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.
I’m in California, in Los Angeles, so depending on the time of year, I’m either an hour behind you or in the same timezone, lol. Kudos to your early birdiness, I’ve never been a morning person. I’ve always been a night owl.
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.
Elon Musk is not better looking than me. Elon Musk is not smarter than me (or else he will realize the Republican government he so wants will cut off those sweet government subsidies to Tesla). And the big difference between Elon and me is that I have more empathy in my little finger than Elon has in his whole body and he is worth about 100 billion. Do women choose empathy? Dont. Make. Me. Laugh.
That should really be the default assumption when someone who is very knowledgeable in one area steps WAY outside their wheelhouse and assumes that will transfer to something completely different and the wheels fall off.
I don't know how much of the success of Tesla and SpaceX has been due to his engineering knowledge, building a culture of 70+ hour weeks (successful for short sprints but unsustainable long-term) or how much is that a layer of management has spontaneously evolved to keep him out of stuff he'll micromanage and insulate line employees from his tirade or even from spending all of his time on overdesigning the door handles and insisting on gull-wing doors and making the CyberTruck look like something a six-year-old discarded in Minecraft when they have major flaws getting the panels to line up and they occasionally spectacularly catch fire.
I do software for a living. It's challenging enough, but I'd be WAY over my skis if someone asked me to design and manufacture cars, build a rocket or (heaven forbid) drop a microchip into the brain of a living animal. I know I'd suck at it, wouldn't do it and would accept the inevitable trainwreck that would accompany it. But there's something in his mind that tells him to do it and launches him straight to Dunning-Krugerville.
And yeah, he's made a ton of money on his endeavors, but if four years of Trump have shown me anything, it's that not-very-bright people (especially ones who start out rich) occasionally fall backwards into massive piles of money.
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*.
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.
I came here to point out he's a narcissist, but you beat me to it.
Hey, two hour time difference between Arizona and the East Coast and I’m up early!!!🌵🌵🌵
I’m in California, in Los Angeles, so depending on the time of year, I’m either an hour behind you or in the same timezone, lol. Kudos to your early birdiness, I’ve never been a morning person. I’ve always been a night owl.
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.
Elon Musk didn't become a Billionaire as a dummy.
He didn't send his astronomical capsule into space and returned it safely to earth.
He didn't take over one of the most used social networks without knowing something about computer operations.
There is a dummy in this discussion - but it isn't Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is not better looking than me. Elon Musk is not smarter than me (or else he will realize the Republican government he so wants will cut off those sweet government subsidies to Tesla). And the big difference between Elon and me is that I have more empathy in my little finger than Elon has in his whole body and he is worth about 100 billion. Do women choose empathy? Dont. Make. Me. Laugh.
That should really be the default assumption when someone who is very knowledgeable in one area steps WAY outside their wheelhouse and assumes that will transfer to something completely different and the wheels fall off.
I don't know how much of the success of Tesla and SpaceX has been due to his engineering knowledge, building a culture of 70+ hour weeks (successful for short sprints but unsustainable long-term) or how much is that a layer of management has spontaneously evolved to keep him out of stuff he'll micromanage and insulate line employees from his tirade or even from spending all of his time on overdesigning the door handles and insisting on gull-wing doors and making the CyberTruck look like something a six-year-old discarded in Minecraft when they have major flaws getting the panels to line up and they occasionally spectacularly catch fire.
I do software for a living. It's challenging enough, but I'd be WAY over my skis if someone asked me to design and manufacture cars, build a rocket or (heaven forbid) drop a microchip into the brain of a living animal. I know I'd suck at it, wouldn't do it and would accept the inevitable trainwreck that would accompany it. But there's something in his mind that tells him to do it and launches him straight to Dunning-Krugerville.
And yeah, he's made a ton of money on his endeavors, but if four years of Trump have shown me anything, it's that not-very-bright people (especially ones who start out rich) occasionally fall backwards into massive piles of money.
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.