It seems strange that this comment was so aggressively down voted. Anything related to Elon gets the same treatment by HN that I feel that Elon invites a visceral rather than an objective reaction.
Because Elon is snakes oil salesman, who thinks he’s smartest and most important human in the history. He also happens to have some very successful products, that his fan base uses to silence any criticism.
If snake-oil salesmanship is all it takes to land rockets vertically and single-handily kickstart the transition to EVs I'm all for it. We need more snake-oil salesmen leading corporate America!
There can't be any objective discussions about Elon any more =) John Carmack finds Elon to be smart and really knowledgeable (listen to the latest podcast from Lex Fridman). And you would think HN trusts the words from Carmack? But most think Carmack, who knows Elon personally is wrong, and their opinion based on some random internet articles, is right.
Elon is super smart. He’s also a snake oil salesman.
These are not contradictory statements.
Unfortunately he chose his intelligence to enrich himself by fooling others. He could have chosen other options. It looked like that was the direction he was going in. By trying to help people. But it’s clear at some point he realized he can make far more money claiming to do something than by actually doing something and decided to focus on that.
> Unfortunately he chose his intelligence to enrich himself by fooling others.
You make it sound like he's selling ads online or something, not building rockets and electric cars, self-driving software and now robots? Like, if you wanted to make as much money as possible and "fool" people as you say, doing a rocket company and a new car company at the same time, pouring all the $100m you earned from selling your previous company, being months from bankruptcy in both ventures seem like a very roundabout and stressful way of becoming a billionaire.
I don't understand where you people get your world view from, are you exclusively reading click-bait news headlines and coming to the conclusion that Elon=Bad? How about reading some actual accounts of the early days at SpaceX for example? I can recommend "Liftoff", it's very balanced, focuses mostly on the employees of SpaceX and doesn't try to paint Elon as some kind of heroic figure, but gives credit where it's due. He comes off as a highly technical, maniacal, single-minded founder, inspiring but working his staff to the bones, and sure, also has some darker sides to his personality. It's the kind of personality that's required to pull these things off.
People just can't give someone any credit if they don't like the person or they have slightly different political views, I guess it's just the times we live in, zero tolerance.
He's generally a force of good for the world but can come over as a bit of a dick sometimes, there are much worse people out there if you need to hate on someone.
I don’t know. Richest person in the world, whose ego is only thing bigger than his wealth, is pretty good person to direct at least some hate at.
And while some of his lies are just to kill competition/extract money from the rich (like FSD), but some are just disgusting.
With neuralink he was openly telling people for few years that his implants will solve their health issues. Implants that killed most of the monkeys in the labs.
It’s disgusting to lie to people with really serious health conditions, give them false hope and likely have them reject other treatments, because Elon said he’ll fix them. You don’t think it’s a good reason to pour some hate at him?
> With neuralink he was openly telling people for few years that his implants will solve their health issues.
He has invested mostly his own money in that.
Are you claiming there is no medical use what so ever for the technology they are developing?
Based on what knowlage do you make that claim?
> Implants that killed most of the monkeys in the labs.
What data is that based on?
> It’s disgusting to lie to people with really serious health conditions, give them false hope and likely have them reject other treatments, because Elon said he’ll fix them.
What? I have heard most of Neurolinks presentation and not a single time did Elon ever suggest that people just delay other treatments. Neurolink has clearly mostly done animal trials and product demonstrations.
I at least have never heard Musk claim that Neurolink would have a product on the market within a short time period.