He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.
I can't believe that so many people still haven't figured him out (which is also true for the previous American and current Russian presidents, who have similarly repulsive personalities).
> He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.
That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things like building reusable rockets or practical mass-market EV's. Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower. (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but being good for humanity overall is not the same as being a good person to be around. He definitely did a lot of good for this world, but that doesn't mean that he's an easy person - quite to the contrary, to be this successful, you need to be very assertive and sure of yourself.
Look at Bill Gates for another example. His early business dealings are well known to be ruthless and he pushed MS at the cost of a lot of things, but now he uses his wealth mostly for good.
As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".
Assertiveness and being sure of yourself can almost be considered prerequisites to becoming that successful, sure I can buy that. Doing things like constantly posting juvenile and inflammatory stuff on Twitter (such as baselessly accusing people who you think have slighted you of being pedophiles), that I'm not as convinced points to traits that are as positive.
> As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".
I don't find that difficult at all. Yes, obviously literally every single person have good and bad characteristics and have done good and bad things. But as a human being I'm perfectly able to look at those things in aggregate and decide for myself if I think they tally up to someone being what I would personally consider a good or bad person.
The question is whether the damage these people made while accumulating wealth gets compensated by the good they did later. With Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller I don’t think so. With Gates I am not sure. Musk actually looks better. He has shaken up two industries that needed a good shake.
> With Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller I don’t think so. With Gates I am not sure
All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer. Nobody sheds a tear for the paper-millionaires, rightfully so. It's only their greed which didn't make them cashout before Standard Oil/Microsoft eventually outcompeted them delivering a better product to the consumer.
Same with Facebook v. Myspace and Google v. Yahoo. Nobody sheds a tear for the shareholders of Myspace and Yahoo. Rightfully so.
Musk is robbing taxpayers in the form of subsidies and tax credits for luxury vehicles which all end up parked in front of Bel Air mansions and 5th Avenue shops.
On top of that he already said that he'll never do philantropy
> All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer. Nobody sheds a tear for the paper-millionaires, rightfully so.
Well actually... Microsoft was almost broken up by the government for what it did to Netscape, until there was a change of US Presidential administration, after which Microsoft was given a wrist slap, and then 9/11 immediately hit, which made the issue disappear from public consciousness.
I'm not exaggerating here: the Department of Justice announced it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft in September 2001. See this article from the WSJ literally the day before 9/11: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000076767888491506
> Microsoft was almost broken up by the government for what it did to Netscape
It should have been given the medal of freedom instead...those crackpots at netscape wanted to charge people money for the browser.
Only former netscape shareholders could possibly defend Netscape.
Microsoft I will always defend, the decision by Gates and Ballmer to allow piracy enabled me and my family to always have the latest version of Windows/Word/Encarta/IE even though we were poor.
“All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer”
Especially Carnegie made life miserable for tens of thousands of his workers. No amount of charity can make up for the amount of suffering he caused.
Exactly. In capitalism, if you want to become rich, successful and admired (purely selfless motivations), you usually end up being good for humanity as a byproduct.
That "usually" is doing a whoooooole lot of heavy lifting. Capitalism is the ultimate "fuck you, got mine" system, and only serves the good of society with heavy-handed intervention.
Even if this was true (nearly everyone who has studied Musk says that although he may not lead day to day engineering, he is gifted at figuring this stuff out)…
It is clearly non-trivial to rally a group of people, funding sources, and, er, marketing resources to accomplish what he has accomplished.
Er... what? He's focussed his attention on some specific problems and made good progress solving them; people have been doing that for as long as there have been people.
Sure he's had great success and clearly does a lot of things well. He's not singular in that.
You need to watch this interview with Tim Dodd (the space YouTuber) and you'll realise in the first 15 minutes he really is an engineer https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw
Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years. The past year was a very slow year for the car selling business except for luxury vehicles of course (which Tesla is). In 2021 Teslas accounted for approx. 1% of total global vehicles sales.
