Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by McLaren_Ferrari 1510 days ago
People should give up.

They should surrender to Musk and let the Elon-mania spread like a wildfire among the population.

Opposing him only prolongs the mania.

At some point such social phenomenons do end on their own. Paul McCartney couldn't walk through London in 1964-65-66-67-68-69-70-71-72.

All of the sudden in 1973 there were other bands and he went back being a human.

1 comments

With all due respect to Paul McCartney, he is just a pop artist of his time. It's not even classical music, let alone CEO of cutting edge enterprises that are likely to change the world.

It's crazy how much hate Elon gets when it's obviously just different politics... a different set of opinions. It's similar to how much some people hate Bill Gates, for no reason, and with zero perspective as to how much he has changed the world.

> With all due respect to Paul McCartney, he is just a pop artist of his time. It's not even classical music, let alone CEO of cutting edge enterprises that are likely to change the world.

Pop-culture phenomenons have nothing to do with the individual's abilities or sector or even net worth. It's about virality. A concept which is not understood yet.

> It's crazy how much hate Elon gets when it's obviously just different politics... a different set of opinions. It's similar to how much some people hate Bill Gates, for no reason, and with zero perspective as to how much he has changed the world.

Bill Gates first put a PC on every desk and only then got paid for it. Him, Allen and Ballmer did so without ever having to raise external money up until IPO. People are suspicious about Musk and his motives because he engineered a way to get paid before doing the bulk of the work (Tesla is a 20 year old company and only accounts for 1.2% of cars sold globally as of 2021), SpaceX is still a startup, NeuraLink is just an idea, The Boring Company is essentially just a meme, Hyperloop completely faded into irrelevance...

Him being at the top of the Forbes list considering all the above lack of presence of his products in the real world makes people wonder about his extremely promotional nature, obsession with pumping the stock and Wall St. excess.

That could be said about every CEO, which isn't hands-on working on their own products or research. Celebrity CEOs are famous because they materialize their own world view or at least try and it can be sort of a spectacle. If those attempts fail, it's not like much was lost, but if they succeed then it moves the world forward, and I think that is good to consider.