[3cats-in-a-coat]

Just an hour ago on some news show from a US TV channel, NBC or Fox or what was it, the host said (about the X rebrand) "it doesn't make sense, so there should be a bigger plan here".

And that indeed sums up so much of the mentality of Elon's supporters. The more stupid things it does, the grander the delusion becomes.

[lamontcg]

Common falsehood that people believe is that smart people simply can't do stupid shit.

[kamel3d]

I agree with you even the saudi investors are also stupid just look at to that line city project

[hef19898]

Also, SoftBank.

[hnbad]

Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart.

The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued.

Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications.

I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out.

[lamontcg]

> Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart.

I agree with all the rest of your points, but I think the problem with this is that Elon really is smart. It is just that you can see that he was mostly a really good salesperson of his personal brand. He also had his finger on the pulse of what was "cool" (internet, space, electric cars) for awhile (a lot of that is probably luck, but there has to be a certain amount of talent there I think--but that talent for fashion always wears off).

He's also smart enough to be able to regurgitate what SpaceX engineers tell him and to manage to sound like he's got a PhD. He must actually study that pretty well and be at least decent enough at physics/engineering that he's clearly above-average intelligent. But it is other people making the breakthroughs in the mathematics of how to hoverslam rockets, he's a bit more like a CEO version of a science communicator.

The thing is that people are largely just ignorant about where all the technology comes from (Lars Blackmore worked at NASA JPL when he published the first articles on successive convexification of the landing problem -- so the US Government really invented hoverslamming rockets), and they are horrible at judging what kind of intelligence a public personality actually has. They also think that smart people are smart at literally everything.

And as much as I hate to admit it, Donald Trump was also smart, but his talents are almost purely sociopathic. And one of those talents is being able to actually lean-in to a shitstorm of stupid that he creates around him, and make his sycophants write it all off as 4D chess. That is actually a talent. A genuinely stupid person wouldn't be able to pull that off.

[mavhc]

And now all he has is the best space company and the best car company, poor bastard.

It was so easy everyone else also did it

[hnbad]

By what measure is Tesla "the best car company"? According to every metric I could find the company is clearly overvalued and stock price is the only measure it seems to truly excel in.

Elon Musk is listed as the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla. Do you genuinely think Elon Musk is so good at being a CEO that he can run three vastly different companies (4 including X Corp which he formally ceded his position as CEO) at the same time? Or do you think that his primary function was founding/buying the companies? Most of his interference in his companies (especially Tesla) seems to have been detrimental: from an atrocious workplace accident rate in Tesla factories because he "doesn't like yellow" to laying off most of Twitter before establishing any persistence/transfer of knowledge.

If you listen to him talk about any subject you're professionally familiar with, it's evident he knows how to mix in buzzwords but doesn't understand the underlying technology or how any of it actually works. His Twitter Spaces interview was a perfect example for software developers, his recent interview about Twitter/X as an "everything app" was an example for anyone working in (or remotely informed about) fintech.

His wealth is almost entirely tied to Tesla's share price and Tesla's share price is tied to his public perception as "real-life Tony Stark". SpaceX mostly runs on government contracts - incidentally most of Tesla's actual revenue also stems from public funds in the form of emissions trading.

[mavhc]

Makes the most EVs, makes the most profit per EV, has the best charging, self driving, efficiency, software.

But if it's so easy, why hasn't anyone else bothered?

All space programs run on government contracts, what's new? He's providing the only reusable rocket, and 10 years later no one else has done that, why?

[dragonwriter]

> But if it's so easy, why hasn't anyone else bothered?

Because to most other automakers, EVs are a side business that competes with their core business, not their core business, and the rest of it because its not true, e.g., Tesla doesn't offer the best self-driving, they just spend more effort trying to sell the idea of self-driving to individual buyers.