https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1841808466848997621
I suspect Elmo may want a pardon in case anything goes down in the next few years about Diddy or whatever.
1 Like
Did Musk post that while wearing a banana costume?
1 Like
4 Likes
So Biden only has a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, but Trump says he’ll do a 300% tariff. So maybe Trump is better for Tesla than Biden, even if he cuts out the tax credit. China might retaliate against Tesla though and that would be worse. Last year Tesla sold 603k cars in China and 675k in the USA, but China could easily overtake the US market and a tariff on Teslas in China would likely hurt Tesla more than a tariff on Chinese EVs in the USA would help them.
But then cutting the capital gains tax could mean a lot more for Elon.
Damn memes.
Why would you ask Elon about the secret service?
I did this like a week ago and everyone yelled at me! To restate: it’s always been clear that Musk is an asshole and that he doesn’t have stable or healthy personal relationships. He derived his sense of self-worth from the belief that he was an Asimovean engineer-hero (reusing that phrase because I’m proud of it!) who was saving humanity by fighting climate change and advancing space exploration.
Whether you agree or not, he believes that he accomplished amazing things in pursuit of those ends and expected that smart people would admire him. What he came to conclude over time (Thai cave thing, COVID, Biden EV policy) was that the admiration (adulation even) that he received from space nerds or magazine puff pieces about “the outsider with a wild plan to reshape the auto industry” did not continue as his enterprises piled up successes and his profile grew and grew. To the contrary, the professional smart people whose respect and admiration he craves actually dislike him intensely, in part because he had (at that time) standard liberal-rich-businessman politics but also because that group of people is extremely allergic to successful businessmen claiming that they earned their success through talent and hard work and should be admired by society for it. He realized that the people whose opinion he cared about would never admire him as the man who built the U.S. EV industry or the man who rebooted space exploration.
From there, it’s not that complicated. Extremist movements all work around the idea of finding people who resent society because it doesn’t accord them the respect they feel they deserve and giving them someone to blame for that fact. Mix in the fact that most of his personal relationships seem to be unbelievably toxic, his psychological stability was never particularly good, he chronically abuses various drugs, and he’s surrounded by sycophantic enablers, and it’s easy to see how he ended up in a self-reinforcing spiral of radicalization and alienation.
5 Likes
I don’t think this is that true. Gates/Bezos/etc. are still idolized. You make it sound like this was inevitable.
Musk lost their admiration because he said idiotic things and the curtain started to come off that maybe he wasn’t as intelligent as he portrayed himself. He totally could have been admired as the man who built the EV industry, if he had just stayed focused on that and not shared his random moronic thoughts. Musk also has always been super thin skinned and can’t accept any criticism/push-back.
5 Likes
He’s a blood-and-soil Nazi, Bobo. People don’t like him because he’s a Nazi. They don’t hate him because they hate successful businessmen or engineers. They don’t hate him because his dick is enormous. They hate him because he’s a Nazi.
12 Likes
I have always suspected the Elon’s parents were murdered in front of him by undocumented immigrants when he was a kid. Feel like I read this somewhere?
There was a time where he at least pretended to be a pretty normal business Dem and didn’t openly espouse Nazi views. People didn’t hate him then, but they also didn’t accord him the kind of respect that he felt he deserved.
He had a Simpsons episode portraying him as the savior of the world exactly as you said he wanted!
Given that nobody will ever have a 100% approval rating, nor should they, you are just laying out the specifics of why he was always bound to be a Nazi. Interesting but at EOD it’s not anyone else’s fault that he has Nazish personality flaws.
This article written by someone who went to dinner parties with actual Nazis before being kicked out of Germany talks about the type of people who become Nazis. What you are describing sounds like a combination of the JD Vance Nazi and the Opportunitistic Nazi:
1 Like
yeah this isn’t hard to figure out. Elon didn’t get any more hate than bezos, gates, et al until he started opening his mouth
2 Likes
He is also an edgelord who craves attention. And once again let’s not forget the drugs. But none of this turned him into a Nazi, it just gave it the opportunity to fully bloom.
1 Like
When was this time - he was given pretty much every accolade a rich guy could want. As mentioned he got a Simpson’s cameo (that wasn’t ironic at all), he got to appear in Iron Man 2, he got to host SNL, he went to all the cool parties, he was on the cover of every magazine, the articles were almost universally fawning.
The only reason he didn’t get the “respect he felt he deserved” was that he basically thought he should have been treated as a modern day Jesus/real life Tony Stark.
1 Like
If someone needs unceasing adulation to not be a Nazi, they’re already a Nazi.
11 Likes
Another theory that explains the evidence is that he was always a white nationalist, was savvy enough to keep that hidden until he had fuck you power and wealth and then cut loose.
I think we should treat him like Jesus, but not the way you’re thinking.
8 Likes
He was in an episode of Rick and Morty, too (great episode that produced a popular meme).