That’s become harder in the last few years and practically impossible in 2022. At this point, I am desperately hoping for SpaceX to get Starship/Superheavy flying before Elon manages to screw that up as well.
I’m not a trained psychiatric professional but it looks to me as if his extreme wealth and success has exacerbated some pre-existing tendencies and turned him into a (danger, medical jargon ahead) full-blown mess. It’s a shame to watch.
I'm sure some of us have parents or grandparents who worked for Howard Hughes back in the day, and are now feeling a strong sense of deja vu. Musk seems to be speedrunning Hughes' career and, really, his entire life.
It seems like he has screwed up being a parent to his many children, most publicly the one that transitioned and cut off ties with him.
He's a lot like Trump in that he jumps into everything declaring it simple and that he gets it unlike everyone else, then says it turns out this is more complicated than anyone thought.
Not much. His public feuding and conspiracy theory spreading is largely constrained to Twitter. The whole thing going under might be the best outcome for him. Presently, however, he’s acting like an addict given the crack store.
In the case of Twitter something had to be done. It was too powerful of a public forum and was mismanaged and run by extremists and exacerbated existing divisions, turning them into real rifts. If half a country feels they are being actively suppressed, demonized, and treated unfairly that is a recipe for disaster. Was Elon the guy to fix it? I dunno who else would be crazy enough to try. And his roots are in web tech so his experience may help.
I suspect that HN has recently seemed more anti-elon because the anti-elon crowd has a lot of bullshit to point to recently, and the pro-elon crowd doesn't really have good defenses to most of it.
Case in point, the HN trope that he is an idiot and doesn't know anything about technology and just takes credit for brilliant engineers' work. I laid out solid evidence that is not true, quoting top of the field scientist and engineers' assessment of his technical knowledge and skills. The only response I get is from RavingGoat (username kind of checks out) claiming Elon must have paid these people to say these things with no evidence whatsoever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33504228
I know this is cliche here, but in this case, it really seems like Redditors have invaded this space.
But over the past few years he’s become much more vocal about current events unrelated to his companies. He has every right to do it, but whether you’re a cable news commentator or Musk, the more you weigh in on social issues the more polarizing you become.