6 ms·

I used to really like and admire Musk. You could say I was a fanboy. I am still asking myself what the fuck happened? Was he faking his true character all this

by iammjm 9mo ago

I used to really like and admire Musk. You could say I was a fanboy. I am still asking myself what the fuck happened? Was he faking his true character all this time and managed to dupe me? Did he suffer some brain damage which changed him this drastically? Was it too much social media, was it covid-related, was he poisoned? Did too much money and power get to him? I would seriously like to know. By know, knowing about his chronic tendency to lie about the most basic stuff (such as being really good in a fucking computer game), I assume he duped me, and this makes me really, really dislike him a lot. And I can't be the only one. I hope he fails in all his endeavors.

WA 9mo ago
You were duped. Tesla‘s paint it black video is from 2016 and one the first obvious lies. People called Musk out on his BS 10 years ago, but he successfully managed to keep a "genius" imagine in the media up until COVID-19 hit. Media sentiment changed around 2020/2021 to adjust to reality of Musk being a massive fraudster.
- rhubarbtree 9mo ago
  Important point here: the discussion is about his character, but you’ve made it about his intellect. I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. I’ve heard silly things like - he doesn’t do anything, it’s all his employees or board or assistant - but reading the history that’s obviously false. It does seem some people can’t cope with the idea that someone is often an asshat is also brilliant. And I’m afraid it’s true with Musk.
  - magicalhippo 9mo ago
    > I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. It's also worth keeping in mind that super smart people can say and do lots of really dumb things. Smart != wise.
  - dwb 9mo ago
    I don’t think Musk is super smart. I think he has some skills that account for how he got to his position other than privilege and luck, I think he probably works hard (or at least, harder than me), but I can’t get to “super smart”.
  - ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
    > I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart I doubt it. He was born into money and was lucky enough to make some excellent purchasing decisions. His various talks and arguments on the internet show him to be fairly stupid in my opinion. I've heard tell that his successful businesses are mainly successful when the staff learn how to manage Musk and prevent his dumbest ideas.
    - ethbr1 9mo ago
      What objective evidence do we have that Musk is smart? Basically: he's extremely rich Working hard and being very good at negotiating compensation packages and picking the right companies/products to be involved with (and a bit of luck) are all sufficient for exorbitant wealth though. E.g. there are plenty of people just as smart as Bezos who didn't hitch their wagon to the "sell something easy on the web" idea at the right time
      - cmurf 9mo ago
        What is a secular term for prosperity gospel?
        jijijijij 9mo ago
        Social darwinism.
        ethbr1 9mo ago
        Plutocracy?
  - zug_zug 9mo ago
    On the one hand he does some things that seem very smart, on the other he does many that are very stupid (cave divers ordeal). So it’s a bit more nuanced than that.
schiffern 9mo ago
> I am still asking myself what the fuck happened? I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well: "Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security." I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475 [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-tesla-deserved-more-credit-2025-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-t...
- cowpig 9mo ago
  Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly? Also, didn't Musk publicly quit Trump's advisory councils over exiting the Paris Agreement back in 2017? Why does that rift not qualify for your "separating politics" hypothesis?
  - watwut 9mo ago
    > Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly? Not OP ... but it would be consistent with observations. It is a party that admires lying and rewards it.
  - nullocator 9mo ago
    I think as the left has become more homogeneously college educated they are less likely to wholesale accept blatant lies and falsehoods. For someone like Musk this will naturally push them to the right because he incessantly lies/bullshits so often and has a visceral negative reaction when being called on it (the cave fiasco comes to mind). If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.
andyjohnson0 9mo ago
He always was an arrogant, over-privileged arsehole. But having an army of "fanboys" will have amplified his character flaws. Ditto his involvement with Trump et al.
input_sh 9mo ago
You were younger and more gullible, he still had a PR firm and didn't tweet his every "thought".
csomar 9mo ago
No. He is the same person. It just happens in a certain time, what he was selling aligned with what you were buying.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 9mo ago
[flagged]
- notahacker 9mo ago
  somebody should look into who owns the @elonmusk account that originates these stories...
- Valid3840 9mo ago
  The "you're a sheep" rhetoric. Great! Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/)
  - b65e8bee43c2ed0 9mo ago
    >The "you're a sheep" rhetoric. Great! you mean the same rhetoric I observe whenever the wrong entity wins an election anywhere in the West? have we not accepted for a fact that most people are so uncritical of the media they consume that a thousand Russian Internet Defense Force operatives can topple a Western democracy over Xitter and TikTok? >Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/) I never said he was a good man before then, or that he is a good man now.
