My Kink: Elon Musk's idiocy
I have long thought the South African grifter was a poor excuse for a human, and now I will share some thoughts. This will be long.
Edited to add:
Literally 15 minutes after I pushed “send” on this, the incomparable Ed Zitron whose page you should subscribe to (it is free, and he is an awesome read) fires off this opus that almost made me light up a cigarette even though I don’t smoke.
Damn dude, that is so fucking awesome.
Now back to my rant…
In the way back, I was blissfully unaware of the festering homunculus that is Elon Musk. Then someone at work circa 2011 mentioned that they really wanted to buy one of the Tesla Model S’s. At the time, it was in the pre-release hype stage, so it was probably 2011, and he gushed about Tesla and how it was going to be awesome.
That prompted me to think and as a good product manager, I started digging.
And what I found was that the “leader” of Tesla — Elon Musk — had a reputation as being a visionary, but in reality, he was a walking, talking human trash fire.
At the time, it took a mere cursory search to uncover many instances of his fuckery, and evidence that he was (and is) a shitbird.
I told my work colleague to look up the goings on about his first divorce, and let me know if you still want to get on a waiting list for a Model S. His eyes were opened up.
The Reality Distortion Effect
Look, I am a fan of Apple products, and have been since the early 2000’s. Steve Jobs was a big part of apple’s comeback success of the late 1990’s that runs through today. And while Steve Jobs was a really fucked up individual1 there was what people called a “Reality Distortion” field that followed Jobs around.
And Elon Musk has the same effect. The number of times he “off the cuff” bullshit2 and his echo chamber of lackeys just lap it up. And when someone dares to poke holes in the wet tissue of Musk’s lies, he has legions of brain-dead acolytes ready to spring into action
to take a bullet for their beloved father figure.
Look, the man didn’t found PayPal, didn’t found Tesla Motors, and in fact was walked out the door of PayPal while he was on his honeymoon with the first Mrs. Musk. He really shafted the true founders of Tesla. Sure, he made electric vehicles desirable, and a hot commodity, but he couldn’t help but elaborate beyond reality3.
But, to my delight I have discovered a whole ecosystem of creators on Youtube and other platforms that delight in their critical cuts of Musk.
The Cybertruck
Look, when the drug addled Musk was doodling on a Ketamine bar napkin out popped the concept for the “Cybertruck.” Likely inspired by the Cyberpunk genre of SciFi, it was to be an angularly muscular truck with a tough stainless-steel exoskeleton that was bullet proof, had a 500+ mile range, and the “best” vehicle to meet the coming apocalypse.
In reality, it was a pretty boring stainless steel paneled traditional chassis design, that disappointed in range, durability, and in fact it turns out that stainless steel does rust, and stain when bird shit or an alkaline car wash detergent is used.
Oops.
I mean, he could have googled the Delorean to learn that indeed “stainless” doesn’t mean what you think it does.
But, we’re going to Mars, right?
Uh, not so much. Sure Musk talks a good game, and his legion of followers will fill in the gaps in the hyperbolic fever dream that Musk riffs on.
But the reality is that by any measure SpaceX and the “Starship” program is not going great. Three attempts, and while they get further each time, each one has been a bonfire of about a billion dollars at a throw.
The Muskrats and the mainstream media are complicit in trying to polish the turd that the last launch was. The video below, done by the outstanding folks at Common Sense Skeptics, is practically a frame-by-frame review, without the whitewashing that the PR office at SpaceX was painting.
Alas, they are missing major milestones, milestones committed to NASA, and it seems to me that they might not be ponying up more cash to fund this development.
Sidebar: There have been many interviews of folks who were part of the original space race and recounting the remarkably few fuckups that NASA had in the race to the Moon.
To a man, they all say that if NASA in the 1960’s had blown up this much rocket resources or wasted this much cash, it would have been SHUT DOWN.
I suspect that future flights will need to be funded by SpaceX either with their cash on hand, or by their financial backers. That should be interesting to watch.
In short, like many of his idle speculations about Tesla (robotaxi’s in 2019 clearing about $100K a year anyone?) much of the hype of SpaceX and Starship is just hokum.
And if you want to point out the success of their commercial flights, note that a lot of their pricing power is possible because the US Government launches are funded at a much higher rate.
And I am still pissed that the Starlink constellation of LEO satellites is fucking up the night sky.
Sidebar: The video above was a detailed analysis of the clusterfuck that was the recent Starship 3 ‘launch’ that while SpaceX claims all the successes, it was clear that it was far from a success. Alas, the video (and the other ones I found) have all been pulled due to fucking copyright strikes. Apparently, one of the creators is editing, and when it is live, I will update this post. Stay tuned!
Me thinks Elon has thin skin, and his “free speech absolutism” is 100% bullshit.
The Twitter Shit-Show
Look, I am going to admit that when I stumbled onto Twitter circa 2009, I found a wonderful community of product managers and it felt like home.
