As much as I enjoy ripping him apart, that last bit ascribes to him a level of forethought and planning that I sincerely think is above him. I think the first one has it. The power is probably nice, especially if it gets him closer to being cool? But honestly when you dig into his history, he is just the cringiest edgelord imaginable who has spent his entire life wanting to be cool, and he just can't. He is an immense child of privilege who could have anything and everything he ever wanted, and the only thing he has ever wanted is for people to think he is cool, and it's the only thing he has never had, and it haunts him.
Truthfully I think this is why he has the following he does. It's just other people who grew up in the nerdy/edgelord spaces, who were bullied in school, who dreamt all day of being so rich that they could finally prove to the cool kids who was really cool. They see themselves in him, and his success is theirs, in a way. That's why there's just cavalcades of weird people online who will absolutely throw themselves on live subway rails to defend him.
It's honestly fucking sad, because he would sell every one of them for an ounce of attention from anyone who isn't them in a fucking heartbeat. They genuinely deserve better.
He played us like a fiddle.
Remember Mars as a backup plan? The reason why we thought SpaceX was a humanitarian and scientific effort that we could rally behind? Yeah that was bullshit. We just played to your wish to be able to trust someone and to be led to safety so we could gather talent and funding. Oh, your planet is in trouble now, and that was your last hope, and now that time is wasted, because you rallied behind the wrong person? Oh well. At least I'm head of DOGE now. pretends to be neurodivergent in order to get away with betraying and abandoning children the world over
Yep, he's probably a predator, guys, and maybe you all asked for it because you repeatedly wanted to turn over your responsibility to someone else (while consuming all the benefits of this planet in its last days) instead of leading your own species to safety instead, despite the repeated warnings over the past 5 decades of possible planet-scale collapse.