    - testdelacc1 9mo ago
      I wish I could be as intelligent and free thinking as you. Sadly I’m a sheep, but it’s so inspiring to see someone like you, to show us sheep what’s possible if you truly free your mind.
- svara 9mo ago
  This really makes no sense because you can just listen to the man himself (and there's a lot of material).
lisp2240 9mo ago
When Elon was a teenager he bullied another kid about his father’s suicide until the other kid pushed him down a flight of stairs. He has always been like this. His character was never a secret. Everything was in plain view but you didn’t want to see it.
- dzhiurgis 9mo ago
  And he's like that because his father beat the crap out of him.
shantara 9mo ago
Thai Cave rescue happened in 2018. It should have already made obvious how completely deranged Musk was to everyone, even if they were not paying close attention before and were dazzled by self-driving cars and Mars colonization promises.
- tjpnz 9mo ago
  I think that marked a turning point for many. He had been known to say dumb things in the past but that was monumentally stupid own goal. Worse, he was given multiple chances to take a step back but just kept digging.
  - orwin 9mo ago
    Yeah, it was mine. That's the moment I thought 'wow that guy is deranged now, he should step back and take some vacations'. Now I realize he was like this from the start, but that was the moment I questioned my hero worship.
- ben_w 9mo ago
  That was certainly the first time he did something so obviously blatantly evil, and obviously his own fault, that I wasn't able to ignore it or dismiss it. It was sufficiently awful, at first I couldn't even believe he'd done it. When I internalised that he was the kind of person to do that, it made it much easier to see his other flaws.
  - dzhiurgis 9mo ago
    [flagged]
cynicalsecurity 9mo ago
> Was he faking his true character all this time and managed to dupe me? Yes. People's true nature reveals once they stop caring about money. To be fair, he was really good at faking.
refurb 9mo ago
I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics. I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive. Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races. Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia. I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank. You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome.
- tick_tock_tick 9mo ago
  Purity tests are extremely common in left wing politics in the USA.
  - imtringued 9mo ago
    And the point of the purity test isn't to establish guilt. You're already declared guilty and the purity test is an attempt at finding or creating evidence of your guilt.
  - ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
    I wasn't aware that there is a left wing in USA politics. The view from an outsider is that you have extreme right-wing and a fascist right-wing.
- rl3 9mo ago
  >I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics. "politics": https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund... https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
  - refurb 9mo ago
kilroy123 9mo ago
He had a PR team working overtime to boost his image. Remember he had a cameo in movie Iron Man 3 back in the day. He meticulously worked on his image for decades.
- tim333 9mo ago
  >screenwriter Mark Fergus told New York magazine that Musk partly inspired the modern portrayal of [Iron Man] >According to Fergus, the character was inspired by an amalgam of real people — but none so much as Elon Musk.
- ben_w 9mo ago
  The Iron Man thing… MCU Tony Stark wasn't as smart as he thought he was. He should've allowed surgeons to help with his heart immediately, rather than the entire B-plot of Iron Man 2; Iron Man 3's plot could've been averted in a whole bunch of ways if he'd been less arrogant and thoughtless, and also shows him as a loner unwilling to call for assistance despite (by this point) being allied with what passes for gods in the MCU; Ultron was his own hubris punching him in the face; the justification he gives for the Sokovia Accords was a stupid response to an act of self-defence that, sure, could've and should've been handled better, but it isn't like Stark himself was great at avoiding collateral damage during emergencies in the other films; his rage-fight against Barnes in Civil War, while understandable, was wildly unprofessional and a sign he was not a suitable person to be in possession of a one-man weapon system like the Iron Man suits have been shown to be; his tech gift to Peter Parker had wildly inadequate safety measures to be gifted to someone still in school, even if they had been to space. Basically: yes, Musk is just like Stark. Half as smart as he thinks he is, has main-character syndrome and/or narcissism.
Gibbon1 9mo ago
I ran into him and the group of obsessed hangers on in 1997-8 or so. He was a nutjob then.
DamnInteresting 9mo ago
I thought Musk was pretty cool when he was just the guy making EVs and reusable rockets happen. I didn't even mind his over-optimistic projections, it's hard to be mad at optimism. But then he started becoming more of a public figure. He called that rescue worker a 'pedo guy' just for turning down a bad idea. He started broadcasting his philosophies, and they were mostly gross. He bought Twitter and made it so everyone had to see his dumb tweets. He revealed himself as a big, moist wad of lies and insecurities. I have a hypothesis that the Hedonic Treadmill[1] can cause actual harm to the human brain; I suspect that over time, in certain brains, extreme wealth erodes the reward centers such that some rich people can't help but be miserable, flailing for ever-elusive life satisfaction. It seems like a fairly serious bug in human software. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

