General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAround what year did Musk start to become "odd"?
At one point he was just the average, pseudo-libertarian entrepreneur. When did he start to become a conspiracy nut?
Hekate
(90,202 posts)
.and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Of course theres also, Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
BigmanPigman
(51,432 posts)The way he has been getting sucked into conspiracy theories is alarming. I guess intelligence vs common sense is the answer. I don't know if he is corrupted by power or just "plain nutty" at this point.
JI7
(89,182 posts)but it just started to come out more.
JohnSJ
(91,965 posts)Dorian Gray
(13,469 posts)He's the prototypical privileged man who thinks he's smarter than he is.
Johonny
(20,684 posts)He used to be good at public image. Now he's lost his ability to censor himself. Which is odd as much of his wealth was based on hyping his public image.
allegorical oracle
(2,357 posts)Wikipedia:
Musk voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[365] In the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Musk endorsed candidate Andrew Yang and expressed support for his proposed universal basic income.[366] He also endorsed Kanye West's 2020 presidential campaign.[367] He said he voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.[365]
In 2022, Musk said that he could "no longer support" the Democrats because they are the "party of division & hate",[368][369] and wrote a tweet encouraging "independent-minded voters" to vote Republican in the 2022 U.S. elections, which was an outlier among social media executives who typically avoid partisan political advocacy.[370][371] He also leaned towards supporting Republican Ron DeSantis in the 2024 U.S. presidential election if DeSantis were a candidate.[372][373]
JHB
(37,132 posts)After all, the SpaceX people had to create an entire "Musk management" apparatus to keep him from interfering too much.
I think mainly his "odd"ness had previously mainly manifested within Tesla and his other companies. His junk had some covering, which got stripped away when he got envious of Bezos and Zuckerberg and decided to buy a media empire. By acquiring Twitter he let all of his junk hang out in the open.
Sympthsical
(8,936 posts)He was always odd, but the visibility and media obsession with Twitter got it all ramped up. He got addicted to the attention, because it's a real time dopamine hit.
He's not unusual in this.
There are a great many people I simply will not read on Twitter, because it will ruin my positive regard for them. Like Neal deGrasse Tyson. I'm an amateur astronomer, obsessed with the topic, watch every cosmology and astrophysics documentary I can get my hands on. Loved this guy back in the 2000s when he and a bunch of other astronomers did all those dinky little shows on History Channel.
Then he got famous. Then he got on Twitter.
It's as if smug self-regard took on human form. I don't know how someone can act like - and apparently believe they are - the smartest person on the Internet, but he managed it. Then he started turning science into shallow, pseudo-spiritual profundity.
I had to tap out. If I hear his voice, I will throw something.
There are others like that. Scientists, actors, academics. People whose work I've enjoyed who then get on social media and reveal they're really very dim, shallow, empty attention seekers outside of their area of expertise.
It becomes a very "Never meet your heroes" kind of situation.
No, no, I prefer to leave the mystery and pretend I didn't watch a brilliant historian navel-gaze about how hard his life is because something happened at a Starbucks. Newp newp.
Mad_Machine76
(24,355 posts)ProfessorGAC
(64,425 posts)Like you, I watch every doc I can. Read several books on the topic, too.
Fascinating.
I met a few of the regulars on "How The Universe Works" at the Adler Planetarium, I think around 2015.
Michelle Thaller, Nina Lonza, Phil Plait & Hakeem Oluseyi were there. It was a fun experience.
Sympthsical
(8,936 posts)Sometimes I'll find things on YouTube with her and fall asleep to them. She was also often in those shows with NdGT back in the day. I've seen her give guest lectures before. When I worked in Berkeley, I'd often slip into Alex Filippenko's lectures at UCB. Pretty sure he knew I wasn't in the class, but he never said anything about it.
I'm a native Chicagoan, so Adler Planetarium has a big presence in my first memories of being interested in astronomy. I was just back there walking around not too long ago during an April and had utterly forgotten how cold loitering around the lake can be. They used to have these nighttime shows when I was a kid, and you'd walk along the rocks and the broken seawall while people were smelting under flood lights for some reason. (And if they caught any, they'd fry some up for you).
Nowadays, I'm subscribed to Anton Petrov on YouTube. He has a lot - almost daily - about developments in the field. I recommend him to everyone. Just the sweetest man who's interested in teaching the subjects rather than trying to be a media personality.
GoCubsGo
(32,061 posts)He has always been a crackpot. It wasn't until he started accumulating his various businesses that people started noticing. Up until he fucked up Twitter, people attributed it to him being some sort of weird savant "genius." He's just a rich asshole who has had the luxury of being "odd" because he's rich. And, remember that he grew up a privileged, rich, white asshole in apartheid South Africa, where it was not his white buddies who toiled in Daddy's emerald mine.
When he was on a smaller stage no one noticed, nor was every word he uttered and every manic deed he accomplished reported.
hunter
(38,264 posts)A crackpot truly believes their own spiel.
Musk was a swindler from the start. I think he arrived at Stanford, saw a bunch of gullible techno-optimists he could swindle, and dropped out of school to do it.
