this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Enough Musk Spam
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I'm in a similar boat. Seems like there was a big marketing / branding push for him to be seen that way in those years, or maybe it was just media doing media stuff (regurgitating and iterating on successful content). And then I stopped paying attention to him, and then he made weird ass comments during that cave rescue situation, and then it's been just rapid fire incidents ranging from embarrassingly childish to shockingly brazen leading to today. Apologies if I've misremembered the timeline, but I seem to remember that as my "wait wtf" turning point with him.
Went from thinking "huh, smart driven guy working on difficult problems few others will" to realizing he's among the most threatening forces working against humanity today, while also a thin-skinned man-baby. Pretty crazy swing. If he'd have kept his crazy under wraps...like...just literally didn't spew it on social media constantly, that one change alone...we'd probably never have realized.
That was him not talking. Media guys can paint a unicorn from everyone when they are static. Or, in Bezos's case, he just have no media coverage like many other rich people.
Musk being Musk publicly is what switched him from the Iron Man type figure to a deranged aged imbecile on drugs talking in zoomer slang. If you want to cringe a lot, watch a meme review with him: https://youtu.be/oJHb5a3ggzE He's that stupid and vocal no one can save him.
You're not wrong, I just don't think it's the whole story. I really do think there was a media campaign of different kinds (podcasts and other "intellectual" media) for a period to create an intentional public image. I mean maybe his rise in the public awareness was organic, I just don't think so anymore.
I am fairly sure a campaign like that was used to elevate JD Vance, there was also this Eric Weinstein guy that was appearing a lot in stuff I saw for a while, those two both closely associated with Peter Thiel. I can probably come up with other examples. I think Musk had a similar "look how smart and great this guy is, everyone!" campaign, and I think the difference is Musk had enough money that he could afford not to rely solely on that image, and he had enough ego that he could never not be himself online for long.
I do believe that he changed. He was always a narcissistic sociopath, but he was also invested in advancing humanity.
And then came his hate for the US government when they tried to tell him what to do, repeatedly, and his obsession with Twitter.
Watch the video I posted. I used to think that, but I now think that it was always just a shtick he was doing for self-aggrandizement. You'll notice that he totally abandoned it, with prejudice, as soon as he could become more self-aggrandized by being a super-MAGA guy than he could be being a super-climate guy.
Ketamine is also a hell of a drug