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.

While this is certainly true, he has also built the most agile company culture and lead those to several achievements previously labeled „impossible“:

-Landing rockets

-EVs that are better than any gas car

-Self Driving in 90% of situations with no premapping nor lidar nor radar.

So yea, he is great at marketing and a lot he does never works out. Yet he achieved more than any single person in history, maybe except Tesla himself.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

He achieved more than any single person in history.... That's the kind of cult of personality stuff that gets us to some weird dark places IMHO

Name the person that has done more

How do you want to frame achieve or do more? Because this list can be long in several different framings

I’d say brought forth by own power and/or leadership technologies that have in a bigger impact on society.

yes, person cults are big evil comitted by those who fall for it. Which are many /but/ the culted person itself.

... and its pretty much always wrong! Whenever i look closer, such hyped ones proof not half as achieving as is told. (while the real John Galts dont get hyped but fought)

Pretty big words of praise for Elon "I haven't created a single profit generating business without government help" Musk 🙃

He has objectively achieved what no other leader could 🤷

And if I’m not wrong the rocket technology that nobody else dared try and the approach to vision AI that nobody else dared try will have at least as much impact as AC technology by Tesla or the internet.

You can hate the guy all you want, but he can assemble world class teams and has the balls to pursue paths everyone else is too afraid to.

I agree with this. Elon gets subsidies on car sales but guess what, the oil and gas industry globally gets a trillion dollars in subsidies annually. I don’t like the subsidy argument.

Elon builds good tech, and he IS an engineer. Where he goes fatally wrong though is his insistence on building on the legacy model of centralized surveillance capitalism.