Normal people used to like Elon. Then he made a cave submarine and was made to look foolish and the mask slipped.
I started off with immense respect for Tesla succeeding in delivering a mainstream electric car, and SpaceX delivering on successful commercial space flight. Finally, I thought. A rich billionaire who might actually be doing good.
Then the paedo cave thing happened. Ok. Guy can’t take criticism. That comment as uncalled for.
Now? Holy shit. The guy is a full on racist, anti trans, misogynist, white supremacist, conspiracy peddling whack a doodle.
Remember that Musk didn't create Tesla, he bought Tesla and made it worse.
He wasn't just made to look foolish, he called the lead cave rescuer a pedophile just and only because the guy didn't wanted to use his insane contraption.
Also, that wasn't the first time. The asshole was fired for incompetence before and only became rich because of shares he had in the company that got bought out. Anything good he's ever done is the work or ideas of others. Anything else is just utter shit.
Hyperloop, anyone? I remember reading in the 80's about how dumb of an idea that was, and in sure he got it from older articles as the first ideas were from the beginning of the 1900's, but he basically popped that idea because he was against high speed rail in LA. You can basically -in part- thank Musk for not having good rail in LA. Meanwhile, china built out a huge rail system because well, at least dictatorships are good for something, I guess.
Do I need to talk about Twitter at all? Bought it for twice the value, and brought it's actual value to 50% within a year. Fired thousands of people for no reason, including loads of business critical employers. Rent on his Twitter loans are due soon, hope you have a billion dollar laying around somewhere asshole!
The guy is a black mark on humanity and I can't wait for the day to see him being bankrupt and having to live in a shitty small house, he deserves it.
What is terrifying id that he has been charged with fraud several times but still isn't in prison even though he is guilty.
I'll have you know I was sick of him before it was cool 😤
A member of my extended family loves Tesla and SpaceX and thinks Musk is a genius. It's frustrating because he's a very smart, generous, and chill family member...but then there's his Musk fan boy thing. I do my best to ignore it and focus on his good traits.
It’s easy to forget that Musk was seen as an “IRL” iron man not that long ago. He was buying tech companies, taking credit for their accomplishments, and making seemingly credible promises of colonizing Mars in the near future.
It all went to shit with Twitter. Musk exposed himself as a guy born with the silverest of silver spoons who failed upward all his life on the backs of the work of his betters who he never paid properly. That’s where all the extra money came from.
You can appreciate what the actual talent at Tesla and SpaceX have accomplished while still seeing Musk as a horrible person. It's just too bad supporting either company puts money in his pocket.
Yeah musk has very little to do with the accomplishments of Tesla or SpaceX. He provides the money. It’s the incredibly skilled workers of said companies that are making things happen. We can absolutely champion removing musk from every position he holds while pushing forward the ideas that space exploration and EVs are good things.
At the same time, we should push for:
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space exploration to be about the search for knowledge and for making a better life for all of humanity based on the resources available in space, instead of building off-planet bunkers for billionaires once their climate change profits run out of steam
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EVs to be efficient, affordable to everyone, and generally more environmentally friendly than any fossil fuel vehicle. This will require significant research into battery technology and production processes. Time for car manufacturers to start spending all those profits they have. The strikes are a good start
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X/Twitter to fail. No bailouts, no buyouts. Let elon lose the 40 Billion he spent on it. For those that supposedly champion capitalism, this should be a win win in demonstrating what the market does when you are no longer competitive.
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Spacex is tough.. Musk can choke on a bag of dicks but spacex is doing some cool stuff that I'm excited about, but I've always been a space and rocket nerd.
See that's my problem with all this. SpaceX and Tesla aren't successful because of Elon Musk. they are successful in spite of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk just puts money in big things. Elon Musk only cares about Elon Musk. Not even money. Elon Musk cares more about Elon Musk than money.
First competitor to Public sector contracts for space flight? Elon Musk can see Elon Musks name on it. First mass produced electric car on the road and in garages? Elon Musk gets to see Elon Musk associated with it. Twitter? Elon Musk gets to be famous even more for tanking a $44b social media company with little to no effort.
