This sounds like it's from 6 months ago.

No, people in the public sphere do not think Musk is doing OK with Twitter. They thought he was doing well when all they saw was him on stage taking credit for Tesla and SpaceX's engineering work.

Now he is at a company where he is dictator supreme, his actions are far more public, and nothing has done more to tear away the illusion of his Midas touch. He's muttering about 'woke mind virus' due to boos at a Chappelle show where the audience were laughing at a half hour of LGBT jokes.

> No, people in the public sphere do not think Musk is doing OK with Twitter. They thought he was doing well when all they saw was him on stage taking credit for Tesla and SpaceX's engineering work.

Prior to the Twitter situation, lots of people thought of Musk along the lines of being a new Henry Ford (American industrialist) or being a real life Tony Stark (Marvel's Iron Man tech genius character). With the successes of SpaceX and Tesla, many thought he could do no wrong.

Musk has certainly done massive damage to his image, and many well known business experts are calling him out for massively overpaying for Twitter, his management style, and even for trapping himself into the situation in the first place.

I think the Henry Ford comparison is not an inapt one, but you need to have a certain understanding of Henry Ford as the guy who bought and published The Dearborn Independent for the comparison to make sense.

An understanding of Henry Ford as a virulent anti-semite makes sense here as well.

"Anti-semite" and "Publisher of the Dearborn Independent" are synonyms in this case; it's the paper he acquired and then used as his nazi bullhorn. I was just being subtle lol

edit: Ford's Twitter, if you will.

Whoops, I should have known that!

Neither Musk nor Ford live up to the idealized/made up version of Henry Ford.

Also, Ford was once asked under oath what year the American Revolution was, and wasn't sure but thought it was 1812. He didn't have much book learning.

he is like Henry Ford in the sense of propagating conspiracy theories. Maybe he's just trying to FULLY henry ford in every sense of the word

> or being a real life Tony Stark

This may have been true a couple years ago, but with the constant delays of the Cybertruck, not to mention the constant lies about FSD [0] have taken down that facade.

[0] In the mid 2010's, I used to be generous about Musk's FSD claims, thinking he just really doesn't understand how hard it is. After a couple years of that, I thought "Eh, he's just trying to drum up investors, no different then any other company being aggressive about timeline claims". But at this point, it's straight-up lies. We're still years away from FSD being usable in city streets, and there's no way Elon doesn't know this, but he still spouts the same bullshit. At this point, his FSD claims are fraud, as far as I'm concerned.

I saw a headline of that but didn't have time, thanks for the reminder to check in on that one. I expect my wife and I will have a good cackle about it.

There is a real life bubble as well.

If I know someone as a Muskovite, I'm not going to talk about Twitter or Musk in front of them. They're just not rational or worth interacting with.

And I'm sure they think the same of me.

People are tribal. If you wanna get things done or work professionally with people, you ignore politics and focus on work.

You say that, based on anecdotal experience, but the move on Twitter's part to ban links to competitors after making a big fuzz about free speech is hard to frame as anything but desperate.

My dad, in his 70s and with zero interest in tech called me to point out Elon's meltdowns. Every tech person I know (except for right wing political folks who put politics first) also consider this extraordinary.

I've literally met no one who thinks things are going fine.