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I've seen people expressing bafflement that the average midwit on Reddit might think they could run Musk's assets better than Musk if they had the same luck/unscrupulousness to have the same resources. I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?
Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? According to them, apparently he doesn't know electricity and servers cost money. And firing most of the worthless staff at Twitter was the worst self-inflicted wound anybody could have ever made!
You ask why this causes bafflement, but do you really think these idiots know something he doesn't? That they have a better grasp of tech and its funding than the man who has a history with payment processors, cybercars, rockets, and now social media - and Elon is just bumblefucking his way to success? I'll grant that he is human and more error-prone than his godly 4d troll image would have some believe. But give any one of his businesses to a chump in that thread (or a group of them) and watch it go belly-up or taken away from them under their noses.
Maybe Musks's single qualification over these people is that he doesn't post on Reddit. A lot of Musk criticism clearly comes from a type who thinks they could do the same job he does even better if only the world had been more fair and gave them the opportunity to do so. It's laughable and contemptible in equal measure.
I think you’re describing Reddit in general. If you read a general news discussion on almost any topic, they’re smugly wrong most of the time. They don’t know how the things they’re discussing actually work, don’t understand the power dynamics of politics at all, and still think that they can run whatever it is better than people who have decades of experience doing that thing.
Of course I think that’s to be expected when most of the user base are college students with minimal work experience and post graduates who have yet to build a solid career. Almost everyone thinks they know how to run things at 18-25 because they are taught all the theoretical stuff about the subject and have never dealt with trying to actually build something.
Elon does draw this more than most because he loves to troll and get attention for himself and put on a show. If he did the same stuff but without the fanfare and trolling, I don’t think most people follow business pages well enough to know about how other CEOs are making very similar decisions.
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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