Musk was CEO of Paypal for 6 months back in 2001. He was fired because he was running the company into the ground. Peter Thiel managed to save the company and sell it to Ebay
> SpaceX is the cheapest way to get cargo into space
Is the American consumer in need to send any cargo to the ISS? SpaceX is a graft built on big government
> Tesla is 3x profit per car versus Ford/GM
30 Billions of subsidies and credits in 20 years to arrive to the same financial achievement as Ferrari in the 90s. Only Teslas don't look like Ferraris unfortunately. They are also still more scarce than Ferraris, if not on the roads, for sure in absolute numbers. Pretty poor performance when the Italian brand makes 9,000-12,000 cars per year dependant upon macroeconomic enviornoment.
Also they are cooking the books. Everybody who looks at musk and how it operates understands this. He believes in manifestation and faking it till you make it.
Elon was gone way before he could have had any influence on modern Paypal's profitability.
>SpaceX is the cheapest way to get cargo into space
Well, we don't know the financials, so it could be cheaper for the customer, while burning investor capital. But this one seems like money-well-spent, at least.
> (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)
I always find it so amusing when the best thing anyone can say about our previous White House occupant is what he DIDN'T do (and not for lack of trying!). As if a pet rock or farm animal couldn't have accomplished the same feat.
And completely ignoring that he was trying his damndest to provoke Iran into a war as late as early 2020, by ordering an airstrike on one of their generals.
Worthwhile things: stacking the Supreme Court with far-right justices & lowering taxes for the wealthy. These are massive successes for the party he represents (which is actually a minority of the country, unfortunately)
The characteristic is being able to see the talents of others and exploit them. Jobs was and Musk is great at that, although Musk is an actual [software] engineer.
Those employees trapped on an island for months developing SpaceX rockets in miserable conditions did the work.
I've always felt Musk's most unique ability was finding the right people to fill the right roles and somehow convince these people to come work 8 days a week for him.
He is definitely technical. Like, his engineers can explain stuff to him. That said, let's not extoll Musk as some super-brilliant mind. He is good, but not THAT good. He pissed off a lot of people at PayPal when he was aggressively pushing for Windows servers.
> Steve Jobs was charismatic and somewhat of an asshole to the people around him. But he wasn’t unhinged, self aggrandizing and attention seeking.
He wasn't unhinged.
He was definitely self aggrandizing and attention seeking.
Jobs was an asshole, but he was an adult asshole. A mature asshole. He wasn't a juvenile asshole. Both Musk and Trump give the impression of having the emotional maturity of a pre-teen.
Smart doesn't mean wise. Yes, he has pushed electric car and space market forward, but he talked about e-cars and going to Mars back when he was 14. He is literally a rich kid living out his teenage phantasies. Albeit successfully. He is still a tool.
Not that impressive, but something our society needs to grapple with: how left hemisphere’s distorted view of reality is highly functional in our cuurent way of life and especially around capitalism.
Much of that is addressed in McGilchrist’s The Divided Brain.
I don’t think Musk is a bad person, but he is displaying like many "high functioning" people in our current economic and political systems, signs of lack of empathy, hyper materialist views, etc.
Unsurprisingly left hemisphere dominant people (who are unbalanced), can do very well in systems that are designed by the left hemisphere and reward everything the left hemisphere is about (control, supposed knowledge of how reality works or is, power, inflated sense of self and ideas of being "self made" etc.)
> Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower.
On the contrary, our world is practically made for those people to be successful. Psychopaths do great in unbridled capitalism.
Actually narcissistic, manipulative, and low empathy people tend to do better in capitalist societies. It tends to be a benefit, rather than a hindrance, when it comes to finding professional success.
I mean, you’ll alienate yourself from everyone, but you’ll be rich!
Source: My wife professionally studies personality disorders
This can also be said about good-hearted people, most of them don't have world-changing achievements. It's said that the rate of psychopathy among CEOs is above the population average.
So not sure what's your point. But I like the passive aggressive nature of your comment.
> Neither Boeing nor Ford have put a car into a trans-Martian Solar orbit
Good?
This reminds me of the scene from the film "Tin Cup" where he asks "You ever shoot par with a 7 iron?" and his rival replies "Hell Roy, it never even occurred to me to try." (The backstory being that Tin Cup and his caddy broke all of his other golf clubs in a childish argument.)
Boeing made the x-37, which is autonomously roving around space, and landing on its own.
Musk pointed a rocket at the sky and pressed play. In terms of difficulty, boosting a car into an extended orbit is trivial. Manoeuvring a "space plane" to intersect multiple satellites, grab them and return to earth, that is orders of magnitude harder.
