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.

Nice one. Brave and mostly true I think. Was discussing this with friend recently. He’s an amazing businessman/Entrepreneur, but he’s no genius, as he’s made out to be. Genius type people are different and you know when you are in the presence of one.

I am most impressed with space-x but much of that technology was developed in the 60’s and then languished for 40+ years… it took someone special to resurrect, bring it together with todays advances, and disrupt the crony capitalism in that sector.

I agree star link is super important. A shrewd move, which will become increasingly important on the world scene … as will be Twitter if he can salvage it.

More disruption more competition more innovation more decentralization is the only way out.

Stepping down from the Friday night soap box. 📦

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Tbf he's never called himself a genius. Other people call him a genius. He's never claimed himself that he is a genius.

I don't think it's fair to criticise someone for not holding up to standards they didn't even set for themselves.