Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’
Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’
What is wrong with him? I think he legit needs psychiatric help.
Maybe the people who get this rich due so at the cost of their mental health. Maybe it’s not healthy for a single person to hold so much wealth.
Deep down, does he know what he is doing is wrong? Is his Twitter behavior an expression of some negative feelings he can’t cope with?
He’s always been a shit head like this. He just got rich enough that he thought he could get away with showing his true colors.
The dude comes from a family of slave owners and was born with a silver spoon up his ass.
Or, as former Texas governor Ann Richards said of George H. W. Bush in 1988:
‘He can’t help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!’
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Did he actually help start any of those companies? I thought he basically bought his way into all but one of them, and the one he was part of he got kicked out of. But I may be remembering that wrong.
You’re not wrong. Musk fanboys are goofy in the head too.
If you’re thinking of PayPal, I think you are at least partially wrong on that: he didn’t start that one either but another company that was not that successful… I want to say he bought the more successful company and kept that name, merging his into it, and tried to do a lot of his own software engineering on it that was so bad they had to rip all of it out when they ousted him for how badly he was managing the company.
This could be misremembered as well though, but I don’t think he actually has a single successful company he can legitimately claim the title of “founder” of without having bought the rights to call himself that when he bought the company.
I think he actually founded SpaceX.
I think you may be right on that one
I don’t mean to rag on you dude but I don’t think he started that many companies. His company was bought out by PayPal in like the late '90s, despite being listed as a cofounder he wasn’t a founder of Tesla, I think spaceX was also founded before Musk. He did help these companies succeed though so I suppose credit for that.
He founded SpaceX, but he was the money man. He didn’t like the way he was treated in Russia, so he said, fine, I’ll make my own rocket program, with blackjack and hookers… But he didn’t actually do any of the lifting, other than lifting the pen to sign the checks. Other, brilliant, people did the real work.
Spacex owes its success to Gwynne Shotwell if anyone, that woman is a powerhouse.
I mean having money and connections to cut through red tape is helpful even if it’s only from his privileged life.
Sure, I don’t deny that, but I don’t think he has ever done something great on purpose. It’s like if I give all of my friends 5 bucks and one of them saves a child from getting hit by a car on their way to 7-11 to buy a Slurpee with that fiver, I don’t get to take credit. Elon has enough money that he can throw a lot of shit at the wall. Some of it sticks. If the Boring company had taken off, he’d still be the same small dick white supremacist he is today, he’d just have exchanged one phallic symbol for another.
I’d say that, other than the money, those companies succeeded in spite of musk rather than because of him. If your only positive contribution is to sign the checkbook to keep it running, that’s not much to give praise over.
I think musk is dumb but he’s engineer dumb, when you hear him talk about rockets with other rocket nerds he does actually know what he’s talking about - he’s not like rocket scientist level understanding but having someone in charge of the money that actually understands and is interested in the principles and practicalities of the task at hand is kinda huge in today’s corporate world.
His problem in Tesla comes from his ability to understand more of the technical situation than most the money people he knows as that’s led him into making some exaggerated claims and pushing through some half baked ideas. The business model for the gigafactory was fantastic, the initial development seemed promising but when he had problems with automation and flow rate that caused so many delays he wasn’t really accounting for that - he could design a great science fiction factory but it got to the point he couldn’t pay people to make his ideas work because they’re not problems you can just brush under the rug - the cybertruck one piece press seems to be an attempt at circumventing problems he already faced with more wishful thinking ‘theoretically we can just…’ classic engineer bravardo, it’s not a bad idea but it’s going to result in tradeoffs and I think we can already see that in how shitty the production version looks compared to the original design.
Elons biggest mistake of course is another classic engineering student error ‘I’m much better at engineering than other people who don’t study engineering, that must mean I’m better than them at the things they study too…’ I think he genuinely thought that rubbing a social network would be really easy for him, he had this idea that the evil fun police were artificially limiting his engagement and all he needed to do is get rid of the bias against him and everyone would see how great he is at reposting ten year old memes and hail him as a hero of the world…
What I’m getting at is you can’t be as dumb as Elon by actually just being dumb, it takes intelligence misdirected to be such an idiot.
I can tell you right now, personally knowing people who worked with him way back on the first Model S, he has always been an absolutely unhinged shithead of the highest degree. He loved going into an absolute berserk rage dropping tons of F-bombs in conference calls, all because someone gave him an answer he didn’t like.
Yeah, there’s a reason the original people at Tesla all left, and he was kicked out of PayPal. Literally the only reason anyone tolerates him in any way is for the financial incentive, and that’s the only way he’s kept people around.
Jesus, I knew he was a piece of shit, I didn’t realize he’d always been like that.
Which successful company did he start?
Not saying you’re wrong. There certainly could have been mental degradation over the years. Or he could have gotten investors lined up by being a really rich kid from a rich family. Money can do a lot of heavy lifting for a piece of shit.
I think it’s a bit of both. To me the coolest thing he ever did was make Tesla tech open source. I have a hard time seeing that Musk in this dude anymore. I used to think he did it altruistically but lately I’m thinking it was probably an ego thing after all. And now that all his ventures are starting to sink he probably regrets the move.
FYI, he didn’t make it “open source”. It was a joke of a sharing agreement that basically said they could use your patents if you used theirs. It was purely so they could steal IP from anyone dumb enough to think that Tesla had some magic “secret sauce”, and took them up on the agreement.
