this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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It's pretty easy. He's been lucky with the work he did (stole/claimed) once or twice in the past and ever since everyone is eating the BS he says. Twitter is only one thing. Hyperloop, SpaceX etc. are all Ideas a 9 year old would come up with and are so out of reality it isn't even funny anymore. Or remeber when he was reinventing the Metro, but worse?
He has be so rich so early in his life, that he never had to grow up. He then surrounded himself by yes-sayers and was lucky with how Tesla turned out (in that it got evaluated like a tech company, rather than a car company). Ever since he can't fathom the idea that someone might know something he doesn't. He also can't grasp the idea that money can't solve certain problems. His twitter posts show how little self control he has and most of it reads like things my 5 year old nephew would say. It's insanity.
So there's plenty you're leaving out there, like the fact he didn't start spaceX or Tesla (although he sued the founders to not mention that publicly), and the Hyperloop is a great sci-fi idea that the math just doesn't work out on (at least not in Earth's atmosphere)
It totally supports what you're saying, the only credit he deserves is as a hype man and for securing government assistance. Nothing he says or does convinces me he's a smart or even slightly self-aware person, but...
Not a day after I posted, musk announced he wanted to remove blocking people on Twitter. That's an idea a 7 year old could tell you is dumb.
Sure, the presence of the mute makes the platform worse rather than unusual, but still, holy hell Batman...
I agree with what you said, and the evidence supports you. But here's where a very small part of me drifts to...
Let's say he's been trying a zero requiem since the beginning. He's measurably advanced key technologies. He's positioned himself to have the ear of very powerful people. He's gained the respect of many of them for growing his wealth to become one of the richest people in existence. They listen to his methods if nothing else.
Now he tanks Twitter in a very public, blundering way. He expressed privately (in now public text exchanges) an interest in getting together a bunch of rich people to buy out social media, because it's an possibly existential risk.
For those watching critically, it certainly looks like he plans to use Twitter to turn money into influence over the population. He keeps insisting moves that are killing Twitter have actually made them profitable. Other social media, like Reddit and discord, took notice and started flirting with these user-hostile ideas.
The most likely result is social media platforms splintering their user bases as they flee elsewhere, while the billionaire held up as an example of why billionaires are actually a good thing becomes hated by large portions of the population (particularly on the left, the side more critical of billionaires and capitalism)
Again, I think you're probably right. I believe he's just a spoiled asshole who read sci-fi and dreamed of being Tony Stark. I'm also deeply concerned about how he started getting political after meeting Trump.
But if he's actually doing it all on purpose to become the symbol of a billionaire that needs to be reigned in, it would probably look a lot like what we're seeing