by iammjm 9mo ago

WA 9mo ago

You were duped. Tesla‘s paint it black video is from 2016 and one the first obvious lies. People called Musk out on his BS 10 years ago, but he successfully managed to keep a "genius" imagine in the media up until COVID-19 hit. Media sentiment changed around 2020/2021 to adjust to reality of Musk being a massive fraudster.

rhubarbtree 9mo ago
Important point here: the discussion is about his character, but you’ve made it about his intellect. I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. I’ve heard silly things like - he doesn’t do anything, it’s all his employees or board or assistant - but reading the history that’s obviously false. It does seem some people can’t cope with the idea that someone is often an asshat is also brilliant. And I’m afraid it’s true with Musk.
- magicalhippo 9mo ago
  > I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. It's also worth keeping in mind that super smart people can say and do lots of really dumb things. Smart != wise.
- dwb 9mo ago
  I don’t think Musk is super smart. I think he has some skills that account for how he got to his position other than privilege and luck, I think he probably works hard (or at least, harder than me), but I can’t get to “super smart”.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
  > I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart I doubt it. He was born into money and was lucky enough to make some excellent purchasing decisions. His various talks and arguments on the internet show him to be fairly stupid in my opinion. I've heard tell that his successful businesses are mainly successful when the staff learn how to manage Musk and prevent his dumbest ideas.
  - ethbr1 9mo ago
    What objective evidence do we have that Musk is smart? Basically: he's extremely rich Working hard and being very good at negotiating compensation packages and picking the right companies/products to be involved with (and a bit of luck) are all sufficient for exorbitant wealth though. E.g. there are plenty of people just as smart as Bezos who didn't hitch their wagon to the "sell something easy on the web" idea at the right time
    - cmurf 9mo ago
      What is a secular term for prosperity gospel?
      - jijijijij 9mo ago
        Social darwinism.
      - ethbr1 9mo ago
        Plutocracy?
- zug_zug 9mo ago
  On the one hand he does some things that seem very smart, on the other he does many that are very stupid (cave divers ordeal). So it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

schiffern 9mo ago

> I am still asking myself what the fuck happened? I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well: "Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security." I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475 [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-tesla-deserved-more-credit-2025-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-t...

cowpig 9mo ago
Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly? Also, didn't Musk publicly quit Trump's advisory councils over exiting the Paris Agreement back in 2017? Why does that rift not qualify for your "separating politics" hypothesis?
- watwut 9mo ago
  > Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly? Not OP ... but it would be consistent with observations. It is a party that admires lying and rewards it.
- nullocator 9mo ago
  I think as the left has become more homogeneously college educated they are less likely to wholesale accept blatant lies and falsehoods. For someone like Musk this will naturally push them to the right because he incessantly lies/bullshits so often and has a visceral negative reaction when being called on it (the cave fiasco comes to mind). If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.

andyjohnson0 9mo ago

He always was an arrogant, over-privileged arsehole. But having an army of "fanboys" will have amplified his character flaws. Ditto his involvement with Trump et al.

input_sh 9mo ago

You were younger and more gullible, he still had a PR firm and didn't tweet his every "thought".

csomar 9mo ago

No. He is the same person. It just happens in a certain time, what he was selling aligned with what you were buying.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 9mo ago

[flagged]

notahacker 9mo ago
somebody should look into who owns the @elonmusk account that originates these stories...
Valid3840 9mo ago
The "you're a sheep" rhetoric. Great! Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/)
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 9mo ago
  >The "you're a sheep" rhetoric. Great! you mean the same rhetoric I observe whenever the wrong entity wins an election anywhere in the West? have we not accepted for a fact that most people are so uncritical of the media they consume that a thousand Russian Internet Defense Force operatives can topple a Western democracy over Xitter and TikTok? >Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/) I never said he was a good man before then, or that he is a good man now.
  - testdelacc1 9mo ago
    I wish I could be as intelligent and free thinking as you. Sadly I’m a sheep, but it’s so inspiring to see someone like you, to show us sheep what’s possible if you truly free your mind.
svara 9mo ago
This really makes no sense because you can just listen to the man himself (and there's a lot of material).

