It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.
Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).
I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.
Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.
my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is
there’s also this at the top of the thread:
I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.
turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent
musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed
remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads
@self It's so weird how important it is to them that some kind of non-fungible dollars from his apartheid mine can't be chased back to paypal.
Like, according to the Musk père et fils themselves, Errol owned a share in an emerald mine; Errol was clearly wealthy during Musk's childhood. They may disagree about many things (about whether Errol was abusive; whether he invested in Zip2), but they both agree he was a wealthy white man in apartheid S.A. with mine shares.
it’s very important to musk fans’ world view that privilege doesn’t exist; that being as rich as musk is an achievable goal that was won through sheer engineering effort and not a massive head start, inability to permanently fail, and gigantic amount of luck. the real musk is incredibly far from an engineer in anything but the title he gave himself, of course, but that’s incidental to the fantasy
if you’d like to see what musk looks like without the mythology and associated weird hangers-on, check out the rest of his family: the father who married and impregnated his own stepdaughter, the sister who throws her family’s money into running a failed streaming service, and others I’ve forgotten because they’re just rich assholes failing to no consequence
The absolute most generous you can be is that he benefitted more from the dot-com bubble than anything, and selling out his zip2 company at a probably very overpriced $300M (in 1999 dollars). That still condemns him as a hype-train ponzi circus master who got lucky.
Also lol copium quote for the funding of zip2 from Elon himself:
could you imagine accepting $20k from your parents for, like, anything at all? for most people that’s the kind of money where the idea of fucking up and losing it is nightmare-inducing and would almost certainly have awful repercussions for both you personally and your family. not for these rich assholes though — there was always more money if that $20k went down the drain
@self @zogwarg I am trying to imagine my parents *having* $20K in 1999 money to invest in anything beyond emergencies. Having parents who have that kind of money to essentially gamble with fucks with your brain, I think.
The dot com bubble and it's consequences...
Didn't musk literally tell a reporter a "cute" story about trying to secretly sell his dad's emeralds to Tiffany's in New York when he was a kid? Either he was lying then or he's lying now and either way he's pathetic