this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Honestly, after this, and hearing some of his recent interviews: I am genuinely convinced that not only is Elon Musk not a genius, but he possess subpar intelligence. You can’t convince me otherwise, I am 100% convinced that the dude is just a clinical moron.
There has been a meme comparing Elon Musk to Wheatley from Portal 2 being put in charge of the whole Aperture Science center and it immediately going to shit, because this robot was literally purposely designed to be a moron… It keeps on getting truer.
To me, he is like Trump, people thinking the dude is a genius, and he’s constantly playing 4D chess, but over time, everything ends up proving that the simplest theory is the correct one, the dude is just a fucking idiot. A man so profoundly stupid at their core that people had to convince themselves, he actually was a secret genius for their nonsense to make sense, like believing that Jar Jar Binks was secretly a mastermind Sith Lord.
If there ever was a perfect demonstration of wealth not equating intelligence, or even merit, the absolute inexistence of meritocracy, this might be it.
It's even worse than that.
Musk is practically stuck in a 13yo's mindset. The golden spoon has been sticking out of his arse since birth, but of course momma and poppa will make little Elmo believe he's a genius because he has... gasp... ideas.
So they push a shitton of money into his education and ideas, and of course he gets stuck in the typical preteen daydreaming phase of being a genius billionaire who can never be wrong. The money allows him to surround himself with people who actually KNOW how to deal with stuff - including making sure he can't screw things up. And that's how the whole Musk Management department of SpaceX was practically born.
But now Twitter is a different story, all his safety nets are gone, and it's all on him. Of course he fumbles it big time.
Simply said, yes, he's an absolute moron. With more money than common sense or logic or talent or knowledge or... Okay this list could go on for a while, I think it's best to stop here.
The biggest irony is that with Emerald Boy 100% preoccupied with Twitter, his other companies are flourishing.
I really liked the Some More News episode on this! It explains pretty well how regardless of a rich person's intelligence they probably get corrupted by mental distortions due to being rich. That is, Elon haa probably been powertripping for too long and lost all basis on how to take good decisions because he lives in his own rich fantasy world thinking he accomplished everything because of his own superior genius...
I worked for a guy, many years ago, small scale version of Musk. Guys like that hate to be contradicted. He had gone into partnership with my old company - which was a digital election company (back in the 90s and early 00s). We prided ourselves on our security and anonymity measures. Under this new company, this guy because CEO, and the first thing he did was tell everyone we could make “millions” by selling user data. I pointed out that violated out privacy and anonymity standards, and not even the next day I was reprimanded for speaking out.
You don’t need to be a billionaire to be stupid. Affluent is enough of a threshold. These are all grifters, granted many being successful. The grifters in this company were big fish/little pond. But they ruined a lovely little company that could have been stable and steady, recession-proof income for decades. Instead, they grifted the angel investors, ran the company into the ground and ended up spawning dozens of competitors in the field whereas before there were only 2 or 3.
These guys go from start-up grift to start-up grift, maintaining their affluence on the investor’s dime. I would say they, and the vulture capitalists they dance with deserve each other, but unfortunately, regular folks are always the collateral damage.
Musk was likely always an idiot, but was propped up by money, and earlier on either knew his place (as the “faceman”) or was adroitly distracted from direct involvement with the actual running of the company he bought.
Love Cody's Showdy.
Didn't get essentially buy established companies and then pretend he invented them.
Tesla and spacex for sure. PayPal was created by merging with another company that did a lot of the work.
He does indeed have a history of paying his way into looking like a visionary and/or an engineer. He bought into Tesla in early 2004, it was founded in mid 2003.
His comfort zone was convincing people to give him money for one really ambitious thing, and then using that money to achieve some other thing (that no one would have given him money for) that is sort of on the way, but which has commercial value to him.
For example, he has repeatedly said his companies will deliver full self-driving cars by dates that have passed - and convinced investors to get him in a position to compete with companies like Toyota, promised a 'hyperloop' and got funding to compete with other horizontal drilling companies, promised to send people to mars and got to compete with other satellite technology companies.
So making big promises paid off for him. For the investors, in terms of long term value, they might have been better off investing in existing companies he ended up competing with.
But I suspect he is now outside his comfort zone, and might not even realise how far out of his depth he is.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions/ the Hyperloop only exists to thunderfuck public transportation projects. Stop giving him benefit of the doubt.
I give him something: the hyperloop proposal was sophisticated enough that several independent teams across the world worked on refinement and even started prototypes.
If he actually did it as a ruse, he must have been smarter than all those people ... which would be a bit concerning.
Get real, mountains of money and one of the best PR teams (if you reply saying he didn't have a PR team I have a bridge to sell ya) in the world is what made that happen, not an idea the majority of people involved in the sector agreeing with it. In fact if you look back you'll find most actual public transportation experts advocated AGAINST the hyperloop as a concept.
Adam Something has a lot of videos explaining how stupid his ideas are, including the whole plan to "go to Mars". They are all grifts.
I think he used to be at least business smart earlier in his life. I keep parroting it, but he might have covid fog, or destroyed his brain with drugs or something..
The most convincing argument that elon does a lot of cocaine is just listening to him speak in a less formal interview.
BUT! I don't think he used to be actually smart, just lucky. Too many people assume "succesful" people had to have done something exceptional to earn it, but 99% of extremely wealthy people acquired that extreme wealth through a simple combination of luck and startup capital (which of course they have because they are lucky).
Over half of his enterprises have folded. Including companies that he bought up.
He's an idea guy and that's it. And even that is more credit than what's due - he's got superficial ideas at best.
The one thing that sets him apart from the average Joe with a failed business is that he's got the capital to try over and over again.
Exactly! He was great at getting press and selling big ideas. He never made his ideas happen, other people did that.
Now with Twitter he's trying to sell an idea no one cares about. No one was clamouring for the next social media platform.
And no one is looking for an 'everything app' either.
He purchased his companies from other people who had already developed the ideas. The only patent with Musks name on it for Tesla is the charging port that is proprietary so other electric vehicles couldn't use tesla charging stations.
There are so many ways to dunk on him lately that I don't think there's a need to misrepresent this stuff. I think we can give him some flowers for being neck deep in the Tesla Roadster and SpaceX Falcon 1 design and release processes almost 20 years ago. But, then he did a Pokemon evolution from that baseline crazy to whatever we're seeing now.
I’m also just not a fan of distorting facts to make someone look bad. If you call someone bad it should only because of things they’ve factually done (and Musk is bad) and not because of some fantasies someone else dreamed up to dunk on them. Also, most people aren’t going to fact-check this somewhere, so it’s easy to spread a falsehood as truth.
The charging port is now an open standard, and pretty much every EV in North America will be using it in a few years.
I've never thought Musk was a genius playing 4D chess, I just think he's a clown dancing around and bonking himself in the fact to distract us from the damage that's being done.