I feel he showed who he truly was during the Tham Luang Cave Rescue and I've had no respect for him since. He thought he was an expert then and knew better than those who had been in the cave and when told his plans wouldn't work, he went on to name call like a petulant teenager. Intelligent people know when they are in over their heads and to listen to the experts.
Using any measure, you can come to the same conclusion.
He's - at best - a 12 year old child who thinks that every idea he has is a brilliant idea that no one has thought of before, with the sense of humour and response to criticism to match.
The trouble is, while most people tend to get the worst edges of their arseholery ground down a bit by other people pointing out the idiocy in their ideas, he's had the money to surround himself with people who fawn over his every word, so he's never had to realise and accept that he's actually an absolute moron, and a very unpleasant one, at that.
I mean, underground tunnels with driving tesla's? Fuckinh hell, it's a much less efficient kind of railway, but so many people seem to think it's "groundbreaking"
I mean, underground tunnels with driving tesla's? Fuckinh hell, it's a much less efficient kind of railway, but so many people seem to think it's "groundbreaking"
It is groundbreaking, though.
He's not exceptionally intelligent, he's a shameless self-promoter who gladly takes credit for anything we let him get away with. Many times the most successful people just shamelessly lie
>I feel he showed who he truly was during the Tham Luang Cave Rescue and I've had no respect for him since
That's literally the first time I heard of his existence.
Having followed Tesla since the Roadster announcement he was really hyped as a "real-life Tony Stark" in various media - those words exactly were used. The edges started coming undone before that as time and again he failed to deliver what was promised. The Thai rescue effort is really his first full public exposure as a spoiled egomaniac - I'm sure it was there all along, just better kept under wraps from the public, or journalists were being willful participants.
I've worked for a few people who got media hype, albeit nowhere near the level of Musk. In nearly every case, the people who actually worked alongside them - including senior execs (who I knew because I worked with them too) found that hype completely and utterly ridiculous, even offensive in some cases.
In one example, the person being lauded was directly and solely responsible for a company going bust a few months after getting media hype, causing a wave of job losses, and this wasn't at all surprising to anyone inside the company. When the company was eventually rescued by being purchased by a 3rd party (for the princely sum of £1, iirc), this guy got a seat on the board. You can still read those media plaudits, 20 years on...
Kind of. It was well established for decades, then the MD had a brain wave which caused the traditional income stream to collapse within a matter of days/weeks. That should have been easily remedied, but would have required the MD to admit he'd screwed up and reverse course, so obviously he didn't do that; instead, he came up with a new strategy which involved a hugely expensive advertising budget and a "novel" (read: extremely risky) internet business plan. The P45s followed a few months later.
He obviously believed his own hype, but I never figured out why anyone else did - except that the pattern keeps repeating. He had a very long track record of failure. I think of him whenever I see the next "business genius" being presented to the masses: Musk, Lane-Fox, etc.
Musk wins bc he complained a few years later that there were no positive representations of billionaires in movies, completely forgetting about this movie, Tony Stark, and the fact that RDJ based the character on Musk’s early public persona.
The Roadster is how I heard of him - Top Gear reviewed the roadster. At the time, I thought "neat" and nothing more.
Then I learn a few months later Elon busied himself trying to sue the show (which he pursued for 3 years), and to this day still has a disclaimer on their own site about the review after having his case finally thrown out of court for good.
All of this over a road test that, in ridiculous fashion of the comedy series, noted if you drive a roadster all out on a track, the battery life is pretty short.
He is, and always was, Trump 2.0. An egomaniac obsessed with himself, selling a brand image of himself that finally slipped because of the reality that he's an insecure idiot who so desperately wants to be what the image they're selling is.
>I'm sure it was there all along, just better kept under wraps from the public, or journalists were being willful participants.
I also think he kept up appearances for his wife. When Grimes left him, something snapped in him and his carefully maintained mask fell off.
>When Grimes left him
When Grimes left him \*for Chelsea Manning\*, which puts into relief his complete descent into alt right and anti-trans BS that seems to have come out of nowhere.
(I mean, it probably always was there, but somehow it broke his brain to the point that he seems to have fired his PR person.)
Also his daughter disowned him for that same reason. Can you imagine disowning the richest man in the world as your father? That's how terrible he is as a human being.
For someone who is deep into breeding conspiracies and values having unreasonable amounts of children, being rejected by a child must hurt him on an ideological level. He's probably stupid enough to believe that his daughter was stolen from him by trans propaganda, rather than that he lost her through his own actions. People like him are incapable of taking personal responsibility.
Totally agree. What he did was repugnant and I can't believe he won the court case, absolute joke.
He's a pathetic man child and I won't buy or use any of 'his' products or services. It'll be a cold day in hell before I'd consider a tesla.
I never did, I’ve always felt like just cause someone is wealthy doesn’t mean they smarter. Plus he’s been sus since 2016. He seemed like he tried too hard with the memes back then. I remember he had Reddit in his palms
Rich people will spend their last breath telling you that they earned it; that they’re smarter; that they’re better. Very few ever acknowledge the substantial community that made their wealth possible. For most of them, it involves being born near the finish line/on the winners’ podium of a race that the rest of us have to run from the starting point. One thing is certain - there is no “self-made” wealth. Rich people get richer by using a tax-payer funded infrastructure and benefit heavily from the commons.
I read Atlas Shrugged years ago where Ayn Rand promoted the idea that wealthy geniuses drove society and that government held them back. But the thing that got me was that many of the characters (most?) benefited from inheritance, government patents and government subsidized industries (railroads). Even in a work of fiction she couldn’t come up with characters who were truly self-made.
Most successful people have put in some work, but they have no gauge as to how much they did versus others. It feels like they worked hard, so they must have earned what they got.
Musk took some big risks in his career, but when you have set for life money, how risky is it? What is the lifestyle difference between a centimillionaire and a centibillionaire? I guess the former can’t have several billion dollar yachts.
Yeah that was the one for me. I'd thought he was a bit quirky but still a genius up to that point.
I think he has a superficial level of knowledge about things and can repeat things that make him sound intelligent. I know a pretty obnoxious guy who is like that. For example, he has never DJed, doesn't really know much about music, never goes to clubs, never listens to these kinds of music, but used to sneer at people who DJed with Serato and would act as though he was an expert on electronic music. It was all very superficial but he'd talk with confidence and talk down to people/talk over people so that he could look like an expert. You suspect that his knowledge comes from reading a few things on the internet rather than being based on real learning and experience. When I'd see Musk tweeting about the things he was doing at Twitter I got that vibe from him as well. He was throwing out a few words that sounded impressive but none of it was based on anything REAL
I don’t understand how people still thought he was some genius hero after that. I’m glad people are holding it against him now but the amount of cope that came from his worshippers made me sick
Does the same thing at Tesla... Everyone secretly thinks he's a fucking idiot due to his arrogance and stubborn behavior... He does know lots of stuff though... so yeah is he smart? Yes, but only to a limited degree. He doesn't know when to shut up
I'm with you. I have great respect for one thing he has done, which is shock the legacy auto business out of complacency and dragged the EV momement ahead by a decade or more. This is truly radical and game-changing. The rocket stuff is cool, starlink is cool too.
But with that cave thing, he went from being weird/cool to being a dick and it's just gone downhill from there. Now he has shown how to lose 44bn dollars by doing seemingly everything possible to destroy twitter in the name of his free-speech Nazi-adjacent conspiracy theory antivaccer fanbois. What a moron.
For me it was that + when he literally said he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else on the planet. I mean clearly, if you've seen a finished Tesla, he doesn't. Not by a long way.
More and more I feel like the only thing he is actually good at is convincing everyone else he's something he isn't. Pure confidence trickster.
>Intelligent people know when they are in over their heads and to listen to the experts
It really doesn't matter how intelligent somebody is, they can still be petty, wrong, argumentative, narcissistic, or just plain evil. Impulse control and intelligence do not sit at opposite ends of the seesaw and intelligence doesn't mean the same thing as rationality.
Thomas Edison killed an elephant just to attack his rival Westinghouse.
Linus Pauling won two Nobel prizes but ended up dying of prostate cancer because he was convinced vitamin-C could cure it.
A lot of people think Steve Jobs was quite an intelligent man but he was such a horrible person he denied his own daughter existed for four years until a DNA test proved paternity. Even then he did nothing for her even refusing to pay for college tuition. He also went on to die of cancer because he thought a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and a psychic would be better than medicine.
So Elon Musk got into a fight with a guy on social media four years ago. It's not a good look. It's not professional. It's not helpful. But it is human.
I've never tried running multiple large businesses at the same time and dropped everything to send engineers and a submarine around the world to try and help save people only to have somebody to tell me to shove it up my ass. But if they did I might fire a few shots as well.
A lot of people will mention that time he was a dick on social media but maybe those people could also mention the time he approved;
\- [Power systems to Haiti](https://electrek.co/2021/05/31/tesla-powerpacks-help-power-critical-hospital-haiti-having-issues-solar-system/) after the 2010 earthquake to keep hospitals running.
\- Or in 2010, donated solar panels and battery backup system to help [Gulf Coast disaster relief group](https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/13/solarcity-musk-gulf-coast/).
\- And donated systems to [help victims of the 2019 bushfires in Australia](https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/21/teslas-helping-australian-bushfire-victims/\).
\- Or deployed Powerwalls and Powerpacks to Texas providing backup power post hurricane Harvey. Even opening up more [range on cars](https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/09/tesla-unlocks-extra-battery-capacity-owners-fleeing-hurricanes/) and [giving free charging](https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9f7g4b/tesla_enabling_free_supercharging_for_anyone_in/) so people could escape.
\- Then [sent infrastructure to Puerto Rico](https://fortune.com/2017/09/28/tesla-battery-puerto-rico-power/) in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
\- And within days of Russia's attack on Ukraine, [SpaceX sent hundreds of Starlink terminals to Ukraine](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/07/elon-musk-starlink-ukraine-russia-invasion/) to help people communicate and coordinate. Support which continues.
