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It's been pretty wild watching Elon set his reputation on fire over the past 6~10 years. He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a si

It's been pretty wild watching Elon set his reputation on fire over the past 6~10 years. He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him today. Too much money genuinely is an illness.

toolz 4y ago
The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? I'll take the people who risk it for progressing tech and innovation any day of the week.
- ABeeSea 4y ago
  Bezo’s isn’t progressing tech and innovation? Odd since there are very few areas of tech that Amazon/AWS aren’t on the cutting edge of.
  - toolz 4y ago
    The only tech advancement I can name off the top of my head from AWS is the dynamo paper in 2007, which to be fair has a substantial amount of influence. In terms of social impact I would say starlink alone will have more impact than any advancements amazon has made. There's no telling how many decades may have passed before people took terraforming mars seriously without someone like Musk - and that appears to have serious potential to save our species some day. I think that's hard to compare to AWS that effectively just enables better monetization of the internet through various bloated digital service industries. Granted I understand everything I'm comparing is extremely subjective, so I wouldn't say you're wrong by any means. My perspective is just very different than your own.
    - ABeeSea 4y ago
      Amazon has a starlink competitor in project kuiper. AWS has made massive investments into solar and wind energy. AWS owns a chip company (Annapurna) producing cutting edge networking, virtualization, and server chips. AWS has a leading industrial IoT / computing at edge platform. AWS played a huge role in the development of Alexa, especially in regard to network latency. Even 15+ years later, S3’s new sharding algo and use of formal methods and proof based testing are as cutting edge is it comes.
      - whatever1 4y ago
        Amazon is also the most advanced logistics company on the planet. Literally off the charts, to the point that benchmarks do not even include them due to the huge gap from the competition.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      I've really been enjoying the cashier-less grocery store experience.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  > The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? All billionaires suck, but Musk sucks the least so get on the fanboi bandwagon? Please. None of these tech billionaires deserve to be treated as anything but the robber barons they are. Musk? He's at best an unhinged narcissist. And that's being kind. The fact that he's bought into his own fan fiction and thinks of himself as a noble futurist doesn't matter much to his overworked employees, the people Musk has defamed on Twitter, or the shareholders he's defrauded through blatant market manipulation.
  - toolz 4y ago
    so if you painted a picture today that had sentimental value to you, so you would never sell it, but someone offered you 1 billion dollars for it (therefore making your net worth instantly 1 billion) would you suck just because you wouldn't sell your picture and give away the money? Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences.
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      > Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences. That's... not how the rich access their wealth. Musk himself has taken out massive margin loans collateralized by his Tesla stock. This allows him to live a very lavish lifestyle without actually having to liquidate his positions or pay any kind of income or capital gains taxes. In fact, this is how most extremely rich individuals operate: their wealth is locked up in equity and then they take out tax advantaged loans to fund their lifestyles. So yeah, if I had a painting worth a few billion dollars, and a bank offered me a 500M loan collateralized by that painting, yeah, sure, of course I'd take that deal. Though ironically, Musk has also recently sold billions of dollars worth of shares, first back in the fall, and again in advance of his purchase of Twitter. So I'm actually not sure how your hypothetical applies to Musk.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
I think he was doing well over the 6-10 year timeframe. It's the past 6-10 weeks that are out of character.
- coldpie 4y ago
  Yeah, depends on when you got on the "oh, Elon's actually a whacko" train, I guess. The Hyperloop fantasy was 2013, the "pedo guy" thing and whatever is going on with his bizarre child name was 2018, COVID reactionary junk in 2020. Just an increasingly public, downward trajectory over the last 10 years.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    Yeah I take it back.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
shkkmo 4y ago
> He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him today. Maybe in your echo bubble, but that is factually quite incorrect. Elon has made some questionable choices over the years and while I not a fan of many of them, I think he generally at least tries to use his capital for the betterment of the world. I think his "mission" is in fact the reason he uses to justify harsh behavior like described in this article.
tomp 4y ago
Sure, except him being probably the most productive human being ever, revolutionising 2 industries, and actually doing something useful with his wealth (looking at you, Bezos, Gates & Buffet)
- coldpie 4y ago
  Yes, that's why it's been so wild. Guy was pretty much solid gold ten years ago, he led a lot of genuinely great stuff. Then he took a long dive down the deep end and now his reputation is in tatters.
- rurp 4y ago
  You're seriously claiming that PCs and AWS haven't been used for anything productive? Ok then...
jimmaswell 4y ago
Apart from a few things like union busting and this remote policy, I've only liked him more and more over time. I was never a "musk fanboy" whom it's hip to whine about and degrade today (you agree with something mean space man said? bOoTlIcKeR sImP!111) but all that whining and degrading has only had the effect of pushing me to like him more. I love that he seems to stand by what he believes instead of letting society tell him what to think, and he's in a position to do so with "fuck you money." I can see a lot of what I would do in what he does so it's a kind of vicarious satisfaction when that makes Twitter droves mad. It's hip to hate cars, he still has cool visions using cars like hyerloop which I love; people whined about the aluminum ships, I love seeing some classic style brought back into things; ungrateful diver guy deserved to have his name dragged through the mud; etc.
guerrilla 4y ago
> . He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him What rock do you live under? He has a huge fanatic cult following and they won't ever shut up about sucking his dick.

toolz 4y ago

The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? I'll take the people who risk it for progressing tech and innovation any day of the week.

