this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Honestly, after this, and hearing some of his recent interviews: I am genuinely convinced that not only is Elon Musk not a genius, but he possess subpar intelligence. You can’t convince me otherwise, I am 100% convinced that the dude is just a clinical moron.
There has been a meme comparing Elon Musk to Wheatley from Portal 2 being put in charge of the whole Aperture Science center and it immediately going to shit, because this robot was literally purposely designed to be a moron… It keeps on getting truer.
To me, he is like Trump, people thinking the dude is a genius, and he’s constantly playing 4D chess, but over time, everything ends up proving that the simplest theory is the correct one, the dude is just a fucking idiot. A man so profoundly stupid at their core that people had to convince themselves, he actually was a secret genius for their nonsense to make sense, like believing that Jar Jar Binks was secretly a mastermind Sith Lord.
If there ever was a perfect demonstration of wealth not equating intelligence, or even merit, the absolute inexistence of meritocracy, this might be it.
Didn't get essentially buy established companies and then pretend he invented them.
Tesla and spacex for sure. PayPal was created by merging with another company that did a lot of the work.
He does indeed have a history of paying his way into looking like a visionary and/or an engineer. He bought into Tesla in early 2004, it was founded in mid 2003.
His comfort zone was convincing people to give him money for one really ambitious thing, and then using that money to achieve some other thing (that no one would have given him money for) that is sort of on the way, but which has commercial value to him.
For example, he has repeatedly said his companies will deliver full self-driving cars by dates that have passed - and convinced investors to get him in a position to compete with companies like Toyota, promised a 'hyperloop' and got funding to compete with other horizontal drilling companies, promised to send people to mars and got to compete with other satellite technology companies.
So making big promises paid off for him. For the investors, in terms of long term value, they might have been better off investing in existing companies he ended up competing with.
But I suspect he is now outside his comfort zone, and might not even realise how far out of his depth he is.
Adam Something has a lot of videos explaining how stupid his ideas are, including the whole plan to "go to Mars". They are all grifts.