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Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame. I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes,

• award_ 4y ago
  I feel this comment. I wasn't always a 'fan' per-se of Elon, but I was definitely able to appreciate what his associated companies had put forth. Anymore, I can't stomach the continuous news stream of awful behavior, treatment of others displayed, etc. I cannot support a person like him or what he stands for/represents at this time (or in the foreseeable future).
  • FormerBandmate 4y ago
    Twitter was always his weakness and now he's ODing on it. Like a crack addict in charge of a cartel superlab
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      It's bound to end just like Scarface, he'll go to war tooting and tweeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuygJnnyiYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuygJnnyiYI
      • galaxyLogic 4y ago
        They say money affects people like drugs. They get high on it. But this kind of erratic behavior makes me wonder, maybe he's on drugs.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      This seems like the right place for me to speculate idly: I've often wondered about sufficient margins for social engagement on these sorts of things. For example: how would you or I behave if, no matter what we did, over 50,000 people immediately reaffirmed us online? Would it take 50,000, or would 10,000 be enough? 5,000, 1,000? This isn't mean to exculpate Musk: he's encouraged this behavior for years, and his own behavior long predates mega-engagement by his fans on social media. And still I can't help but wonder how many of us would be able to similarly contort ourselves, if so much affirmation was on the line.
      • me_again 4y ago
        "To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and remain absolutely sober". -Logan Pearsall Smith
      • saalweachter 4y ago
        Honestly having 5-10 people reaffirming everything you say or do can be catastrophic, if it's the wrong 5 or 10.
      • pardon_me 4y ago
        Charges raised for fraud mid 2024 Arrested before 2026
      • arlcode 4y ago
        I feel like the fact that he is evidently posting without a filter and probably reading the endless streams of meaningless confirmation is extra damaging. We all sometimes ridicule the stilted corporate speech of some rich people and their reluctance to appear in public, but increasingly I feel like some of them do it to not fall into the social media trap. Having a public team write your statements and asking them to provide a weekly/monthly report on the good and the bad seems like a working strategy. Those people are doing their job and you can even employ different teams to get a more nuanced view while you yourself can be more distanced and collected. Of course Elon Musk specifically is s social media addict who seems to enjoy being praised by sycophants no matter what he does. He chooses this.
  • josephjrobison 4y ago
    He’s kinda like Edison and Feynman.
    • dexterdog 4y ago
      Minus the brilliance
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      Don't insult Edison and Feynman.
      • kadoban 4y ago
        Edison was more than a bit of an asshole anyway, the comparison isn't too bad.
    • ninjin 4y ago
      In what way? Feynman was chronically allergic to bullshit, not chronically addicted to it.
  • libraryatnight 4y ago
    Yes, I wasn't a "fan" but in general I found Tesla and SpaceX to be really cool companies doing things I didn't think I'd see in my life time. When he was a goofball or a little unprofessional it didn't bug me too much, sometimes it was even a little funny, but it got more and more troll-ish and pandering to a mean spirited crowd. Now he's just obnoxious and I wish he'd go away.
  • ilyt 4y ago
    I'm perplexed why people "supported" this twat from the start
• walrus01 4y ago
  Maybe three or four years ago I thought that musk was basically something like the second incarnation of Howard Hughes. Some sort of eccentric high tech aerospace industry misunderstand genius. Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money. Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle unless you are a hardcore musk stan.
  • Zigurd 4y ago
    Hell of an analogy esp if Starship turns out to be a Space Spruce Goose.
    • walrus01 4y ago
      Hughes as a company did a lot of cool stuff way after the ww2 era, in fact Boeing's satellite business for large and serious commercial and military geostationary satellites is what used to be Hughes in El Segundo CA, acquired about 20 years ago.
      • inferiorhuman 4y ago
        Hughes (now Boeing via McDonnell Douglas) helicopters are quite something. The 500 is generally regarded as quite the hot rod (especially compared to the 206/407). You can even get one in single rotor configuration (NOTAR). Hughes left quite a legacy beyond the Spruce Goose and hopefully El Muskrat will too. It'd be a damn shame if he succeeds in completely destroying Tesla and Space-X. Oakland PD has a couple of 500s which is neat, but what always brings a chuckle is the tale of how New Zealand farmers went all in on the 500 because nothing else could touch the performance for… hunting deer.
      • blululu 4y ago
        The trouble is that all the cool stuff was also the stuff that Hughes Jr never really cared for. Lasers, Radar, electronics escaped his interest. Hughes wanted you to build world class airframes and sadly this is the one thing Hughes Aircraft never really did well.
• retrac 4y ago
  Same. I knew he was arrogant etc., but some degree of that almost comes with the territory. And he is prone to intense idiosyncratic interpretations that lead to unusual behaviour. But I also got suckered into thinking the man had some sort of primarily altruistic drive. Maybe he once did. Celebrity tends to ruin even good men.
  • tartoran 4y ago
    Altruistic? Elon Musk?
• DiNovi 4y ago
  he was always like this, he just had pr people. read the article his ex wife wrote in like 2012 about how weird he was
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • wpietri 4y ago
    I read it years ago and it's such a jaw-dropper that it has always stuck with me: https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/ https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start... Think about a wedding. Think about a bride and groom happily dancing, looking forward to their life together. And what does Elon say at this moment? "As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship.'"