I have a coworker like this. He's always been a big fan of Joe Rogan, which was simply a harmless hobby five years ago, but now means that he gets sucked into some very dangerous ideas. He's a great guy to work with though.
I had an old coworker try and convince me I didn't need high blood pressure meds because of Rogan. "You just need to exercise and take vitamins". Yea. I'm going to listen to a podcaster more than my personal doctor that has examined me sixteen million times.
They aren't wrong that these things can help. But there are other people just prone to things and need extra assistance.
There are so many people that just don't keep up with the news or are in a bubble so they don't see any other perspectives. And I get that. It's really hard to escape the bubble.
Assuming they regularly use the English-language internet, I feel like it's less they don't keep up with it and more they're willfully blind to it. They would have to either go out of their way to avoid it or assume every article that casts him in a bad light is from jealous competitors in industries he's iNnOvAtInG in.
I don't give a shit about Musk at all and have never actually seeked out news about him yet it's basically impossible to not see headlines about his latest bullshit antic if you're just casually on the English speaking internet, so I really doubt there are that many people who are just "out of the loop" unless they're not a native English speaker or rarely use the internet at all.
Is it possible they're actually really into the science, or is it unmistakably fanboyism?
I question this too. I love SpaceX, and Tesla has definitely made great progress. In just a few years spacex has made scientific revolutions that would take NASA and ESA decades. Don't get me wrong, I hate the capitalism part. They definitely need government controls and incentives to keep "enshitification" for profit at bay. But the company seems to be doing a positive good so far, without a doubt. That said, I hate Elon Musk as a person. He pours money into great ideas, but only because he's a narcissist who wants to see his name on it. SpaceX has prospered in spite of him.
I feel like 80 percent of the internet revolves around bullying other people while somehow insisting you have the moral high ground.
EDIT:
The responses are proving my point.
He's not calling out Elon. He's calling anyone who likes Elon a massive loser. Dude's an asshole.
I think there's a difference between bullying and calling out asshole behaviour.
Elon Musk is fair game because he's a total twat to everyone around him. If he was nice to everyone it would be a different matter.
He could be nice to everyone, it's totally possible, he'd still be rich as hell his asshole behaviour did not make him rich, it isn't an excuse and it isn't a requirement.
He isn't calling out Elon Musk. He's calling anyone who likes Elon a loser.
That's asshole behavior, and I'm willing to bet that he justifies it by claiming that everyone he's targeting is morally inferior and deserves to be ridiculed.
To be fair to him, loads of Elon followers are rather dickish in their behavior, anything to defend Elon. That brings me to point two: anyone who defended an incompetent asshole just because he managed to get rich, is an idiot and an asshole himself.
Elon is incompetent as fuck (he got fired for incompetence, anything good he did is basically other people's ideas or work, Hyperloop anyone, and just the entire Twitter debacle) and he's a huge asshole (mistreats his employees, called the cave rescuers pedophiles because they didn't wanted to use his retarded solution, yaddah yaddah yaddah)
Anyone defending that piece of shit honestly deserves to be called anything.
Devil doesn’t need an advocate. And victims don’t need to be gaslit.
I’m sure it feels that way from a certain perspective when victims finally get a platform to speak about oppressors who have been the real world bullies without being questioned because they have too much leverage. They should be able to handle it. If not maybe they should change if they don’t like it when crunching people results in getting told how they be.
Yeah, kinda the entire state of discourse and why anyone not terminally online hates talking about anything in proximity of political or controversial. The only people you see blow up in attention are those so derogatory, shameless, and degenerate who are well passed caring about social consideration and manners in debate or conversation. It's literally just about the concept of ratio and "I have more invisible people giving me gratification than you". Social media gave birth to the concept that anyone can be important for long enough to get high on the feeling, and it's fucking dismal for a functional society.
