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It makes me sad to see that his fan base turned into a cult for the most part. I used to admire him until the veil fell off, I still admire the technologies him

It makes me sad to see that his fan base turned into a cult for the most part. I used to admire him until the veil fell off, I still admire the technologies him and the smart people at Tesla and SpaceX have created, but my admiration doesn't extend to him anymore.

mrfusion 5y ago
Everyone has good and bad attributes. If you’re expecting anyone to be 100% good you’ll be disappointed. I’m still a fan because he seems about 90% right on his opinions and he’s doing amazing work.
- txru 5y ago
  Man but the bad 10% is so rough. The Thai diver situation wasn't some off the cuff rant, that was someone wealthy and influential in concerted effort to utterly destroy someone who had done some good in the world. Intellectual genius but moral void can still apparently be admirable?
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    I wouldn't call it a moral void. Heroes are better and worse than ordinary people, it's unfortunate that we've been raised on simplistic stories where if someone is worth being on a side with they can't have any significant flaws.
    - txru 5y ago
      I fully recognize that people exist in shades of gray. However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.
xiphias2 5y ago
Just like him I've got to a position where I can live very comfortably, but I would never ever give up my comfortable life and all my money for creating/buying startups that will most likely fail (of course I'm still investing). I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  Sorry I was not clear, it was not the fan base that turned me away from him. It was the way he treated his workers during the start of the pandemic, forcing them to work. Along with other workplace controversies. That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.
  - donatj 5y ago
    - sho_hn 5y ago
      I believe OP is referring to Musk re-opening production against Alameda County's standing work-stop rules at the time. This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    You’re right, but actually the workers know what they are getting into in return for their options packages, it’s clear on Glassdoor. When I was looking for jobs in 2016, my slogan for myself was invest in Tesla, work at Google, not the other way around. The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.
- Kaze404 5y ago
ethbr0 5y ago
Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish? If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that. Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.
- bambax 5y ago
  > Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish? He can be both smart and evil. It happens often (not all the time, but most of the time).
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Matt Levine was, clearly, being snarky. Especially considering that such activity would be illegal. As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    He's generally always snarky and not-snarky at the same time. Would it be illegal? The SEC is moving, but big ship, turn slowly, crypto-is-quasi-security, etc. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-17/elon-musk-controls-bitcoin-and-dogecoin-prices-with-pure-magic https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-17/elon-m... I work under the default assumption that most CEOs of successful companies, when taking actions on their company's behalf, are sociopathic assholes. It's certainly true that Tesla wouldn't have been able to raise as much money from equities markets if Elon had been quieter.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      It may take a long time for the ship to turn, but it has turned. John McAfee was indicted by the CFTC for doing this sort of pump & dump. I think anyone as high profile as a CEO would find themselves in the same boat. Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them. I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?
jpgvm 5y ago
I still admire him, I just don't idolize him. The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration. I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard. I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  I can agree with this take.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mbesto 5y ago
  > The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around I mean he's clearly doing something right. But the people at the top are most definitely not staying around. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executives-who-report-elon-musk-high-turnover-rate-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executives-who-report-...
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    Executives != smart people, some of them are but revolving door of executives speaks more to how hard it is to find good executives and just how cutthroat of an environment Tesla is performance wise. I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      > along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse Give someone a massive retention bonus (in this case structured as an RSU) to get them to stay doesn't seem like unique genius to me
banannaise 5y ago
This is what happens when you gradually drive away the reasonable people from any group - what's left is a combination of natural cultists and formerly reasonable-ish people who got railroaded into a cult without realizing it.
api 5y ago
If I wrote off every genius who is also unstable or acts like an ass I would have to delete a lot of my music collection. If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad? I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.
- fl0wenol 5y ago
  I don't think Elon was strategically necessary to get EVs over the adoption hump, in that the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. And retrspectively it's been a huge distraction from the change we really need, which is the improvement of public transportation in our largest cities. But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - api 5y ago
    > the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball. In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.) The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption. There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation. The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!). It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets. I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out. I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts. Edit: speaking of EVs: I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office. I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture. No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
you can admired a person. you don't have to idolize him like he is a second coming of Jesus
bratwurst3000 5y ago
Yes same here. At the end he is only a lying salesman and nothing more .
jeffbee 5y ago
A "fan base" for a man is the definition of a cult. Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
mardifoufs 5y ago

mrfusion 5y ago

Everyone has good and bad attributes. If you’re expecting anyone to be 100% good you’ll be disappointed. I’m still a fan because he seems about 90% right on his opinions and he’s doing amazing work.

