Surprised that people know so much about Musk and claim they don’t like him. I can see nerding out on your hero or whatever, but to be motivated to research his personal upbringing out of disdain for the man strikes me as a bit unhinged. As someone who is 60/40 pro musk it’s bizarre the emotions he triggers in certain types of people. If we could somehow harness that energy…
I don't think it's weird. I know a lot about the life of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy and Bernie Madoff, but that doesn't mean that I like them. Not trying to compare Musk to a serial killer or a Ponzi schemer, but my point is that I think most of his critics will acknowledge that he's an interesting person, even if they think he's a douchebag.
I think he is interesting. The details of his father’s financial transactions feels a little bit obsessive but yeah, obviously if you are the sort to spend time studying Ted Bundy, I guess Elon’s father isn’t totally off brand. Who am I to judge. I find a lot of things interesting myself, though less often people, more often ideas. To each their own!
Musk really brings out some of the worst in this community. I suppose many have subconscious jealousy, because there's the delusions of grandeur types that "just know inside" that eventually they will be huge founder/CEO's of something, and yet no matter what it is, it will never live up to what Elon has done having success after success of the biggest kinds, fucking starting electric vehicles tackling climate change (!!) and the world's premier rocket (!!) company.
Not only that, but he really has the adulation of normies. I mean, this is supposed to be a community of builders, "definite optimism", that we can work hard and will good things into the universe. And yet, I have the most "degenerate" type people on Instagram posting clips of Elon speaking how we need to not get caught up on the doom mongering, it's not going to help us move humanity forward and actually do the things we need to do. Yet here, it's mostly negativity, "we're doomed and everything is shit".
I also frequent a forum about sport X. It's a young man's game and most spend tons of hours practicing it. So who frequents this forum? Generally, all the people who have aged out of it, unable to play all the time like they used to, and they are just shitting all over anything any professional does. I mean they are vicious on the slightest technical things, and yet they're all much worse, sitting on a forum criticizing it, instead of doing it. This thread reminded me of that so much.
I think Musk already figured this out: he's overworking his employees and overselling to his customers. He's a marketing genius, better than Steve Jobs
of course they wanted, and it might still be a good deal for them long term. But compared to market rates, the USD/hour is smaller in Tesla than at most tech companies. Musk makes up the difference with PR: he sales the job so well that people are willing to take a paycut to work there. Nothing wrong with that, also nothing wrong with being convinced to spend more on a car than you need too, in fact I think most Americans do anyway...
The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
If you cannot see how that leads to gloom and doom oriented media and politicians that lean on eschatological themes, you aren’t woke.
>> "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.
> The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't contradict my point. This is a hard problem, because there isn't some malevolent agent acting consciously at the center of it. It's a bunch of different people acting naturally and responding to their environment and incentives.
This sibling comment probably has it part right (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355482). The true cause of this overprotective hypervigilance is probably weakened communities, which itself is most likely an unintended side effect of a bunch of different things.
This too was a media driven hysteria. You can see how the news amplifying a few rare kidnapping and molestation cases, if it bleeds it leads style, is directly correlated to the public intrigue. A lot of movies and tv shows took on these themes as well. Much like the red scare and more recent mass hysterias driven by an unscrupulous news industry political complex.
