I was a fan of Musk until only recently with the dealings with Twitter. Right off the bat treating peoples livelihoods as a joke was wrong and cruel. This isn't some sensationalized political story, he literally started off the acquisition carrying a sink into the Twitter HQ and thought it was hilarious.
But I still totally agree, arguments to downplay his role in Tesla are totally illogical. Founder or whatever, he took control of a company that was totally irrelevant and led it to 1+ million vehicle per year, 10s of billion revenue, and pretty undeniably caused a huge momentum shift in the industry.
he's had a similar attitude with employees at TSLA for over a decade now - the difference is everyone who joined Tesla knew what they were getting into.
But literally his first act as CEO of Tesla in 2008 was to lay off 20% of the company. He's always been very fire-happy.
He value truth more that the jobs of the former employees at Twitter.
The Twitter files tell us about the level of corruption going on with real implication on the live of way more people that the select few that worked at Twitter.
Alternatively: Because he literally is not a founder and is often portrayed as one (such as in GP’s comment)
But also yeah, generally he gets a lot of hate for a long and increasingly public track record of being a jerk.
For example, big jerk move to announce he’s “switching parties” to try to frontrun a story about him sexually harassing an employee. Dragging 300MM people already in a lot of stress and cultural tension into your own sexual misconduct issues is really bad form IMO.
They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say.
When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.
I'm not sure that even remotely tracks if you're trying to imply that the American left claims that everyone that agrees with them is the only smart people. If anything a lot of their narrative is that they're oppressed by people who are smart and better at politics and business than they are.
Did Elon ever really change his political opinions? Or just become more clear about them? Either way, I think a lot of it was the Twitter takeover just going full "he's either taking this 0% seriously, or doing the most insane maneuver ever" and I'm not sure the evidence has come down on the side of him being all that serious about it.
You can debate if it'll ultimately work out better for him/Tesla/Twitter, but it certainly seems like he's playing pretty loose with his money, Tesla's future, and a lot of other things.
There's a lot of articles about how he maybe is doing something dumb because he may be doing something dumb. It's not the first time he's done it, and most of the things I've seen have included a caveat that this could very well work out.
Think about the number of times that Donald Trump got called stupid starting from when he launched his presidential campaign. You may hate the guy's politics, but he is objectively not dumb, but the "bad people are dumb, smart people are good" narrative must be reinforced relentlessly. It's the golden hammer of political propaganda because IT WORKS!
The counter for Donald Trump being stupid is that Greta Thurnberg is smart and good and everyone must listen to her and do what she says when she is at best very average.
Trump historically hasn’t been stupid, but that doesn’t mean much in the present. Age gets everyone and his frontal cortex doesn’t exactly seem in shape.
Beyond his usual behavior of believing the last thing anyone told him, when you let him in front of kids he tells them Santa isn’t real, he gave a bunch of Boy Scouts an unrehearsed speech mostly anecdotes about high society parties he went to as a kid in NYC… is that “smart”?
(Also, after he got hospitalized for covid, it was notable he kept bragging in public that he’d passed a dementia test.)
Both Bush Jr and Trump actively played dumb as political theater. That is not the same as the narrative switching to Elon being dumb (and totally not even an engineer, can’t even code lol) the second it became clear he held right wing opinions and planned to act on them.
Elon is a litmus test for nerds. You can tell a lot about an engineer by when they decide(d) Elon is a clown. No doubts the insanity started long before the cave diver defamation incident (although this was the turning point for me personally as well)
If you're a techie that is still holding onto Elon as a hero, good businessman or otherwise decent human being after the Twitter fiasco I'm not sure there is much left to save (or the horse incident, or the time he had secret children with an employee, and the time he stole Grimes' eggs to have a child with a surrogate, and the time he.... )
Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.
I think assuming any white guy living in Thailand is a sex tourist was pretty common up through the 2000s. It’s like the kind of joke you’d expect South Park to make.
As a Christian, I find Elon to be an immoral man, but I still think that he is an objectively successful entrepreneur and an engineer who's extremely skilled in execution. Why does his viewpoint on things irrelevant to business and engineering matter in this discussion?
But I still totally agree, arguments to downplay his role in Tesla are totally illogical. Founder or whatever, he took control of a company that was totally irrelevant and led it to 1+ million vehicle per year, 10s of billion revenue, and pretty undeniably caused a huge momentum shift in the industry.