He has two fanbases: 1) teenagers who are also gooning & are impressed by cheating at Diablo, and 2) CEOs who are mostly not online, are narcissists who pay very little attention to anything but themselves, and are thus out of the loop enough not to know about the gooning.
you are dramatically underestimating how depraved the Silicon Valley investor class is
Well yeah good point 😅 but I was talking about the global business class as a whole, which is who is writing/reading the puff pieces about him. Most of those guys don’t know what’s happening on the Internet. I assume the Silicon Valley/VC CEOs are well aware but are also gooning.
And, say, fifteen years ago when he first became somewhat famous, it was because “electric cars” were like the coolest and most virtuous way to get super-rich, and that’s all people knew about the guy.
I remember reading my first profile of Musk (New Yorker?) which went out of its way to give him his due while making it clear he was a fatuous twit and a bad boss. I was “ugh, guess I never have to think about THAT jerk again.” It was like 2008.
😬😬😬 I edited a pretty bad book maybe 10 years ago that was about how to enhance your business leadership style & it called Elon “visionary”. I was like, I suspect this is not going to age well, but whatever, this guy probably isn’t going to do anything more terrible than accumulate more $ and die…
I'm not somebody who's a TOTAL cynic about "business guys"; I used to be but I try to be an adult these days, heh. But "guy who lucks into something at the ground floor and makes it big" is ALWAYS retroactively a "visionary". It's just survivor bias and laziness.
When people talk (or used to talk) about the "visionary" things Musk says or does, a lot of us just think "yeah okay I read a bunch of sci-fi books when I was seventeen too."
This is unfortunately why many of us didn’t take him seriously! I thought he’d spend his life wanking off, buying expensive toys and talking nonsense about colonizing Mars. I think he would’ve stuck with that & not ramped up to trying to control geopolitics if not for the drugs.
Well, that and all the edgy-techno-right-wing politics enthusiasts sucking up to him online. He was like "wow people like me AND they have exciting ideas!"
True. He is one of the most pathetically addicted to praise people that has ever existed on the planet.
I can think of another one! But that's no coincidence, I guess.
It’s what they bonded over, I guess? Their bromance lasted longer than made any rational sense, but maybe the fact they were (initially) getting a lot of mutual ass-kissing from the Venn Diagram overlapping portion of their respective cults helped keep it going as long as it did.
Yeah I used to think that word meant people thought someone was visionary about y’know actual ideas & products, but turns out it’s C-suite code speak for: visionary about what will make a lot of money. Who knew.
(And most “visionaries” only even pull off the “make a lot of money” bit once or at most twice in their career & spend the rest of the time flopping hard, but once or twice is enough to impress some people I guess.)
…I’ll leave it in, whatever. The book authors were difficult in general and it was a minor point not worth quibbling over. Haunts me to this day. To be fair I don’t think anyone could have completely predicted this guy would go from average super-rich jerk to ketamine-fueled government destroyer.
As I was just saying about JD Vance, Musk was clearly a textbook case of "getting radicalized online," just as a grown-ass adult not a lonely incel boy.