• @alvvayson
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    1 year ago

    I honestly think the money made him lose his mind.

    It’s probably going to be necessary for the mental well-being of billionaires that the public limits how much money they can have.

    And it’s not just Musk. Also Epstein, Prince Andrew, Trump, Bezos, Zuckerberg. It seems smart and capable people are literally losing their minds when they get too rich and powerful.

    Steve Jobs is an interesting case. His mental health was obviously deteriorating and got him kicked out of Apple. That led to an improvement which led to Pixar and the iMac, iPhone and iPhone. Then he lost his mind again.

    Musk also got into SpaceX and Tesla after getting kicked out of PayPal.

    US presidents are only allowed two terms. Maybe there should be a rule that after 10 years of being a billionaire, you get reduced to 500 million.

    These guys need a challenge to excel. A mountain to conquer. Once they achieve the top, their brains rot faster than a banana.

    We should probably pick them up at the top and put them back at the base of the next mountain to climb.

    Just thinking out loud.

    • Dojan
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      111 year ago

      He was never not an arse though. A walking talking arse. I still don’t get how he’s conned anyone into buying what he’s selling.

      • @vind
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        51 year ago

        It’s because to most people he appears to know what he is talking about. Once he gets into a field one knows something about, it’s clear he is just bullshitting constantly.

        • nyoooom
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          -31 year ago

          I totally agree with most of the criticism, but when he talks about rockets he knows what he’s talking about. Not sure about the rest tho.

          • @dragontamerOPM
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            1 year ago

            Nah.

            He tried to convince the world that his last exploded rocket was an outstanding success.

            But we look at the damaged launchpad and now the delayed Moon project because of the explosion and we who know better understand that he is also an idiot with rockets.

            Do you really think SpaceX is on schedule to deliver a Moon Lander or launch vehicle by 2025?

            https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59231632


            Elon Musk is a master of marketing. It will do you well to understand what mental-trick he played here. When Elon Musk spends a $Billion failing at a hard problem, he looks like a genius even though everything fails.

            But when Elon Musk fails at a task that everyone thinks is an “easy” or “solved” problem IE: Hey Elon / SpaceX, are you actually going to deliver on NASA’s contract in 2024? Oh wait, you aren’t, lets delay the “Return to the Moon” project to 2025. Oohhhh wait, you’re rocket is still exploding on the launchpad? We’re going to have to delay longer… aren’t we?

            Now we see he’s an idiot. Because SpaceX/Elon has made the mistake of accepting a real world job with real world schedules and consequences. You can’t just fail like an idiot on a task everyone knows is doable (IE: return to the moon project).

            So what’s the lesson? Spend other people’s money (Lol, Elon is spending SpaceX’s money, not his own $Billion) on failures to look busy. Even if you know it won’t work, pretend your failures are successes, and people will believe you if they think its a hard enough problem. (Ex: rocket explodes, declare a success even if it delays other projects. Distract people from the slipping schedule).

      • @alvvayson
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        21 year ago

        SpaceX brought us rockets that can land.

        Tesla brought EV’s to the mainstream when all the other car makers were only producing compliancy cars.

        Maybe he was always an arse, but back in 2018, he really did seem to me like the closest thing to a Steve Jobs 2.0 in Silicon Valley.

        I bought Tesla stock, and I have sold it all, and made quite a nice buck. No regrets on my side.

      • @dragontamerOPM
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        1 year ago

        The theory going around is that when his daughter came out as Trans … Elon took a hard right, anti-LGBTQ stance.

        Dunno how legit that rumor is, but the timing seems to fit.

        I mean it’s chicken and egg, right? If Elon was going right wing privately at home… that would only cause one of his kids to come out as Trans.

    • @demlet
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      31 year ago

      I kind of take issue with the idea that any of the people you listed are overly smart. Bezos, the guy’s a monster but I do think he was a visionary. But mostly they won the lottery with a lucky idea, either their own or someone else’s that they stole. Elon is proof of that with the whole Twitter debacle, and so is Zuckerberg with Meta. They have their handlers to keep them on track. Any time they try to go off and be maverick innovators again they fall flat on their faces. Why? Because, again, the truth is that they just got very lucky the first time. Then they get surrounded by yes-men (and women!) and grifters, and their world gets so distorted they start to believe they’re superhuman geniuses.

      • @dragontamerOPM
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        11 year ago

        Zuck at a minimum has shown applications of the method of paired comparisons, as well as the multiarmed bandit problem, to serve the most effective ad engine of modern history.

        It’s arguably an evil invention that spies upon us and feeds us misinformation. But no one can argue against it’s efficacy.

    • @dragontamerOPM
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      1 year ago

      Nah. Anyone who looked at history knows that Elon was like this since Paypal days in the 90s.

      However, VCs we’re inclined to make such people heroes in the 2014-era of cheap money. Having quirky CEOs like Theranos, FTX, Tesla was hip and hot.

      0% interest rates meant that shoving money to idiots was a good financial strategy, and simply outlasting the competition would work. See Jet.com which succeeded.

      Uber and Lyft are others from this era of loose money policy. WeWork too. Less successful though.

      Today, Tesla is suffering from the same ills as Uber, Lyft, WeWork. Today’s 5.25% interest rate is too much to bare for these insanely run companies.


      All that has changed in the past 10 years is a concept called Venture Capitalist submarine money. The VCs ain’t helping Musk anymore, marketing has changed.

      All you are feeling is the external influence that online ads, online messaging and hype can do to your brain.

      Ex: think of all the free press Elon got when Hollywood said that Iron Man was based off of him in the 2008 movie. That’s kinda-sorta submarine money there. That’s Hollywood telling you subtly to like Elon Musk, and that subversive messaging works.

      Turn that off (no one in Hollywood likes Elon anymore) and then the feeling goes away.