    • textbookrental 4y ago
      That's awesome.
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      Alpha, huh? Well he's certainly not mature and stable enough for a Beta release!
  • zeven7 4y ago
    What happened to the PR team?
    • yashg 4y ago
      He probably fired them as well. Sometimes people start believing in their own BS.
    • DiNovi 4y ago
      they don’t have access to his phone, but the twitter app does
    • 4y ago
• jjulius 4y ago
  This wasn't a slide, this is who he has always been.
• coliveira 4y ago
  Well, it is one thing when we hear about someone who is a douchebag but we have no proof. Another entirely different thing is to witness this kind of behavior up close. This is what EM is providing everyone since the last few months.
• javajosh 4y ago
  >Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did. Same. It's one thing to use a slur like that in some personal dispute; but this was against a hero who had saved children, and on a public forum. I've lied to myself that this was a minor dispute. And it would be that if he'd apologized. But the lack of apology is a very serious red flag of character. Impulsive unkind and unfair behavior is something we all are guilty of some time. But to not acknowledge it and make amends? That's wrong. Because the easy thing was the apology, sincere or not. Musk must have pushed back against his people to not apologize. Musk wanted to hurt that man, and he still wants to hurt him, would hurt him again if given the chance, worse if it was legal. And for what? Publicly criticizing Musk's (frankly hair-brained) idea to save those kids. (Honestly, I don't remember the details.) He reacted very badly to a fair criticism, with personal malice and rage, and he believes these reactions to be appropriate and, if anything, displaying admirable restraint. I can't help but see echos of that lack of empathy, that meanness, as he takes his various actions now with Twitter - firing large swaths of staff, sending demanding emails to the remaining staff on very short term. We are all capitalists and so give a proven leader like Musk enormous leeway in this position. But his behavior has been absolutely rotten. Even layoffs can be delivered with more grace! His words and actions, apart from layoffs, feel like angry, vengeful behavior rather than "effective leader" behavior - all echoes of the "pedo guy" incident.
  • hndamien 4y ago
    To give this more context, Vern Unsworth was mocking Elon Musks attempts to help on request of the lead diver, after providing many batteries and engineers time to work on a solution. Vern himself was not an actual diver in the rescue.
    • dekhn 4y ago
      He wasn't a rescue diver, he was the local expert, having mapped the cave and knowing more about its structure than anybody else in the world. he was truly qualified to say that Elon's attempt wasn't going to work and was hogging to much attention.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• DanielVZ 4y ago
  Tinfoil hat on: the dude is a foreign asset and now has to pay dividends. Tinfoil hat off: all the admiration and money he received turned him into whatever it is that we are seeing today.
  • dmonitor 4y ago
    if elon were a foreign asset, he’d be playing WAY safer with all this shit. he’s probably just doing this because he wants to.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Admiration and money don't really change people. It more exposes them.
    • franciscop 4y ago
      Why not? I can definitely see it changing people, e.g. a simple example making them more paranoid.
      • DonHopkins 4y ago
        Which makes me even more impressed that Weird Al and Steve Martin are still nice guys. ...Too bad about Dave Chappelle, though. He's on his way to pulling a Gallagher.
      • JackeJR 4y ago
        I think this is maybe in reference to LBJ's lifelong biographer Robert Caro where he states that "power does not corrupt, power reveals". In it he asserts that what one does with power after obtaining it reveals what the person is. It was there all along, power simply makes it show up prominently.
        • franciscop 4y ago
          Yes I understand but I am challenging that with my question (besides "power" in the abstract is very different vs "being constantly recognized/followed"). Certainly being followed, attacked and assaulted in public constantly for being famous can bring trauma, and trauma can change a person, usually for the worse.
• maegul 4y ago
  I've seen enough behind closed doors to believe wealthy+successful+powerful people are given every opportunity to go down dark paths of personal "development" and that statistically some are likely to turn out "bad" while protected by many layers of power and appearance and prestige. I recall having conversations with some people, who seemed to follow the "scene" more than I, telling me that his image was relatively well curated and managed by PR people in and around his companies, and that his "quirkiness" was allowed out in managed quantities so as to maximise interest and attractiveness without being off-putting. I never looked into it because I didn't care much. The rockets stuff is cool but also profitable so good for him and capitalism. But I found it highly believable and never really understood the cultism around him. I wouldn't have predicted this twitter or doucheness, but I certainly don't find it surprising.
• xwolfi 4y ago
  Why twitter though, it's quite small and not very influent except maybe in some countries like the US, could have bought Weibo and reached a huge market for potential clients and way more ways to make money. America is probably saturated, it's not even like it wants to buy Musk products, and Musk feels so much more like a Chinese boss than the head of an american social platform having to navigate impossible compromises :D The strategy to act like a republican douche courting Trump to try to maybe make them like barely finished EVs might pay off, but it's such a risky bet. I d pay good money to witness one day american conservatives "owning the libs" through buying his electric cars. Twitter itself will never yield him 44bn, so there s no economic rationality for the buyout: it can only be now a derivative gain.
  • polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > could have bought Weibo and reached a huge market for potential clients and way more ways to make money. I really don't think Elon would do well in quietly taking orders from CCP.
• scaramanga 4y ago
  The EV industry is a distraction to prevent us from doing what is needed to save the environment: ie. minimise the use of cars. It (much like the hyperloop scam it necessitated) is simply an attack on car-free living and public transport.
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    No, that's dumb. These are largely orthogonal problems. Not having EV's wouldn't have made everyone suddenly switch to public transit and bikes, as cool as that might be. They'd just keep driving gas and diesel vehicles. And realistically, you can't get rid of cars and trucks entirely. Even super dense areas with strong public transit still use plenty of cars and trucks, because they're useful. You think Singapore and Tokyo and Seoul could run on no cars or trucks whatsoever?
    • scaramanga 4y ago
      Car-free living doesn't imply the total eradication of all cars. It just means reducing dependency on them to a bare minimum: ie. those uses which cannot possibly be replaced. The former is something that literally nobody has ever proposed. The latter is something which is a serious policy option. Also you are making a logical fallacy by assuming I am saying that -EV's- (sorry: "EV industry", different thing) are singularly responsible for the lack of decent climate policies. I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many. FYI: I live in Seoul and there's certainly a lot that could be done to reduce the insane amount of cars from current nightmare levels. Korea has a very powerful auto industry, one thing they could do is stop subsidizing it. Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!"
      • TulliusCicero 4y ago
        > Car-free living doesn't imply the total eradication of all cars. Yeah no shit. That's why EV's are super useful, even if you wish we had a lot less cars, like me. > I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many. Doesn't matter. EV's still help the climate relative to keeping gas and diesel vehicles around. Blaming them is stupid. > Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!" Nah. The problems preventing greater uptake of public transit are largely unrelated.
• bongoman37 4y ago
• Lerc 4y ago
  I feel like this was something that he was turned into. Things like the pedo guy comments and the Covid skepticism and a bunch more are genuine criticisms, but for every story of substance there has been a deluge of pure character assassination. Between the years of long work hours and a stream of hot or cold praise or condemnation I think it's quite easy to lose your moral compass. I think a lot of my friends think I'm a die hard Musk fan when I say a criticism is unfair. I actually just think he's a human being under a microscope coping poorly. I'll support the criticism when I think it's warranted. The is a culture of everything is bad because bad man is bad, that unsettles me. As for this particular story on HN, I really don't know. Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
  • s17n 4y ago
    Well he already commented on the bans, so he's aware of them. I think it's pretty safe to say it was his decision.
  • http-teapot 4y ago
    Calling someone a pedophile without proof is genuine criticism?
    • zerocrates 4y ago
      I believe the person you replied to was saying that was an example of a legitimate issue with Elon's behavior, as compared to the "pure character assassination."
  • jjulius 4y ago
    >Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups. This is an issue that allegedly involves Musk's family. He's tweeted about it directly multiple times stretching back to his initial offer of cash for @elonjet to go away, and has directly discussed this policy change in his own tweets over the past 24 hours, including tweeting about this round of bans. Are you actually saying "it's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved" in this specific issue, or...?
• exodust 4y ago
  > "...he'll apologise. He never did." He apologised more than once. Including on Twitter and again in court where he looked the guy directly in the face and apologised. I mean, it was widely reported but somehow you missed the headlines at the time such as Washington Post's "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment: ‘The fault is mine and mine alone’"!
  • beachy 4y ago
    You're right, I did miss it. But it looks he followed up with this (after the apology) so the point stands: He blasted: "He's an old, single white guy from England who's been travelling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time. "There's only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach. It isn't where you go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else. "Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex-trafficking."
    • exodust 4y ago
      But you wrote the statement "he never did", as if you'd done your homework and had concrete facts. And others have replied to your comment saying "yeh he never apologised" etc. Note the virality of wrong information when you're on an attack path. Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview. Musk's sub wasn't used for the cave rescue, but was kept by the Thai Navy who said they could use it for future rescues. The navy were trained in how to use it. The diver guy was wrong to attack Musk. So the sub couldn't be used in the cave, so what? It was help, undeserving of scorn. I'm not excusing Musk's reactionary comments, but I'm glad the diver lost the court case. The diver wanted 160 million dollars and was awarded zero by the jury. And speaking of apologies, the diver never apologised or backed away from accusing Musk of a stunt and telling him to stick his sub up his rear end. A sub that a team of people worked on, not just Musk.
      • beachy 4y ago
• scubbo 4y ago
  I agree. This slide into barefaced shittiness hurts all the more because, at first, he felt like the hero we needed. EDIT: "barefaced" intentional because there's significant evidence to claim that these character traits were always present (see - the famous essay by his ex-wife), just less noticed.
• Taniwha 4y ago
  Yeah I think he's lost it - all that money seems to really have gone to his head. Really he should be doing one thing well (pick cars or rockets) and enjoying life - spending hours a day personally banning people he doesn't like on twitter can't be good for his mental health - frankly the emperor has no clothes