If Elon recognized that he had the social skills of an NPC and had hired a PR team, we would probably all still adore him and likely he would still just be doing engineering company stuff.

Take heed, if you have money, power, and poor social skills, hire people to manage it for you.

Sad world where people expects successful people to hire a PR team just to be liked.

Mostly people expects successful people to just live their lives.

Musk is DESPERATE to be adored and DESPERATE for influence and power outside the scope of his success.

Those are personal failings, not the failings of society.

Only if one insists on talking/tweeting all the time. Plenty of business leaders do just fine by mostly keeping their mouths shut.

Ah, so, just like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quiet_Place

What was the genre of that film again?

I don't, but I expect a powerful person to have the foresight to have not just Yes men around them and listen to advice/voices that give them counter points to what they want to blurb out before they blurb it out.

He could, however, not give a fuck about whether he is liked or not, which is certainly what I would do if I had 400,000,000,000$ of fuck you money. But being what would in rude terms would be described as an "attention whore", he instead spends his time making insane tweets and pretending to be good at videogames in order to impress a bunch of adolescent boys. It's almost sad.

try being a billionaire and you'll note "being liked" becomes a vastly heavier lift

Not as sad as a world in which Billionaires actively and shamelessly use their power to rebuild the government on their favor and spread misinformation, populism and hate globally their own media platforms.

> just to be liked

It's not merely about "likability" but more about carefully controlling the messaging, and avoiding controversies or really bad missteps.

A defendant or plaintiff can choose to remain totally silent in a court of law and speak through their attorney. The attorney filters what their client has to say, recasts it in legal terminology, and everything the attorney says and does should protect the interests of the client and the court, in opposition to the other side.

It's also about a division of labor: for God's sake, what CEO/politician/bishop wants to open all his own mail when a secretary can filter it? What CEO is going to read social media all day and respond to their DMs? Waste of a salary! Does Mr. Musk or President Trump really write all the covfefe on his own, or does he employ ghost writers? How would we know?

A PR firm likewise has a fiduciary and legal duty to protect the interests of an entity, to keep them out of litigous entanglements, and yes, to put on the best public face that they can in order to 'be liked'. Unless the org has some weird reason to play the villain or adversary in some way, and likability is not an ultimate goal, such as a gangsta rapper with a public beef, I suppose. They still use social media to sell music.

For me all he had to do was not openly be a genocidal white supremacist. Maybe he needs a crew to help him with that, but I think there's something about that that's a bit more than "poor social skills" and I'm sick of pretending that me not knowing what to say to people at funerals is the same as him delivering multiple Nazi salutes at the presidential inauguration.

Elon Musk is the head of the republican party and won the election? Or do you just ctrl+f for "white supremacist" and throw the same shit at every wall you find to see where it will stick?

> He's just the head of another political party

Oh, here we were believing Trump when we are told Musk isn't in charge of anything, either administratively or politically.

You sound like you have a severe case of Elon Delusional Syndrome and Trump Delusional Syndrome. I suggest you see a doctor to help you through the difficult time you’re having. Also, can you tell your fellow domestic terrorists to stop fire bombing and shooting Tesla’s and their stores?

The temerity of the whole TDS bullshit is the most obvious proof of an astounding lack of self-awareness on the right. Here the people obsessed with Obama around baseless internet memes for 8 years, who were clutching their pearls over Clinton having an affair, who stuck stickers of Biden on gas pumps for years, who now have latched onto "domestic terrorism" as their new favorite phrase, think dislike of Trump is some unique thing affecting just the "other team."

All you have to do is listen to Trump speak to realize he's fairly unique in quickly-obviouly-un-American ways among recent US Presidents.

It's not a lack of self-awareness, it's a purposeful muddying of the waters. It's making being angry at a nazi salute the same as being angry at a tan suit: meaningless. These people aren't stupid. You can tell because what they do works.

I believe he has pretty good social skills, he managed to fly under the radar as a public figure for long enough, until he was powerful enough to no longer need to give a fuck.

His work history doesn't exactly say "pretty good social skills"

If he'd had better social skills, he wouldn't have been fired from x.com and made even more money from PayPal.

Paypal is a good example actually: convincing enough to get named ceo, but gets kicked out once his partners get to the bottom of it.

He had a PR team. It all started to go wrong after he fired his PR team.

I think something similar happened to Tom Cruise several years ago.

far from everyone would agree its going wrong

This is more a consequence of doing all the drugs.

His son becoming a trans turned him wholly against the left overnight.

"His son becoming a trans" is a really awkward and kind of shitty way to say "his daughter came out as trans". And this has nothing to do with "the left" unless you're a piece of shit who can't accept who people are and have to find an "other" to hate.

Not starting transition is also a life changing decision. Testosterone never stops permanently mutilating the bodies that it poisons until it's removed from the body.

> It's quiet amusingy that up ubtill recently in the usa it was easier to get surgery to turn you to your 'real' gender compared to buying yourself some alcohol.

That's not true at all. Kids can't just get surgery on their own. They need parental consent at the very least. Interestingly, one survey indicated that 97% of minors receiving breast reduction surgery were not transgender kids, but cis male kids with gynecomastia. In your hand-wringing about life-changing decisions, would you deny these boys the treatment they need and instead force them to keep their breast growth all throughout adolescence?

And it's certainly easier to get parental consent to consume alcohol than it is to get elective gender-affirming surgery. The total number of people getting GAS in the USA in one year has never exceeded ~13,000. That's for all ages. Meanwhile about 10 million young people under 21 per year drink alcohol, of whom about 10% were able to obtain it from their own home, which in some states is perfectly legal.

> I think the republican position is more nuanced than that. To summarize: 'all children are special and important but any life changing decisions like joining the army or getting a tattoo are best left for later in life.

I didn't realise republicans were against genital mutilation.

*daughter

Don't abuse ketamine, kids.

And love your kids, folks.

Watch out and make sure your rocket doesn't explode to early.

Or at least don't hate them and then become convinced there are global conspiracies...

> It seemed to all start going wrong with "pedo guy". Before then Musk was doing great things at Tesla and SpaceX.

If you read the Isaacson biography of him, it seems like he's always been like this.