His ego is a big part of it. He's never wrong in his own eyes.
But keep one thing in mind with Musk. He left South Africa because his family saw the ending of apartheid coming. (Not any of the reasons he's used as excuses)
That old white South African bigotry is still there and explains a lot of what he's done to Twitter.
He’s a narcissistic, immature, spoiled brat. He grew up in a culture where his daddy made money off of slaves, so I don’t think we can expect too much humanity out of the man.
Look how he decided to build electric cars, and in what order.
First he copied a Lotus roadster but put a battery and an electric motor in it making it very heavy and violating the Lotus principle of "First, remove mass." (This is the car he sent into space.)
Then he built a huge, impractical, but beautiful luxury sedan with silly settings for speed: Ludicrous, Plaid, etc. Very rich people (the target market) aren't drawn to silly, but the Model S carries on. It's plagues with electric gremlins and is unreliable. But its pioneer owners (those who haven't returned to Mercedes or Lexus) are among his biggest fans!
Then he devoted immense resources to make a very expensive SUV with "falcon-wing doors" that GO UP but in a new, different, and almost impossible to design, build, and use way. Car guys were fired from Tesla for telling Lonnie it wasn't the way to do SUV doors. They are hopelessly unreliable, these doors, but the Model X soldiers on.
Finally he bowed to Board and staff pressure and made a "sedan" but the name he wanted for it was tied up in litigation for years. Litigation with Ford, who owned the name "Model E" and had for decades. The 'simple, unpretentious' Model 3 was made with an interior full of substandard materials and errors in production. But it carries on and has spawned a taller, heftier, family-friendly Model Y. Now the Y is the best seller and quality suffers everywhere it's made.
All this to produce an SUV. That's electric. And not really affordable.
But he now has 64% of the electric car market (down from 78% two years ago.)
And these are his car models.
The Roadster
S-3-X-Y
The Truck
The Affordable Vaporware Sedan
That's the naming convention. Nowhere to go from here, right?
Something else Musk, Trump and Dubya have in common: they're all the children of rich, powerful people who evidently were not great parents. You can add the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos to that list as well.
Putin too. I think it’s a function of something very simple. A single human mind was never meant to be this instantly connected to every other person on Earth or to have the power of instant worldwide communication and influence over all other people. Human brains were never meant to have a firehose of data and information pointed at it all day long. Most of the world had no idea what Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan was doing. It took years maybe lifetimes for civilizations to meet. Now we are simply buried in a Niagara Falls of stimulation and it’s making people like Elon go fully insane.
Totally agree. I think it's easy to think these huge, rich celebrities must be "better" than the rest of us, but we're still all humans. And it's also easy to fall into the trap of thinking a person must be good at everything if they excelled at one thing. As dumb as I can be, any famous/rich/influential person can be equally (or more) dumb. Not every move is some tiny part of a giant, unfathomable, strategy.
Among the long list of grievances of the fascist crowd (aka, rank and file GOP voters) is their perpetual insistence that they are looked down upon by 'Coastal elites' and 'Ivory tower intellectuals'.
I mean, they're not wrong- those comfortable residing in the most highly educated, culturally diverse communities tend look askance at the emotionally stunted, cognitively deficient frothing mobs populating 'the heartland'.
Because the emotionally stunted, cognitively deficient frothing mobs populating 'the heartland' are atrocious violent, bigoted, ignorant cretins, reflected in their voting patterns, policy preferences, and expressed attitudes.
But, the atrocious violent, bigoted, ignorant cretins need something to feel better about themselves (there must be some flicker of recognition they are in fact emotionally stunted and cognitively deficient), so they create totems of what passes for smart among the functionally illiterate (exemplified by MTG).
Their idols are, to a person, vile deranged morons, who appeal only to vile deranged morons, but whom the vile, deranged morons proclaim are *the real geniuses*.
Elon was smart enough that he brought people like Leighton Woodhouse into this and we both know Leighton well enough to know that he is quite intelligent even if he has gone over to the dark side.
To me what is important is that we stop saying MAGA people are stupid and pretending that any of these people are acting in good faith. Whether it’s the GOP, MAGA or the faux-left reactionary, populists we need to be clear that they are losing and lashing out. Calling them dumb or hypocritical isn’t going to work. They don’t care. It is fascism and these people are acting in bad faith. We need to be clear about that and respond accordingly IMHO.
That headline might actually be the most accurate analysis of Musk ever written.
His ego is a big part of it. He's never wrong in his own eyes.
