He’s not, though. He’s had plenty of successful companies that have done some pretty amazing things, and he’s become a multi-hundred-billionaire starting from a relatively extremely small amount of seed funding.
I suspect that his successes in other fields may have led him to think he would be just as good at running a social media company, which isn’t going so well for him.
He bought a company that got bought by PayPal. He didn’t build anything he didn’t run anything. He bought an existing company that got bought out. At SpaceX and Tesla they have entire structures created to stop Elon from fucking up shit and to manage him. If you need your company organized to manage the owner and stop them from fucking shit up you don’t get to claim to be smart or to build amazing stuff. In every case it’s the engineers that build amazing things despite Elon’s involvement. Elon himself is an idiot.
If Elon’s an idiot who doesn’t do anything, then why are so many of his companies successful at the revolutionary things they try? How’s Blue Origin doing with its rockets, for example?
I think there’s a very clear theme of “I don’t like this person therefore I believe he has no positive qualities whatsoever” going on here.
Because he’s a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn’t wreck them?
He didn’t build any of it.
While he obviously has some intelligence, he’s still very much an idiot. One just has to look at his immature and mostly incoherent public relations and business decisions to see that. Further, as smart as he thinks he is, he’s not designing rockets. He pays much smarter people than him to do that for him.
People will often say that very rich people MUST be extremely intelligent, after all - they have more money than you!
I would counter that sociopathy and the ability to work with a complete lack of morals is what allows people to truly become wealthy. There’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
- Offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion
- Try to back out when Twitter says “ok lol”
- Get forced to complete the purchase
- Saddle Twitter with the debt you now have as a result of buying Twitter
- Invite all the previously-banned bigots and hatemongers back on the site
- Make your staff’s lives hell, including bullshit ‘performance’ stuff like checking how many lines-of-code they write, so most of them are either fired or leave on their own
- Raise API prices sky-high, get ridiculed
- Lock everything behind user log-in, logged-out users can’t see anything
- Rate-limit how many things logged-in users can do
- Break widgets
- Was once the public square of the internet, now weather services are moving to Mastodon
- “why are we still losing money >:(”
- Initiate a half-assed rebrand to “X” but the logo, 𝕏, is literally just a mathematical symbol. Who needs copyright on your billion dollar company’s brand identity, eh?
Whoa, be careful everyone, these are the slick moves of a master genius!
It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.
I literally said in the comment that you’re responding to that Musk isn’t good at running Twitter.
