Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.
You don’t become a billionaire by caring about people.
And I believe he was raised wealthy too. Extreme wealth fundamentally disconnects you from most people.
He was a pampered prince among priviliged white children. In white supremacist Pretoria south africa. So he’s doubly detached and dysfunctional.
One really contradicts the other.
A person can only generate so much money by not caring about other people. If they cared about other people, they would spend their money to improve something instead of hoarding it for themselves or distribute it evenly between themselves and those they exploit.
An empathetic person would know that they have no right to have that much money.
They would be able to see that they were lucky in an exploitive system and they would understand that their work is not worth more than the work of other people.
You can’t be rich and be a good person at the same time, because money is generated by exploiting labor and you can only generate more money by exploiting more work.
In the very end this money belongs to the people who carried Elon Musk through his life. He did not invent those rockets. He did not program those cars. He did not dig the lithium for the batteries under extremely dangerous conditions out of the ground while being paid peanuts. What he contributed to his wealth is the willingness to exploit other people.
So, a psychopath.
Could also just be quite a bit further along the autism spectrum.
Hard to say for sure, but he’s never struck me as sincerely psychopathic. Narcissistic sure, but not really psychopathic.
I mean he profits from the suffering of others. I don’t see how that’s not psychopathic
Because that’s not the definition of psychopath.
Most of us profit from the suffering of others. Does that make us all psychopaths?
In any case, I would probably classify him as evil, regardless of whether he’s a psychopath.
The dude fired a bunch of people, never paid their severance and refuses to communicate with them. The dude is a fucking complete sociopath. He lies to investors about deadlines, he lies about the potential of his technology to consumers, and he lies to his own staff.
You can stop simping for him, he doesn’t want to ride your dick, mate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem
Autistic people feel empathy. Source - am autistic, feel (pretty strong and sometimes unpleasant) empathy.
Flawed genius. The flaw being he isn’t a genius but is rather a fucking idiot with a silver spoon.
Yeah he’s the modern day version of Edison
They Both stole inventions the employees invented and claimed to have invented stuff that had already been invented
americans say it with me “Edison did not invent the light bulb”
Ever see the actual founders of Tesla talk? They laid out the whole Tesla plan. Elon takes those talking points and everyone thinks he made it.
As much as I hate him he is kind of a marketing genius. Tesla is such a big company, not because they are superior cars, but because Elon marketed himself as a visionary of the future, got a large fan base of techbros then marketed Tesla stock to those tech bros and finance bros as a great investment because his super genius future cars are going to change the entire world.
And the investors don’t care its all hyperbole, false promises and market buzzwords, as long as the line goes up they continue to invest, thus making Musk richer.
Marketing geniuses are people who take real assets of a brand and find just the right angle to connect with the masses. They create sustainable growth and generate almost endless demand for their products and services.
Elon Musk is a grifter and a charlatan who fed mediocre journalists with empty promises to regurgitate to investors. Even Elizabeth Holmes was able to pull that off.
When journalists saw through him, he switched to lying to cryptobros on social media. Then that well dried up as well, and now he’s pandering to insane alt-righters.
Every audience is less wealthy and less relevant than the previous one.
Just like all charlatans, he’s getting cornered by his own lies and unrealistic expectations. And he’s running out of options.
tl;dr Con men are not marketing geniuses, they are con men.
All marketing is just a grift, whose point is to make more money off a product. And Elon becoming one of the richest people on earth defacto proves that his lying, empty promises crypto pump and dump and buzzword meme/shitpost marketing worked. And Musk drones are still clamouring for his poorly made death machines he called cars, and space x flights are booked out years in advance (due mostly due Shotwell and the engineers incredible success way more than anything Musk has done, but still) so by any measure of capitalist success he’s doing well, he’s just not ethical in any way.
We need a “No Shit Sherlock” tag
I knew this when he laughed at a deer that drowned in a backyard pool when he was in a pewdiepie youtube video.