Ford make cheap cars world wide at volume, and pioneered the production line.
as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time. I am rich because I joined the right start up and got bought out. yeah I worked hard, but not anywhere near hard enough to justify the money I got.
> as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time.
Let me rephrase:
SpaceX was valued at less than one billion dollars when they launched the first Falcon 9 to orbit.
The total money raised in the investment rounds only exceeded $1 billion in 2015, after 13 launches.
Total raised from investors only exceeded $2 billion, enough to be called “billions” plural, in Jan 2019, which is just before SpaceX got Starhopper off the ground.
Ford pioneered modern car manufacturing, and Boeing got stuff farthet out in space. Shooting a Tesla on a SpaceX rocket was just a publicity stunt. A genius one it seems.
Despite which SLS is still not flying and Starliner is stuck in test flights and not human certified, despite both having been started a bit before SpaceX was being valued as high as $1.3 billion.
Similar with Ford: fantastic past! Yet the money from that past win didn’t let them do what Musk did.
Other than a demonstration that the new experimental launch vehicle worked? Sure, shame nobody took him up on the offer a free launch, but I kinda understand why people didn’t want to risk its maiden flight.
> That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things
Nobody should be surprised when a CEO acts like a jagoff, that's par for the course.
To wit, so quickly HN forgets about Jobs and his cult of personality. Ten years ago, it felt like half of the people on this forum had their lips so far up Jobs' sphincter that they could see the sunlight through his nostrils. Now it seems this adulation has found a new outlet.
It's a reminder that cult of personality is a virus which can attack anyone ranging from the successful full stack developer making 200k in the Bay area to the Iowa farmer trying to figure out who to vote for.
It's also a reminder that things can always become worse. At least Jobs managed to first put a phone in every pocket and only then got paid for it. Like Gates with PCs.
Also Jobs was paid a salary because his hubris got himself outed from Apple the first time around and his ownership was down to single digits.
Musk first sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla , he then managed to inflate a financial bubble to get paid upfront for work he'll never deliver.
It's precisely this narcissistic personality which some people love about him.
Personally I blame marvel movies. Many immature people think the world is a superhero flick and Elon Musk is a real-life Tony Stark: arrogant billionaire genius who is going to fix the world from his superlab.
Honestly I would rather blame some fans (Musk included) of great shows like Rick & Morty, IASIP, Breaking Bad or the Joker movie for mistaking protagonists/anti-heros/funny characters for people to emulate and completely missing the point.
If you cheer the part you're supposed to laugh at/feel sad for, I start to get a picture of what "dangerous" media could mean.
As a counterpoint to shows like the ones you list (where they revel in showing terrible, yet likable, characters doing terrible things), the show "Mythic Quest" flips and shows terrible characters struggling with trying to change within themselves, and how it's a slow, discontinuous process where it's possible to both backslide and recover.
In the first movie he commits extrajudicial killings (maybe these are murders, maybe not) and then when leaving the scene almost kills a 'friendly' pilot, while laughing about it all with his buddy.
I'm Civil War he tries to kill the man who murdered his parents, for revenge, not justice.
And when Stark almost killed thr world through Ultron, after being traumatised by near death experience saving NYC, he continued his self righteousness and ran straight for the Sarcovia Accords as a counter balance.
If you look at the Avengers from a realistic perspective then they're a group of anarchistic, unhinged, uncontrollable vigilantes who resist any kind of oversight or procedures to reduce collateral damage.
They possesses supernatural abilities and incredible technologies and use them to... maintain American hegemony and the capitalist status quo. It's almost some Elysium type shit.
He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative,
dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking,
unhinged.
I can't believe that so many people still haven't
figured him out
Many of their fans love them precisely because of those "negative" qualities.
Previous and the current presidents are far worse evil people. They first destroyed lives with meaningless lockdowns then pumped trillions of dollars which destroyed economy and impoverished people. Musk cannot even come close to these.
I find it fascinating when someone agrees with me about a person (e.g. the previous president being evil) but their list of reasons has none of the items on my long, long list of terrible actions and, instead, has only items from my "at least they did the following" list.
I can't believe that so many people still haven't figured him out (which is also true for the previous American and current Russian presidents, who have similarly repulsive personalities).