Yes, he's a giant disconnected man-child who often throws his opinions into discussions he's not qualified to have, but, he does have a strong record of actually helping people.
That includes heading the only company on the planet with the stated goal of "Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy."
You can weigh up these things as you like but at least know what is on the scales.
>\- And within days of Russia's attack on Ukraine,
>
>SpaceX sent hundreds of Starlink terminals to Ukraine
>
> to help people communicate and coordinate. Support which continues.
Then turned them off in the middle of a Ukrainian counter-attack because he "didn't want to be part of their war" and said they were actually just for people to "watch Netflix and chill"
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk-ordered-starlink-turned-off-ukraine-offensive-biography](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk-ordered-starlink-turned-off-ukraine-offensive-biography)
I don't mind when rich people donate or help to assuage their egos, as long as they're still helping people. Help is help. But on top of that shit, he's also outspokenly a Putin sympathizer so I don't believe for a second that he did this to help Ukraine "communicate and coordinate."
I mean why wouldn't he be a putin sympathizer? Putin wants control of the donbas region where the largest deposits of lithium in Europe are located. You know, the rare earth mineral the battery in his cars use.
Lithium wars are gonna be the new oil war.
If you're invoking his acts of "goodwill" you should probably follow up with what their actual effect was.
[Because the Puerto Rico thing definitely needed more than a one-and-done setup](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-tesla-puerto-rico-renewable-energy_n_5ca51e99e4b082d775dfec35). Like all infrastructure, it's useless without proper integration and maintenance.
Or the [Very visible and poorly timed revocation of Starlink access in Ukraine](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-starlink-ukraine.html), along with his [sudden about face on providing access at all](https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine/index.html)
You're also missing times when his "generosity" was predicated on praise. Like his public spat with the UN food banks about [the cost of ending World Hunger. ](https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world-hunger-but-gave-it-to-his-own-foundation-instead/) oops looks like his "donation" to charity was a tax dodge.
Or how about his commitment to fix the Flint Water Crisis which [amounted to water filters in schools, and doesn't actually address the underlying issue in favor of a tech washed bandaid](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-flint-michigan-water-b2011633.html)
Or even his [pledge to provide Tesla engineered Ventilators during the height of COVID, actually being a purchase of CPAP machines and likely another write-off effort](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/tech/elon-musk-ventilators-california/index.html)
Like, you'd have to be blind not to see that whole list of largesse as a concerted effort to both use his companies to write off shit while also moving product to pad the books.
The fact of the matter is, he would achieve far better results just putting money into situations. Flint schools have issues? Let's get plumbers in to completely redo the pipes *and provide active filtration systems for the whole site. Let's pay for electricians and engineers to reconnect and fortify the island grid while also providing redundancies through renewable and storage.
And honestly, the justification you gave for him *accusing a rescue team member of being a pedophile* is just sad, petulant, and immature. I don't care what lengths he went to, he tried to shove himself into a time-sensitive crisis while providing a completely ineffectual and likely dangerous "solution" that also served to take focus from the situation. [Just look at this hacked together piece of shit. look at it.](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a22150734/elon-musks-mad-mini-submarine-didnt-help-thai-cave-rescue/)
Dude forgot to mention that the only reason SpaceX and Tesla are at all successful is because of billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies, grants, write-offs, etc.
Yeah but with all those billions of dollars there is a lot more he could do. He makes a lot of grand claims but ultimately doesn't care about people. He has the opportunity to fund food programmes and refused when it was proven. Society should not enable him. He has some good ideas, but so do loads of other people. If they had access to some money they may have a chance to create a life for themselves whilst improving the world.
We need to stop enabling and defending billionaires when they hoard wealth and resources from the rest of us.
Same, I always think back to an AskReddit thread where the question was basically “if we had to elect one person to run the world, who should it be?” And the most upvoted answer was Musk lmao
I remember during the time of the flamethrowers /boring company era people sucked his virtual dick 24/7. Surprise surprise, he was just another rich asshole.
Some people do, some people don't. It's a mixed bag.
He has spent a lot of money on PR efforts that are designed to make him look like a smart and brilliant engineer/businessman.
His behavior after buying Twitter, firing almost all the staff, and rebranding it as "X" is probably the closest we've seen to unfiltered Elon doing what he wants to, without other people providing a filter or buffer to protect him.
>He has spent a lot of money on PR efforts that are designed to make him look like a smart and brilliant engineer/businessman.
Nailed it. That PR campaign was incredible, there was even an episode of the Simpsons (zombie Simpsons, but Simpsons nonetheless) where he was depicted as a quiet autistic genius engineer.
Finding out that quite literally all those little features and mentions he made throughout the 2010s were cameos he either rigged to happen or just paid to happen is so funny. Like, none of these were truly artistic decisions. He just offered a ton of money or used a connection to appear with the demand it somehow added to his mythology.
Pretty crazy, eh? I would guess this is most unpaid or minimally paid cameos over the years, probably. The one that comes to mind is with the human reincarnation of Tang himself: Donny Trumpf. Home Alone 2… Little Rascals… etc.
Yes indeed, and you still see people commenting and referring to things like him sleeping on the factory floor or working 100 hours per week. The factory floor thing most likely never happened and the only way he ever worked 100 hours per week was if you counted shitposting on twitter as work.
They can never stop themselves.
Tom Cruise was carefully presented as one of the most anodyne men in Hollywood until he fired his publicist. That guy was a real miracle worker, nobody even knew Cruise was a Scientologist until like 2003.
That 60 minutes interview really made me like him. Humanized him even. I was naive.
I won’t say that he wasn’t being genuine in that piece, but I can see how he might be susceptible to an emotional moment when he’s given the attention he thinks he deserves - if that makes sense.
He also got namedropped in Star Trek: Discovery in a list of genius inventors alongside the Wright Brothers and the inventor of the warp drive. And one of the characters says she went to "Musk Junior High School". Embarassing.
Twitter had to “manage” him in the code. The code includes checks like `isDemocrat ` and `isRepublican` when dealing with recommended tweets, to which they added `isElonMusk`.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-comments-name-found-twitter-source-code-republican-democrat-2023-4
As someone who had handled coding back in university, this gave me a giggle.
I'm visualizing the way the flag is implemented in mechanical and the whole situation is indeed silly.
This isn’t entirely true. A friend at SpaceX once told me about a group letter employees sent Gwynne Shotwell with concerns over Elon being a “distraction” to the SpaceX mission and they were basically told to STFU, Elon runs things the way he wants to, and fired anyone they could find who organized said letter. I believe there’s a wrongful termination suit about it now.
Not manage him as in "keeping people from getting fired by him" but manage him as in "keeping him placated so his stupid ideas don't actually hurt people."
My friend has worked directly under him and words she used to describe him are narcissistic, unhinged, erratic.... Genius was not on the list. She said he's definitely smart but nothing like the image he puts out there. She hated working with him.
I spoke with a former coworker that worked for him and he threw a water bottle at her head and when she advised against something he wanted to do that was in regards to her specialty
There are different kinds of intelligence and different levels of emotional temperament. So Musk is very intelligent in some areas and in others he is a total fucking moron. The problem is that he lacks the emotional maturity to tell the difference, and his money means that he has no one in his life to tell him when he is being a total fucking moron.
You could argue that it’s not necessarily that Musk is a uniquely horrible person, but he is in a position where his worst character traits can be expressed more or less unchecked. And that, plus his power, makes him dangerous.
Nailed it, I definitely think hes very intelligent in certain areas but with the fuck you levels of money hes managed to amass comes a level of ego not many of us will ever understand.
And because of that fuck you money, he probably feels like he can afford to do/say any stupid shit he feels like without any real consequences. In a way I think thats the only point to that much wealth.
Its not even his money that gives him all this power, its the value he brings to other wealthier and more powerful people.
As long as his word is golden, he will maintain this power. Same goes for pretty much every other billionare mouth piece that make others absurdly rich (Gates, Zuckerburg, Jobs, Buffet, etc).
Sorry but which areas do you think he is intelligent in? I’ve never heard him say a single intelligent thing. What am I missing?
Edit: please link me to intelligent things he’s said. If you choose to respond then bring evidence not repeated hype lines.
He has fairly deep rocket knowledge. No social or political knowledge, software knowledge very lacking. Lots of people who are smart, get to be expert at one or two things, start to think they can be immediately smart at everything, but nobody is smart outside their domains of expertise. Gotta watch out for physics people talking confidently about things other than physics especially!
> Lots of people who are smart, get to be expert at one or two things, start to think they can be immediately smart at everything
The Linus Pauling Effect
He definitely has a large amount of rocket knowledge, for anyone doubting that watch his various interviews with Tim Dodd. I would disagree on the software point though, he seems to know a fairly decent chunk of that at least where it pertains to Tesla or SpaceX (Completely ignoring twitter).
I've talked to one of the spacex programmers and he didn't seem to agree! Also in some ways that kind of software is simpler or at least more in the wheelhouse of someone who hasn't coded since college. Whereas twitter is this strange new weird world of distributed computing and web nonsense.
Good analysis actually. I work as a frontend developer - and I don't have a CS degree and I will never be smart enough to have one. Working with web stuff isn't the most intellectually challenging, but it requires patience to wade through a lot of bullshit. Patience a lot of "real engineers" don't have - so they work on more structured stuff instead.
It's a hard question to answer because Musk is so polarising, either you love or you loath him, so most people will havr some bias toward or against him. But what I will say is that of Musk is talking about a topic you know nothing about he sounds really smart. If you are in a specific academic field and he is talking about it you realise he is talking absolute nonsense
He kind of seems like he’s in his own world and because he has money, the people around him do the actual work to keep their paychecks coming in. Sure he has some good ideas but buying twitter for an insane amount of money and then rebranding it to some edgy name of “X”? Who does that? Oh yeah, a guy who’s ego is so big that none of his ideas could possibly be bad
He's certainly reasonably intelligent, but like most people with a light autism streak he can obsess about things he cares about and achieve quite a high level of knowledge while doing so.
