I find it sad that almost nobody is willing to take a nuanced view on Elon. I can highly recommend people to read Isaacson‘s biography of him. You don’t have to like him (you won’t), but it’s good to have a well formed opinion.
We spend too much time thinking about celebrities in general. Irrespective of your opinions on Musk, Zuckerberg, Sam Altman etc, it's probably healthier to spend time thinking about your friends and family instead.
I bin celebrities into "insane people with too much money" bucket and spend minimal time on them. This allows me to keep them away from my life.
They have to display that they're worthy of being followed or listened to. It's their burden, not mine, and this proved to be very effective filter for regulating my brain time on people I don't know.
I have a reasonably nuanced view on him and admire his ability to cut through bullshit and build, but he needs to stop visiting the website formerly known as Twitter and go back to working on real concrete problems.
Twitter is this thing he's most ill fitted to be on and work on and also what he can't get away from. Hope it isn't his undoing because that would be a pathetic end.
I disagree with this. I think there's believable evidence from people who have worked with him that he's an effective technical administrator who focuses on learning his area of business[0], but also a bully and a braggart whose opinions on broader society are awful.
The main answer to the paradox of “how does he succeed while making so many bad decisions?” is that he’s the most focused person in the world. When he decides to do something, he comes up with an absurdly optimistic timeline for how quickly it can happen if everything goes as well as the laws of physics allow. He - I think the book provides ample evidence for this - genuinely believes this timeline, or at least half-believingly wills for it to be true. Then, when things go less quickly than that, it’s like red-hot knives stabbing his brain. He gets obsessed, screams at everyone involved, puts in twenty hour days for months on end trying to try to get the project “back on track”.
This is from a person who has failed to understand that most of what Elno says e.g. at those big Tesla day events is just baits for his followers and baits for investors. He's regularly promising the impossible. He's a confidence artist a.k.a. con man a.k.a. notorious liar, someone who lures people into giving him money in exchange for things he'll likely never deliver, and if and when he delivers, it's rather too late, too little. He's done that countless times with e.g. the Tesla semi, including his ~2017 assertion "this is something we can do now, right now". He could not do it then and he hasn't done it since. This is just one example. He feels entitled to say like anything he feels he can get away with and gets mad if his minions don't manage to get it done. This guy's a fraud in and out.
Yeah most of the specific engineering praise I see about him is by people paid to have such opinions. We know Musk fires anyone who pushes back, so we are left to assume employees have fallen in line. When you actually look at their praise critically it is faint, comparing him to a toddler as if that’s a virtue.
The ridiculous number of companies that he's involved in seems to be more part of the problem than the solution, especially given how many waking hours he's apparently spending on social media (another trait shared with the former president)
One, that book is filled with BS (https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/1/23895069/walter-isaacson-...). Second, I don't care if Elon had a tough childhood or is autistic or is high on ketamin all the time. He's got too much power, too much wealth and is displaying alarming behavior.
is the Elno supposed to be comedic or just derogatory?
It doesn't really strengthen your point like you think it might. And ironically is right out of Trump's playbook (who you are railing against a few comments above)
Ok I guess one can take different standpoints on this one. Part of it is naming taboo / damnatio memoriae, also observed for years by Stephen Colbert who had all written references to Trump starred out (as in, T*p or similar) and only referred to him in the spoken as "the former president" (even when reading out a quote that had "Trump" written). Other than that, Elno is derogatory, yes. The "right out of T*p's playbook" makes me think, of course.
