This is true. Elon swings wildly in the public image from genius to idiot and from superhero to supervillain.

Very few opinions otherwise.

Polarized as anything else.

Musk is doing his best to polarize people against him all on his own.

His public image is a direct result of his actions. Stuff like blazing a blunt in a podcast was legit funny, him calling a rescue diver a pedo was fucked up, but nowadays he's showing open disdain for democracy and its freedoms - he's making a clownshow out of "freedom of speech" (just try tweeting a substack link), openly shitting on the freedom of press (by not having media teams at all, banning critical media like Tesla did in Germany a few months ago, or by firing Twitter's PR team and replacing it by a poo-emoji autoreply) and personally had a bunch of high-profile fascists unblocked while antifascist accounts got the boot on the suggestion of people like "Catturd" or Andy Ngo. Not to mention his various run-ins with the law such as him ignoring direct SEC orders (the one where he was supposed to have someone else sign-off on tweets with stock market impact) or the shady stuff surrounding the German Tesla factory.

He could have stayed in the public image selling expensive cars with weirdly sexual naming schemes (S-3-X-Y) and shooting rockets into orbit... but no, that amount of attention wasn't enough for him. It's all a direct result of his own actions.

Good points. I also wouldn’t characterize his actions at Twitter thus far as being “single minded.” Twitter is personal to him, and he can’t keep his ego from getting in the way of making rational business decisions.

> (Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)

funny that you need to put a "space man still bad" disclaimer in a neutral comment to not get buried by the hive mind

if true, i wonder, does spacex and tesla still need such a leader nowadays?

No, certainly not Tesla, and I think the over investment in self driving cars is a result of him not stepping back soon enough.

SpaceX is run incredible well by Gwynne Shotwell, she is responsible for the success of the Falcon launch business and Starlink. Without Elons mad visions and relentless need to keep moving Starship would not be happening, so maybe he is still important for that.

Twitter needed constant input from government money to run disinfo campaigns. Dropping $44 billion on it and using it to antagonize the main client that kept the whole company afloat was a bad idea. Now Elon is panicking because those $44 billions were dropped on a hole.

Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.