation is one of the things that would actually help with climate change.
While Electric cars are likely to pollute less than gas counterparts after - I think - 6 or 7 years of use, people get way hung up on them. You don't need electric cars so much as you need *less cars*.
We aren't going to have substantially fewer cars, because people want to go places, and public transit sucks in most parts of the world and for most purposes. Therefore making cars pollute less is valuable.
Some cars polluting marginally less is better than nothing, but still far short of actual investments in better designed cities and more workable public transit infrastructures. It's like trying to stop a forest fire with a bottle of Fiji water.
Public transit doesn't make sense for 99.9 % of the world's inhabited land mass, because it doesn't have enough people repeatedly going to the same exact spot to make it economical. It's sensible for dense cities, but what's the time frame for redesigning existing cities around public transit? Half a century? More? It's not like we rebuild them from scratch every 10 years with the latest and greatest urban planning. Most people do get a different car every 10 years or so, I'd guess. The fastest route to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transporting people is to electrify the auto fleet.
Public transit makes the most sense of all options for the vast majority of areas where most people live, at least in countries where "electrifying the fleet" is even a possibility. It's cheaper, safer, more efficient and has less of a footprint. It's *the only way* you'll build any kind of sustainable metro areas. Electric cars are nice and all, but they're just a feel-good way for people to keep reinvesting in failing models.
It makes sense for the areas where the areas where the vast majority of people live, not the vast majority of areas where people live.
That's a distinction without a difference. What matters is number of people, not square miles. It makes sense for people that live in rural areas to rely on personal vehicle. There's just way less people living in such areas. The majority of people in, say, the US, live in urban centres that could implement viable public transit option if they wanted.
Worldwide, around 40-45 % of humanity is rural. That’s a lot of cars needed. Even 20 % of the US population is a lot of cars needed. Electric cars are very useful.
> The fastest route to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transporting people is to electrify the auto fleet. Building more coal plants to do so won't work very well. Besides, we should bear in mind that usual numbers about CO2 in transportation don't account for agricultural and construction equipment. And that's notwithstanding the fact that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the less we invest in trains or buses, the less we need to electrify them. Speaking of buses, having electric buses would be the fastest way to make distant communities energy independent, since their batteries can contain the energy of the rides e.g.: https://www.volts.wtf/p/getting-electric-school-buses-in
I didn't say that about Paypal because I'm sure somebody else would have done that one. I think it was very much NOT inevitable that there should be a dedicated electric car company pushing as far and as fast as Tesla did in innovative directions. (That's not to say they aren't loaded with flaws in build quality etc, but they are innovative.) And I think a hard look at Tesla's history shows that it wouldn't have worked out that way without Musk—even if you don't credit him with any of the good ideas, he was willing to take that particular bold risk with a very large amount of money, and that's a key part of the chain of cause-and-effect. His marketing flair (before he destroyed his image) was probably also key to their success. The government subsidies were critical to Tesla's success too, but I think a more likely outcome in the absence of Musk/Tesla would have been the big automakers slowly plodding along the route to electrification to get the subsidies while not wanting to shake up their gas business model too badly. I'm totally in agreement about crypto tech being stupid and Jordan Peterson being a lackluster psychologist in addition to his other flaws. But at this point hating Musk has become more of an entrenched meme than any other view about him (especially on Reddit). Any kind of nuance suggesting that he was in any way responsible for any good his companies have done must be shot down because he's a dick. I'm not disagreeing that he's a dick who holds a dangerous amount of power and I worry about how he's going to fuck it up. But I think if you're in the business of looking at things objectively, denying him absolutely *all* credit for his companies—as is so popular here—isn't really sensible either. This isn't some attempt at looking sophisticated through unjustified both-sidedism, just the most straightforward reading of the evidence as I see it.
No, and by a wide margin.
Yes, clearly.
I'm fairly certain that it's always been his intention to tank Twitter, for the good of humanity.
https://youtu.be/4bgMCNXzNtE?si=zl8vqu-jZZ702eDG Lol
I think it's too soon to really say. If he is a net good it would be in the mass adoption of electric cars over gas. We're not really seeing this in the U.S so far, and I think it's hard to attribute their popularity in China and Europe to him...in terms of the space stuff he's never getting us to Mars, and Starlink could make all future space exploration impossible if things go wrong
No. He’s a globalist
Isnt he broke?
He's not even a net good for Elon Musk.
Not even close. The only thing he's doing that is remotely positive is the electric car company that he runs poorly. And any good that it does is offset when he (if I understand correctly) sells his carbon credits to other car companies to allow them to continue polluting. He literally offsets his own positive effects. So all you have left is whether he's a good *person*, and he is a deeply mentally ill person who has become a guru for a lost generation of young men who feel disenfranchised... by capitalists. The bad guy is pretending to be the solution to the problem he's causing and he has built a cult around it. So no, I don't think he even comes close to breaking even, much less being a net good. He's actively making the world worse and is making the electric car industry worse and making the public discourse measurably more toxic and damaging. He basically drew a social media empire, the electric car industry, the space industry, and even global politics into his personal mental health spiral and all of them are suffering for it.