txru 5y ago
Man but the bad 10% is so rough. The Thai diver situation wasn't some off the cuff rant, that was someone wealthy and influential in concerted effort to utterly destroy someone who had done some good in the world. Intellectual genius but moral void can still apparently be admirable?
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it a moral void. Heroes are better and worse than ordinary people, it's unfortunate that we've been raised on simplistic stories where if someone is worth being on a side with they can't have any significant flaws.
  - txru 5y ago
    I fully recognize that people exist in shades of gray. However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.

xiphias2 5y ago

Just like him I've got to a position where I can live very comfortably, but I would never ever give up my comfortable life and all my money for creating/buying startups that will most likely fail (of course I'm still investing). I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.

Bilal_io 5y ago
Sorry I was not clear, it was not the fan base that turned me away from him. It was the way he treated his workers during the start of the pandemic, forcing them to work. Along with other workplace controversies. That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.
- donatj 5y ago
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    I believe OP is referring to Musk re-opening production against Alameda County's standing work-stop rules at the time. This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  You’re right, but actually the workers know what they are getting into in return for their options packages, it’s clear on Glassdoor. When I was looking for jobs in 2016, my slogan for myself was invest in Tesla, work at Google, not the other way around. The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.
Kaze404 5y ago

ethbr0 5y ago

Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish? If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that. Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.

bambax 5y ago
> Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish? He can be both smart and evil. It happens often (not all the time, but most of the time).
ineedasername 5y ago
Matt Levine was, clearly, being snarky. Especially considering that such activity would be illegal. As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  He's generally always snarky and not-snarky at the same time. Would it be illegal? The SEC is moving, but big ship, turn slowly, crypto-is-quasi-security, etc. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-17/elon-musk-controls-bitcoin-and-dogecoin-prices-with-pure-magic https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-17/elon-m... I work under the default assumption that most CEOs of successful companies, when taking actions on their company's behalf, are sociopathic assholes. It's certainly true that Tesla wouldn't have been able to raise as much money from equities markets if Elon had been quieter.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    It may take a long time for the ship to turn, but it has turned. John McAfee was indicted by the CFTC for doing this sort of pump & dump. I think anyone as high profile as a CEO would find themselves in the same boat. Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them. I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?

jpgvm 5y ago

I still admire him, I just don't idolize him. The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration. I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard. I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.

Bilal_io 5y ago
I can agree with this take.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mbesto 5y ago
> The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around I mean he's clearly doing something right. But the people at the top are most definitely not staying around. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executives-who-report-elon-musk-high-turnover-rate-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executives-who-report-...
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Executives != smart people, some of them are but revolving door of executives speaks more to how hard it is to find good executives and just how cutthroat of an environment Tesla is performance wise. I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse Give someone a massive retention bonus (in this case structured as an RSU) to get them to stay doesn't seem like unique genius to me

banannaise 5y ago

This is what happens when you gradually drive away the reasonable people from any group - what's left is a combination of natural cultists and formerly reasonable-ish people who got railroaded into a cult without realizing it.

api 5y ago

If I wrote off every genius who is also unstable or acts like an ass I would have to delete a lot of my music collection. If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad? I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.

fl0wenol 5y ago
I don't think Elon was strategically necessary to get EVs over the adoption hump, in that the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. And retrspectively it's been a huge distraction from the change we really need, which is the improvement of public transportation in our largest cities. But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- api 5y ago
  > the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball. In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.) The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption. There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation. The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!). It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets. I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out. I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts. Edit: speaking of EVs: I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office. I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture. No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.

MangoCoffee 5y ago

you can admired a person. you don't have to idolize him like he is a second coming of Jesus

bratwurst3000 5y ago

Yes same here. At the end he is only a lying salesman and nothing more .

jeffbee 5y ago

A "fan base" for a man is the definition of a cult. Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.

mardifoufs 5y ago