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I definitely am discussing Reddit in general. The hot takes and easy karma shown in that thread appear any time Elon or any minimally right-coded figure pops up as a topic nearly anywhere on the site. You'll be browsing a sub for a video game or show you like and then one day there's a "DAE see similarities between Musk and the Dark Lord?" post sitting up top with 6 gold and thrice the upvotes relative to anything else.
Few are immune to smug convictions. But there is something stupefying about the particular thing they are convinced of. I'd frankly find it more tolerable if they accused him of being a grifter, a conman, a snake, or even evil. But dumb and incompetent? It's this reflexive tic among leftitsts where surely your opponents are just straight-up retarded; as opposed to you, brilliant cat man shooting for the 6 figures with your journalism and poli-sci courses (assuming they're even taking those and not just posing). And it's not just Reddit. I dont think a week goes by where I don't get fed an article about how Musk is doing something crazy or inscrutable. Just this morning I was reading about his digs at Wikipedia, and the article hintingly framed this as mental instability.
This started to feel tryhard with Trump, and it's doubly so with Musk.
I think the forward in your face way that both Trump and Musk do things matters a lot here. There are thousands of tech companies out there doing very similar work to what Musk does. There were certainly hybrid and I think electric cars made by other companies that don’t get the same attention Tesla does. Even outside of tech, lots of companies have moved plants to locations with less regulation. There have been companies that have had massive layoffs and major retooling that don’t get the same attention that Musk gets, and that’s in part because he’s doing these things in very loud public ways.
Trump was the same way. If you’d have put his actual agenda up against any Republican of the last generation, he’s not that unusual. If you took him back to 1992, he’s a democrat. The difference again tends to be that he’s loud, proud and extremely in your face abouT what he’s doing.
I think there are a lot of reasons that that style is seen as stupid. Most people have been taught by culture to see thinkers as quiet unassuming people who don’t have emotions and don’t really market themselves or their ideas. The persona of Spock is the archetypal “deep thinker” in American culture. Trump and Musk are not like that. I don’t think it’s grifting in the normal sense of things. They actually believe in the things they say, but they also understand that a persona full of confidence and a bit of showmanship are needed to make the changes they need to make. But if you’re used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, showmen aren’t going to come off as smart. Then add in that they’ve been in university where they’ve been taught that smart people are the ones with the right opinions and thus once Musk starts saying the wrong opinions he gets seen as obviously stupid because if he were smart he’d agree with the phds in the university.
Not only am I used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, I'm used to thinking of loud confident people being full of shit.
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It doesn't help that Musk has actually got stupider as he got more famous. Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did. But since he was normie-famous he has mostly been signal-boosting right-coded midwit conventional wisdom.
You can tell this by looking at what experts in his fields think of him. The car and rocket people all had the initial reaction of "This is a longshot, but it could work, and I want it to work." People who know anything about civil engineering's reaction to Hyperloop and The Boring Company was "Musk doesn't even understand why the last N people who tried this failed, so he is going to repeat those mistakes." And people who know about AI tend to think that Tesla is well behind Waymo and Cruze in autonomous driving.
My guess is that the underlying cause is some combination of drug abuse, long-term effects of lack of sleep, and no longer feeling the need to do his homework before running his mouth.
Or maybe he knows more about physics than other topics he’s tweeting about. Most people have a single or at best a set of very closely related domains that they really truly understand on a deep level. Musk is really scary good at technical stuff, he knows a lot about mechanical and software engineering. He knows less about politics and whatever conventual wisdom he’s tweeting about.
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I think the Onion article was correct, he just wants to be liked. Right-coded midwits are desperate for some really well-known person to like them, so they are easy to cater to this way, and Musk is one of the most famous men on the planet.
Which is one of the reasons I think we might see him, and his companies, faceplant soon-ish. There's no way someone in his position doesn't know these aren't the people you're supposed to court if you want to stay on the good side of the establishment. It's either "I gotta found someone to rally around me when the chickens come home to roost" or it (and here I mean everything he's doing with Twitter rather than just signal boosting the right) is a parting FU on his way down.
So 'roll hard right and die'?
It probably says something if this passes for "hard", but yeah.
Oh I agree, it was just to keep the direct reference.
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There is no damn way he had more than a surface level understanding of any of it.
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