Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.
You don’t become a billionaire by caring about people.
And I believe he was raised wealthy too. Extreme wealth fundamentally disconnects you from most people.
He was a pampered prince among priviliged white children. In white supremacist Pretoria south africa. So he’s doubly detached and dysfunctional.
Emerald mine with heavy labor exploitation was involved, too, IIRC
It was, that he denied and even put a reward up saying if people could find the proof.
Then his dad came forward saying it was true.
lol threw his own kid under the bus for a reward he didn’t need
Lmao. Did he give his dad the reward?
He corroborated it himself in the press at one point, before a lot of the bad press about him got out and the mine story started to become a liability for him.
And yet millions of naive people around the world still love that psychopath.
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They’re basically money junkies. They never got past puberty because their only drive is to secure more for themselves, which is like pre-proto-primate logic.
It’s nothing different than the fent addicts I see on the daily.
If Elon is on steroids, he’s using them wrong.
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Okay that’s a little hyperbolic. There are penty of juicing bodybuilders that are the nicest people on the planet. Unless musk is blasting trenbalone of course then sure.
I agree, but I want to imagine a world where you could.
One really contradicts the other.
A person can only generate so much money by not caring about other people. If they cared about other people, they would spend their money to improve something instead of hoarding it for themselves or distribute it evenly between themselves and those they exploit.
An empathetic person would know that they have no right to have that much money.
They would be able to see that they were lucky in an exploitive system and they would understand that their work is not worth more than the work of other people.
You can’t be rich and be a good person at the same time, because money is generated by exploiting labor and you can only generate more money by exploiting more work.
In the very end this money belongs to the people who carried Elon Musk through his life. He did not invent those rockets. He did not program those cars. He did not dig the lithium for the batteries under extremely dangerous conditions out of the ground while being paid peanuts. What he contributed to his wealth is the willingness to exploit other people.
If only meritocracies were real
So, a psychopath.
Could also just be quite a bit further along the autism spectrum.
Hard to say for sure, but he’s never struck me as sincerely psychopathic. Narcissistic sure, but not really psychopathic.
Autistic people feel empathy.
I mean he profits from the suffering of others. I don’t see how that’s not psychopathic
Because that’s not the definition of psychopath.
Most of us profit from the suffering of others. Does that make us all psychopaths?
In any case, I would probably classify him as evil, regardless of whether he’s a psychopath.
The three core traits of psychopathy:
• Arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style: impression management or superficial charm, inflated and grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying/deceit, and manipulation for personal gain.
Everything about this describes Elon.
• Deficient affective experience: lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (coldness and unemotionality), callousness and lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Several people have described this about him, especially his first wife. This article is about this. And he routinely blames others for negative things that happen. He called a professional diver a pedophile for not liking his stupid submarine idea to rescue those kids from that cave, and doubled and tripled down on it when called out. Again, not accepting responsibility for his own idea being dumb, he had to deflect and slander someone else.
•Impulsive and irresponsible lifestyle: impulsivity, sensation-seeking and risk-taking, irresponsible and unreliable behavior, financially parasitic lifestyle and lack of realistic, long-term goals.
This is a man that will do monumentally stupid shit on a whim, which has landed him with fines from the SEC. Like saying he was taking Tesla private, that he already secured funding, etc. None of which happened. He ended up buying Twitter based on an impulse tweet and got stuck with it after signing the contract without doing any due diligence at all. He has thousands of engineers behind him that make his impulse claims come true a lot. And several of them across companies have come out and said that they didn’t know about features until Elon just tweeted them out.
By pretty much all metrics he is a psychopath. He just has the money for an army of people to keep him in line enough.
This is not a good descriptor of paychopathy. Psychopaths are essentially people with antisocial personality disorder, you can look up the DSM or ICD 10 entry for that, having those traits is not enough to secure a psychopath label.
The ICD-10 is out of date. The current revision is ICD-11, which collapsed all personality disorders into one single “Personality Disorder” diagnosis. Antisocial Personality Disorder doesn’t even exist anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-11#Personality_disorder
Psychopathy is a trait of Personality Disorder. Not a standalone diagnosis.
ICD isn’t a diagnostic manual. It’s just for medical record and bill coding.
Most of us don’t willingly profit from the exploitation of others
The dude fired a bunch of people, never paid their severance and refuses to communicate with them. The dude is a fucking complete sociopath. He lies to investors about deadlines, he lies about the potential of his technology to consumers, and he lies to his own staff.
You can stop simping for him, he doesn’t want to ride your dick, mate.
What was this firing people?
Hmm yeah I’ve never been able to decide if his lying is because he’s actually delusional or if he is a sociopath.