Whoa TIL. Thanks for the info, I stand corrected.
He is a Narcissist. Yes, that is a medical condition. He is thoroughly unable to recognize other people as equal. They are mere nuisances.
Until they are in power.
No, it makes no difference. The disability is in him. Their power or any other of their features cannot change it.
I thought “narcissist” was legitimately confused with “sociopath” in this thread for a second.
After looking over the definitions again for the distinctions, my immediate thought was “why not both?”
I don’t know, really: is “sociopath” also a condition or just a bad habit?
It’s also in the DSM, but there’s probably ranges of both and I don’t think either one precludes or excludes the other. Narcissism also shares a lot of symptoms with bipolar disorder, which the recent interviews with the biographer Walter Isaacson about Musk seems pretty clearly to be a problem. (See ‘demon mode’)
Indeed.
Eh you spend your whole life getting away with anything because you have the money, you end up starting to believe your own bullshit.
One of the reasons so many people are rich is because they make money off the smart or the hard working. You never do the work yourself because you legitimately aren’t the best person for the job.
I think Elon bought in too much during the wave of “I’m a tech genius who put a car in space, make electric cars and spaceships” and I think he actually believes he did that instead of the countless and thankless hours of all the real professionals.
The problem with this thinking, is now he feels like he ^needs to do something. Just like that micromanaging boss who doesn’t help at all and just spouts random nonsense thinking it will magically make it go faster. But instead he’s just self sabotaging the process.
This is what happens when you start to believe your own bullshit. If he was smart, he should walk away and let the professionals handle it.
He’s more and more turning into Trump minus the dementia. In Germany we have the term “Cäsarenwahn”, for when someone loses touch with reality from having too much unchallenged power. Haven’t found any English equivalent so maybe it’s time for another loan word.
Is that derived from caesar as in a Roman emperor? Because that’s pretty cool if it is.
Yes. It literally means “lunacy of ceasars”. Ancient Rome had plenty of examples.
I love it. German has some terrific words.
Megalomania?
Yeah, that is what all of the major dictionaries are translating it as.
use that word on the Internet and it’ll be confused with megalovania
Metroidvania?
Caesar’s wank?
He is 100% going to run for president at some point unless something stops him from thinking he has a chance.
Not of the US anyway, he isn’t a Natural Born citizen and that is a constitutional requirement. As I understand it, changing that would require an amendment and as it stands, I can’t see any way for that happen with the chaos in government.
Ah right, forgot about that. Hopefully that technically keeps his power limited.
Excessive wealth definitely leads to bad mental health outcomes for the wealthy.
The wealth and power leads to their becoming detached from the rest of humanity. They start seeing others as objects instead of people.
He’s gone full Howard Hughes.
I think he’s just stupid and never actually had to run a company. Make insane demands and people had to figure it out
They get this way partly because they’re surrounded by yes men.
To take an example of someone like Harvey Weinstein. They don’t typically come out of the gate asking people to get naked for a movie role.
But they might first just be handsy with people and nobody says anything so it becomes normal, then they start caressing people and this becomes the new normal. Before you know it you’re fucking insane.
To put it simply, people don’t normally notice incremental changes in people and over time these can become pretty outlandish.
With Elon it’s that nobody ever tells him he’s wrong and before you know it you think you know everything.
I’m pretty sure he’s high, like, all the time now.
So am I, but I don’t act like this.
Well, yeah, because you haven’t been grinding up hundred dollar bills into each bowl.
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I want him to get the help that he needs. Not because I sympathize with him to any degree (I don’t). But because I want him to stop ruining everything.
Well, maybe hold off until he’s killed the failwhale.
For greater good.
Trying to explain one’s behaviour as a psychological issue isn’t automatically sympathy towards the person.
Who is “we”?
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But nobody here is actually excusing Musk’s behaviour. You’re arguing against something that hasn’t been claimed, with weirdly authoritarian rhetoric at that.
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They get that rich at the cost of A LOT more than their mental health…
It makes perfect sense once you understand money is a hard drug.
No one needs this much money, they could be living a quit happy fulfilling life but instead all they do is try to obtain more, at the expense of social relations, their family and their own mental health. They destroy their own lives to get the dopamine hit of the numbers going up.
People like Elon are addicts. Greed is an illness but rather than giving these people medical help to stop hoarding excess wealth we glorify their problem like their winning.
It is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Even the extremely rich tend to not wield power with such a kind of wild abandon as elon, they tend to offset as much responsibility as possible and ride the wave, because the level of delusional self-importance you need in order to believe yourself smarter than literally everyone under you is even too astounding to the leeches of society.
He is sinking the ship on purpose.
Bankruptcy frees him from paying back the 44 billion he borrowed to buy Twitter.
That is his only option.
Stop underestimating him, just because he is evil does not mean he is dumb.
How would that work? If X goes bankrupt, he’s still on the hook for buying it? He’s not the one going bankrupt, the business he bought would be. That would be like if I bought a car and crashed it and wrote it off. I still bought the car, I just drove it into a telephone pole. I still owe the money for the wreckage.
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Wow, 2 years old Lemmy user. That makes him an early adopter rather than a Reddit API refugee.
The cake is a lie
I didn’t realise Lemmy had cake days.
Happy cake day!