Why would he cuck for a system he wouldn't be a part of?
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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He'll be bankrupt within 5 years, but honestly it's getting to the point where I see him jailed before that.
I don't like Musk but I highly doubt he'll be bankrupt anytime soon.
I get people are gonna say he was always this bad but I honestly don't buy it.
While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors. The limited comments he did make on politics were pretty liberal, and usually specific to the environment. He was liked enough in heavily liberal circles to get multiple positive shoutouts. One of them was from freaking Star Trek, which as a sidenote inadvertently ended up aging like wine.
Modern Elon is absolutely unhinged. He seems to spend more time on Twitter making an ass of himself in ways you'd normally associate with a teenage edge lord. He's an active and aggressive liability to his companies, both in terms of his persona and business decisions. He's huge on politics to the point where he tried to interfere with the Russo-Ukraine war for a bit. A lot of times it feels like it's a matter of time before he gets on stage with Kanye and starts trying to rap.
I think a combination of social media and covid broke him. I know Lemmy doesn't think rich people are human, but I think it's more nuanced than that. While they often have quirks, at the end of the day we're all human. There are millions of people whose brains became fried due to culture war shit on social media post 2014. There's no reason Elon would be immune to the same mechanisms that radicalize an average person.
A lot of times it feels like it's a matter of time before he gets on stage with Kanye and starts trying to rap.
I don't know if you came up with this but god damn lol.
If they do this then we’ll know for sure the writers are stealing our ideas for content
While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors.
Back then he still had his handler/business mommy Mary Beth Brown. She had basic control over his scheduling and publicity outreach since he started Tesla. In 2014 he canned her after she asked for a raise, he's been handling his own pr and schedule ever since.
The problem with assuming that this is a recent change in personality is that it requires ignoring all his prior reported behaviour. It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.
No Elon did not become an asinine child overnight, he's been that way the whole time. He just believes he's now rich enough that he doesn't have to pretend to be a different person. No JFK Jr did not become an insane person because he watched too much fox news, he's literally been eating roadkill since he was a child.
All of these wealthy and powerful people have an entire system working for them dedicated to protecting their public image.
It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.
I similarly didn't know how much of an asshole Steve Jobs was until listening to a podcast about his behavior. I had the same vague understanding of him everyone did (he's regarded as a visionary, but was a micromanager and a perfectionist, etc).
PR firms and handlers do the devil's work of making these monsters presentable to the public.
Some of the shit his daughter has said about him is fucking incredible- like weird sexual shit with her (I don't think he was grooming her, he was just creepy as fuck) and just being cruel to her for no reason.
Combo of info at these two sites:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-133000491.html
Also, and this isn't anywhere near as bad but it just... ick. He used to wash his feet in the toilet. Seriously.
You're trying to blame his shift on social media and the pandemic, and you're also claiming that the same thing happened to millions of other people for the same reasons, and I just haven't seen any evidence to support that.
We can point to people acting like lunatics during the pandemic, of course, but if you want to claim that to pandemic caused them to become lunatics then you would have to look at how they behaved prior to it. And you can try to blame social media for how people see politics, but there again I don't think the facts are on your side. Most people know that things your friend posts on Facebook may or may not be true. But many people, especially middle-aged and older people, believe that there's a great deal of truth in the 24-hour news cycle that they see on television, when in reality that's been highly tailored by the major news networks to make it seem like the sky is falling.
It has been remarked for a long time that many arrogant ultra rich people end up surrounding themselves by yes men, that insulation is created by their money and power, and over time their views grow unhinged because they don't have contact with the real world or the general public. We know this happens often enough, and if I were speculating, I'd say the same thing happened here.
Look if you don't think there's any evidence to support social media and the pandemic leading to both a decline in mental health and radicalization, I don't know what to tell you. Not only have there been like a million different articles on it, but this is patently obvious to the vast majority of people who lived through the entire thing.
This isn't exclusively a middle aged man thing, a conservative thing, or even a political thing. A ton of people struggled enormously during the pandemic, sought solace in social media, and left with an extremely weird set of beliefs.
