Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ May 26 2022 10:43am)

Wealthy guy who does his best to stay in the public spotlight has detractors. Oh wow. Such demonizing. He's also a billionaire. If that's not incentive enough to do what he does we're kinda fucked as a species.

You are correct. I misremembered. (Discord has a search feature. From:thesnipa + "engineer") To be clear, I don't think Elon is an idiot. I'd say he's above average in some respects. Hell, it'd be hard to have his upbringing and not end up above average. He was extremely privileged and went to the best schools, and has been surrounded by lots of competent people. It'd be hard not to pick a lot of things up from osmosis in that environment.

But I don't think he contributes a ton in his engineering ability. He probably even has okay business accumen and experience. I just see his early companies where he did more harm than good in the product, his current failures in things like Solar City and the inevitable failure of StarLink to get economic viability, and his constant proposals of physically impossible shit, and conclude that he's not a major asset in terms of engineering. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe those dumb things he proposes are purely for the sake of keeping in the spotlight. I can't read his mind.


The only reason this is worth pointing out is because Elon specifically tries to cultivate himself as an everyman who made it on the back of his hard work and extreme brain power. If he was just a dude who owned a company and didn't actively try to build that image of himself none of what I said would be controversial IMO

Quote (Sh00p @ May 26 2022 12:00pm)

Not expecting much from someone who would definitely muder 10+ children instead of giving up thier guns.

"But officer, they were all vaccinated!"

Quote (thesnipa @ May 26 2022 12:12pm)

The largest gap i see here is you keep using phrases like "tries to cultivate himself", which i dont agree with. i think his fans do that, maybe even PR firms, but personally i see him as fairly humble and realistic when he's not memeing. i know a lot of people have a hard time separating the two, but being a vet of internet forums for decades i think we both have the ability to separate that most of the time.

as to demonizing i think we just traffic different spaces, on redit and twitter the dude is HATED. not to trump levels for sure, but he's attacked fervently at every turn. i cant post links publicly but if you're curious lmk ill pm u, ive read like 10 this morning lol.

Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ May 26 2022 12:23pm)

I agree he has detractors but you said

"look who's leading the charge into the future, China. we fucked up by investing in them, we gave them all the tools to replace us, and they will. eventually it wont be a situation where we even have leverage to ask them to change, we'll beg for crumbs. they're going to colonize space first, because we'll squander our head start by demonizing the Elon's of our society, as we're doing now both with space and electric cars"

We aren't going to miss out on electric cars and colonizing Mars because people on Twitter get mad at Musk. He's a billionaire. If that isn't enough to work through the Twitter mob I don't know what is.

Musk just recently said 15 minutes of good thinking is worth a million dollars. He actively cultivates his public image as an incredibly intelligent wonderchild and that's been the case since the 90s when he insisted on revolutionizing banking.

I'll look for more examples. I'm on my phone.

Quote (Sh00p @ May 26 2022 10:00am)

Not expecting much from someone who would definitely muder 10+ children instead of giving up thier guns.

"But officer, they were all vaccinated!"

Quote (fender @ May 26 2022 12:46pm)

Quote (fender @ May 26 2022 10:46am)

Quote (IgoSoHard @ May 26 2022 12:58pm)