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They do it because his political views don't align with their own. It's a fairly simple thing to understand about human nature.

ksec 4y ago
> It's a fairly simple thing to understand about human nature. Amercian Nature.
ethanbond 4y ago
Alternatively: Because he literally is not a founder and is often portrayed as one (such as in GP’s comment) But also yeah, generally he gets a lot of hate for a long and increasingly public track record of being a jerk. For example, big jerk move to announce he’s “switching parties” to try to frontrun a story about him sexually harassing an employee. Dragging 300MM people already in a lot of stress and cultural tension into your own sexual misconduct issues is really bad form IMO.
narrator 4y ago
They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say. When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.
- myko 4y ago
  > When Elon changed his political opinions Has he changed his political opinions? His downfall to me started when he called an actual hero a pedo for no reason at all, except to salve his damaged ego.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.
    - perryizgr8 4y ago
      > dangerous thoughts It's getting awful tough to separate the serious from the satire nowadays.
  - Phlarp 4y ago
    Elon is a litmus test for nerds. You can tell a lot about an engineer by when they decide(d) Elon is a clown. No doubts the insanity started long before the cave diver defamation incident (although this was the turning point for me personally as well) If you're a techie that is still holding onto Elon as a hero, good businessman or otherwise decent human being after the Twitter fiasco I'm not sure there is much left to save (or the horse incident, or the time he had secret children with an employee, and the time he stole Grimes' eggs to have a child with a surrogate, and the time he.... )
  - astrange 4y ago
    I think assuming any white guy living in Thailand is a sex tourist was pretty common up through the 2000s. It’s like the kind of joke you’d expect South Park to make.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I'm not sure that even remotely tracks if you're trying to imply that the American left claims that everyone that agrees with them is the only smart people. If anything a lot of their narrative is that they're oppressed by people who are smart and better at politics and business than they are. Did Elon ever really change his political opinions? Or just become more clear about them? Either way, I think a lot of it was the Twitter takeover just going full "he's either taking this 0% seriously, or doing the most insane maneuver ever" and I'm not sure the evidence has come down on the side of him being all that serious about it. You can debate if it'll ultimately work out better for him/Tesla/Twitter, but it certainly seems like he's playing pretty loose with his money, Tesla's future, and a lot of other things. There's a lot of articles about how he maybe is doing something dumb because he may be doing something dumb. It's not the first time he's done it, and most of the things I've seen have included a caveat that this could very well work out.
  - narrator 4y ago
    Think about the number of times that Donald Trump got called stupid starting from when he launched his presidential campaign. You may hate the guy's politics, but he is objectively not dumb, but the "bad people are dumb, smart people are good" narrative must be reinforced relentlessly. It's the golden hammer of political propaganda because IT WORKS! The counter for Donald Trump being stupid is that Greta Thurnberg is smart and good and everyone must listen to her and do what she says when she is at best very average.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Both Bush Jr and Trump actively played dumb as political theater. That is not the same as the narrative switching to Elon being dumb (and totally not even an engineer, can’t even code lol) the second it became clear he held right wing opinions and planned to act on them.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Trump historically hasn’t been stupid, but that doesn’t mean much in the present. Age gets everyone and his frontal cortex doesn’t exactly seem in shape. Beyond his usual behavior of believing the last thing anyone told him, when you let him in front of kids he tells them Santa isn’t real, he gave a bunch of Boy Scouts an unrehearsed speech mostly anecdotes about high society parties he went to as a kid in NYC… is that “smart”? (Also, after he got hospitalized for covid, it was notable he kept bragging in public that he’d passed a dementia test.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
krater23 4y ago
Not the political views, they are irrelevant. His others views make him really unsympathetic.
- anon291 4y ago
  As a Christian, I find Elon to be an immoral man, but I still think that he is an objectively successful entrepreneur and an engineer who's extremely skilled in execution. Why does his viewpoint on things irrelevant to business and engineering matter in this discussion?
  - misiti3780 4y ago
    I recommend reading this guys books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman You're in a cult, and you dont know it. I was raised in this cult too, now I see the light (so to speak)
    - anon291 4y ago
      I don't believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, so this book wouldn't 'help' me. Thanks for the tip though. Also, this is again irrelevant to the discussion of Musk's business/engineering prowess.
kcb 4y ago
I was a fan of Musk until only recently with the dealings with Twitter. Right off the bat treating peoples livelihoods as a joke was wrong and cruel. This isn't some sensationalized political story, he literally started off the acquisition carrying a sink into the Twitter HQ and thought it was hilarious. But I still totally agree, arguments to downplay his role in Tesla are totally illogical. Founder or whatever, he took control of a company that was totally irrelevant and led it to 1+ million vehicle per year, 10s of billion revenue, and pretty undeniably caused a huge momentum shift in the industry.
- alfor 4y ago
  He value truth more that the jobs of the former employees at Twitter. The Twitter files tell us about the level of corruption going on with real implication on the live of way more people that the select few that worked at Twitter.
- Centigonal 4y ago
  he's had a similar attitude with employees at TSLA for over a decade now - the difference is everyone who joined Tesla knew what they were getting into. But literally his first act as CEO of Tesla in 2008 was to lay off 20% of the company. He's always been very fire-happy.

