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Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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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.