ABeeSea 4y ago
Bezo’s isn’t progressing tech and innovation? Odd since there are very few areas of tech that Amazon/AWS aren’t on the cutting edge of.
- toolz 4y ago
  The only tech advancement I can name off the top of my head from AWS is the dynamo paper in 2007, which to be fair has a substantial amount of influence. In terms of social impact I would say starlink alone will have more impact than any advancements amazon has made. There's no telling how many decades may have passed before people took terraforming mars seriously without someone like Musk - and that appears to have serious potential to save our species some day. I think that's hard to compare to AWS that effectively just enables better monetization of the internet through various bloated digital service industries. Granted I understand everything I'm comparing is extremely subjective, so I wouldn't say you're wrong by any means. My perspective is just very different than your own.
  - ABeeSea 4y ago
    Amazon has a starlink competitor in project kuiper. AWS has made massive investments into solar and wind energy. AWS owns a chip company (Annapurna) producing cutting edge networking, virtualization, and server chips. AWS has a leading industrial IoT / computing at edge platform. AWS played a huge role in the development of Alexa, especially in regard to network latency. Even 15+ years later, S3’s new sharding algo and use of formal methods and proof based testing are as cutting edge is it comes.
    - whatever1 4y ago
      Amazon is also the most advanced logistics company on the planet. Literally off the charts, to the point that benchmarks do not even include them due to the huge gap from the competition.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    I've really been enjoying the cashier-less grocery store experience.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? All billionaires suck, but Musk sucks the least so get on the fanboi bandwagon? Please. None of these tech billionaires deserve to be treated as anything but the robber barons they are. Musk? He's at best an unhinged narcissist. And that's being kind. The fact that he's bought into his own fan fiction and thinks of himself as a noble futurist doesn't matter much to his overworked employees, the people Musk has defamed on Twitter, or the shareholders he's defrauded through blatant market manipulation.
- toolz 4y ago
  so if you painted a picture today that had sentimental value to you, so you would never sell it, but someone offered you 1 billion dollars for it (therefore making your net worth instantly 1 billion) would you suck just because you wouldn't sell your picture and give away the money? Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    > Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences. That's... not how the rich access their wealth. Musk himself has taken out massive margin loans collateralized by his Tesla stock. This allows him to live a very lavish lifestyle without actually having to liquidate his positions or pay any kind of income or capital gains taxes. In fact, this is how most extremely rich individuals operate: their wealth is locked up in equity and then they take out tax advantaged loans to fund their lifestyles. So yeah, if I had a painting worth a few billion dollars, and a bank offered me a 500M loan collateralized by that painting, yeah, sure, of course I'd take that deal. Though ironically, Musk has also recently sold billions of dollars worth of shares, first back in the fall, and again in advance of his purchase of Twitter. So I'm actually not sure how your hypothetical applies to Musk.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

I think he was doing well over the 6-10 year timeframe. It's the past 6-10 weeks that are out of character.

coldpie 4y ago
Yeah, depends on when you got on the "oh, Elon's actually a whacko" train, I guess. The Hyperloop fantasy was 2013, the "pedo guy" thing and whatever is going on with his bizarre child name was 2018, COVID reactionary junk in 2020. Just an increasingly public, downward trajectory over the last 10 years.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Yeah I take it back.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

shkkmo 4y ago

> He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him today. Maybe in your echo bubble, but that is factually quite incorrect. Elon has made some questionable choices over the years and while I not a fan of many of them, I think he generally at least tries to use his capital for the betterment of the world. I think his "mission" is in fact the reason he uses to justify harsh behavior like described in this article.

tomp 4y ago

Sure, except him being probably the most productive human being ever, revolutionising 2 industries, and actually doing something useful with his wealth (looking at you, Bezos, Gates & Buffet)

coldpie 4y ago
Yes, that's why it's been so wild. Guy was pretty much solid gold ten years ago, he led a lot of genuinely great stuff. Then he took a long dive down the deep end and now his reputation is in tatters.
rurp 4y ago
You're seriously claiming that PCs and AWS haven't been used for anything productive? Ok then...

jimmaswell 4y ago

Apart from a few things like union busting and this remote policy, I've only liked him more and more over time. I was never a "musk fanboy" whom it's hip to whine about and degrade today (you agree with something mean space man said? bOoTlIcKeR sImP!111) but all that whining and degrading has only had the effect of pushing me to like him more. I love that he seems to stand by what he believes instead of letting society tell him what to think, and he's in a position to do so with "fuck you money." I can see a lot of what I would do in what he does so it's a kind of vicarious satisfaction when that makes Twitter droves mad. It's hip to hate cars, he still has cool visions using cars like hyerloop which I love; people whined about the aluminum ships, I love seeing some classic style brought back into things; ungrateful diver guy deserved to have his name dragged through the mud; etc.

guerrilla 4y ago

> . He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him What rock do you live under? He has a huge fanatic cult following and they won't ever shut up about sucking his dick.