Yes. Plenty were basically saying what I did. That he fooled us for a while.
And there were a lot saying things like:
yes.
I think people are reacting to you saying this with some clarifications on what we meant:
Some of us DID think that he was a bit of jackass prior to the pedoguy shit. But it’s also true he was not as open about who he was and what he believed.
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Elon’s company using unfair practices?
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This. The one time I worked at a (small, private) company that offered me some, I was 1) not allowed to exercise them until I left the company or it was sold, and 2) not allowed to know how even the meaningless-number-on-paper was determined or how it got changed over time. When I got promoted and granted more options, I wasn’t even told what the meaningless number was. Then the company got sold, lo and behold at a price below the meaningless number, and I was forced to lose my options or to exercise them and then sell immediately, making net $0.
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He literally bought Tesla from people who were pushing electric cars.
And poor Ed Begley Jr gets no respect.
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The full extent of Musk’s jackassery wasn’t as obvious prior to 2018 or so but lots of people who had been paying attention were criticizing him for years before then.
For example, his questionable design and management decisions at Tesla kept introducing production delays long after his first customers had laid down good money for a car and many of his investors were getting ready to bail. And of course he’s been a longtime foe of anyone who supports workable public transit. Here’s a 2017 article from Wired, which is probably one of the most techbro-friendly publications out there, explicitly calling him out:
The narrative that either progressives or the tech set were unified in their admiration of Musk is just revisionist nonsense.
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Yep. Certainly in space policy circles that I ran in in the early 2010’s, people saw through him and knew he was full of shit. I talked to a few people that had taken meetings with him, and didn’t have much good to say about him. This went a long way towards informing my opinion of him at the time.
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FWIW, My turning point was the Pedo Guy events. If others saw it sooner then good for them.
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Yes and no…
They’re arbitrary value of course, and if you’re stuck with asshole founders or investors they can screw you over much easier than in a public company, but they’re not really meaningless. They can be structured for an exit on leaving the company (sell to an existing shareholder with right of first refusal, for example), or be redeemed/exchanged upon acquisition,…
It can be a genuine mechanism to express gratitude or pay someone their real worth in an early-stage company. But of course, it can be abused like everything else.
So I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think that while he was always potentially that guy, he could have turned out quite differently. People do change, and not always for the better. It’s hard not to have some respect for what he’s done, even as I’m horrified by what he’s showing himself to be. I kind of understand the process of how it happens.
If you work closely with VCs (especially the Silicon Valley kinds) you’re told to dream big all the time. This is why you get those grandiose mission statements like “organize the world’s data” or indeed, “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy .” This isn’t just random megalomania - it’s megalomania with a purpose. First, of course, potential investors, employees and even customers can be quite taken in by the Steve Jobs type reality distortion field. But also, it’s supposed to be a beacon for you as a founder in the dark days of corporate near-death experiences, something to keep you going (Tesla went through at least one well-publicised one, and possibly many more). But as you get more and more successful, the more it starts becoming a platitude and, well, meaningless.
But the megalomania itself remains, especially if the founder is a megalomaniac to begin with (and, well, someone who founds both an EV company and a rocket company in the 200xs is by definition a megalomaiac). In a very real sense, you become the embodiment of that megalomaniac vision.
Now, after all the near-deaths, after all the nailbiting launches, you hit success - people are actually paying you real money for your product and your valuation starts going astronomical. You IPO because the investors need returns (and frankly, so do you) and your valuation is now in several billions of USD. But now, your megalomania hits reality. It’s no longer a bunch of Valley VCs you’re impressing - it’s a whole gaggle of regulators, it’s retail investors and PE firms, who don’t care about your grandiose vision, or your reality distortion field. They want revenue numbers and quarterly targets. They want compliance with SEC rules and a whole host of other regulations. This is where you start resenting them, because the megalomania of the early days is still there. And you cannot accept this new reality - your mission matters damnit! It’s about the survival of the human race if Earth is hit by an asteroid! And these damned regulators and money men are making it so hard…
This is the point when some entrepreneurs enter the Lex Luthor phase (or for that matter, the Iron Man 2 phase). Increasingly cocky and disconnected, acting more and more super-villany. They make business decisions that screw over large masses of people, they bully governments into concessions, and they make impulse purchases of companies (or start ones) they just have no clue about. It’s not just Musk - think of Bezos, Page and Brin,… All the way back to Henry Ford!
He actually started SpaceX himself, and we should give credit for that. Tesla, of course, he was an investor who muscled his way in to call himself a “founder” (which has become another of those meaningless terms now). But you should also appreciate that Tesla didn’t actually have a product at the time he muscled his way in, and I believe that the whole idea of the Roadster funding the development of the Model S which would pave the way for the Model 3 was pretty much his concept. Also, apparently he took a pretty active role in the development of at least the Roadster and the Model S.
