He's admired by a lot of people who have gotten into trouble for saying bigoted things, who felt that there was nothing wrong with what they said or did (scroll up to see someone complaining that this is about "getting offended by some words and a picture") or refuse to acknowledge concepts like systemic racism...and think they were wronged. Victims of liberals, wokeness, "PC police" and so on.
They see him saying the same sort of things they did, and mistake the ability of an oligarch to escape consequences for almost anything...for "courage" and "free thinking."
Coverage of Musk has always been mixed and in main stream media often covered negatively.
Maybe in the more techy press it was mostly positive. But even then, go threw history here on HN. The idea that Tesla was scam and just about to go bankrupt was common wisdom and anybody who disagree got down-voted.
So the idea that positive press coverage is responsible is kind or ridiculous.
Its more like its the endless pro-vs-anti Musk wars that lead to this effect. And that happens in the media as it does on HN.
That's why he showed up alongside Tony Stark in Iron Man 2 and was treated like a god on an episode of Big Bang Theory.
The media, for the most part, treated him gently until the Thai cave incident when people started to catch onto the idea that this "quirky genius" might be an asshole.
There was lots of high profile reporting calling Musk dumb for believing in EV and landing rockets. Media constantly using burning Tesla to show how bad EV are. The most important car show in the world, as mainstream as it gets, shit on Tesla hard. Lots of interviews with former CEOs of car companies explaining how dumb Tesla was.
So did fucking Larry Ellison lol. Wasn’t that movie basically an ad for Oracle.
Funnily enough, that's exactly what happened under communism.
All I'm doing is observing that not only is "if we don't defend the billionaires, they'll come after us commoners next" true, it is a major feature of recent history. That sentence could serve as a decent summary of the 20th century.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/temporarily_embarrassed_milli...
Doesn't start entirely organic but it ends up being nearly 100% organic hate for certain topics.
Useful idiots start parroting hit campaigns and it becomes "common knowledge" for them which they repeat whenever the topic comes up, creating more useful idiots.
See any "controversial" topic here. Eich/Brave, Elon/Tesla, Facebook/React. It's all the same talking points, some being years old, most being purely emotional/subjective.
If you respond back they'll just call you a paid shill or troll, but if you don't respond back the echo chamber goes unchallenged and makes more useful idiots to parrot those same talking points to restart the cycle.
Funny you mention Nickleback, it was the first time I noticed the hive mind hate. Personally they are a really good band and everyone I know (outside of Reddit) likes them and knows pretty much every single one of their songs, wonder who Chad Kroeger pissed off.
Bezos is not that. It's maybe a bit exaggerated where it might seem like people think he's the worst person, but in reality he's just a name that everybody knows who most people think is a bad person on multiple levels - but the approach to management of quantifying everyone and treating them like machines so that they have wild turnover is something that a lot of people all agree is awful and repugnant.
I'm sure if you want to understand why Musk is hated you can google it, but he clearly courts controversy and tries to get attention by saying outlandish things and it usually backfires. His handling of twitter seems toxic to a lot of people (Just work crazy hard and sleep in the office or you suck!). Then there was the sexual harrassment too right? He never apologizes for any of it that I've seen. Also there are accusations he's manipulated stock prices for a meme. And at this point I think a lot of people think he's too chaotic/random to believe what he says afterall, even if he gave an apology.
Gates is a good counterexample. Either of these people could act like Gates and be less hated.
What's up with that?