Of course, over the next decade or so, it became less homey, but it was still a cohesive group, even if the “growth hackers” and grind-core mindset infected it.
When Musk was in his whiteboy overbite dance trying to back out of his drunk impulse purchase of the Bird app, I knew that my time there was limited.
But I didn’t expect it to go as badly as it ultimately did. I figured he would unban a lot of fucking horrible people, and then try to contain the fallout with the advertisers, as if he wanted to ever get his money back out of Twitter, he would need to make it a better platform for ad buyers4.
Clearly, that didn’t happen, and in fact, he has unleashed and empowered the worst of the far right and conspiracy cranks. There is so much racist, anti-semitic, fuckwadery on the site, as well as in-your-face porn (I mean, my last visit in March of 2023 to check before I pushed the “delete account” made me wonder if I had by accident logged into Pornhub) that it is irredeemable.
The recent debacle of Twitter trying to sign Don Lemon, former anchor on CNN to do a regular video based show is illuminating. For this, there was an hour long interview of Musk by Don Lemon, and let’s just say that he didn’t have to ask any tough questions to get Musk to dither and look like a fucking choad.
Naturally, the ultra thin-skinned Musk fired (tore up the contract, same diff) Lemon via Tweet, apparently catching CEO in name only, Linda Yacarino by surprise5.
Final Thoughts
Look, I know Musk has legions of fans who hang off his every word, but the truth is that he has been in the right place, at the perfect time to exploit the market and society.
The Muskrats6 are all in on his brilliance, and genius5 dimensional chess playing, but he didn’t found Tesla (he pulled a dick move to force out the true founders), Tesla would have died had it not gotten nearly $500M in ARRA funds in the wake of the GFC, SpaceX does do a decent job of commercial space flight, but that is on the back of many billions of dollars pumped in by the government. Oh, and he charges the US Government a significant premium, and if the government ever were to force most favored nations pricing of lifting to space, the rest of the customers would probably see a 40% increase in cost to move a kilogram to orbit.
Twitter will live as long as he wants to keep funding it, but it has become a far right racist hellscape where the fucking worst of humanity has a safe space.
Snowflakes indeed.
Tesla’s fleet is old, and while there was a relatively minor update to the model 3 lately, they look the same. The model y is now 5 years old, and that makes it difficult to sell replacements to people coming off lease. And don’t get me started about the homeless abortion that is the Cybertruck. Seriously the NHTSA needs to get involved because it is a menace for pedestrians and other drivers.
No, you can definitely say I am not a fan.
The podcast “Behind the Bastards” did a 4 part (more than 4 hours) on Steve Jobs co-hosted with the incomparable Ed Zitron that really lays out how fucked as a human that St eve Jobs was. I highly recommend it.
Some examples:
Full self driving will be ready in
2016,2017, … , whatever year is next year…Tesla Semi
The Roadster 2
Roof tile solar
Starship will visit Mars in
2021,2022, …And so many more
Truth is, Tesla would have gone bankrupt if it wasn’t for US Government assistance in the early 2010’s as part of the American Recovery Act.
While Twitter mostly monetized via ads, their system and level of tracking was primitive compared to the vampire squids that are Google and Facebook. My ‘hosts’ file has about 1300 lines of servers to block to keep Facebook from following me everywhere I go. As far as I could tell, Twitter had (and has) virtually no extensive cross site tracking, no tracking pixels, no social plugins (like comments and “likes”) that 3rd party webs use - but really are just mechanisms to track the ever—loving shit out of you.
They still don’t track, but they have pretty much screwed the pooch on the attract new and more advertisers to the platform.
Apparently, one of her ongoing projects is to rehabilitate Twitter in the eyes of the advertisers by attracting big name talents (like Tucker Carlsen and Don Lemon) to increase “legitimate” traffic and thus entice mainstream advertisers to return to the platform.
Alas, I suspect the ads will remain penis enlargement, doomsday preppers, and scammy bitcoin and goldbug shit.
I like this term for his acolytes that hang off his every word, and spend upteen hours defending him whenever there is someone debunking his bullshit. I fully expect this post to get a lot of “well ackshually” replies. Goes with the territory.
I don’t recall who but there were calls from a few members of Congress for an investigation of Space-X. To determine contract violations etc. I don’t recall the specifics and, like so many other newsworthy events, the story was overtaken by Trump this or GOP that. Love your spot on assessment of Twitter, and its constituency of neo-Nazi snowflakes 😂.
Good stuff. It's heartbreaking to spend that kind of money on space ships to bolster your shitty ego. I too, enjoyed Twitter in the beginning, and as someone in advertising and social media, I struggled to find it a place for any brands other than maybe energy drinks and cars. I dropped it after he bought it. It gave me a headache and was upsetting. I dont need more of that in my life! 👍