Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.

He is a genius marketer but he also has an ability (or his teams) to miraculously deliver and save himself of his lies. I remember 2018/2019 and Tesla on the verge of running out of cash, the production nightmares etc. He lied, as you said, repeatedly, with taking private 420, with robotaxis everywhere in 2 years thanks to fully autonomous vehicle he knew were impossible, he raised money on those lies, and was successful at solving the issues (probably thanks to the money he raised on those lies)

Musk is certainly selling narratives and lies but he is also, certainly also quite good at getting things done. There is an issue with regulator and justice punishing only the liars who fail. Basically, if Elizabeth Holmes had in the end found a business model for Theranos, the fake tests would have been forgotten. As long as you don’t punish liars who succeed, despite their success, you will continue seeing Holmes, Maddoffes, Bankman-Fried the guy from Fyre Festival etc. This fake it till you make it ethos is a bad one

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Discussion

Indeed, look at the products from Tesla and Spacex. They're mindblowingly good and far ahead of the competition.

Steve Jobs was maybe not the most pleasant dude too, but I'd buy his stock anyday.

Also, manufacturing is pretty hard, managing all supply chains. Boeing also completely failed on the Starliner timeline, but who talks about that CEO? And what about legacy car manufacturers, are they all scammers too suddenly?

No. But Elon is far more aggressive in selling to investors things that don’t exist and are not feasible short term. Then he is able to deliver some of them longer term, and this is impressive but he should not lie so aggressively and the regulator should pursue him more aggressively when he does imo

Agree that he presents ideas before they're done. He's not like Steve Jobs who didn't present prototypes. Though I kinda like Elon does that. I like to watch the progress they're making on rockets, cars and robots. I would miss that otherwise.