A long time ago he did useful things before the brain rot set in.
Yeah, he made a Space Invaders clone when he was 11 or 12. Since then, though, he’s just been a rich guy paying more competent people to do stuff and then taking credit for it himself.
Just because someone is a twat now doesn’t mean we should erase all their past achievements.
Not really. He just bought his way into all the positions of power he held. He didn’t create paypal, he didn’t create Tesla, he didn’t create the boring company, he didn’t create SpaceX, he didn’t create Twitter. The only marginally useful thing he did was throw money at things.
I completely agree with you. I’m not defending Elon here, but I want to expand on your conclusion.
Electric car companies from the last 20ish years:
Polestar
Fiskar
Faraday
Karma
Rivian
Tesla
Canoo
Only Tesla is profitable. The others are defunct, funded by private equity and operating at a loss, owned or partly owned by a different company, or are basically stillborn (not dead, but not doing much of anything). Even if his only contribution is throwing money at Tesla, that seemed to be enough to keep them going until they could stand on their own. Keep in mind, all these other companies had money thrown at them too.
I think the same goes for space x. I’ll give the bastard credit where it’s due: he didn’t stop throwing money at Tesla and SpaceX even after all logic and reason said he should stop, and now they’re successful. Maybe he had vision, maybe he got deep into a K-hole and had a vision, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else would have kept them afloat by any means possible. If anything, legacy auto, Boeing, etc were waiting for Tesla and Space X to fail so they could buy them cheap and absorb their talent and tech.
So no, he didn’t found these companies, and I don’t believe a single word of his claims that he contributed in any meaningful way to their engineering or tech, but I don’t think they’d exist in their current successful state without his money.
To put this another way, he deserves recognition for his stubborn insistence that these companies should continue to exist.
Along the same line of thinking, Twitter’s current state is 100% his doing. He was very public about exactly what he was doing after he was forced to carry through on his lies and buy it. He very publicly killed that company, and is using his money to fuel the necromancy keeping it going.
I can only hope that SpaceX and Tesla eventually find themselves out from under his influence.
The only thing I might buy him doing is contributing to the Zip2 code but my guess would still be he just paid for his buddy’s pizzas and called it a partnership.
I used to believe he was at least a successful PR huckster but even that it seems more likely now that he was paying a firm for that.
I knew something was up when a puff piece on SpaceX came out and this idiot journalist is AMAZED that this super genius CEO/Engineer/Breeder got his shoes dirty to slap some epoxy on something that just “randomly” cracked in testing before a horde of journalists took a guided tour.
Like, for real, at least make him pretend to do math for engineering cred before you suck his dick.
A long time ago he did useful things before the brain rot set in.
Just because someone is a twat now doesn’t mean we should erase all their past achievements.
Yeah, he made a Space Invaders clone when he was 11 or 12. Since then, though, he’s just been a rich guy paying more competent people to do stuff and then taking credit for it himself.
Nobody’s doing that. I listed all of them above.
that’s not how lemmy works.
No. He didn’t. There is no such thing as a “good” capitalist parasite.
Not really. He just bought his way into all the positions of power he held. He didn’t create paypal, he didn’t create Tesla, he didn’t create the boring company, he didn’t create SpaceX, he didn’t create Twitter. The only marginally useful thing he did was throw money at things.
I completely agree with you. I’m not defending Elon here, but I want to expand on your conclusion.
Electric car companies from the last 20ish years:
Polestar Fiskar Faraday Karma Rivian Tesla Canoo
Only Tesla is profitable. The others are defunct, funded by private equity and operating at a loss, owned or partly owned by a different company, or are basically stillborn (not dead, but not doing much of anything). Even if his only contribution is throwing money at Tesla, that seemed to be enough to keep them going until they could stand on their own. Keep in mind, all these other companies had money thrown at them too.
I think the same goes for space x. I’ll give the bastard credit where it’s due: he didn’t stop throwing money at Tesla and SpaceX even after all logic and reason said he should stop, and now they’re successful. Maybe he had vision, maybe he got deep into a K-hole and had a vision, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else would have kept them afloat by any means possible. If anything, legacy auto, Boeing, etc were waiting for Tesla and Space X to fail so they could buy them cheap and absorb their talent and tech.
So no, he didn’t found these companies, and I don’t believe a single word of his claims that he contributed in any meaningful way to their engineering or tech, but I don’t think they’d exist in their current successful state without his money.
To put this another way, he deserves recognition for his stubborn insistence that these companies should continue to exist.
Along the same line of thinking, Twitter’s current state is 100% his doing. He was very public about exactly what he was doing after he was forced to carry through on his lies and buy it. He very publicly killed that company, and is using his money to fuel the necromancy keeping it going.
I can only hope that SpaceX and Tesla eventually find themselves out from under his influence.
But he did create lots of entertainment as a byproduct of all of this. In this regard, Trump is his worst competitor.
The only thing I might buy him doing is contributing to the Zip2 code but my guess would still be he just paid for his buddy’s pizzas and called it a partnership.
I used to believe he was at least a successful PR huckster but even that it seems more likely now that he was paying a firm for that.
You mean he used to have a better PR team, before he got rich enough to not need one.
I think that you are accurate but in the case of Elon I think that he always was a fraud and we just found out the last 3 years
What? I’ve been calling him a cunt since PayPal
I knew something was up when a puff piece on SpaceX came out and this idiot journalist is AMAZED that this super genius CEO/Engineer/Breeder got his shoes dirty to slap some epoxy on something that just “randomly” cracked in testing before a horde of journalists took a guided tour.
Like, for real, at least make him pretend to do math for engineering cred before you suck his dick.