this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
738 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59495 readers
3114 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For someone who is supposed to be smart, he’s an idiot.
I'm interested in why people have hyped him up to be smart?
I've watched a few podcasts with Elon as the guest and he comes across as average as an average person can be.
The only thing I've seen is that he jumps at opportunities he believes will be profitable, and has leveraged what he has against partners and adversaries for his own personal gain.
It came from a long time ago. See the power of people like Elon was being rich enough they could throw money at shit with little risk and also be rich enough to get smart people to do all the good shit.
But he was the face of it all for a long time, people legit saw him as the person who brought in electric cars (yeah i know he wasnt) and thinking space x is the rival to NASA.
Many people idolized him as a genius.
Then he ruined it, and you know why? Because he opend his fucking mouth just like the podcast you're talking about and many people saw him for the idiot he was.
The problem? Elon himself believed the bullshit, he hinself thought he was a genius. And now hes trying to "run" things and its all falling to the ground. Because he never realized the only reason he had anything good was because of the actual smart people employed there.
Honestly, I'll give Musk the credit for making electric vehicles cool. Not that he did the design or engineering, mind you, but that being stubborn about making electric vehicles "a thing" actually did move the industry towards electric vehicles proper, by throwing money at it and implementing a plan to make it more economically feasible. We all put a lot of faith in Tesla for being the ONLY company that seemed to be pushing forward with mass market EV adoption, when so many other companies were too scared to do it themselves. Now that there are more companies, and older established companies making EVs, and now that Elon has outed himself as kind of a twat, it's easier to dismiss him. But I will give credit where credit is due. I don't think we would see this boom in electric vehicles without him and Tesla kicking the car industry in the balls
Also Iron Man was a big movie at the time so people thought of him as the "real life Tony Stark." That whole myth that you could have a super genius that could build a fusion reactor from a box of scraps was a thing at the time and here's Elon Musk seemingly doing the same kind of thing.
Of course it's silly, you have to have teams of people solving thousands of problems (big and small) to be able to get new technology.
But yeah it's the most extreme version of the old saw "better to keep your mouth shut and have everyone assume you're a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." In Musk's case, he could have kept his mouth shut and had everyone assume that he's a genius.