this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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I was certainly a fan of early Elon. A serious push to address one of the causes of climate change, opening up some patents to allow other companies build charging networks, a disruptive can-do attitude that spurred Old Automobile to actually start innovating in response.
There were doubts, but I think the turning point for me was when he attacked the divers working to get the Thai kids out of the cave, just because they thought his submarine ideas sucked.
He’d been doubling down on being an arsehole increasingly since then. I absolutely would have considered buying a Tesla in the old days, now? Absolutely not.
They innovated first. GM and BMW and so on put out electric cars in the 90's they just didn't market them well and the battery tech wasn't as good then meaning range was limited. Not to mention the lack of infrastructure for charging which I will admit that Tesla (not Elon) did push for and develop.
The Roadster was an ice breaker vehicle and I will fully admit that. Musk was involved but he wasn't the one who made those ~~fears~~ feats of battery engineering possible. He really does take credit for a lot of stuff just because he happened to be in the vicinity. I can understand being a Tesla fan. I can't really understand being an Elon Musk fan.
Yeah the Twitter nonsense has been such an absolute shitshow that it’s easy to forget he had in fact turned for the worse prior to it. I didn’t flag it at the time, consciously, but The Boring Company was another early signal. Rich guy is stuck in traffic, says: “screw this I’m digging tunnels, bitches!” And then they made and sold branded flamethrowers to raise seed money…? I mean WTF kind of college dorm antics are these?
He used to be so much more grounded, back in the days of talking about our carbon emissions as the dumbest experiment of all time, and how he started SpaceX to make our species interplanetary and better able to survive major disasters. I was all for that Elon. Then he had a kid with a musician and mashed his ass cheek into a keyboard to come up with a name. I think he’s deeply personally broken. I don’t know what hopes he had for his marriage and family or how badly that situation is fucked for him post-divorce but it seems like it could be pretty bad and fueling a lot of pain and malice not to mention likely substance abuse.