My perspective on Elon is very different from Lyn. To preface, I am not an Elon fanboy, don’t own any Tesla, SpaceX. Some random thoughts:

1. I don’t think it’s fair to criticize a person and call their work scams without them being there to defend themselves.

2. It’s easy to jump on the hate bandwagon if you are part of the same community and someone respected makes a strong statement, but that doesn’t make that statement true.

3. To me it makes no difference what you specialize in as a founder, engineering, marketing, a bit of both, or neither. The job of an organizational leader is to find people smarter than them to take charge of various aspects of a company. If you are the smartest person in the room and doing everything yourself, you’ve limited yourself and your company drastically. The fact that he is a better marketer shouldn’t matter in personal judgements.

4. From what I’ve read and heard, it seems Tesla was a tiny company when he took over. Even if he did “buy in” the fact that it is where it is today says something about his talent (whatever you decide that talent is). Subsidies or not, he is playing by the existing rules and avenues provided to him. This is what successful entrepreneurs do - figure out ways to make things work. I don’t understand why people are hung up on subsidies.

5. I heard in a video interview of someone senior at NASA being very grateful that SpaceX exists. The private nature of the company has brought costs down significantly for NASA. Was he bootstrapped by NASA? Sure. But getting govt. contracts and funding is sorta expected when you are building a spaceship company…

6. I don’t agree with Saife that his rockets are going nowhere. If the goal is truly to settle Mars, then naturally you’re going to do a lot of other things prior to actually doing that thing. It’s not cheap, it’s not immediately beneficial but such is the tradeoff for colonizing another planet. Whether he actually plans to do this or not is not something I would know, nor anyone here - it’s all just guesses.

7. Don’t know enough about Solar company, but if the only sin is facing bankruptcy, I don’t see how that can be used as an insult in any manner. Businesses fail all the time. Most businesses fail by default. There’s nothing atypical about this situation unless there are some details I am unaware of. Again, if solar company took advantage of subsidies, I don’t see how that’s a negative - in fact it’s the smart thing to do. The playbook is there, he’s just playing it.

8. Whether Elon actually bought Twitter for free speech is also anyone’s guess. I don’t think we can judge him on his actions with Twitter. What seems dumb to us, could actually be a smart long term move. I don’t know whether they are smart moves (something tells me they are not), but a lot of people who did seemingly weird things and were criticized at the time ended up succeeding. If I am not mistaken, Apple was mocked for the iPhone not having a physical keyboard. Many prominent figures in history were mocked for their thoughts and ideas only to be vindicated later.

9. Where he gets funding from seems irrelevant to me. Saudis, China… who cares? You are wearing clothes made by child labor, yet nobody is complaining. China and Saudis probably own half of America, where are the outcries about that?

10. Like many, I think he is screwing up big time with Doge. I think he’s wrong by not embracing Bitcoin, wrong with his Twitter moves. Something tells me he is acting out of desperation - just doing what he think is best, whether that’s the right thing or not.

Lastly, we don’t know what kind of pressure he’s under, what his family life is like, so many unknowns to understand why someone does something. There may be only 1 person here qualified who understands what kind of pressure can be on them at that level but it’s certainly not me or you. It’s easy to be on the sidelines pretending like we all know the right answers, but a different thing entirely living it and making the calls as you go.

It’s very likely that Nostr dominates everything long term - this I am very bullish on, but I also don’t wish the worst even for my enemies. I hope Elon finds a way and doesn’t lose everything in the process. Twitter has been a great connecting tool for many years and has made so many people much more aware of what’s happening in the world. My hope is that Twitter somehow integrates with Nostr in some form, even as a baby step, before everyone else in the legacy media catches on.