The Musk Situation

Where were you when you realized Elon Musk wasn't either a genius or even a good person?

As someone who never fell under the spell of the mythos and cult of personality that is Elon Musk, it has been something to behold seeing the scales fall from the eyes of the cult members as they realize that he’s not a super genius, master engineer, uber physics geek, and they see him for what he has always been, a dweeb who got bullied in school, abused by his violent father, steeped in the miasma of Apartheid South Africa, and who lucked his way in on what was to become PayPal in the 1990s and thus have at a relatively young age “fuck you” money, who turned to rockets and cars.

Of course, there are tons of documentary evidence that Musk wasn’t a key technical asset to these endeavors. In fact he was the money, and he used his ego, and his power of the purse to force his way into “owning” these companies.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

From The Poke

That gets me to the point I want to make. As the incomparable

Will Lockett

in his ‘stack “Planet Earth & Beyond” posted a few days ago, there is a new phenomenon of Musk Realization Syndrome, which is when people who have been in the thrall of Musk’s cult of personality lose their fascination with Musk.

Musk Realisation Syndrome Is Real

In this, he talks about his disconnection from the cult being when Musk dictated that the Tesla fully autonomous driving system would solely use the array of cameras and AI to interpret the space around the car and to navigate, the rationale being that humans only have two eyes, so that’s good enough. Will being someone who knows that when you have systems where there are real risks (and do not be deceived, a 35-hundred-pound vehicle can do a fuck-ton of damage to people and property) you have multiple, redundant systems, and plenty of fail safes. Anyone who has any serious engineering background can tell you that shit can and does go wrong. ALL THE FUCKING time.

Anyhow, he writes in that post above:

Musk Realisation Syndrome
Definition: The moment Elon Musk authoritatively talks about a topic you understand with a painful lack of knowledge, context, or experience, creating a cascade of realisation that Musk is actually an incompetent, egotistical, fraudulent halfwit. This syndrome can cause depression, disillusionment, anger, bitterness, and, in some cases, deep-seated denial, cognitive dissonance, and even derangement.

And this is spot on. People talk all the time of the Steve Jobs RDF or Reality Distortion Field that encircled him. And to be fair, that was very real.

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My story

It was 2010(ish), and at the time I was the product manager for a product called RightFAX, and our group’s headquarters was in Bellevue Washington. Thus usually once a month I got on a plane to SeaTac, rented a car, and visited the mothership.

At the Hilton Bellevue, I spied someone’s brand new Tesla Roadster. I had heard of them, but this was the first time I saw one, and I will admit it looked cool.

That led me to note the marque and to look it up.

And that led me to stories of how Musk ratfucked Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhardt the true founders of Tesla motors, basically stealing the company out from under the founders, and establishing his pathetic ass as the titular founder.

Then I read about how he ratfucked his first wife¹, and I immediately knew he was human garbage.

I mean, I was ecstatic when yesterday’s Dingus of the Week March Madness bracket ended with Elon Musk taking the top Dingus of the week for 2024. Thanks to

lyz

for her tireless efforts to document some of the shittiest people on the planet.

If that’s not enough, my homies at Behind the Bastards also have given Musk the bastard treatment. I can assure you that if Robert Evans is scripting one of the BTB episodes on you, you are a real piece of shit:

So, no, I never fell into the clutches of the cult of Musk.

But beyond that, Musk fits into an archetype. Allow me to explain.

The MIT man

Do not get me wrong, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an amazing school, where the geekiest of geeks get their ultimate geek cred.

Top tier in engineering, aerospace, hard sciences, but also a solid business school (the MIT Sloan School of Management is outstanding, and if I had chosen an MBA route, that would have been my destination over HBS).

That said, like the annoying frat boys who attend Hahrvahrd (Harvard) to feather their network for future employment and wealth generation, many (not all) folks who graduate from MIT have a ginormous chip on their shoulders.

They feel that they are special because they made it in, and got their degree. That is like the Nerd-dom equivalent to the Harvard MBA in management consultants, a license to be “awesome” and to dominate any room.

If you have worked with an MIT alum, you undoubtedly have heard them utter things with an authority that is peak mediocre middle aged white man entitlement. Hell, plenty of ink has been spilled, here is Laurie Ruettimann’s post on The Confidence of the Middle-Aged White Man. But toss in MIT, and it is turned to eleven:

No, they think that their credentials from MIT makes them unequivocally the smartest man in the room, and that everyone else needs to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up when they are gracing them with their MIT gilded insight.

And if you happen to have two of them on the same meeting, hoo-boy, you are gonna see some mad dick-measuring as they battle for MIT-supremacy.

Musk exhibits all of this behavior. He is so cock-sure that he is the smartest man, that his opinion is the only one that matters, and for fuck’s sake, it is this paean to his own awesomeness that he is deigning to share with all the plebes.

Add to that his mighty pile of Divorced Dad energy, and you have a cuddle-puddle with some of the worst fucking people on the planet.

I mean, he was somewhat constrained in his worst tendencies until his daughter transitioned, and he broke. He bought Twitter, ruined it, falling first into the Nazi and Antisemitic right-leaning cesspool and then falling hard for Trump, and all things MAGA.

And now he with his go-go team of mutant incel² security breaches he calls DOGE are doing a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly³ of the US Government. And he’s full on embracing the third rail, as Trump brings the US into the newly arising Turd Reich. Musk appears to be angling for a 1,000 square mile “autonomous” zone in a state like Texas where he can make his own reverse Galt’s Gulch community, with blackjack, and hookers.

If only Musk had taken that first bolus of FU money and just bought himself a Carribean islet to have a sex farm.

Want to learn more about Musk? I recommend Common Sense Skeptics,

Will Lockett

’s outstanding stack, Chris Norlund on YT does great takedowns of his finances and liabilities.

Coda

Musk isn’t newly a fucktard, he’s always been one. Unfortunately, he was very effective at selling himself as the savior of humanity.

But at heart, he is the typical bullied boy who learned to bully people, and then due to luck and timing allowed him to become the wealthiest man who has ever existed.

I didn’t get into his affinity for humor that is apropos for a teen-aged boy, or his insanity in his pronouncements about Mars and manned space travel.

No, I could write a back-breaking tome on all this shit.

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1. Honestly, there is so much ink spilled about his shittiness as a human being

2. I heard someone call the DOGE staffers as “Teslacels” and I about died laughing

3. RUD’s are polite euphemisms for when your $500M rocket toy goes BOOM.