He hasn't done a damned thing to make the world a better place.
zuul
(14,615 posts)and later asked to have her name changed. Musk was always a weird libertarian asshole, but he seems to have turned hard against Democrats when Xavier asked to have her name changed to Vivian. Vivian also asked to use her mothers last name so she could disassociate herself from her intolerant father.
Liberal In Texas
(13,453 posts)It's becomes a short walk to "odd" and then a few more steps to "madness.'
Johnny2X2X
(18,745 posts)He's always been odd, but his recent hard right turn is because he's completely out of touch with real people right now. It happens when people become more famous and more powerful, they no longer interact with "real" people, the world around them becomes insulated by people catering to their every need and every whim. When he was building his businesses, he got real feedback from those around him because he hadn't yet retreated to his ivory tower. Now, he only hears from people wanting to reinforce his beliefs and decisions, he has no one giving him real info and he has no true window into the world that is really happening out there.
Same thing happened with Bill Maher, he stopped meeting new people and learning about their experiences. Instead he has the same small set of people he hangs out with that reinforce his views on things. He's so out of touch that he spends 10 times more time worrying about the hand full of trans athletes who might have a competitive advantage in their sports than he does worrying about the fact that the GOP wants to turn 165 Million American's bodies into government property.
marble falls
(56,359 posts)haele
(12,581 posts)He's always played the nerd contrarian - a "wunderkind" to be noticed. That was his game plan in the '80's/90's. Pull a bunch of Sci-fi concepts out of his ass, use some basic engineering or programming to conceptualize and market them during a tech boom, and look like a genius.
His programming prowess was okay. His physics/mechanical engineering knowledge was around a high level tech or maybe a BS grad student level. Just enough to recognize decent tech being engineered by others and capitalize on the hard work and thinking of other engineers.
He had a head start (Daddy's infamous Emerald mine shares) and a lot of luck where others with more education and experience failed.
Plus, he partied well enough to attract other liberatarian tech bros.
He parlayed small bits of Nonsense tech and conspiracy theories from the beginning of his career to sound smart and,/or interesting. Over the years, he just started spouting more and more of it to get noticed, until it's gotten to the point his true intellectual laziness is apparent to everyone.
He's not the only "genius" out there riding high on the coat tails of others. Not the first, nor the last.
Haele
UTUSN
(70,497 posts)highplainsdem
(48,731 posts)and they had a terrible marriage, though when they divorced and she had custody, her ex still had their three kids staying with him on weekends. Then Elon, when he was 10, was somehow convinced by his paternal grandmother that it was unfair his dad didn't have any of the kids living with him during the week, so he moved in with his dad and spent weekends with his mom. Elon's wealthy father gave his ex as little money as possible and tried to convince people Maye was an unfit mother. She says her three kids never mentioned their dad around her, that it was as if he didn't exist.
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/a29663489/maye-musk-memoir-interview-2019/
If this is true, it helps explain Elon being messed up.
Demsrule86
(68,352 posts)He is an ignorant ( no college degree of any sort) person...a child of South Africa apartheid who's rich Daddy owned an emerald mine.
Besides the N-word, other racist language used in the factory include descriptions that likened Black workers to a porch monkey and hood rats and suggestions that they go back to Africa, according to the lawsuit. The complain also alleges the factory was racially segregated, resulting in the area where Black workers labored to be derided as the slave ship, or the plantation.
He is being sued and Black workers are asking monetary compensation for being unfairly called racist names, fired, not given promotion and segregated from other workers...
brooklynite
(93,873 posts)His ideological predilections didn't really become public until Twitter became a fixation.
Kablooie
(18,572 posts)They invited all the car companies to discuss how to move the US to Electric vehicles.
Tesla was the only company excluded. Allegedly because they werent unionized.
Musk was noticeably upset and soon after is when Musk turned on Biden and the left and started to embrace conservatives.
It was not a smart move to have the EV summit and exclude the one company that has done more than any other by far to make EV cars popular.
My impression is that Musk is not so much for conservatives as against liberals because of this personal snub.
icymist
(15,888 posts)MSNBC's Joy Reid Claims Elon Musk 'Misses' Apartheid-Era South Africa
https://reason.com/2022/04/27/msnbcs-joy-reid-claims-elon-musk-misses-apartheid-era-south-africa/
I think it was always within him. Just lately, when he gathered more money than most small countries, he no longer gives a shit and just lets it out.
Musk should never be near our NASA space program.
moondust
(19,917 posts)he may have pandered and marketed more to libtard tree-huggers who were much more likely to buy his EV cars than were the GQP fossil fuel troglodytes. Those days are past.
WarGamer
(12,106 posts)Tesla reported the most visited website on the Tesla browser inside the cars was drudge... back when drudge was RW.
moondust
(19,917 posts)WarGamer
(12,106 posts)WarGamer
(12,106 posts)But he's used the Michael Jordan philosophy up to now.
"Republicans buy sneakers, too"
Musk probably thought, "Keep mouth shut so liberals and conservatives buy my cars"
Dave says
(4,608 posts)ExWhoDoesntCare
(4,741 posts)I don't care enough about the wanker to look, but I'm certain that all that's wrong with him started at birth.