Given you calling these people stupid, I'd be shocked if you out-earned them over the past 15 years[1]. And if your counter-argument will be "that's a bad yardstick" then what yardstick shall we use? I own no TSLA stock, nor do I particularly like Musk, but this weird irrational hatred just doesn't seem to contribute anything other than reiterating the (oh so boring) liberal "Musk bad" zeitgeist talking points.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/roe
At least, these were previously American values to hate these people.
He's a literal Nazi who gave the sieg heil salute on national television.
It's not irrational for people to think he's a bad person.
This isn’t a liberal/conservative thing.
This is a class conflict thing.
The rich are stupid, just like everyone else. That in itself goes against the narrative that has been woven in our corporate mass media, the accepted narrative that makes it seem as though the rich are meritous and deserve to hoard wealth.
This lie told to all of us, among other lies, protects the rich from having their ill-gotten gains seized by the working people. It’s worth reminding everyone that the riches of the few depend entirely on the labor of the many. They need us more than we need them. Their illusion of the legality of their private ownership of excessive wealth depends on physical protection provided by the working class. If every OpenAI employee quit, if every Sam Altman bodyguard and doorman quit, if every police officer refused to protect the wealthy, these people would be financially worthless. And it really is as simple as that, it wouldn’t even be that hard to shatter the illusion.
To bring this back to being relevant to the article, this illusion is why CEOs will never be held accountable for their actions. Shareholders are part of the pyramid scheme feeding everyone on the very top. Failures of the visionary founder CEO are like failures of Kim Jong Un: certainly not their fault! Your undying support as a shareholder is required to right the ship. Your lack of faith is what caused the failure in the first place.
Of course I haven’t out-earned them, I don’t have an army of accountants and lawyers working due me to dodge taxes and avoid complying with laws, access to private equity investment, insider trading knowledge, and all of my income is W2, so my tax rate is about 4x higher than any billionaire.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7ek63e5xyo
One reason of many why I say that the CEO class is no longer accountable for anything. Laws do not exist for them.
The Optimus narrative is so obviously a fraud. The things can "dance" and play chess, but they cannot operate in dirt, scrub the kitchen, etc. Even if they succeed, BYD will build a $7000 Optimus. Intimidation of crowds and barking orders at humans (for example for the human to clean the kitchen floor) seem the only somewhat realistic goals.
Just look at Elon’s insane pay package, approved in a landslide. The skulls of the average shareholder must echo like a cave.
And the rich accuse the poor of their poverty being their own fault, because they are just being irresponsible, making bad decisions, and spending unwisely. They should look in the mirror.