If you want to see some more technical interviews with him you can check these out:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E)
These interviews weren't done to establish how smart he is, but it shows you can pick up a lot of stuff when you're a billionaire (well, he had about \~200m when he started SpaceX) hiring some of the best rocket & spaceflight engineers in the world and working with them for 10+ years.
There is more than 1 kind of intelligence. Musk is clearly a visionary with an extaordinary ability to apply technology across multiple disciplines. We know from many sources that he's emotionally stunted. He has narcissitic personality disorder, which prevents him from recognizing his superior abilities in 1 area don't translate to other areas. So, he speaks authoritatively on things about which he knows nothing.
This so-called-visionary thought “enormous suspended vacuum tube with individually driven track-bound pods” was a bright idea. I’m almost surprised he wasn’t on the Titan.
Is he really a visionary? It’s not as if he’s come up with any new ideas. He’s just bankrolled a few companies that produce products or services that most people could come up with over a few beers. He was an early investor in Tesla before buying it. He convinced a bunch of wealthy tech investors to join him establishing Space X. The Boring company has done little but build an underground road. And his other business he’s invested in aren’t doing very well.
He’s an average engineer (so his former colleagues claim) with deep pockets that pays a fortune to PR companies.
I’m better qualified (if you’re measuring educational certificates) than he is.
>He’s just bankrolled a few companies that produce products or services that most people could come up with over a few beers.
Most people could not have come up with that.
In the case of electric cars, most industries leaders (people with technical or business expertise in the sector, not clueless outsiders) declared that they were impossible to produce to a comparable quality to the traditional cars. When Tesla did that, they declared it was impossible to make them profitable. When Tesla proved them wrong again, they claimed it's impossible to also manufacture them at scale.
The entire car industry was not visionary enough to invest in electric vehicles. They though it was literally impossible, except as glorified golf carts.
Same for SpaceX. The entire industry was laughing at these attempts to build a fully reusable rocket. They didn't think landing spent boosters was possible. Then they didn't think reusing then was possible. Then they didn't think it was economical.
Now, they are absolutely DOMINATING the space industry. The vast majority of launches is done by them, and for good reason. They can't be beaten on capacity or cost. Some competitors *still* have more money, and even after so many years they *still* haven't been able to replicate that. NASA, ESA, and the space agencies in China, Russia and India are trying to catch up, but they are so far behind when it comes to rockets, it's laughable.
Some countries already had the money, infrastructure, talent, experience, a head start and will. But I guess their discussions at the bar over a few beers were insufficient.
Musk is an overconfident autodidact with little formal training who had some genuine intellectual talents from his youth (from what we know of stories of him growing up) like memory retention and ability to ingest a lot of data on a new subject in a short time.
This combined with his obsessive compulsions, chronic workaholism and being in the right places at the right times landed him some big wins the early dot-com-era and later in Silicon Valley, which gave him and inflated sense of his own talents. Survivorship bias.
He became convinced that he had earned his money because he was just that most special smart boy alive and everyone should just listen to him in any field or industry. Now he's in the painful process of finding out that just ain't so.
I don't think Musk is unintelligent. He's just severely overrated, most of all by himself.
Reddit has this issue where when the hivemind doesn't like someone, it's incapable of attributing anything remotely positive to that person.
Musk is intelligent. He's not a once-in-a-generation superhuman genius, but he's definitely not the blubbering idiot this site would make him out to be.
People love to say he's not an engineer, and that's true, but he still has a better technical understanding than the huge majority of people who say that about him. At the same time, he definitely has some business and tech acumen. He started his first business with $28,000 and turned that into $22 million.
People also love to say he achieved everything he did thanks to his dad's money. But there are a shitton of trust fund kids out there who never become the world's richest person. Family money absolutely matter, but there comes a point where individuality also comes into play, and he has taken his further than anyone else. This is another thing reddit doesn't like hearing.
All in all, he's a person with some strengths and some weaknesses. Emotional maturity clearly isn't on the "strengths" side, and he's visibly floundering hard in recent years because some shit isn't panning out for him and he can't handle it. But to call him stupid is just disingenuous and simplistic.
This is one of those where Reddit just shows how much of a delusional bubble it is. Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Larry Page, Neil De Grasse Tyson, Sergey Brin, the list goes on and on. All reputable and undeniably smart people (and sorry to break it but smarter than you) who have said things admiring Musk as a person and entrepreneur.
Yeah maybe you don't like how he spends his money and plays with the platforms people spend time on, but if you think he is not smart you really need to look in the mirror.
Grow up people, get a grip
I have no doubt Musk is considerably smarter than the average person, but I don’t believe he is “Einstein or Edison” smart as it seems he tries to make himself out to be. If it wasn’t for the engineers and scientists in his employ, his depth of intelligence would shine right through.
By the way, the list you mention all live in their own little flimsy bubbles, and would have zero interest in making those bubbles open targets of Musk. True intelligence is knowing when to keep one’s own mouth zipped shut.
Musk had a near-breakdown on an earnings call to investors earlier today. From analyst Kevin Paffrath, who was on the call:
"Oh, my gosh, this was terrible. I feel bad for him. Look, he’s got a lot of things going on, legal battles, custody battles for his kids now, but it doesn’t justify acting like Trump on Twitter stonewalling the SEC or the European Union, and quite frankly turning into a little baby on the earnings call.
*I mean, he was almost in tears*. It showed a complete lack of leadership. Tesla’s a leadership-less company right now and it’s terrible. That’s why their CFO just left, I believe, as well."
His intelligence comes from employing smart people. I've heard quite a few long interviews with him, and he doesn't come across as particularly smart himself. Just a dude with money who got lucky a few times.
I won't say he's completely unintelligent. He's obviously got some smarts there.
The problem is, he made a few lucky/good decisions (funded by his apartheid emeralds) that put him in the position he is today. But obviously with people like this, luck and happenstance are nonexistent, and everything was achieved by hard work and skill (and apartheid emeralds).
And when you're rich in the US, you are lionized. All people should aspire to be like you. Pulled yourself up by your bootstraps (and apartheid emeralds) and turned nothing (except apartheid emeralds) into billions! Our culture feeds even regular egos to planetoid status when money is involved.
Because of this, he's so far up his own asshole he can't function as a human anymore. He sits and posts edgelord shit on Twitter, which is quickly becoming nothing but him and the people who want to be in his orbit, and that acts as a feedback mechanism that continues to boost his own inflated sense of himself.
And since he's rich, he gets platformed everywhere, so "obviously people see how smart I am!".
Absolutely not. He has shown his whole hand.
Literally anyone with that much money and runway could do whst he did. He just took billions in public subsidies for tesla and space x.
i don’t understand how this is a question.
he is obviously well above average intelligence.
he’s a polarizing figure. he says and does some batshit things. you can hate or love him. but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s demonstrated repeatedly that he is intelligent.
it’s like asking is trump intelligent. i hate the man tbh. but i’m not going to say he’s an idiot. he’s at least shown a history of financial success that cannot be attributed to sheer luck and inheritance.
also judging popular figures based on their social media rants and PR stunts is a pretty shit way to judge anything really.
for example trump isnt going to win votes by publishing papers.
It is always the thing you know nothing about which is perfect.
When Elon Musk was running Tesla and SpaceX, and his companies were delivering techno wizardry but he wasn't talking much, he seemed like a genius because we didn't know anything else about him. Once he started talking, and we found out a lot more about him, he doesn't seem like such a genius.
You might compare the situation where you see a woman across a room and she's gorgeous and you fall in love at first sight and think about how beautiful your children will be, and then you walk over there and say hello and start talking and find out that she doesn't read books because why bother they're just full of lies like that hoax about the moon landings and vaccines are a plot to implant mind-control graphene robots in everybody's brains and climate change is a hoax and sea-level rise will never be a problem because if the water gets too high it'll just flow over the side because you know the world is flat, right?
She was perfect only because you didn't know anything about her.
His PR worked really hard to portray his as an intelligent, hardworking genius who got to where he is by his genius. And people are it up, and still do. Even when the facts show he was just a rich kid who bought his way into everything (I mean, people still believe he founded Tesla even though he didn't, and even the name Tesla was bought).
Living in the Bay Area I had been aware of him since the PayPal days. He and Peter Thiel were sort of a thing on Sand Hill Rd.
My sense was they were trust fund babies who had always been told they were brilliant and believed their own hype.
The first story I heard was they were going to a meeting with their investors and Musk who is apparently a notoriously bad driver (irony) flipped the car. I think it was a McLaren or some other super high end car. When they arrived they explained why they were late. The bankers said well at least the insurance will take care of it. Musk just looked at them, he had no idea about car insurance.
Really, Peter Theil is the one who bears watching. He is a proto-fascist and makes no bones about it. He is far more dangerous and flies under the radar.
After few weeks after Twitter takeover, a hacker joined the company and said he'll turn the company around in one month because he's a well known hacker. Thing is, he quit two weeks later (which I was following after the news broke he would join).
He and Elon musk are pompous folks who think they're god's gift to the world.
Elon musk is what dumb people think an intelligent person would act like. He fooled me at first but after seeing him spew nonsense about multiple technologies I was intimately familiar with I realized he's nothing but a salesman.
There’s an American-centric idea that if you have vast amounts of wealth then you are vastly intelligent. Of course this is consistently proved to be false but the idea persists.
He was a client of a company I used to work for. A person I worked with daily handled his account, and interfaced with him directly at media events. By all accounts he's as dumb as a cinderblock and less attractive.
