I get it. Watching some of the videos of him giving tours around the SpaceX facilities, he comes across as a real first-principles thinker. So much of tech disruption is applying first-principles thinking to problems and coming up with better solutions. Given that he's so great at it, I can see why people look up to him for it, his companies are clearly successful for having built things from first-principles – electric cars, rockets, etc.

Except... of course... it's not that simple. "First-principles" thinking is a nice buzzword and it's rooted in some truth, but it's an excuse for university engineering graduates to ignore real world problems and consequences, and jump to solutions that are certainly disruptive, but often disruptively bad, and rarely overall an improvement from the status quo. It's pure naivety, and as someone with a lot of self confidence from unearned privilege, it's something I'm constantly battling against inside myself. Can I really do a better job than experts? Probably not.

Is SpaceX much better than competitors? Yes, but not entirely because of first-principles thinking, there was a lot of winning the right contracts and clever business decisions from Gwynne Shotwell. Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price. What about Twitter? Well Musk dropped in to a working business to re-evaluate everything with that first-principles thinking and look where it's got him. He was naive. He didn't value the expertise of those actually doing the job for years, and he's effectively destroyed the business.

So yeah, I get why people like him, and in moderation I think those aspects are worthy of respect. However Musk doesn't do moderation, and so it just comes across as naive.

> Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price.

And yet, Tesla makes like 10x the profit of German car makers per vehicle sold [1].

The established car makers still, over a decade after the first Tesla rolled on the streets, haven't come close to realizing just how screwed they are... the biggest threat to Tesla isn't the established car makers, it's Chinese BYD.

Don't get me wrong: Musk is despicable as a person. But those working under him have truly created awesome things.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/elon-musks-guerilla-taktik...

Yeah you're right, I was simplifying a little. I think the main thing is that almost every "first-principles" company ends up hitting up against "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that", and it's just down to naivety.

Musk's ideas are both good and original. But the ones that are good are not original, and the ones that are original are not good.

He was involved in companies that built real things like rockets. That's pretty cool! I was willing to cut him some slack in the past... ok, he's quirky, whatever. But now he just looks like a petty, nasty person and I think he threw away the good will people had for him, even if they weren't in the 'adore' category.

Similar here. I used to cut him quite a bit of slack, and have posted several defenses of him on here several years ago, primarily for having actual accomplishments.

At this point, I'm embarrassed to have done so, and seriously doubt even those accomplishments, which I now credit far more to the people around him accomplishing despite Elon rather than due to his influence (not that he deserves zero credit, but far less than he gets or wants).

Aside from the kind of recent entitled asshattery and actively promoting authoritarian propaganda while claiming it's all "centrist" (perhaps it is from an apartheid point of view..., what undid it for me was his public exchanges with Twitter engineers in late '22, just displaying brazed BS and ignorance while trying to belittle everyone. What a smug, ignorant, blustering, asshat, wasting everyone's time, all for his own inadequate ego.

Surrogate father for 20yo hustle bros.

Please don't do this here.

He's the richest man in the world. For a lot of people, that's enough to earn their admiration. There's this warped perception that if you have a lot of money, there must be something exceptionally positive about your character.

It's the Just World Fallacy/Hypothesis. The belief that "you get what you deserve", good or bad. It's at the root both of a lot of hero worship and also at the root of a lot of unwillingness to help people who are struggling out of the shared belief that you must have done something to deserve where you are - good or bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Also the techbro dream - the marketing has worked for his image, and he's the ideal of a smart, successful, techie, engineer - although realistically he's only one of those

Yeah that's gotta be the one.

In an era where everything is politicized, especially in the US, defending Elon is about political alignment. This is why you'll see conservatives who don't even know much about Elon sing his praises - because they believe he's one of them.

Maybe I'm just a effeminate big-city lefty liberal but it seems like the stan culture for Elon is the same as for Trump, Desantis, Joe Rogan, and all the other guys who peddle easy answers for a difficult world.

Only somewhat more seductive, because for a while there Elon was actually involved in some very cool new technology development before he totally went off the rails, so there's still some latent "hey isnt he the guy that landed a rocket" psychological/cultural energy.

I went from having never heard of him to knowing him as the guy with the company that landed two rocket boosters on live TV. And that was the extent of my engagement with his persona, so he could easily have maintained a positive impression by just being careful with public statements.

Making spaceflight exciting again was huge and it must have taken an incredible engineering effort to get semi-reliable high-definition live streams from multiple angles on and around rockets.

And then Twitter brain.

I have a theory! Totally unevidenced, but maybe you'll find it useful.

A narcissist has two important parts. One is a desperate hunger for status. The other is a grandiose false self that they see as sufficient to justify their importance. Narcissists put amazing time and energy into constructing and performing the false self. If you've ever met one in person, they can be amazingly compelling.

But what if somebody has the same deep emotional hunger but lacks the ability to construct the false self? One path is developing a realistic sense of self and balanced emotions. But what if they don't?

My theory is that they are prone to attaching their identity to an existing narcissist. They become fans, even superfans. They adopt their opinions. They buy their products. They identify with the narcissist's public false self.

So I think Elon's stans are the ones who, if they were big boy narcissists, would have a false self like "Elon the billionaire playboy technoking". They see themselves as brilliant first-principles thinkers who can sweep into a room and by the sheer power of their genius make vast improvements over whatever the petty mortals previously present were doing.

There but for the grace of god go I, honestly.