But keep one thing in mind with Musk. He left South Africa because his family saw the ending of apartheid coming. (Not any of the reasons he's used as excuses)
That old white South African bigotry is still there and explains a lot of what he's done to Twitter.
He’s a narcissistic, immature, spoiled brat. He grew up in a culture where his daddy made money off of slaves, so I don’t think we can expect too much humanity out of the man.
Look how he decided to build electric cars, and in what order.
First he copied a Lotus roadster but put a battery and an electric motor in it making it very heavy and violating the Lotus principle of "First, remove mass." (This is the car he sent into space.)
Then he built a huge, impractical, but beautiful luxury sedan with silly settings for speed: Ludicrous, Plaid, etc. Very rich people (the target market) aren't drawn to silly, but the Model S carries on. It's plagues with electric gremlins and is unreliable. But its pioneer owners (those who haven't returned to Mercedes or Lexus) are among his biggest fans!
Then he devoted immense resources to make a very expensive SUV with "falcon-wing doors" that GO UP but in a new, different, and almost impossible to design, build, and use way. Car guys were fired from Tesla for telling Lonnie it wasn't the way to do SUV doors. They are hopelessly unreliable, these doors, but the Model X soldiers on.
Finally he bowed to Board and staff pressure and made a "sedan" but the name he wanted for it was tied up in litigation for years. Litigation with Ford, who owned the name "Model E" and had for decades. The 'simple, unpretentious' Model 3 was made with an interior full of substandard materials and errors in production. But it carries on and has spawned a taller, heftier, family-friendly Model Y. Now the Y is the best seller and quality suffers everywhere it's made.
All this to produce an SUV. That's electric. And not really affordable.
But he now has 64% of the electric car market (down from 78% two years ago.)
And these are his car models.
The Roadster
S-3-X-Y
The Truck
The Affordable Vaporware Sedan
That's the naming convention. Nowhere to go from here, right?
Better buy Twitter, or not, or yes, sure.
Something else Musk, Trump and Dubya have in common: they're all the children of rich, powerful people who evidently were not great parents. You can add the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos to that list as well.
Putin too. I think it’s a function of something very simple. A single human mind was never meant to be this instantly connected to every other person on Earth or to have the power of instant worldwide communication and influence over all other people. Human brains were never meant to have a firehose of data and information pointed at it all day long. Most of the world had no idea what Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan was doing. It took years maybe lifetimes for civilizations to meet. Now we are simply buried in a Niagara Falls of stimulation and it’s making people like Elon go fully insane.
Totally agree. I think it's easy to think these huge, rich celebrities must be "better" than the rest of us, but we're still all humans. And it's also easy to fall into the trap of thinking a person must be good at everything if they excelled at one thing. As dumb as I can be, any famous/rich/influential person can be equally (or more) dumb. Not every move is some tiny part of a giant, unfathomable, strategy.
I always think of this Groucho Marx quote whenever people hold up obvious signs of Musk’s ineptitude as subtle signs of his genius:
“He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”
Like gravity, dumb is pretty much always there whether we can explain it or not.
Like the poor, it will always be with us.
Among the long list of grievances of the fascist crowd (aka, rank and file GOP voters) is their perpetual insistence that they are looked down upon by 'Coastal elites' and 'Ivory tower intellectuals'.
I mean, they're not wrong- those comfortable residing in the most highly educated, culturally diverse communities tend look askance at the emotionally stunted, cognitively deficient frothing mobs populating 'the heartland'.
Because the emotionally stunted, cognitively deficient frothing mobs populating 'the heartland' are atrocious violent, bigoted, ignorant cretins, reflected in their voting patterns, policy preferences, and expressed attitudes.
But, the atrocious violent, bigoted, ignorant cretins need something to feel better about themselves (there must be some flicker of recognition they are in fact emotionally stunted and cognitively deficient), so they create totems of what passes for smart among the functionally illiterate (exemplified by MTG).
Their idols are, to a person, vile deranged morons, who appeal only to vile deranged morons, but whom the vile, deranged morons proclaim are *the real geniuses*.
Just a thought.
Elon was smart enough that he brought people like Leighton Woodhouse into this and we both know Leighton well enough to know that he is quite intelligent even if he has gone over to the dark side.
To me what is important is that we stop saying MAGA people are stupid and pretending that any of these people are acting in good faith. Whether it’s the GOP, MAGA or the faux-left reactionary, populists we need to be clear that they are losing and lashing out. Calling them dumb or hypocritical isn’t going to work. They don’t care. It is fascism and these people are acting in bad faith. We need to be clear about that and respond accordingly IMHO.
Kind Regards, A Bay Area reader.