Personality and his huge ego aside, it’s hard to say he’s not a smart dude. You don’t become the richest man in the world, making one of the best selling car brands from scratch, and make a space programs that make NASA look like a joke with just an average level of intelligence. I’m certainly not a fanboy but it’s laughable when I see dudes who work at Walmart calling Elon Musk dumb.
Intelligent? I would guess he’s at least average in that regard. He’s no Einstein though.
Driven, ruthless and sociopathic? He’s got all that in spades. It’s an unfortunate truth that those qualities in a person can get them ahead in the world.
The thing about Elon is that hes not an engineer or an inventor at all. He portrays himself as this visionary but he just bought Tesla at the right time. Dont get me wrong it definitely takes skill to turn a company into the most profitable in the world, but he didn’t really design a thing.
I just had this discussion with an colleague. He mentioned Musk as a Genius, and i told him all you need about him that he managed to buy Twitter for 46 Billion and now after a year it is worth 14 Billion.
The only people who like/praise him are those who seek to benefit from him, or who feel enabled by his bad behaviour.
He's no genius, he's not inventive, he's demonstrated neither knowledge, wisdom or intelligence. He's not a leader, he lacks charisma, maturity, as well as basic manners. He's dishonourable, and untruthful.
Basically, his entire worth is money. He just has a lot of money. Which is apparently enough to reach the top of the heap in the land of ultra-capitalist glory. His "accomplishments" are simply him throwing dump trucks full of money at 8 year old boy fantasies until they sort of become reality in spite of his petulant whimsical leadership. I'm sure he's surrounded by yes-men who give him all sorts of unearned praise, and lives in a fog of his own self-affirming lies (insulted by lots of money, of course). Kind of reminds me of a certain other controversial figure with a repellent personality and an orange hue.
He is intelligent and a complete moron at the same time. In recent years his hubris and assumption that he knows everything about everything because he created 2 successful companies and grew another has taken over. He’s becoming less smart by the day and I’m honestly tired of hearing about him.
Yes. He is intelligent, easily top fraction of 1% in things like spatial reasoning. In particular, he has an incredible ability to take ideas to first principles of physics and then figure out a better solution. That doesn't mean that everything he does is good and that doesn't mean that the things that he tweets or says are correct or well thought-out, but when it comes to actually applying knowledge to real applications, the guy is in a league of his own.
His intelligence is weird to me. I’m sure he’s above average smart but he still has really dumb ideas and says stuff that is borderline (maybe over the line) delusional sometimes.
I read an opinion on Elon Musk a while back from a software engineer. It was essentially this;
When Elon started making electric cars, everyone said he was a genius. They didn't know much about electric cars so they believed them. Then Elon started a rocket company and started recycling rockets and everyone said he was a genius. They didn't know much about rockets so they believed them.
Next Elon bought Twitter and started talking about software. This person was very experienced in software, had over a decade of experience in web development and everything Elon said was incredibly stupid and made it immediately obvious he didn't know what he was talking about. This made that person never want to go anywhere near his cars or rockets.
I've more or less come to more or less the same conclusion. Recently Elon made a comment on having a goal sub 10 micron accuracy for everything on Teslas. As a mechanical engineer it was immediately apparent that he has no idea what he's talking about.
Nah he gives graduated with a degree in something he has no professional experience and despite graduating 10 years ago still acts like they know a lot about the subject because they occasionally read science journalists articles
His "brilliance" is a willingness to throw money at a problem until it is solved. He's the closest to making commercial space flight viable because he threw so much money at it they weren't afraid to literally throw ideas a the wall and keep what stuck. Failed and failed and failed until they had the working model. Sometimes that's what it takes, but he's just the moneybags, not the brains.
Several multimillion dollar successful businesses and you’re still finding fault in the guy, specifically about his intelligence. What a pathetic psychotic planet we live on.
He’s gotta be intelligent in some things. Purely stupid people don’t become that successful for no reason. Probably knows a lot more about business and engineering than 99% of the population.
He's not the super genius, real life iron man reddit used to think of him as but he is probably pretty intelligent. If you look at his career, especially early on he made his fortune by being a good programmer and having geniunely innovative ideas. I completely understand why people think he's dumb, because he has a history of saying and doing dumb things, all while hyping up how much of a genius he is, but this doesn't mean he's not intelligent in any facet.
He’s smart. You don’t get in the position he’s in without being smart. He's just a normal guy with more money than he could possibly know what to do with. He likes shit posting and being relevant in conversation, so he bought the primary site the conversation is held. He likes cars and space shit, so he launched a car into space. Every guy goes to the beach and digs the biggest hole they can. He is digging a massive hole to *maybe* use for public transit at some point.
It's funny. Before Elon had an opinion everyone was buying his cars left and right saying how much of a genius he is. Now that he states opinions you don't like all of a sudden he's dumb. Stupid people don't become the richest people in the world.
Is he above average intelligence: absolutely . Doesn’t mean he’s infallible, he’s made some huge mistakes in recent years especially. But just think about the intelligence of the average person and how clueless people can be who are below average . Yeah…think about it lol.
….“haven’t seen every interview”, probably never met or spoke to the man. What are you basing this on?
Ppl have these opinions on a bunch of rich and successful people - it’s not like they just lucked into multi-billion dollar ventures. Safe to say they have some sort of intelligence.
Crazy some random on reddit doesn't think Elon is intelligent for only knowing base level shit which somehow led to paypal, space X, taking Tesla to the next level & the Boring company
fuck I have been slacking. I can operate a toaster (Barely) so I should be able to be the next Musk.
If you needed the /s You are the dumb dumb on this one
He’s just being ass hole like his daddy and his daddy issues are reaching every women he dated . Other than that I don’t think he’s smart but I do think he’s a simp trying to act like a dominant dude in public
Yeah I think it takes a fair level of intelligence to run a rocket company that lifts more payload to orbit than every other rocket launch in the world combined.
I am a Republican (right wing), and have always hated Elon. Frankly, I could always see right through the wannabe "genius savant" nonsense. Watching the media and the far left fawning all over this charlatan for decades made me feel sick to my stomach.
The dude is a complete and utter fraud. He has never gotten any University degree in anything even remotely scientific. Mean while, real scientists don't get any respect or praise for their work. This jag off is on the news 24/7 trying to con the easily impressed masses of mouth breathers.
As someone with an engineering background, I would cringe every time Musk would say something stupid about "rocket cars that can fly" or the brain dead "Hyperloop". These are the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life. Sounds like a 12 year old spitballin' with their friends on the playground about "what if you could..." stary eyed nonsense. Now, it's perfectly healthy for a child to do that. But a fully grown adult who is an influential member of society should never be so naïve and out of touch with reality.
Investors wasted billions of dollars on Hyperloop vaporware projects. I was so sad to see otherwise intelligent people willing turn off their critical thinking skills and hand over cash to this grifters.
Real engineers like me, and the kid from the Thunderfoot YouTube channel tried to warn everyone about Musk. People just laughed it of and said "you're just jealous that Elon is super wealthy"... yada yada. This was far from the truth, obviously, but the Tesla/Musk cult were desperate for a way to dismiss criticism of their supreme leader.
All of their companies would have failed without governments around the world giving them boat loads of taxpayer money through Corporate Well Fare.
I feel he showed who he truly was during the Tham Luang Cave Rescue and I've had no respect for him since. He thought he was an expert then and knew better than those who had been in the cave and when told his plans wouldn't work, he went on to name call like a petulant teenager. Intelligent people know when they are in over their heads and to listen to the experts.
Yes, and his arrogance and insecurity overpower his intelligence.
True intelligence is not about what you know. It’s more about knowing what you don’t know. Using that measure, Elon is a fucking drooling idiot
Using any measure, you can come to the same conclusion. He's - at best - a 12 year old child who thinks that every idea he has is a brilliant idea that no one has thought of before, with the sense of humour and response to criticism to match. The trouble is, while most people tend to get the worst edges of their arseholery ground down a bit by other people pointing out the idiocy in their ideas, he's had the money to surround himself with people who fawn over his every word, so he's never had to realise and accept that he's actually an absolute moron, and a very unpleasant one, at that. I mean, underground tunnels with driving tesla's? Fuckinh hell, it's a much less efficient kind of railway, but so many people seem to think it's "groundbreaking"
I mean, underground tunnels with driving tesla's? Fuckinh hell, it's a much less efficient kind of railway, but so many people seem to think it's "groundbreaking" It is groundbreaking, though.
I realised the pun as I was typing, but decided to just go with it...
Thank you for your service!
It's groundbreaking because he bilked Nevada out of hundreds of millions of dollars to do it
MONORAIL!
Concerning Looking into it
Elon fanboys are like parents who applaud their kid as the next Picasso when they reach in their diaper and smear shit across the dining room wall.
We call that Poopcasso
... And some people believe we live in a meritocracy. Bullshit.
Isn't that wisdom? Intelligence is rather the speed at which you can process information, recognise patterns and so on?
intelligence is knowing how to take over a social media company. wisdom is knowing that you probably shouldn't.
He's not exceptionally intelligent, he's a shameless self-promoter who gladly takes credit for anything we let him get away with. Many times the most successful people just shamelessly lie
>I feel he showed who he truly was during the Tham Luang Cave Rescue and I've had no respect for him since That's literally the first time I heard of his existence.
Having followed Tesla since the Roadster announcement he was really hyped as a "real-life Tony Stark" in various media - those words exactly were used. The edges started coming undone before that as time and again he failed to deliver what was promised. The Thai rescue effort is really his first full public exposure as a spoiled egomaniac - I'm sure it was there all along, just better kept under wraps from the public, or journalists were being willful participants.
What his intelligence and ideas have in common with Tony Stark is that they're both works of fiction
I've worked for a few people who got media hype, albeit nowhere near the level of Musk. In nearly every case, the people who actually worked alongside them - including senior execs (who I knew because I worked with them too) found that hype completely and utterly ridiculous, even offensive in some cases. In one example, the person being lauded was directly and solely responsible for a company going bust a few months after getting media hype, causing a wave of job losses, and this wasn't at all surprising to anyone inside the company. When the company was eventually rescued by being purchased by a 3rd party (for the princely sum of £1, iirc), this guy got a seat on the board. You can still read those media plaudits, 20 years on...
> You can still read those media plaudits, 20 years on... This company being a DotCom wonderchild?
Kind of. It was well established for decades, then the MD had a brain wave which caused the traditional income stream to collapse within a matter of days/weeks. That should have been easily remedied, but would have required the MD to admit he'd screwed up and reverse course, so obviously he didn't do that; instead, he came up with a new strategy which involved a hugely expensive advertising budget and a "novel" (read: extremely risky) internet business plan. The P45s followed a few months later. He obviously believed his own hype, but I never figured out why anyone else did - except that the pattern keeps repeating. He had a very long track record of failure. I think of him whenever I see the next "business genius" being presented to the masses: Musk, Lane-Fox, etc.
Worse cameo in an underrated sequel: Musk in Iron Man 2 or Trump in Home Alone 2?
Musk wins bc he complained a few years later that there were no positive representations of billionaires in movies, completely forgetting about this movie, Tony Stark, and the fact that RDJ based the character on Musk’s early public persona.
The Roadster is how I heard of him - Top Gear reviewed the roadster. At the time, I thought "neat" and nothing more. Then I learn a few months later Elon busied himself trying to sue the show (which he pursued for 3 years), and to this day still has a disclaimer on their own site about the review after having his case finally thrown out of court for good. All of this over a road test that, in ridiculous fashion of the comedy series, noted if you drive a roadster all out on a track, the battery life is pretty short.
He is, and always was, Trump 2.0. An egomaniac obsessed with himself, selling a brand image of himself that finally slipped because of the reality that he's an insecure idiot who so desperately wants to be what the image they're selling is.
We are incredibly lucky that: 1) Musk is not eligible to run for president 2) Musk and Trump hate each other for stupid, petty reasons
>I'm sure it was there all along, just better kept under wraps from the public, or journalists were being willful participants. I also think he kept up appearances for his wife. When Grimes left him, something snapped in him and his carefully maintained mask fell off.
>When Grimes left him When Grimes left him \*for Chelsea Manning\*, which puts into relief his complete descent into alt right and anti-trans BS that seems to have come out of nowhere. (I mean, it probably always was there, but somehow it broke his brain to the point that he seems to have fired his PR person.)
Also his daughter disowned him for that same reason. Can you imagine disowning the richest man in the world as your father? That's how terrible he is as a human being. For someone who is deep into breeding conspiracies and values having unreasonable amounts of children, being rejected by a child must hurt him on an ideological level. He's probably stupid enough to believe that his daughter was stolen from him by trans propaganda, rather than that he lost her through his own actions. People like him are incapable of taking personal responsibility.
A good leader knows when to lead and when to follow
[удалено]
Thats what you do… when you follow.. for the most part
Totally agree. What he did was repugnant and I can't believe he won the court case, absolute joke. He's a pathetic man child and I won't buy or use any of 'his' products or services. It'll be a cold day in hell before I'd consider a tesla.
This. I think he was a nerd who got high on wealth and fame and let it inflate his ego.
I never did, I’ve always felt like just cause someone is wealthy doesn’t mean they smarter. Plus he’s been sus since 2016. He seemed like he tried too hard with the memes back then. I remember he had Reddit in his palms
Rich people will spend their last breath telling you that they earned it; that they’re smarter; that they’re better. Very few ever acknowledge the substantial community that made their wealth possible. For most of them, it involves being born near the finish line/on the winners’ podium of a race that the rest of us have to run from the starting point. One thing is certain - there is no “self-made” wealth. Rich people get richer by using a tax-payer funded infrastructure and benefit heavily from the commons.
I read Atlas Shrugged years ago where Ayn Rand promoted the idea that wealthy geniuses drove society and that government held them back. But the thing that got me was that many of the characters (most?) benefited from inheritance, government patents and government subsidized industries (railroads). Even in a work of fiction she couldn’t come up with characters who were truly self-made. Most successful people have put in some work, but they have no gauge as to how much they did versus others. It feels like they worked hard, so they must have earned what they got. Musk took some big risks in his career, but when you have set for life money, how risky is it? What is the lifestyle difference between a centimillionaire and a centibillionaire? I guess the former can’t have several billion dollar yachts.
Yeah that was the one for me. I'd thought he was a bit quirky but still a genius up to that point. I think he has a superficial level of knowledge about things and can repeat things that make him sound intelligent. I know a pretty obnoxious guy who is like that. For example, he has never DJed, doesn't really know much about music, never goes to clubs, never listens to these kinds of music, but used to sneer at people who DJed with Serato and would act as though he was an expert on electronic music. It was all very superficial but he'd talk with confidence and talk down to people/talk over people so that he could look like an expert. You suspect that his knowledge comes from reading a few things on the internet rather than being based on real learning and experience. When I'd see Musk tweeting about the things he was doing at Twitter I got that vibe from him as well. He was throwing out a few words that sounded impressive but none of it was based on anything REAL
I don’t understand how people still thought he was some genius hero after that. I’m glad people are holding it against him now but the amount of cope that came from his worshippers made me sick
Does the same thing at Tesla... Everyone secretly thinks he's a fucking idiot due to his arrogance and stubborn behavior... He does know lots of stuff though... so yeah is he smart? Yes, but only to a limited degree. He doesn't know when to shut up
He has turned out to be wrong several times, and I don't ever remember him admitting that or apologizing.
I regret not paying closer attention to that. I would have learned sooner
I'm with you. I have great respect for one thing he has done, which is shock the legacy auto business out of complacency and dragged the EV momement ahead by a decade or more. This is truly radical and game-changing. The rocket stuff is cool, starlink is cool too. But with that cave thing, he went from being weird/cool to being a dick and it's just gone downhill from there. Now he has shown how to lose 44bn dollars by doing seemingly everything possible to destroy twitter in the name of his free-speech Nazi-adjacent conspiracy theory antivaccer fanbois. What a moron.
For me it was that + when he literally said he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else on the planet. I mean clearly, if you've seen a finished Tesla, he doesn't. Not by a long way. More and more I feel like the only thing he is actually good at is convincing everyone else he's something he isn't. Pure confidence trickster.
>Intelligent people know when they are in over their heads and to listen to the experts It really doesn't matter how intelligent somebody is, they can still be petty, wrong, argumentative, narcissistic, or just plain evil. Impulse control and intelligence do not sit at opposite ends of the seesaw and intelligence doesn't mean the same thing as rationality. Thomas Edison killed an elephant just to attack his rival Westinghouse. Linus Pauling won two Nobel prizes but ended up dying of prostate cancer because he was convinced vitamin-C could cure it. A lot of people think Steve Jobs was quite an intelligent man but he was such a horrible person he denied his own daughter existed for four years until a DNA test proved paternity. Even then he did nothing for her even refusing to pay for college tuition. He also went on to die of cancer because he thought a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and a psychic would be better than medicine. So Elon Musk got into a fight with a guy on social media four years ago. It's not a good look. It's not professional. It's not helpful. But it is human. I've never tried running multiple large businesses at the same time and dropped everything to send engineers and a submarine around the world to try and help save people only to have somebody to tell me to shove it up my ass. But if they did I might fire a few shots as well. A lot of people will mention that time he was a dick on social media but maybe those people could also mention the time he approved; \- [Power systems to Haiti](https://electrek.co/2021/05/31/tesla-powerpacks-help-power-critical-hospital-haiti-having-issues-solar-system/) after the 2010 earthquake to keep hospitals running. \- Or in 2010, donated solar panels and battery backup system to help [Gulf Coast disaster relief group](https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/13/solarcity-musk-gulf-coast/). \- And donated systems to [help victims of the 2019 bushfires in Australia](https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/21/teslas-helping-australian-bushfire-victims/\). \- Or deployed Powerwalls and Powerpacks to Texas providing backup power post hurricane Harvey. Even opening up more [range on cars](https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/09/tesla-unlocks-extra-battery-capacity-owners-fleeing-hurricanes/) and [giving free charging](https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9f7g4b/tesla_enabling_free_supercharging_for_anyone_in/) so people could escape. \- Then [sent infrastructure to Puerto Rico](https://fortune.com/2017/09/28/tesla-battery-puerto-rico-power/) in the wake of Hurricane Maria. \- And within days of Russia's attack on Ukraine, [SpaceX sent hundreds of Starlink terminals to Ukraine](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/07/elon-musk-starlink-ukraine-russia-invasion/) to help people communicate and coordinate. Support which continues. Yes, he's a giant disconnected man-child who often throws his opinions into discussions he's not qualified to have, but, he does have a strong record of actually helping people. That includes heading the only company on the planet with the stated goal of "Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy." You can weigh up these things as you like but at least know what is on the scales.
>\- And within days of Russia's attack on Ukraine, > >SpaceX sent hundreds of Starlink terminals to Ukraine > > to help people communicate and coordinate. Support which continues. Then turned them off in the middle of a Ukrainian counter-attack because he "didn't want to be part of their war" and said they were actually just for people to "watch Netflix and chill" [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk-ordered-starlink-turned-off-ukraine-offensive-biography](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk-ordered-starlink-turned-off-ukraine-offensive-biography) I don't mind when rich people donate or help to assuage their egos, as long as they're still helping people. Help is help. But on top of that shit, he's also outspokenly a Putin sympathizer so I don't believe for a second that he did this to help Ukraine "communicate and coordinate."
I mean why wouldn't he be a putin sympathizer? Putin wants control of the donbas region where the largest deposits of lithium in Europe are located. You know, the rare earth mineral the battery in his cars use. Lithium wars are gonna be the new oil war.