I'm sure I could find some of these sources, but I feel like I'd be trying to convince someone that the sky is blue. This is so abundantly obvious that you've either been living under an extremely large rock or are dead set on believing what you want to believe.
"Wouldn't it be much nicer and easier if we lived in an oligarchy?" Said the man who would benefit the most from an oligarchy.
It's such a crazy stance to have when you consider the fact that America is basically already a corporatocracy and this guy literally owns parts of the corporations that have huge influence on American law and policy. Like, I guess already being able to lobby and fuck over the people just isn't enough for these people and they need to have full authoritarian control?
I guess it's true what they say, "Give them a inch..."
The funniest part is that Elon looks like he has the testosterone of a mouse. I guess Hitler had brown eyes and it didn't stop him though
Child of apartheid emerald baron doesn't like democracy.
Shocker.
Frankly he’s more child of 4chan than anything else mate.
Pretty much fell for the 4chan/8chan memes like the rest of the alt-right. I really wish twitter would die already, so it can fertilize whatever grows in it's place.
I keep linking to this Adam Conover interview with Elle Reeve because it's so amazing. She talks all about how the modern crop of Republicans are all living in this bubble created by 4Chan where they think trolling and bigotry and misogyny and such are hilarious and believe everyone else agrees. It's a long interview but absolutely worth the time, even if you just watch in chunks.
Saw that not too long ago, also there's a Netflix documentary (the antisocial network) that details a good bit of it too. As someone who was pretty familiar with it in the late 2000s, I was kinda shocked that so much of the bullshit that's invaded politics in the past decade has stemmed from there. I remember the first time someone was trying to show me all the q-anon crap, they eat up that garbage.
And no, the headline isn’t exaggerating. It’s literally that cringe.
As an autist, I'm revoking his diagnosis, he's neurotypical now.
We don't want him, either. Maybe we need a new classification.
The biggest problem, at least from my perspective, is not his claim of autism. Maybe he has it, maybe he doesn't. As far as I know, he's never been evaluated.
The biggest problem is that he uses the claim of autism as a shield for his awful behavior.
Autism is not an 'get out of being an asshole for free' card because autism and being an asshole are totally unrelated.
Is autist a for real term? I keep seeing it and I remember a first saw it years ago somewhere and it was not taken kindly to.
Elon, if you don’t like the USA system, why the flying fuck did you move here?
Go back to South Africa you ladder pulling, entitled piece of shit.
Take Canadian wannabe secessionist Ted Cruz with you.
Ted Cruz is Canadian???
So, let me get this straight.....a Canadian moves to Texas, and then when it snows and gets cold, he flees to Mexico???
Welp. Nobody can say that Ted Cruz is a stereotype. We CAN say he's an asshole though. Which I will. Ted Cruz is an asshole. There, I said it.
His mother was American and his father was, I believe, Cuban. Neither had Canadian citizenship. They happened to hatch him in the territory of Canada while his mom was working in Alberta, so he technically was Canadian until this all came out in 2014 or 2015 when he was running in the Republican primary and he renounced his citizenship. Unfortunately for you, he was a dual citizen thanks to his mother so you can't deport him back to us. Feel free to deport him into the Gulf of Mexico if you want, though.
Can we deport him to the homeland of his father? I'm guessing Cuba would have a few ideas about what should be done with Ted Cruz.
Some of the replies are hilarious. "you do not get to drop “low t men” when you look like shane gillis after a baron harkonnen-style milk bath"
He has people that shower him. That’s pretty fucking pathetic if you ask me.
That can't be true.
Which probably means it is true. What the fuck?
I don't know if it's true or not, but I did find out through searching that he went from "showering is the most important thing ever" to "I don't have time to shower" over the course of three years:
https://www.sj-r.com/story/business/2015/01/06/elon-musk-reveals-his-most/35590257007/
https://www.thewrap.com/elon-musk-isnt-bathing-these-days-heres-why/
Holy shit, that is the whitest white man in existence. Isn't South Africa hot? How did he survive down there?
They took and kept slaves.
Didn't he go bald at like 20 years?