Memes

Hahahaha...he didn't start Tesla or spaceX

He did sue the founders of Tesla, the settlement demanded they refer to themselves as "co-founders" and not publicly refute him calling himself the founder.

There's speculation that the spaceX founders signed a similar NDA, but the company existed before him, and their goal was always scaling up spaceflight

Musk is good at two things, fundraising from Uncle Sam, and hype. And he did those well, and if he stuck to that I'd still be singing his praises... Except he hasn't.

He's not a smart man technically - a decade ago I first read a post-mortem about how he was booted from the company that bought PayPal (and put him on the map when they sold it, as he still had shares). They kicked him out for utterly failing to build a payment platform as he promised, then pushing they switch everything from Linux to Windows, refusing to understand that was impractically difficult (and just a bad idea, even Microsoft runs Linux on their servers now). He kept pushing this and being distributive, and so they threw him out

Every time he's tried to start something, it failed - he can't build a team to save his life.

He's good at hype and having money, I used to say "he's a billionaire who read a lot of sci-fi growing up... That's not the worst thing to be".

Now? He's convincing people his abusive management strategies brought this success, but those teams were long formed by people who deeply care about the future of humanity. They're driven, intelligent, and passionate people - did they succeed because of him, or in spite of him?

I can't say for sure, but I can say for sure that they could've done this with someone else at the helm, but he couldn't have done it from scratch