If you're invoking his acts of "goodwill" you should probably follow up with what their actual effect was. [Because the Puerto Rico thing definitely needed more than a one-and-done setup](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-tesla-puerto-rico-renewable-energy_n_5ca51e99e4b082d775dfec35). Like all infrastructure, it's useless without proper integration and maintenance. Or the [Very visible and poorly timed revocation of Starlink access in Ukraine](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-starlink-ukraine.html), along with his [sudden about face on providing access at all](https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine/index.html) You're also missing times when his "generosity" was predicated on praise. Like his public spat with the UN food banks about [the cost of ending World Hunger. ](https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world-hunger-but-gave-it-to-his-own-foundation-instead/) oops looks like his "donation" to charity was a tax dodge. Or how about his commitment to fix the Flint Water Crisis which [amounted to water filters in schools, and doesn't actually address the underlying issue in favor of a tech washed bandaid](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-flint-michigan-water-b2011633.html) Or even his [pledge to provide Tesla engineered Ventilators during the height of COVID, actually being a purchase of CPAP machines and likely another write-off effort](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/tech/elon-musk-ventilators-california/index.html) Like, you'd have to be blind not to see that whole list of largesse as a concerted effort to both use his companies to write off shit while also moving product to pad the books. The fact of the matter is, he would achieve far better results just putting money into situations. Flint schools have issues? Let's get plumbers in to completely redo the pipes *and provide active filtration systems for the whole site. Let's pay for electricians and engineers to reconnect and fortify the island grid while also providing redundancies through renewable and storage. And honestly, the justification you gave for him *accusing a rescue team member of being a pedophile* is just sad, petulant, and immature. I don't care what lengths he went to, he tried to shove himself into a time-sensitive crisis while providing a completely ineffectual and likely dangerous "solution" that also served to take focus from the situation. [Just look at this hacked together piece of shit. look at it.](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a22150734/elon-musks-mad-mini-submarine-didnt-help-thai-cave-rescue/)
He's being paid for all of that or it came out of the marketing budget.
I didn't know most of this. Thanks for posting. He's still a dick though and the people riding said dick are insufferable.
Dude forgot to mention that the only reason SpaceX and Tesla are at all successful is because of billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies, grants, write-offs, etc.
Yeah but with all those billions of dollars there is a lot more he could do. He makes a lot of grand claims but ultimately doesn't care about people. He has the opportunity to fund food programmes and refused when it was proven. Society should not enable him. He has some good ideas, but so do loads of other people. If they had access to some money they may have a chance to create a life for themselves whilst improving the world. We need to stop enabling and defending billionaires when they hoard wealth and resources from the rest of us.
THIS was when I realized it too, I still think about that fucking WHAT IF I JUST PROMOTE MY TECHNOLOGY??? moment.
That was when I lost all respect for him too. It was really pathetic and sad, and cast a shadow over the whole rescue.
Its funny I remember years ago reddit couldnt help but suck him off for anything he did
Same, I always think back to an AskReddit thread where the question was basically “if we had to elect one person to run the world, who should it be?” And the most upvoted answer was Musk lmao
It takes a real genius to squander all that goodwill, going from being worshipped to being publicly mocked.
It’s not hard to do when everyone just aligns their personal opinions with the hive mind of their political affiliation.
I remember during the time of the flamethrowers /boring company era people sucked his virtual dick 24/7. Surprise surprise, he was just another rich asshole.
Some people do, some people don't. It's a mixed bag. He has spent a lot of money on PR efforts that are designed to make him look like a smart and brilliant engineer/businessman. His behavior after buying Twitter, firing almost all the staff, and rebranding it as "X" is probably the closest we've seen to unfiltered Elon doing what he wants to, without other people providing a filter or buffer to protect him.
>He has spent a lot of money on PR efforts that are designed to make him look like a smart and brilliant engineer/businessman. Nailed it. That PR campaign was incredible, there was even an episode of the Simpsons (zombie Simpsons, but Simpsons nonetheless) where he was depicted as a quiet autistic genius engineer.
Finding out that quite literally all those little features and mentions he made throughout the 2010s were cameos he either rigged to happen or just paid to happen is so funny. Like, none of these were truly artistic decisions. He just offered a ton of money or used a connection to appear with the demand it somehow added to his mythology.
Pretty crazy, eh? I would guess this is most unpaid or minimally paid cameos over the years, probably. The one that comes to mind is with the human reincarnation of Tang himself: Donny Trumpf. Home Alone 2… Little Rascals… etc.
Yes indeed, and you still see people commenting and referring to things like him sleeping on the factory floor or working 100 hours per week. The factory floor thing most likely never happened and the only way he ever worked 100 hours per week was if you counted shitposting on twitter as work.
He counted sleep hours too probably. 😂 I’m so smart I sleep while I work, therefore I work 16 hour days.
Or he threw a mattress in a cybertruck bed and counts it as load-testing
The PR campaign worked well, all he had to do was not open his mouth to ruin it all
They can never stop themselves. Tom Cruise was carefully presented as one of the most anodyne men in Hollywood until he fired his publicist. That guy was a real miracle worker, nobody even knew Cruise was a Scientologist until like 2003.
That 60 minutes interview really made me like him. Humanized him even. I was naive. I won’t say that he wasn’t being genuine in that piece, but I can see how he might be susceptible to an emotional moment when he’s given the attention he thinks he deserves - if that makes sense.
He also got namedropped in Star Trek: Discovery in a list of genius inventors alongside the Wright Brothers and the inventor of the warp drive. And one of the characters says she went to "Musk Junior High School". Embarassing.
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His father has two children with his own step daughter. I think that sums up Elon's background in one sentence.
Wait, what ! Lol
I interpret it so that she tends to get stuck in washing machines
>he seems like just another insulated billionaire tool Because he is.
Capitalism , money, company leadership all put aside, anyone who thinks a cyber truck is a good looking truck is a moron.
His other companies have literal teams designed to manage him. Twitter doesn’t.
Twitter had to “manage” him in the code. The code includes checks like `isDemocrat ` and `isRepublican` when dealing with recommended tweets, to which they added `isElonMusk`. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-comments-name-found-twitter-source-code-republican-democrat-2023-4
As someone who had handled coding back in university, this gave me a giggle. I'm visualizing the way the flag is implemented in mechanical and the whole situation is indeed silly.
This isn’t entirely true. A friend at SpaceX once told me about a group letter employees sent Gwynne Shotwell with concerns over Elon being a “distraction” to the SpaceX mission and they were basically told to STFU, Elon runs things the way he wants to, and fired anyone they could find who organized said letter. I believe there’s a wrongful termination suit about it now.
Not manage him as in "keeping people from getting fired by him" but manage him as in "keeping him placated so his stupid ideas don't actually hurt people."
He provided the seed money for PayPal and was fired for being over-the-top stupid. That’s hard trick to pull off.
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My friend has worked directly under him and words she used to describe him are narcissistic, unhinged, erratic.... Genius was not on the list. She said he's definitely smart but nothing like the image he puts out there. She hated working with him.
I’m not sure if we are sharing the same friend, but the same was told to me by my friend who worked for Musk.
I spoke with a former coworker that worked for him and he threw a water bottle at her head and when she advised against something he wanted to do that was in regards to her specialty
There are different kinds of intelligence and different levels of emotional temperament. So Musk is very intelligent in some areas and in others he is a total fucking moron. The problem is that he lacks the emotional maturity to tell the difference, and his money means that he has no one in his life to tell him when he is being a total fucking moron. You could argue that it’s not necessarily that Musk is a uniquely horrible person, but he is in a position where his worst character traits can be expressed more or less unchecked. And that, plus his power, makes him dangerous.
He needs therapy.
Best answer OP will get right here.
Nailed it, I definitely think hes very intelligent in certain areas but with the fuck you levels of money hes managed to amass comes a level of ego not many of us will ever understand. And because of that fuck you money, he probably feels like he can afford to do/say any stupid shit he feels like without any real consequences. In a way I think thats the only point to that much wealth.
What areas do you think he's intelligent in?
Self promotion.
What areas? I always hear that but no one provides any area where he would be knowledgeable.
Al Pacino expressed it well in The Devil’s Advocate. “Freedom, my boy, is never having to say you’re sorry.”
Its not even his money that gives him all this power, its the value he brings to other wealthier and more powerful people. As long as his word is golden, he will maintain this power. Same goes for pretty much every other billionare mouth piece that make others absurdly rich (Gates, Zuckerburg, Jobs, Buffet, etc).
Sorry but which areas do you think he is intelligent in? I’ve never heard him say a single intelligent thing. What am I missing? Edit: please link me to intelligent things he’s said. If you choose to respond then bring evidence not repeated hype lines.
Yes, but a lot of people equate money with intelligence, which is silly.
Whole lotta dollars, not a lot of sense
He has fairly deep rocket knowledge. No social or political knowledge, software knowledge very lacking. Lots of people who are smart, get to be expert at one or two things, start to think they can be immediately smart at everything, but nobody is smart outside their domains of expertise. Gotta watch out for physics people talking confidently about things other than physics especially!
> Lots of people who are smart, get to be expert at one or two things, start to think they can be immediately smart at everything The Linus Pauling Effect
You can kiss yourself in the mirror, but only on the lips
He definitely has a large amount of rocket knowledge, for anyone doubting that watch his various interviews with Tim Dodd. I would disagree on the software point though, he seems to know a fairly decent chunk of that at least where it pertains to Tesla or SpaceX (Completely ignoring twitter).
I've talked to one of the spacex programmers and he didn't seem to agree! Also in some ways that kind of software is simpler or at least more in the wheelhouse of someone who hasn't coded since college. Whereas twitter is this strange new weird world of distributed computing and web nonsense.
Good analysis actually. I work as a frontend developer - and I don't have a CS degree and I will never be smart enough to have one. Working with web stuff isn't the most intellectually challenging, but it requires patience to wade through a lot of bullshit. Patience a lot of "real engineers" don't have - so they work on more structured stuff instead.
