Musk: He's always been full of shit, and he is not the messiah
From the very beginning Musk has been a shitbird garbage excuse of a human being. Now he has unlimited unaccountable power, while Trump defers the government to him.
I first became aware of Musk (Elon Musk) circa 2008 or 2009. I was in Seattle visiting my home office, and I saw an original Tesla “Roadster”1. The car that was the proof of concept. Elon Musk was an investor in the nascent Tesla car company, but the company was the dream of its true founders, Eberhard and Tarpenning, and Musk provided critical funding to get their first car out.
Seeing one in person, I thought “cool”, and it was cool.
A couple years later, about the time of the commercial launch of the Model S, I started hearing people in my circle2 begin to rave about how visionary Musk was, that he “founded” Tesla.
Connecting that with the original Roadster I saw a few years earlier, that I did dig into and thus I was aware that Musk was virtually uninvolved apart from providing funding, so to hear people that I knew and respected were parroting that Musk was the originator of the idea.
And that started me down the rabbit hole. Elon Musk was a terrible human being then, as the story of him basically forcing the real founders out, and hogging all the credit.
Then I read about his divorce from his first wife, and it cemented my belief that he is the worst fucking human being on the planet.
But there has always been a dedicated cadre of superfans, people who truly polish his knob, who follow him on social media and go into attack mode whenever someone dares to offer any criticism.
But in my journeys of anti-Musk viewing and reading (and there is a LOT of it if you look), there is one creator on Youtube: Thunderfoot (aka Phil Mason), a scientist who produces videos that explain things, debunks pseudo-science, and he takes explicit delight in needling Musk at any opportunity.
Below, I link his latest, and it is TF doing his best work. If you do watch it (and I recommend it) if you go scrolling through the comments, you will see plenty of supporters, but also the swarms and legions of Musk fanboys who will shit all over it.
If you like this, do dig further into Thunderfoot’s content. He’s a great creator.
And then 10 minutes after I pushed publish on this, I find this screen cap:
The roadster was the powerplant (motor) and battery pack/control that Eberhard and Tarpenning designed, shoehorned into a Lotus sourced chassis. This is sort of the reverse of the AC Cobra strategy from the 1960’s
My circle is almost always people I work with. In real life I have virtually no friends apart from my wife. And that’s the way I like it.
Try a YouTube channel by Chris Norlund.
My brother in law, who in his fifties should know better, is an Elon bro. One dares not say a single word against Elon and he is spoken of as though he is a close friend. I once mentioned that he gets a lot of money from the government and was excoriated because “he paid it all back”.
I haven’t asked yet whether that has changed or how my Bernie Sanders loving BIL deals with Elon’s fascism. I feel bad for my sister, she is a scientist working in biotech.