Among the political commentariat on the left, this kind of person is a Neanderthal that should be relegated to the dustbin of history.
For a lot of people on the outside of that demographic, he's just a fun, brilliant, if occasionally douchy guy who's way less out of touch than his billionaire contemporaries, and actually works to build neat things.
Yeah - this is basically my take, and stated better than I did in my comment.
In contemporary culture, that is enough to be considered right wing. Neutrality slowly ceased to be an option.
He IS an easy enemy in this regard, not only to the left. All his (mis)behaviour, naming his child like that, manipulating currency rates through tweets, that's not exactly what average people could afford. If he didn't fit this stereotype of billionaire, I'm sure he would be liked more.
Even so I just don’t think these things are a big deal? I also don’t agree with the anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment though.
It’s just odd to me given how much he’s done to aid the transition to EVs and renewable energy. I guess it’s not a huge surprise, people are wildly inconsistent around tribal issues.
I've got bad news for you. There is no secret plan that explains the irrational behavior.
On Twitter people on the left claim vaguely that Elon is bad and why is SNL doing this etc.
People on the right say Elon is great and SNL is normally unfunny.
In the former case I think it’s just because people associate Elon with the right for some reason.
The latter is easier to understand since a lot of SNL’s humor is explicitly political (not in a bad way imo).
Part of me wonders if the irreverent tweets were an intentional way to broaden his appeal. He needed EVs to go from “liberal” Prius symbols about the environment to cool.
That’s a Herculean task when you think about it. Even now there are still coal rolling truck drivers yelling at EVs, but the sentiment has definitely changed in a positive way.
He did this without having to embrace trump (unlike Thiel for instance).
I think his biggest miss was on covid, but he seems to agree that he was wrong.
I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.
Putting all this aside and looking at what he’s building - it’s an exciting time to be alive. Most companies are fairly dull doing fairly dull things. Elon takes huge risks to try to pull the future down earlier. For the most part, he succeeds.