Engineer, maybe not. But plenty of inventors are not necessarily even college graduates.
And that’s the thing - Tony Stark is a fictional character, not real life. In real life, Tony Stark looks like Elon Musk.
The third of those at least is like a 100+ year old giant which was making commercial vehicles since 1945, and some of India’s first SUVs since the 1990s. Very different beast from Tesla.
I would think that’s very close to the mark. After 30 years of being the Anointed One he needs something like that.
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I’ll give you a 33 on the test.
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My family owns both a Honda (mine) and a Tata (EV, my dad’s)… 
Ok, but they do actually invent stuff, something Musk has never done. Not once. Ever.
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I doubt it. If you read the article I posted above, you’ll see that a lot of his unpleasant views are very similar to those of his maternal grandfather. Musk never really rejected them even when he was covering for himself with PR. He’s not an engineer but technocracy still suits his megalomania and definitely has appeal for his techbro fanbois.
There’s also his upbringing in South Africa, which involves a level of middle-class privilege and entitlement most Americans can’t grasp. And while he says he left to avoid mandatory military service that means might prop up apartheid, his objection comes off as more grounded in general Libertarian anti-statism than the particular policies of his birth state.
I’ve been in tech for 25+ years and met a lot of successful and/or lucky founders over that time. Yes, the money and power ruined some (as with Musk, drugs often contributed in those cases). However, the majority managed to retain their pre-IPO personalities and views, for better or (in Musk’s case) for worse.
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As I understand it he invented electric cars, rockets, free speech, and the number 420.
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But also probably never engaged with them either until very recently. That’s what it feels like to me…
But something I can - middle-class Indian privilege is quite similar (and I come from the top of the Indian middle-class food chain). A lot of my peers have these latent ideas that come out at the darnest times…
Oh, definitely! In the majority of cases, this whole thing is healthy. All that vision and mission stuff is integral to building good companies, and most people aren’t latent megalomaniacs. But I think it’s also a function of too much success - most entrepreneurs would be happy to IPO at a decent valuation (or get acquihired by some big company at a decent valuation) and either enjoy life or retire. But if you happen to wake up one morning as one of the richest men in the world, it can do things to your brain (like bring up latent racist anarcho capitalist tendencies from your youth as a privileged white in apartheid SA for example).
I find that fame and celebrity (especially at a relatively young age) contribute more to this kind of megalomania than money. I’ve heard several ultra-famous people describe having similar delusions of grandeur. However wealthy they are, the vast majority of tech founders don’t have Musk’s high public visibility and – more importantly regarding this discussion – don’t want it.
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I agree with you for the most part. Some of the nicest rich people I’ve met are tech founders, and I know enough wealthy people who aren’t megalomaniacs too.
Quite a lot of people simply, literally can’t afford to act like the assholes they really are.
Billionaires can.
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I did not claim it before… but I am now: Some of us in the industry knew going back as early as (and perhaps earlier) 2012. That was when Aerojet was shopping my then employer, Rocketdyne, for acquisition. Nervous Rocketdyne employees looking into jumping from a ship that included (yuck!) Aerojet, looked very closely at [read: researched] SpaceX, it being in Hawthorne, California and therefore not absolutely requiring that ship-jumpers move out of SoCal. That’s when we started learning of troublesome issues involving labor code violations, worker safety, and denying workers’ pay. So, for us, “jackass” since 2012… then officially upgraded to “fucking asshole” less than four years later when several very talented techs and engineers who ditched Rocketdyne for SpaceX returned to the fold with tales of woe while slaving there. So, I – and many, many others at the Rock – knew that Musk was a jackass over a decade ago.
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Sorry, not very much impressed with rich white dudes coming from an apartheid state whose family profited from violent forms of labor and failing upwards for his life…
It’s buying into the bullshit that is capitalism, and the neoliberal variant, shot through with white male supremacy.
Dudes with an ego trip has always been pretty fucking meaningless.
or, maybe they were ALWAYS like that… there is a pretty strong correlation between CEOs and psychopathy, after all. And capitalism as always depended upon people willing to throw away their humanity to make some cash… it’s what drove the slave trade, the industrialization of britain and the violent colonization of Ireland, India, Africa, and other places…
Why? Because he read sci-fi books warning about the privatization of space and thought it was a how to manual?
Which likely explains all the problems people have had with them… but hey, he’s a genius, right? They’re just naturally good at everything, so why not just let them do whatever the fuck they want to the world, whatever the ACTUAL damage is to the rest of humanity. We’re all worth hurting as long as ELON’s ego is served…
He can get fucked. I’m sick of people fucking our planet up to feed their god damn egos…
That.
No, not really. Because the goal is never the betterment of humanity, whatever they might say. It’s always about using shared resources to build up wealth at the expense of the rest of us. Always. It’s never been anything else. That’s capitalism at it’s core, and the current iteration is that times a million…
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