I fear you're going to see gen alpha kids, who are consuming this at a rate far greater than any previous generation, will become just braindead. I've already seen it where a lot of 11-13 year old kids I know still act like they're 6 and parrot memetic shit that has no meaning beyond just being something repeated to them during their parental granted 6 hours of screentime.
Picking up on weaker or those who won't seriously fight back is these guys characteristic they are proud of.
Is this Seth Meyers writer?
Hard to recognize him without a tank top
I had the same thought, and like you I have no intention of looking it up, lol.
Looks like it
Elon musk, Lord of the incels
Looking into it
Exactly
Nah,they may just be gullible. My little cousin is a musk fan and I've been trying uh, encourage him to look a little deeper
Beautiful
Solid double tap
People on Twitter spend way to much time worrying about what others are doing
I agree, as I upvote your internet comment about some guy commenting about another guy.
In my experience, people who worship Elon and people who hate him, are the most obnoxious people I found on social media.
Yep, and the later are overrepresented here and they think they are so cool and different from the pleb.
The fact that we were upvoted and downvoted in almost equal numbers kinda proves my point.
"my hot take is so ... interesting"
Well he is making $25k EV, so I guess he is doing more than the dopes in legacy auto companies
No that's the people who are actually doing work at those companies. Elon is busy suing to say he founded a company that he bought, playing Elden Ring, and shitposting on Twitter about how much work he does
His money is still facilitating the car be built.. The way legacy auto is going I don't think EV would be as big without Tesla
Dispite having mixed opinion on Musk i have to admire dude doesn't give a crap about snoflakes, wokeness or stack prices. I guess you gotta be half crazy to become richest dude in capitalist world.
Exploding EVs is a lie that big oil and legacy auto has successfully managed to push to match the Elon bad crowd and it’s a disgrace.
I was defending EVs, not Elon.
Thanks for proving my point.
Literally the only bad things I hear about EVs other than Tesla is the brake fluid drying out from never being used because of regen braking, or batteries being expensive to replace and kinda necessary when buying used, or stock tires being cheap.
Only Tesla has headlines that make it to my screen about fires, exploding, steering wheels falling off, getting stuck in full throttle, spying on people at their homes and the workers passing around the videos and just being creepy, dying from rain, people accessing the someone else's Tesla from their app or something, etc.
But as they say 'all press is good press'. Whenever someone talks about EVs it always seems to be Tesla.
Check out the Mozilla car privacy study published recently. While Tesla is at the top of the list for privacy violations, they all do it. The quality control issues are mostly real on Tesla vehicles, but it seems to be very exaggerated. It's been a while since I saw anyone mention the EV Mustang's roof literally flying off of their cars, which you have to admit is a pretty serious problem. And Teslas are definitely not catching fire left and right.
Musk is a terrible person with some really bad takes. That said, I think it's better to criticize him and his work for they actual and very real problems rather than exaggerations.
Musk (and Tesla) are extremely polarizing for headlines and drive clicks.
Just shitty business.
you're actually correct. and the down votes kind of prove how effective it's been on people who lack any sort of critical thinking skills.
I absolutely despise Elon, but this exploding dangerous ev bullshit is exactly what we don't need in order to transition away from fossil fuel.
You cannot defend anything SpaceX or Tesla on lemmy. It's not even worth the effort.
A simpler explanation is that people despise Elon Musk and everything he touches. Couple this with a general anti-car sentiment in leftist spaces because they're effectively an icon of American capitalism and it's reasonable to assume people would mock Teslas as dangerous. Also, Teslas have catastrophically and very publicly failed in the past, which definitely contributes to that sentiment: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tesla-car-battery-fire-needed-6000-gallons-water-to-extinguish-rcna68153
I never understood the anti-car thing for American leftists. I am probably as left as they come (barring gun stuff) and even I can't see how we ditch cars anytime within my lifetime. What is the plan build every suburbia into a mini metropolis? Or just pay for the houses and raise suburbia to the ground. There is just too much suburban sprawl, you would need so many frigging busses to service that. And we're not even talking about Rural america.