I mean either way I think he’s an idiot. But I’m not sure of the root cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem
Autistic people feel empathy. Source - am autistic, feel (pretty strong and sometimes unpleasant) empathy.
Oh for sure. But an autistic psychopath may not.
Definitely not equating the two. I’m well aware that autistic people are often more empathetic, not less.
But some of his mannerisms just strike me as somewhat autistic. He doesn’t strike me as a straight psychopath.
People on the spectrum generally do feel empathy it is of a different sort than people who are NT.
Sociopath, big difference
Flawed genius. The flaw being he isn’t a genius but is rather a fucking idiot with a silver spoon.
Yeah he’s the modern day version of Edison
They Both stole inventions the employees invented and claimed to have invented stuff that had already been invented
americans say it with me “Edison did not invent the light bulb”
Ever see the actual founders of Tesla talk? They laid out the whole Tesla plan. Elon takes those talking points and everyone thinks he made it.
The irony of him buying a company called Tesla and taking credit for their work would be seen as too on the nose if it was a plot point in a movie.
As much as I hate him he is kind of a marketing genius. Tesla is such a big company, not because they are superior cars, but because Elon marketed himself as a visionary of the future, got a large fan base of techbros then marketed Tesla stock to those tech bros and finance bros as a great investment because his super genius future cars are going to change the entire world.
And the investors don’t care its all hyperbole, false promises and market buzzwords, as long as the line goes up they continue to invest, thus making Musk richer.
its easy when you can dump money into not just ad companies but entire news agencies.
not smart, rich
Marketing geniuses are people who take real assets of a brand and find just the right angle to connect with the masses. They create sustainable growth and generate almost endless demand for their products and services.
Elon Musk is a grifter and a charlatan who fed mediocre journalists with empty promises to regurgitate to investors. Even Elizabeth Holmes was able to pull that off.
When journalists saw through him, he switched to lying to cryptobros on social media. Then that well dried up as well, and now he’s pandering to insane alt-righters.
Every audience is less wealthy and less relevant than the previous one.
Just like all charlatans, he’s getting cornered by his own lies and unrealistic expectations. And he’s running out of options.
tl;dr Con men are not marketing geniuses, they are con men.
All marketing is just a grift, whose point is to make more money off a product. And Elon becoming one of the richest people on earth defacto proves that his lying, empty promises crypto pump and dump and buzzword meme/shitpost marketing worked. And Musk drones are still clamouring for his poorly made death machines he called cars, and space x flights are booked out years in advance (due mostly due Shotwell and the engineers incredible success way more than anything Musk has done, but still) so by any measure of capitalist success he’s doing well, he’s just not ethical in any way.
You call the man a marketing genius while simultaneously believing all marketing is just a grift. Why would you use such an honorable term to refer to him instead of just calling him a genius grifter, then?
My man, just don’t use the word marketing for things that are not marketing. It’s not hard, specially if you believe they’re synonyms. Use grifting instead.
You think there is any honour or adoration in anything I said?
As much as I hate him he is kind of a marketing genius
There is.
Then you are mistaken
We need a “No Shit Sherlock” tag
I knew this when he laughed at a deer that drowned in a backyard pool when he was in a pewdiepie youtube video.
Obvious sociopath called a sociopath. More at 11.
No need to follow him for 3 years to see that he has no empathy. Just hear him speak for a couple of minutes.
Could have seen that coming with how his estranged daughter feels about him
Could have seen that coming by looking at Errol. Elon claims he’s not close to his father. But he acts like him in a lot of ways. Odd right.
Unlimited money does that to people
Because he is a clown
Sweet Walter Isaacson is a brilliant biographer. I bet Elon flips his shit when he writes the truth…
That’s most of the people on Twitter.
As a non native speaker i will just say that “having a feel for emotions” sounds like shit english to me and i dont have high hopes for books written by people that use that phrase.
Yeah, why didn’t he simply write “Elon dont have mood for #vibes”?
So you would also enjoy such gems as dont have taste for palatableness or an comprehension for cognizance? Really dont know if my grip of the language is better or worse than yours. Feel for emotions is about as smooth as two lawnchairs chained together being thrown down a flight of stairs and could be repaced by “lacks empathy” or just “is a horrrible cunt” or has no mood for the feeling of emotions and vibes as you like to put it.
I’m not sure what you mean by your comment, but I was just making a joke about how dumb people’s language on social media is these days
Well i thought you meant it as a critizism of my remark because of that i elaborated:
having a feel for emotions taste for palatableness comprehension for cognizance
is essentially describing a noun with the verb of the same meaning and unnecessary blathering you could just say
has empathy has refined taste is intelligent
and that is why i think the author of the autobiography probably is a bad writer.
Well, the biographer is Walter isaacson and I doubt you’re going to find many people more qualified to write a biography than him.