lisp2240 9mo ago

When Elon was a teenager he bullied another kid about his father’s suicide until the other kid pushed him down a flight of stairs. He has always been like this. His character was never a secret. Everything was in plain view but you didn’t want to see it.

dzhiurgis 9mo ago
And he's like that because his father beat the crap out of him.

shantara 9mo ago

Thai Cave rescue happened in 2018. It should have already made obvious how completely deranged Musk was to everyone, even if they were not paying close attention before and were dazzled by self-driving cars and Mars colonization promises.

tjpnz 9mo ago
I think that marked a turning point for many. He had been known to say dumb things in the past but that was monumentally stupid own goal. Worse, he was given multiple chances to take a step back but just kept digging.
- orwin 9mo ago
  Yeah, it was mine. That's the moment I thought 'wow that guy is deranged now, he should step back and take some vacations'. Now I realize he was like this from the start, but that was the moment I questioned my hero worship.
ben_w 9mo ago
That was certainly the first time he did something so obviously blatantly evil, and obviously his own fault, that I wasn't able to ignore it or dismiss it. It was sufficiently awful, at first I couldn't even believe he'd done it. When I internalised that he was the kind of person to do that, it made it much easier to see his other flaws.
- dzhiurgis 9mo ago
  [flagged]

cynicalsecurity 9mo ago

> Was he faking his true character all this time and managed to dupe me? Yes. People's true nature reveals once they stop caring about money. To be fair, he was really good at faking.

refurb 9mo ago

I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics. I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive. Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races. Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia. I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank. You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome.

tick_tock_tick 9mo ago
Purity tests are extremely common in left wing politics in the USA.
- imtringued 9mo ago
  And the point of the purity test isn't to establish guilt. You're already declared guilty and the purity test is an attempt at finding or creating evidence of your guilt.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
  I wasn't aware that there is a left wing in USA politics. The view from an outsider is that you have extreme right-wing and a fascist right-wing.
rl3 9mo ago
>I find it odd to completely disavow someone because you don’t agree 100% with their politics. "politics": https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund... https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- refurb 9mo ago

kilroy123 9mo ago

He had a PR team working overtime to boost his image. Remember he had a cameo in movie Iron Man 3 back in the day. He meticulously worked on his image for decades.

tim333 9mo ago
>screenwriter Mark Fergus told New York magazine that Musk partly inspired the modern portrayal of [Iron Man] >According to Fergus, the character was inspired by an amalgam of real people — but none so much as Elon Musk.
ben_w 9mo ago
The Iron Man thing… MCU Tony Stark wasn't as smart as he thought he was. He should've allowed surgeons to help with his heart immediately, rather than the entire B-plot of Iron Man 2; Iron Man 3's plot could've been averted in a whole bunch of ways if he'd been less arrogant and thoughtless, and also shows him as a loner unwilling to call for assistance despite (by this point) being allied with what passes for gods in the MCU; Ultron was his own hubris punching him in the face; the justification he gives for the Sokovia Accords was a stupid response to an act of self-defence that, sure, could've and should've been handled better, but it isn't like Stark himself was great at avoiding collateral damage during emergencies in the other films; his rage-fight against Barnes in Civil War, while understandable, was wildly unprofessional and a sign he was not a suitable person to be in possession of a one-man weapon system like the Iron Man suits have been shown to be; his tech gift to Peter Parker had wildly inadequate safety measures to be gifted to someone still in school, even if they had been to space. Basically: yes, Musk is just like Stark. Half as smart as he thinks he is, has main-character syndrome and/or narcissism.

Gibbon1 9mo ago

I ran into him and the group of obsessed hangers on in 1997-8 or so. He was a nutjob then.

DamnInteresting 9mo ago

I thought Musk was pretty cool when he was just the guy making EVs and reusable rockets happen. I didn't even mind his over-optimistic projections, it's hard to be mad at optimism. But then he started becoming more of a public figure. He called that rescue worker a 'pedo guy' just for turning down a bad idea. He started broadcasting his philosophies, and they were mostly gross. He bought Twitter and made it so everyone had to see his dumb tweets. He revealed himself as a big, moist wad of lies and insecurities. I have a hypothesis that the Hedonic Treadmill[1] can cause actual harm to the human brain; I suspect that over time, in certain brains, extreme wealth erodes the reward centers such that some rich people can't help but be miserable, flailing for ever-elusive life satisfaction. It seems like a fairly serious bug in human software. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill