You were duped. Tesla‘s paint it black video is from 2016 and one the first obvious lies. People called Musk out on his BS 10 years ago, but he successfully managed to keep a "genius" imagine in the media up until COVID-19 hit. Media sentiment changed around 2020/2021 to adjust to reality of Musk being a massive fraudster.

Important point here: the discussion is about his character, but you’ve made it about his intellect.

I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. I’ve heard silly things like - he doesn’t do anything, it’s all his employees or board or assistant - but reading the history that’s obviously false.

It does seem some people can’t cope with the idea that someone is often an asshat is also brilliant. And I’m afraid it’s true with Musk.

I don’t think Musk is super smart. I think he has some skills that account for how he got to his position other than privilege and luck, I think he probably works hard (or at least, harder than me), but I can’t get to “super smart”.

> I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart.

It's also worth keeping in mind that super smart people can say and do lots of really dumb things. Smart != wise.

> I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart

I doubt it. He was born into money and was lucky enough to make some excellent purchasing decisions. His various talks and arguments on the internet show him to be fairly stupid in my opinion. I've heard tell that his successful businesses are mainly successful when the staff learn how to manage Musk and prevent his dumbest ideas.

What objective evidence do we have that Musk is smart?

Basically: he's extremely rich

Working hard and being very good at negotiating compensation packages and picking the right companies/products to be involved with (and a bit of luck) are all sufficient for exorbitant wealth though.

E.g. there are plenty of people just as smart as Bezos who didn't hitch their wagon to the "sell something easy on the web" idea at the right time

What is a secular term for prosperity gospel?

Social darwinism.

Plutocracy?

On the one hand he does some things that seem very smart, on the other he does many that are very stupid (cave divers ordeal). So it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

I have this [flagged] comment from 4 years ago, recounting my own perception of the events, and I stand by it

>pre-2018, he was a journalists' sweetheart. they were singing him praises and they didn't bring up attention to his misdeeds

>at some point around that time, he had pissed them off with the "who owns the media?" tweet, and they did a 180 degree turn. he didn't suddenly become eccentric then, his eccentricity started to get extensive negative attention. there's a plethora of media sweethearts who get away with far worse things without a peep from checkmarked firebrands

>in other words, you've changed your mind on cue, and you never had an independent opinion to begin with

The "you're a sheep" rhetoric. Great!

Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/)

>The "you're a sheep" rhetoric. Great!

you mean the same rhetoric I observe whenever the wrong entity wins an election anywhere in the West? have we not accepted for a fact that most people are so uncritical of the media they consume that a thousand Russian Internet Defense Force operatives can topple a Western democracy over Xitter and TikTok?

>Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/)

I never said he was a good man before then, or that he is a good man now.

I wish I could be as intelligent and free thinking as you. Sadly I’m a sheep, but it’s so inspiring to see someone like you, to show us sheep what’s possible if you truly free your mind.

somebody should look into who owns the @elonmusk account that originates these stories...

This really makes no sense because you can just listen to the man himself (and there's a lot of material).

Thai Cave rescue happened in 2018. It should have already made obvious how completely deranged Musk was to everyone, even if they were not paying close attention before and were dazzled by self-driving cars and Mars colonization promises.

I think that marked a turning point for many. He had been known to say dumb things in the past but that was monumentally stupid own goal. Worse, he was given multiple chances to take a step back but just kept digging.

Yeah, it was mine. That's the moment I thought 'wow that guy is deranged now, he should step back and take some vacations'. Now I realize he was like this from the start, but that was the moment I questioned my hero worship.

That was certainly the first time he did something so obviously blatantly evil, and obviously his own fault, that I wasn't able to ignore it or dismiss it.

It was sufficiently awful, at first I couldn't even believe he'd done it. When I internalised that he was the kind of person to do that, it made it much easier to see his other flaws.

> obviously blatantly evil

He responded to defamation with defamation. Pedo guy tried to sue and lost.

Where is the obvious blatant evil?

He had a PR team working overtime to boost his image. Remember he had a cameo in movie Iron Man 3 back in the day.

He meticulously worked on his image for decades.

>screenwriter Mark Fergus told New York magazine that Musk partly inspired the modern portrayal of [Iron Man]

>According to Fergus, the character was inspired by an amalgam of real people — but none so much as Elon Musk.

The Iron Man thing… MCU Tony Stark wasn't as smart as he thought he was. He should've allowed surgeons to help with his heart immediately, rather than the entire B-plot of Iron Man 2; Iron Man 3's plot could've been averted in a whole bunch of ways if he'd been less arrogant and thoughtless, and also shows him as a loner unwilling to call for assistance despite (by this point) being allied with what passes for gods in the MCU; Ultron was his own hubris punching him in the face; the justification he gives for the Sokovia Accords was a stupid response to an act of self-defence that, sure, could've and should've been handled better, but it isn't like Stark himself was great at avoiding collateral damage during emergencies in the other films; his rage-fight against Barnes in Civil War, while understandable, was wildly unprofessional and a sign he was not a suitable person to be in possession of a one-man weapon system like the Iron Man suits have been shown to be; his tech gift to Peter Parker had wildly inadequate safety measures to be gifted to someone still in school, even if they had been to space.

Basically: yes, Musk is just like Stark. Half as smart as he thinks he is, has main-character syndrome and/or narcissism.

When Elon was a teenager he bullied another kid about his father’s suicide until the other kid pushed him down a flight of stairs. He has always been like this. His character was never a secret. Everything was in plain view but you didn’t want to see it.

And he's like that because his father beat the crap out of him.

You were younger and more gullible, he still had a PR firm and didn't tweet his every "thought".

I ran into him and the group of obsessed hangers on in 1997-8 or so. He was a nutjob then.

> Was he faking his true character all this time and managed to dupe me?

Yes.

People's true nature reveals once they stop caring about money.

To be fair, he was really good at faking.

> I am still asking myself what the fuck happened?

I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well:

"Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security."

I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-t...

The big event just before he announced he was now voting Republican in May 2022 was newspapers reporting on him sexually harassing an employee 6 years earlier.

That timeline is backwards. The political affiliation change is before the accusation story.

Also, don't we say "allegedly" anymore? Or just Musk?

I was always confused and intrigued what was going on behind the scenes when Tesla was so obviously and publicly rejected by the Biden administration in that manner.

Musk was even then a polarising figure, but given Tesla was arguably more “American” than even the self-proclaimed traditional American car companies, it seemed a weird, self-defeating, perhaps emotional, position for the administration to take.

That 2021 event was very much not about EVs-in-general, but about supporting UAW as a union at a time when a lot of their jobs were about to be disrupted because Biden just signed an EO (14037) that pushed traditional automakers towards making more EVs (target being 40-50% by 2030, but it was non-binding).

So, why were Ford, GM and Stellantis there but Tesla wasn't? Because Tesla was already making EVs only, because none of its workforce is a part of UAW (due to Tesla being anti-union) and because this EO had no impact on Tesla's workforce what so ever. Elon being butthurt about it doesn't change the fact that it would've made zero sense to have Tesla there.

You don't have to take my word for it, Jen Psaki directly addressed this at a press briefing:

> Asked if Tesla being a nonunion company was the reason it wasn’t included Thursday, Psaki replied, “Well, these are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/tesla-snub-white...

Thanks; actually, your background context is a lot more informative than the quote. It makes a lot more sense that they were excluded because it didn't make sense for them to be there because it was an event targeted at the union(s) because the administration had just made things difficult for them.

(The quote sounds simply like "we excluded Tesla because they are anti-union"...)

Tesla not being unionized was the main guess I heard about it at the time. The legacy auto industry has a history of outsized political influence leading to many dumb decisions on politician's part from an administrative success perspective.

I don't know either really, I'm just reporting remembered second-hand sources.

Except there is nothing in musks history that suggest this. His actual behavior was always consistent with who he is now. He just became more aggressive as people pointed it out.

He did not leaned a little right. He had the same political opinions, but less of narcissist rage over not being admired.

He obviously always held the normie billionaire libertarian "taxes bad, regulations bad, unions bad" right positions, enjoyed "politically incorrect" jokes and had some weird preconceptions like obsession with male heirs that might not be overtly political but line up with certain more fringe right views. Maybe he chose to hide some spicier views about the apartheid era.

But there's also definitely been a change. He publicly endorsed Democrat candidates on numerous occasions, including against normie business-friendly Republicans. Think his metamorphosis in actual unfiltered views is best shifted from the "I absolutely support trans but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare" to his current campaigns...

In the past (early Tesla - SpaceX - Boring Company - Hyperloop - crypto) he seemed apolitical and only to really care about setting up the building blocks for a new, different society on Mars. Maybe a pipe dream, maybe megalomaniac, but just very cool and very futuristic. He didn't seem very political aside from a libertarian bent.

Somewhere along the road he devolved into a petty and weird character, and then went off the deep end into full spectrum alt-right weirdness.

He is the same type of talented hype man as Jobs was, with the same sort of reality distortion field. Otherwise SpaceX reusable wouldn't have happened. And even Jensen Huang was supremely impressed how fast xAI built up data centers.

Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly?

Also, didn't Musk publicly quit Trump's advisory councils over exiting the Paris Agreement back in 2017? Why does that rift not qualify for your "separating politics" hypothesis?

I think as the left has become more homogeneously college educated they are less likely to wholesale accept blatant lies and falsehoods. For someone like Musk this will naturally push them to the right because he incessantly lies/bullshits so often and has a visceral negative reaction when being called on it (the cave fiasco comes to mind).

If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.

> Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly?

Not OP ... but it would be consistent with observations. It is a party that admires lying and rewards it.

Generally, right-wing politics are about the exploitation of others and lying is typically a part of that.

No. He is the same person. It just happens in a certain time, what he was selling aligned with what you were buying.

He always was an arrogant, over-privileged arsehole. But having an army of "fanboys" will have amplified his character flaws. Ditto his involvement with Trump et al.

I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics.

I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive.

Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races.

Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia.

I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank.

You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome.

>I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics.

"politics":

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Those links are all political views.

Beyond the veracity of those numbers, it is a political decision whether or not the US should be spending $150B on foreigners or Americans.

The manner in which that decision is executed is very much a reflection of moral character.

Whose morals? Yours?

And from what I remember, we weren't supposed to force others to follow our morals.

Unfortunately, fully understanding GP's comment requires one having a soul. This is also known as basic empathy in some circles.

>Those links are all political views.

Yes, Harvard and The Lancet are just wildly political.

>Beyond the veracity of those numbers ...

In addition to being incompetent slouches.

Unfortunately, we can multiply any given figure by 0.01 and still get something that amounts to mass murder.

>... it is a political decision whether or not the US should be spending $150B on foreigners or Americans.

A proper political decision wouldn't have involved an abrupt rug pull on a bipartisan program that's been operating for the better part of a century.

There's this thing called continuity that's usually taken very seriously. Especially when hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives are hanging in the balance.

This is the nuanced view. In todays polarized world, it is sadly completely unacceptable. At least there are two of us now! ;)

Purity tests are extremely common in left wing politics in the USA.

And the point of the purity test isn't to establish guilt. You're already declared guilty and the purity test is an attempt at finding or creating evidence of your guilt.

I wasn't aware that there is a left wing in USA politics. The view from an outsider is that you have extreme right-wing and a fascist right-wing.

And Hitler painted some nice watercolours.

But the history is written by victors.

Glib answer, but it's usually historians.

As a non-American, even the US Democratic party is waaaay to the right of my Overton Window. While the US is arguing about if the 2nd Amendment should be restricted in cases like "fully automatic weapons" or "people with felony convictions" etc., I'm from a nation where the police aren't routinely armed and don't want to be, not even with pistols.

This doesn't mean I can't admire NASA, that I have to dismiss the Hoover Dam, that I think every act by Obama or Bush was heinous.

Likewise, I can look at Falcon 9/Heavy, at the progress with Starship, and applaud.

But.

His "Paint is Black" video, and what he claimed about it, was a lie. He himself is pretty awful, and already fits amongst the others you list given the revealed preferences shown by Grok, and by his reactions to criticism of Grok's behaviour.

The bonus-target market-cap of 8 trillion only makes sense with a very optimistic view of the AI Tesla's developing for both FSD and Optimus, and by "very optimistic" I mean "FSD turns them into a monopoly supplier of cars worldwide; or both FSD and Optimus together displace a significant fraction of the US low-skill jobs market while also getting a monopoly on industrial robots and a monopoly on cars in just the USA". It's the kind of thing I expect we'll be putting into history lessons next to Enron and Dutch Tulips, with laws passed to prevent whatever investigators find out to be the key mechanism behind it.

Even with SpaceX, it's impressive, but not because it actually hits Musk's goals, rather because everyone else in space is "over optimistic" about their schedules even harder than Telsa is.

GP dislikes Must because s/he felt Musk duped them. What does that have to do with ad hominem? There's no objective argument to dislike; GP dislikes the way the objective arguments were put forth.

I'm in the market for a car right now, and on paper, a Tesla makes the most sense. I won't be buying one. I'm happy to leave a little utility on the table just to avoid being associated in any way with Musk or his companies. Some might find that "odd", but I really don't care. I don't want to look down at my steering wheel and see the Tesla logo and have to justify to myself why it's OK that I gave my hard-earned money to someone who is actively working to destroy things I hold dear.

I thought Musk was pretty cool when he was just the guy making EVs and reusable rockets happen. I didn't even mind his over-optimistic projections, it's hard to be mad at optimism. But then he started becoming more of a public figure. He called that rescue worker a 'pedo guy' just for turning down a bad idea. He started broadcasting his philosophies, and they were mostly gross. He bought Twitter and made it so everyone had to see his dumb tweets. He revealed himself as a big, moist wad of lies and insecurities.

I have a hypothesis that the Hedonic Treadmill[1] can cause actual harm to the human brain; I suspect that over time, in certain brains, extreme wealth erodes the reward centers such that some rich people can't help but be miserable, flailing for ever-elusive life satisfaction. It seems like a fairly serious bug in human software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill