Eh.. I don't get the sudden hate for Elon, honestly, I don't know what's to dislike. People these days bother me, they want to pull apart everyone else, go try do something awesome yourself.
The narcissism, the childlike behavior of arguing by insulting, constant condescension of everyone else, the incessant lying, deception, and misleading about the company
and
the cult of worship around him.
> People these days bother me, they want to pull apart everyone else, go try do something awesome yourself.
reply
I do not think people criticizing Elon musk are criticizing him because of his success. There are thousands of successful people, even in our age/era/generation that are not criticized as such.
Do you really care that much? Everything in this world is about tradeoffs. So tell me, if you had a magic button that would erase this narcissistic, childlike, condescending cult leader from history as if he was never born (or retired to the Bahamas forever after selling PayPal), would you press it? If you would, then in my opinion you are a spiteful and/or neurotic person with a distorted sense of scale. If you wouldn't, then all the factors you mentioned above are really unimportant compared to the results produced by Elon, and you know it. This is not to say that his behavior shouldn't be improved in an ideal world (we don't live in one, though). This is to say that Elon is more than worth the tradeoff. At this rate of crappy behavior observed he's basically a steal.
Any time someone achieves significant popularity, there will always be a large group of people posting long essays on the internet about how that person doesn't deserve it for whatever reason. I see it as a side effect of the crab in a bucket mentality.
Sudden?
There have been plenty of warning signs over the years. By the time recent shitstorm(s) started I already had a strongly negative opinion of the guy.
The article is annoying, because of the "why" minisections. Why should we defend him? Because he tries. Because we want to go to mars. Because he redefines ambition. Because he is a superhero. Because everyone makes mistakes. Because he understands. One at least mentions the cars, another the production line improvement he made. But a lot of why they defend him is simply wishing for visionaries. Musks actual achievements are far more modest than what they think he can perform.
>He is under attack. For tweeting the wrong thing, for not making enough cars, for appearing unstable. Some of the criticisms have merit. Much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg. But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity?
Yeesh, what an opening paragraph. This, and the rest of the articles, seem to focus on the idea that Elon Musk isn't just a slightly more philantropic than average billionaire with a very good PR department, albeit one he's doing his best to undo the work of.
As one of the articles rightly states, Musk provided some funding for these projects, but is at best one person among tens of thousands actually responsible for _any_ of the achievements of "his" companies - scare quotes intentional, for between the loans and government grants it starts to become unclear what, other than the cult of personality which evidently no longer serves the needs of relatively mature and legitimate enterprises, he actually brings to the table here, beyond being an ideas guy who can afford to throw money behind getting external funding to try things.
Whether he deserves the shit he gets talked about him is a matter for debate, but it's very much a reaction against nonsense like one of the articles here comparing him to Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, two comic-book superheroes defined by superhuman brilliance and superhuman finances, while Musk clearly can have only one of those things.
At the end of the day, though - do we need articles defending a man with a net worth of twenty billion dollars from the average citizen--who's net worth is closer to twenty _thousand_ dollars--'s criticisms? No, we don't. Whatever criticisms might be had, they're clearly not stopping him from doing whatever he likes.
If you remove Elon Musk from the story, does SpaceX exist? Tesla? Do we still have self-landing, re-usable rockets? Are car companies still rushing to build electric vehicles in 2018?
The individual companies likely not, but it's not like those are the only companies doing these things. Human achievements come from standing on the shoulders of giants, not from individual supermen - we see this through history time and time again, with so many groundbreaking discoveries being independantly made at about the same time simply because previous discoveries had made them possible.
This is not to diminish the minds of those who discovered them, of course, but it is to _temper_ the hero worship. What SpaceX is doing is not enabled by an individual superman, as the comparison with Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark would suggest, but by allocating resources to something made possible by the work of hundreds of thousands of people.
Remove one man from the picture there and that work still exists. Just as other companies are doing the same things _now_, because they are possible _now_, they would be with any individual person removed, regardless of who that person was. The details would be different - without Musk, it would be some other company doing this, without the lead designer, the things themselves would look different, without the lead engineer some components would make different tradeoffs, et cetera - but without Elon Musk, everyone working at SpaceX would still exist, everyone working at Tesla would still exist, and everyone working at other companies doing the exact same things would still exist. We could be a little behind, for sure, the hero worship could well have translated into inspiration for some, or even a lot of, people, but that doesn't make the man himself necessary for any of those things.
I worry that saying things like this comes across as attacking the man, which it absolutely isn't. Without Einstein, we would still have made the same realisations, collectively, eventually. Other people were working on the same things at the same time. Without Edison, we would still have the electric lightbulb, entirely likely invented by, hm, who...
Oh right, Tesla. The company itself is named after one of the most blatant examples of this phenomenon. Musk may even understand - he certainly does, he's clearly not dumb - that he isn't a unique superman. That doesn't make him "bad", but it does mean that we really don't need to waste thousands of words on defending his obviously harmful actions under the theory of "we have to let him do and say bad things or he might stop doing good things too."
>At the end of the day, though - do we need articles [...]? No, we don't.
Who's "we" and who are you to state that articles should or should not have been written? I don't understand this mindset. I understand disagreeing with the thesis of a piece of writing but I don't understand the notion that a piece of writing "didn't need to have been written."
Readit News
The narcissism, the childlike behavior of arguing by insulting, constant condescension of everyone else, the incessant lying, deception, and misleading about the company
and
the cult of worship around him.
> People these days bother me, they want to pull apart everyone else, go try do something awesome yourself. reply
I do not think people criticizing Elon musk are criticizing him because of his success. There are thousands of successful people, even in our age/era/generation that are not criticized as such.
2) selling vapor ware (full self driving)
3) stock price manipulation
Yeesh, what an opening paragraph. This, and the rest of the articles, seem to focus on the idea that Elon Musk isn't just a slightly more philantropic than average billionaire with a very good PR department, albeit one he's doing his best to undo the work of.
As one of the articles rightly states, Musk provided some funding for these projects, but is at best one person among tens of thousands actually responsible for _any_ of the achievements of "his" companies - scare quotes intentional, for between the loans and government grants it starts to become unclear what, other than the cult of personality which evidently no longer serves the needs of relatively mature and legitimate enterprises, he actually brings to the table here, beyond being an ideas guy who can afford to throw money behind getting external funding to try things.
Whether he deserves the shit he gets talked about him is a matter for debate, but it's very much a reaction against nonsense like one of the articles here comparing him to Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, two comic-book superheroes defined by superhuman brilliance and superhuman finances, while Musk clearly can have only one of those things.
At the end of the day, though - do we need articles defending a man with a net worth of twenty billion dollars from the average citizen--who's net worth is closer to twenty _thousand_ dollars--'s criticisms? No, we don't. Whatever criticisms might be had, they're clearly not stopping him from doing whatever he likes.
This is not to diminish the minds of those who discovered them, of course, but it is to _temper_ the hero worship. What SpaceX is doing is not enabled by an individual superman, as the comparison with Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark would suggest, but by allocating resources to something made possible by the work of hundreds of thousands of people.
Remove one man from the picture there and that work still exists. Just as other companies are doing the same things _now_, because they are possible _now_, they would be with any individual person removed, regardless of who that person was. The details would be different - without Musk, it would be some other company doing this, without the lead designer, the things themselves would look different, without the lead engineer some components would make different tradeoffs, et cetera - but without Elon Musk, everyone working at SpaceX would still exist, everyone working at Tesla would still exist, and everyone working at other companies doing the exact same things would still exist. We could be a little behind, for sure, the hero worship could well have translated into inspiration for some, or even a lot of, people, but that doesn't make the man himself necessary for any of those things.
I worry that saying things like this comes across as attacking the man, which it absolutely isn't. Without Einstein, we would still have made the same realisations, collectively, eventually. Other people were working on the same things at the same time. Without Edison, we would still have the electric lightbulb, entirely likely invented by, hm, who...
Oh right, Tesla. The company itself is named after one of the most blatant examples of this phenomenon. Musk may even understand - he certainly does, he's clearly not dumb - that he isn't a unique superman. That doesn't make him "bad", but it does mean that we really don't need to waste thousands of words on defending his obviously harmful actions under the theory of "we have to let him do and say bad things or he might stop doing good things too."
Who's "we" and who are you to state that articles should or should not have been written? I don't understand this mindset. I understand disagreeing with the thesis of a piece of writing but I don't understand the notion that a piece of writing "didn't need to have been written."