Elon Musk is not an inventor, a creator or an innovator. He is not a thoughtful leader or steward of companies, nor is he worthy of any title that suggests he has been the active force behind any major accomplishment by any company.
He isn’t Steve Jobs, because Steve Jobs had ideas. He isn’t Tony Stark, because Tony Stark was a scientist. He doesn’t cleanly match any startup founder’s template, because most founders — even the most insipidly-privileged Stanford graduate — seem to find some sort of joy in the creation of software or hardware, even if said joy is how much money it might make them in the future.
No, Elon Musk is far more of a modern-day hustler, a nihilistic master of the art of financial plate-spinning and theoretical value. He is, in many ways, quite innovative, but only in the sense that he has repeatedly found ways to swindle the media and the financial markets without ever having to make or do anything. His joyless, banal and destructive path to becoming the world’s richest man is fueled entirely through exploiting the weaknesses of society. To quote Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker , Musk has a “Ph.D in man’s ignorance,” and can cleanly see where rules can be bent or broken entirely without creating any real existential threat.
Musk is possibly the world’s greatest plate-spinner. Never quite lying, never quite telling the truth. "Hard to pin down,” but not in the way that Kara Swisher thought. In another life, Musk would’ve been one of the traders that Lewis worked alongside at Salomon Brothers (now part of CitiGroup) — a selfish, arrogant, and sexist con artist, taking advantage of the desperation and greed of others by selling them a pleasant and real-sounding dream connected to, at best, a somewhat inferior version of reality.
And he’s really good at using the levers of the financial markets to sustain his empire of nothing, leveraging one part of his wealth to sustain or enhance another part — like getting SpaceX to buy tens of millions of dollars of SolarCity’s “solar bonds” back in 2016 (the same year that Tesla acquired them), or borrowing $1 billion from SpaceX to purchase Twitter.
A sensible, normal and moral person might believe these actions were illegal, perhaps covered by some sort of insider trading rule that stopped a rich guy pumping the value of a public stock using the coffers of another company he owns. And that person would be wrong, because Musk, despite often acting like a complete dipshit, is acutely aware that there is no golden rule other than that whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Musk has a unique talent in picking companies that can have their market capitalization grown through showmanship — cars, rockets, solar panels, things that you can buy and sell and grow and innovate upon, virtue signaling to the growth-at-all-costs rot economists. Elon has successfully convinced the financial media and analysts that Tesla is an eternal growth machine to the point that many outlets have become Musk’s de facto PR agencies, even if some cracks have begun to show thanks to his obsession with the cybertruck.
Musk realized early on that by crafting a certain persona — the modern day trailblazing innovator with his hands in the future — he could take advantage of the emotional (and at times deeply illogical) nature of the markets, manipulating large cadres of investors into believing that he was a kingmaker.
interesting that the post is back to the bird, and twitter branded. is that from the app?
Abbreviated version: he’s a Wharton Grad.
Yeah I copied the link from the app and removed the tail or whatever that thing after question mark is called.
https://twitter.com/SamSacks/status/1717469507189416193
ETA: As far as I can tell all of posts with tweets have the bird and say Twitterdotcom…
How does that thing keep getting worse and worse?
Can’t wait to see how he rants and raves once (if) production ones hit the street and he finds out how good stainless steel will look after some time in the elements and getting scratched by regular wear and tear.
Citation needed.
He outright lies all the time. Everything else is just bullshit.
Obligs:
i’m terrified what these things will do in a crash, or a pedestrian collision. suvs are terrifying enough, these look worse and are way heavier 
Something something company town something something feds breathing down the back of his neck something
but but but
“It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said.
he’s just trying to figure out if they should release it before or after full self driving
"PayPal is actually a less complete product than what we came up with in July of 2000, so 23 years ago.”
so see, he knows what he’s talking about.
also, not quite related, but i have this bridge for sale if anyone is interested:
… and that multi-billion-dollar “technology company” does not employ a single engineer capable of rebranding it 
As long as Elon doesn’t notice it doesn’t matter.
Small test:
So even if you manually change twitterdotcom to xdotcom it just redirects to twitterdotcom.