ksec 4y ago

> It's a fairly simple thing to understand about human nature. Amercian Nature.

ethanbond 4y ago

Alternatively: Because he literally is not a founder and is often portrayed as one (such as in GP’s comment) But also yeah, generally he gets a lot of hate for a long and increasingly public track record of being a jerk. For example, big jerk move to announce he’s “switching parties” to try to frontrun a story about him sexually harassing an employee. Dragging 300MM people already in a lot of stress and cultural tension into your own sexual misconduct issues is really bad form IMO.

narrator 4y ago

They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say. When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.

myko 4y ago
> When Elon changed his political opinions Has he changed his political opinions? His downfall to me started when he called an actual hero a pedo for no reason at all, except to salve his damaged ego.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.
  - perryizgr8 4y ago
    > dangerous thoughts It's getting awful tough to separate the serious from the satire nowadays.
- Phlarp 4y ago
  Elon is a litmus test for nerds. You can tell a lot about an engineer by when they decide(d) Elon is a clown. No doubts the insanity started long before the cave diver defamation incident (although this was the turning point for me personally as well) If you're a techie that is still holding onto Elon as a hero, good businessman or otherwise decent human being after the Twitter fiasco I'm not sure there is much left to save (or the horse incident, or the time he had secret children with an employee, and the time he stole Grimes' eggs to have a child with a surrogate, and the time he.... )
- astrange 4y ago
  I think assuming any white guy living in Thailand is a sex tourist was pretty common up through the 2000s. It’s like the kind of joke you’d expect South Park to make.
noirbot 4y ago
I'm not sure that even remotely tracks if you're trying to imply that the American left claims that everyone that agrees with them is the only smart people. If anything a lot of their narrative is that they're oppressed by people who are smart and better at politics and business than they are. Did Elon ever really change his political opinions? Or just become more clear about them? Either way, I think a lot of it was the Twitter takeover just going full "he's either taking this 0% seriously, or doing the most insane maneuver ever" and I'm not sure the evidence has come down on the side of him being all that serious about it. You can debate if it'll ultimately work out better for him/Tesla/Twitter, but it certainly seems like he's playing pretty loose with his money, Tesla's future, and a lot of other things. There's a lot of articles about how he maybe is doing something dumb because he may be doing something dumb. It's not the first time he's done it, and most of the things I've seen have included a caveat that this could very well work out.
- narrator 4y ago
  Think about the number of times that Donald Trump got called stupid starting from when he launched his presidential campaign. You may hate the guy's politics, but he is objectively not dumb, but the "bad people are dumb, smart people are good" narrative must be reinforced relentlessly. It's the golden hammer of political propaganda because IT WORKS! The counter for Donald Trump being stupid is that Greta Thurnberg is smart and good and everyone must listen to her and do what she says when she is at best very average.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Both Bush Jr and Trump actively played dumb as political theater. That is not the same as the narrative switching to Elon being dumb (and totally not even an engineer, can’t even code lol) the second it became clear he held right wing opinions and planned to act on them.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Trump historically hasn’t been stupid, but that doesn’t mean much in the present. Age gets everyone and his frontal cortex doesn’t exactly seem in shape. Beyond his usual behavior of believing the last thing anyone told him, when you let him in front of kids he tells them Santa isn’t real, he gave a bunch of Boy Scouts an unrehearsed speech mostly anecdotes about high society parties he went to as a kid in NYC… is that “smart”? (Also, after he got hospitalized for covid, it was notable he kept bragging in public that he’d passed a dementia test.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

krater23 4y ago

Not the political views, they are irrelevant. His others views make him really unsympathetic.

anon291 4y ago
As a Christian, I find Elon to be an immoral man, but I still think that he is an objectively successful entrepreneur and an engineer who's extremely skilled in execution. Why does his viewpoint on things irrelevant to business and engineering matter in this discussion?
- misiti3780 4y ago
  I recommend reading this guys books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman You're in a cult, and you dont know it. I was raised in this cult too, now I see the light (so to speak)
  - anon291 4y ago
    I don't believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, so this book wouldn't 'help' me. Thanks for the tip though. Also, this is again irrelevant to the discussion of Musk's business/engineering prowess.

kcb 4y ago

I was a fan of Musk until only recently with the dealings with Twitter. Right off the bat treating peoples livelihoods as a joke was wrong and cruel. This isn't some sensationalized political story, he literally started off the acquisition carrying a sink into the Twitter HQ and thought it was hilarious. But I still totally agree, arguments to downplay his role in Tesla are totally illogical. Founder or whatever, he took control of a company that was totally irrelevant and led it to 1+ million vehicle per year, 10s of billion revenue, and pretty undeniably caused a huge momentum shift in the industry.

alfor 4y ago
He value truth more that the jobs of the former employees at Twitter. The Twitter files tell us about the level of corruption going on with real implication on the live of way more people that the select few that worked at Twitter.
Centigonal 4y ago
he's had a similar attitude with employees at TSLA for over a decade now - the difference is everyone who joined Tesla knew what they were getting into. But literally his first act as CEO of Tesla in 2008 was to lay off 20% of the company. He's always been very fire-happy.