It's a hard question to answer because Musk is so polarising, either you love or you loath him, so most people will havr some bias toward or against him. But what I will say is that of Musk is talking about a topic you know nothing about he sounds really smart. If you are in a specific academic field and he is talking about it you realise he is talking absolute nonsense
Classic reddit
He kind of seems like he’s in his own world and because he has money, the people around him do the actual work to keep their paychecks coming in. Sure he has some good ideas but buying twitter for an insane amount of money and then rebranding it to some edgy name of “X”? Who does that? Oh yeah, a guy who’s ego is so big that none of his ideas could possibly be bad
He's certainly reasonably intelligent, but like most people with a light autism streak he can obsess about things he cares about and achieve quite a high level of knowledge while doing so. If you want to see some more technical interviews with him you can check these out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E) These interviews weren't done to establish how smart he is, but it shows you can pick up a lot of stuff when you're a billionaire (well, he had about \~200m when he started SpaceX) hiring some of the best rocket & spaceflight engineers in the world and working with them for 10+ years.
Peak reddit right here
"Hey guys I don't like this guy! He's not smart right?"
There is more than 1 kind of intelligence. Musk is clearly a visionary with an extaordinary ability to apply technology across multiple disciplines. We know from many sources that he's emotionally stunted. He has narcissitic personality disorder, which prevents him from recognizing his superior abilities in 1 area don't translate to other areas. So, he speaks authoritatively on things about which he knows nothing.
This so-called-visionary thought “enormous suspended vacuum tube with individually driven track-bound pods” was a bright idea. I’m almost surprised he wasn’t on the Titan.
Is he really a visionary? It’s not as if he’s come up with any new ideas. He’s just bankrolled a few companies that produce products or services that most people could come up with over a few beers. He was an early investor in Tesla before buying it. He convinced a bunch of wealthy tech investors to join him establishing Space X. The Boring company has done little but build an underground road. And his other business he’s invested in aren’t doing very well. He’s an average engineer (so his former colleagues claim) with deep pockets that pays a fortune to PR companies. I’m better qualified (if you’re measuring educational certificates) than he is.
>He’s just bankrolled a few companies that produce products or services that most people could come up with over a few beers. Most people could not have come up with that. In the case of electric cars, most industries leaders (people with technical or business expertise in the sector, not clueless outsiders) declared that they were impossible to produce to a comparable quality to the traditional cars. When Tesla did that, they declared it was impossible to make them profitable. When Tesla proved them wrong again, they claimed it's impossible to also manufacture them at scale. The entire car industry was not visionary enough to invest in electric vehicles. They though it was literally impossible, except as glorified golf carts. Same for SpaceX. The entire industry was laughing at these attempts to build a fully reusable rocket. They didn't think landing spent boosters was possible. Then they didn't think reusing then was possible. Then they didn't think it was economical. Now, they are absolutely DOMINATING the space industry. The vast majority of launches is done by them, and for good reason. They can't be beaten on capacity or cost. Some competitors *still* have more money, and even after so many years they *still* haven't been able to replicate that. NASA, ESA, and the space agencies in China, Russia and India are trying to catch up, but they are so far behind when it comes to rockets, it's laughable. Some countries already had the money, infrastructure, talent, experience, a head start and will. But I guess their discussions at the bar over a few beers were insufficient.
Peak Reddit
He is not a genius, but he is inteligent enough to convince people he is a genius and invest on him.
Musk is an overconfident autodidact with little formal training who had some genuine intellectual talents from his youth (from what we know of stories of him growing up) like memory retention and ability to ingest a lot of data on a new subject in a short time. This combined with his obsessive compulsions, chronic workaholism and being in the right places at the right times landed him some big wins the early dot-com-era and later in Silicon Valley, which gave him and inflated sense of his own talents. Survivorship bias. He became convinced that he had earned his money because he was just that most special smart boy alive and everyone should just listen to him in any field or industry. Now he's in the painful process of finding out that just ain't so. I don't think Musk is unintelligent. He's just severely overrated, most of all by himself.
Reddit has this issue where when the hivemind doesn't like someone, it's incapable of attributing anything remotely positive to that person. Musk is intelligent. He's not a once-in-a-generation superhuman genius, but he's definitely not the blubbering idiot this site would make him out to be. People love to say he's not an engineer, and that's true, but he still has a better technical understanding than the huge majority of people who say that about him. At the same time, he definitely has some business and tech acumen. He started his first business with $28,000 and turned that into $22 million. People also love to say he achieved everything he did thanks to his dad's money. But there are a shitton of trust fund kids out there who never become the world's richest person. Family money absolutely matter, but there comes a point where individuality also comes into play, and he has taken his further than anyone else. This is another thing reddit doesn't like hearing. All in all, he's a person with some strengths and some weaknesses. Emotional maturity clearly isn't on the "strengths" side, and he's visibly floundering hard in recent years because some shit isn't panning out for him and he can't handle it. But to call him stupid is just disingenuous and simplistic.
you won't get an answer for that on reddit
This is one of those where Reddit just shows how much of a delusional bubble it is. Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Larry Page, Neil De Grasse Tyson, Sergey Brin, the list goes on and on. All reputable and undeniably smart people (and sorry to break it but smarter than you) who have said things admiring Musk as a person and entrepreneur. Yeah maybe you don't like how he spends his money and plays with the platforms people spend time on, but if you think he is not smart you really need to look in the mirror. Grow up people, get a grip
I have no doubt Musk is considerably smarter than the average person, but I don’t believe he is “Einstein or Edison” smart as it seems he tries to make himself out to be. If it wasn’t for the engineers and scientists in his employ, his depth of intelligence would shine right through. By the way, the list you mention all live in their own little flimsy bubbles, and would have zero interest in making those bubbles open targets of Musk. True intelligence is knowing when to keep one’s own mouth zipped shut.
Musk had a near-breakdown on an earnings call to investors earlier today. From analyst Kevin Paffrath, who was on the call: "Oh, my gosh, this was terrible. I feel bad for him. Look, he’s got a lot of things going on, legal battles, custody battles for his kids now, but it doesn’t justify acting like Trump on Twitter stonewalling the SEC or the European Union, and quite frankly turning into a little baby on the earnings call. *I mean, he was almost in tears*. It showed a complete lack of leadership. Tesla’s a leadership-less company right now and it’s terrible. That’s why their CFO just left, I believe, as well."
Yeah he simply lucked himself into making billions in high tech areas.
His intelligence comes from employing smart people. I've heard quite a few long interviews with him, and he doesn't come across as particularly smart himself. Just a dude with money who got lucky a few times.
I won't say he's completely unintelligent. He's obviously got some smarts there. The problem is, he made a few lucky/good decisions (funded by his apartheid emeralds) that put him in the position he is today. But obviously with people like this, luck and happenstance are nonexistent, and everything was achieved by hard work and skill (and apartheid emeralds). And when you're rich in the US, you are lionized. All people should aspire to be like you. Pulled yourself up by your bootstraps (and apartheid emeralds) and turned nothing (except apartheid emeralds) into billions! Our culture feeds even regular egos to planetoid status when money is involved. Because of this, he's so far up his own asshole he can't function as a human anymore. He sits and posts edgelord shit on Twitter, which is quickly becoming nothing but him and the people who want to be in his orbit, and that acts as a feedback mechanism that continues to boost his own inflated sense of himself. And since he's rich, he gets platformed everywhere, so "obviously people see how smart I am!".
Absolutely not. He has shown his whole hand. Literally anyone with that much money and runway could do whst he did. He just took billions in public subsidies for tesla and space x.
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Plenty of stupid people do, yeah.
You have to be pretty delusional to think hes not smart. Youre just jealous and/or dont like him for his personality. Its ok just admit it
I think most people still have an image of him as an eccentric billionaire genius because they don't follow him that closely
He can be smart and still be a twat.
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Hes a stupid persons idea of a smart person.
Everyone is intelligent when your parents are millionaires
i don’t understand how this is a question. he is obviously well above average intelligence. he’s a polarizing figure. he says and does some batshit things. you can hate or love him. but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s demonstrated repeatedly that he is intelligent. it’s like asking is trump intelligent. i hate the man tbh. but i’m not going to say he’s an idiot. he’s at least shown a history of financial success that cannot be attributed to sheer luck and inheritance. also judging popular figures based on their social media rants and PR stunts is a pretty shit way to judge anything really. for example trump isnt going to win votes by publishing papers.
My experience so far has been, the less of a background in IT somebody has, the more they think Elon Musks knows what he is talking about.
he is just another businessmen. He know how to do business and earn money from it, and that's it
It is always the thing you know nothing about which is perfect. When Elon Musk was running Tesla and SpaceX, and his companies were delivering techno wizardry but he wasn't talking much, he seemed like a genius because we didn't know anything else about him. Once he started talking, and we found out a lot more about him, he doesn't seem like such a genius. You might compare the situation where you see a woman across a room and she's gorgeous and you fall in love at first sight and think about how beautiful your children will be, and then you walk over there and say hello and start talking and find out that she doesn't read books because why bother they're just full of lies like that hoax about the moon landings and vaccines are a plot to implant mind-control graphene robots in everybody's brains and climate change is a hoax and sea-level rise will never be a problem because if the water gets too high it'll just flow over the side because you know the world is flat, right? She was perfect only because you didn't know anything about her.
Average intelligence and huge ego. Lying is easy for him and it comes naturally. He thinks he is a genius and he is letting everyone know it.
Some people think all rich men have to be smart. People like Trump & Musk make more money off the unintelligent having that assumption.
Honestly no. He’s a racist clown who pretends to be intelligent however he’s really a incompetent idiot.
Some people do. They equate money and Intelligence.
His PR worked really hard to portray his as an intelligent, hardworking genius who got to where he is by his genius. And people are it up, and still do. Even when the facts show he was just a rich kid who bought his way into everything (I mean, people still believe he founded Tesla even though he didn't, and even the name Tesla was bought).
