Douchebag 2.0—an Elon Musk company

Maybe we should see if there are some people we can all agree were good at the business.

Henry Ford?
Cornelius Vanderbilt?

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Different guy - the one I knew was the one that did the programming - Shawn Fanning. He was the one that became a minor celebrity - wore the Metallica T-Shirt at the MTV Movie Awards.

The one that later went onto Facebook is Sean Parker. That’s the super rich one. I think he was the business side of Napster.

Though Wikipedia tells me Fanning has done fine - looks like he was a serial entrepreneur - no big hits but kept building stuff people wanted to buy, some of them with Parker.

Tim Cook?

Sure but he’s no Steve Apple

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Did I say Musk was bad at business? He’s good at it. That’s not a compliment! It doesn’t mean he’s smart. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t go around firing people because they won’t bow down and worship him.

Is Steve Jobs that different from Elon Musk? Maybe he just didn’t live long enough for his heel turn

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I though that’s what people were arguing about.

iPhones haven’t killed as many people as Teslas (if you don’t count the child workers)

I thought people were arguing about whether he was an idiot or not and other people just can’t see how that’s possible because he’s made so much money in business.

I thought we all agreed he was an idiot. But maybe I was wrong

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Yeah, to me, you cannot be completely dumb and overcome all the obstacles Musk has in his companies’ success. His business success is conclusive evidence that he is at least not completely dumb.

Also about whether he’s lucky or just a million times better at business than anyone you’ve ever met.

Elon Musk obviously also has this “superpower.” There are countless examples but expect an unanimous verdict in my favor on a single piece of evidence from a couple of days ago: Musk publicly mocking the guy in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy after Musk “fired” him.

Part of the power of shame is you don’t have to feel it to fear it. Both Musk and Trump are deathly afraid of it.

Trump and Musk are both deathly afraid of shame from being viewed as a “loser” but not for normal human stuff like it being shameful to treat a disabled guy as a POS leech to be disposed of asap with no regard for his humanity.

Trump would have never put out the public apology that Musk eventually did. Even with the threat of litigation. He would not have been able to admit he’s wrong about anything

Even if true, it’s at best different tactics from shameless sociopaths. Clearly Musk’s apology was out of self-interest rather than shame for what he did.

But in MySpace we all got to be friends with Tom.

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Zuck > Musk is one of the hotter takes I have heard. Facebook luckboxed extremely hard and after its big boom was over it went into a hard decline such that the average age of users now is like 60 and it is pretty much a platform for scamming people. Its other successful products were acquired properties. Zuck is currently betting the company on the idea that everyone will want to live in the metaverse having meetings with cartoon avatars.

Facebook had dominance of social media just as it was taking off. Compare their “empire”, such as it is, with the empire Google have built on top of search dominance just as that was taking off.

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