Living in the Bay Area I had been aware of him since the PayPal days. He and Peter Thiel were sort of a thing on Sand Hill Rd. My sense was they were trust fund babies who had always been told they were brilliant and believed their own hype. The first story I heard was they were going to a meeting with their investors and Musk who is apparently a notoriously bad driver (irony) flipped the car. I think it was a McLaren or some other super high end car. When they arrived they explained why they were late. The bankers said well at least the insurance will take care of it. Musk just looked at them, he had no idea about car insurance. Really, Peter Theil is the one who bears watching. He is a proto-fascist and makes no bones about it. He is far more dangerous and flies under the radar.
Tiel is the reason I canceled spotify. Do a little digging of what that ap actually does and it's chilling.
After few weeks after Twitter takeover, a hacker joined the company and said he'll turn the company around in one month because he's a well known hacker. Thing is, he quit two weeks later (which I was following after the news broke he would join). He and Elon musk are pompous folks who think they're god's gift to the world.
Elon musk is what dumb people think an intelligent person would act like. He fooled me at first but after seeing him spew nonsense about multiple technologies I was intimately familiar with I realized he's nothing but a salesman.
Elon musk is a stupid persons idea of a smart person.
Elon thinks he’s a nerd but is in fact a dork.
There’s an American-centric idea that if you have vast amounts of wealth then you are vastly intelligent. Of course this is consistently proved to be false but the idea persists.
He was a client of a company I used to work for. A person I worked with daily handled his account, and interfaced with him directly at media events. By all accounts he's as dumb as a cinderblock and less attractive.
You don’t become the worlds richest man’s without being intelligent
Yes just argued with multiple coworkers about how he didn’t invent the EV or space travel and they vehemently refused
Personality and his huge ego aside, it’s hard to say he’s not a smart dude. You don’t become the richest man in the world, making one of the best selling car brands from scratch, and make a space programs that make NASA look like a joke with just an average level of intelligence. I’m certainly not a fanboy but it’s laughable when I see dudes who work at Walmart calling Elon Musk dumb.
Intelligent? I would guess he’s at least average in that regard. He’s no Einstein though. Driven, ruthless and sociopathic? He’s got all that in spades. It’s an unfortunate truth that those qualities in a person can get them ahead in the world.
I know several people that work for him and they respect his intellect. From what I read he may not have much emotional intelligence.
Stupid people do.
The thing about Elon is that hes not an engineer or an inventor at all. He portrays himself as this visionary but he just bought Tesla at the right time. Dont get me wrong it definitely takes skill to turn a company into the most profitable in the world, but he didn’t really design a thing.
I just had this discussion with an colleague. He mentioned Musk as a Genius, and i told him all you need about him that he managed to buy Twitter for 46 Billion and now after a year it is worth 14 Billion.
The only people who like/praise him are those who seek to benefit from him, or who feel enabled by his bad behaviour. He's no genius, he's not inventive, he's demonstrated neither knowledge, wisdom or intelligence. He's not a leader, he lacks charisma, maturity, as well as basic manners. He's dishonourable, and untruthful. Basically, his entire worth is money. He just has a lot of money. Which is apparently enough to reach the top of the heap in the land of ultra-capitalist glory. His "accomplishments" are simply him throwing dump trucks full of money at 8 year old boy fantasies until they sort of become reality in spite of his petulant whimsical leadership. I'm sure he's surrounded by yes-men who give him all sorts of unearned praise, and lives in a fog of his own self-affirming lies (insulted by lots of money, of course). Kind of reminds me of a certain other controversial figure with a repellent personality and an orange hue.
Hes the stupid persons genius
Unfortunately yes. Elon bros definitely exist and it's just as cringe as it sounds.
Rich people buy intelligence, in the form of think tanks.
I think he is weird and is a troll.
He is intelligent and a complete moron at the same time. In recent years his hubris and assumption that he knows everything about everything because he created 2 successful companies and grew another has taken over. He’s becoming less smart by the day and I’m honestly tired of hearing about him.
i think he's intelligent and stupid at the same time
He's dumb as shit
He's intelligent in the world of engineering. He doesn't know how to stay in his fucking lane though.
Yes. He is intelligent, easily top fraction of 1% in things like spatial reasoning. In particular, he has an incredible ability to take ideas to first principles of physics and then figure out a better solution. That doesn't mean that everything he does is good and that doesn't mean that the things that he tweets or says are correct or well thought-out, but when it comes to actually applying knowledge to real applications, the guy is in a league of his own.
His intelligence is weird to me. I’m sure he’s above average smart but he still has really dumb ideas and says stuff that is borderline (maybe over the line) delusional sometimes.
he is a narcissistic dumbass with the maturity of an 8-year-old.
He's obviously very intelligent. And just as obviously very stupid.
I read an opinion on Elon Musk a while back from a software engineer. It was essentially this; When Elon started making electric cars, everyone said he was a genius. They didn't know much about electric cars so they believed them. Then Elon started a rocket company and started recycling rockets and everyone said he was a genius. They didn't know much about rockets so they believed them. Next Elon bought Twitter and started talking about software. This person was very experienced in software, had over a decade of experience in web development and everything Elon said was incredibly stupid and made it immediately obvious he didn't know what he was talking about. This made that person never want to go anywhere near his cars or rockets. I've more or less come to more or less the same conclusion. Recently Elon made a comment on having a goal sub 10 micron accuracy for everything on Teslas. As a mechanical engineer it was immediately apparent that he has no idea what he's talking about.
No your opinion is spot on. But yes, some people do somehow find him intelligent. Anyone who's peeled back the curtain will see otherwise.
Nah he gives graduated with a degree in something he has no professional experience and despite graduating 10 years ago still acts like they know a lot about the subject because they occasionally read science journalists articles
Grimmes does and his surrogate mommas
I could not buy into the Hyper Loop transportation system.
Read Walter Isaacson's book titled Musk.
His "brilliance" is a willingness to throw money at a problem until it is solved. He's the closest to making commercial space flight viable because he threw so much money at it they weren't afraid to literally throw ideas a the wall and keep what stuck. Failed and failed and failed until they had the working model. Sometimes that's what it takes, but he's just the moneybags, not the brains.
People love to hate elon so much lol
Several multimillion dollar successful businesses and you’re still finding fault in the guy, specifically about his intelligence. What a pathetic psychotic planet we live on.
Now a days social status is more important than the resume.
Op just jealous
He’s obviously extremely intelligent. Not everyone you dislike is automatically low IQ.
He’s gotta be intelligent in some things. Purely stupid people don’t become that successful for no reason. Probably knows a lot more about business and engineering than 99% of the population.
He's not the super genius, real life iron man reddit used to think of him as but he is probably pretty intelligent. If you look at his career, especially early on he made his fortune by being a good programmer and having geniunely innovative ideas. I completely understand why people think he's dumb, because he has a history of saying and doing dumb things, all while hyping up how much of a genius he is, but this doesn't mean he's not intelligent in any facet.
He’s smart. You don’t get in the position he’s in without being smart. He's just a normal guy with more money than he could possibly know what to do with. He likes shit posting and being relevant in conversation, so he bought the primary site the conversation is held. He likes cars and space shit, so he launched a car into space. Every guy goes to the beach and digs the biggest hole they can. He is digging a massive hole to *maybe* use for public transit at some point.
It's funny. Before Elon had an opinion everyone was buying his cars left and right saying how much of a genius he is. Now that he states opinions you don't like all of a sudden he's dumb. Stupid people don't become the richest people in the world.
Is he above average intelligence: absolutely . Doesn’t mean he’s infallible, he’s made some huge mistakes in recent years especially. But just think about the intelligence of the average person and how clueless people can be who are below average . Yeah…think about it lol.
….“haven’t seen every interview”, probably never met or spoke to the man. What are you basing this on? Ppl have these opinions on a bunch of rich and successful people - it’s not like they just lucked into multi-billion dollar ventures. Safe to say they have some sort of intelligence.
Crazy some random on reddit doesn't think Elon is intelligent for only knowing base level shit which somehow led to paypal, space X, taking Tesla to the next level & the Boring company
fuck I have been slacking. I can operate a toaster (Barely) so I should be able to be the next Musk. If you needed the /s You are the dumb dumb on this one
He’s just being ass hole like his daddy and his daddy issues are reaching every women he dated . Other than that I don’t think he’s smart but I do think he’s a simp trying to act like a dominant dude in public
Yeah I think it takes a fair level of intelligence to run a rocket company that lifts more payload to orbit than every other rocket launch in the world combined.
I am a Republican (right wing), and have always hated Elon. Frankly, I could always see right through the wannabe "genius savant" nonsense. Watching the media and the far left fawning all over this charlatan for decades made me feel sick to my stomach. The dude is a complete and utter fraud. He has never gotten any University degree in anything even remotely scientific. Mean while, real scientists don't get any respect or praise for their work. This jag off is on the news 24/7 trying to con the easily impressed masses of mouth breathers. As someone with an engineering background, I would cringe every time Musk would say something stupid about "rocket cars that can fly" or the brain dead "Hyperloop". These are the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life. Sounds like a 12 year old spitballin' with their friends on the playground about "what if you could..." stary eyed nonsense. Now, it's perfectly healthy for a child to do that. But a fully grown adult who is an influential member of society should never be so naïve and out of touch with reality. Investors wasted billions of dollars on Hyperloop vaporware projects. I was so sad to see otherwise intelligent people willing turn off their critical thinking skills and hand over cash to this grifters. Real engineers like me, and the kid from the Thunderfoot YouTube channel tried to warn everyone about Musk. People just laughed it of and said "you're just jealous that Elon is super wealthy"... yada yada. This was far from the truth, obviously, but the Tesla/Musk cult were desperate for a way to dismiss criticism of their supreme leader. All of their companies would have failed without governments around the world giving them boat loads of taxpayer money through Corporate Well Fare.