He made a space rocket company called Space Sex and your choices of Tesla cars are S3XY. Maybe he wasn't like that in the PayPal days, but ever since he has been loud in public, he has been like this loud in public.
Let's be clear that the PayPal days consisted of his company merging with a company that was doing something his was failing at, spending 4 months as the CEO arguing that the entire thing that Comenity had built (which was "PayPal", that they'd already built a working version of, trademarked, etc., before the merger) be thrown away and rewritten in ASP, because he didn't understand Java.
So horrific was his tenure at PayPal that, in a world where CEOs "pursue opportunities", "spend time with family", etc., Musk was openly fired. In absentia. The morning he left for his honeymoon. How badly do you have to fuck up as CEO for the Board to do that to you?
Musk's "contribution" to PayPal is mostly just "cashing dividend checks".
The difference is that it used to be combined with some pretty cool stuff. He was a loudmouth jackass but he was (running companies that were) doing neat things with electric cars and rockets. Now the cars and rockets are stagnant, his newer ventures are jokes, he blew up Twitter, and is making a decent attempt at wrecking the country I call home. The loudmouth jackassery was kind of amusing when there was cool stuff to go along with it. Not so much anymore.
He wasnt running those companies so much as they were running him. These groups had dedicated soft protocls for handling elon's bullshit and disasterous influence. He's always just been the money guy. His ideas have always been shit, and the ideas he shared that were good invariably were ones he was handed and was repeating (often handling related questions rather poorly).
just look at his consistent and extreme lack of comprehension of fairly basic engineering. The man is a talentless hack, who paid his way into fame and the appearance of success. His contribution to paypal was his money. When paypal and x (at the time elons online bank) merged, paypal's code etc. Weren't really infleunced by elon or even x. X was crazy unsafe and unreliable, and so merging really only brought together intelligent havenots with a decent product with an unintelligent nepobabies wealth.
he didnt invent tesla either. He just bought into the company and bought the right to call himself a founder and marketed that angle aggresivley.
elon is an idiot, and always has been. Idiots need symbols though, so other idiots idolize him, propping him up.
Was he just lucky, then? SpaceX and Tesla have both been very successful, with business models that looked pretty dubious at the time. Electric cars and rockets looked like good ways to turn large fortunes into small ones, not the other way around.
he is certainly rich by most peoples standards but his networth is enormously inflated and represents unrealised capital which he gas succesfully leveraged for things like buying political influence.
That being said, most of those we would call intelligent in this kind of discussion are not good woth money, they're good woth more practical and interesting things. Things that aren't total figments of our collective imagination. Being good with money is like being good in theology.
There is no way a net worth of over four hundred billion Earth dollars is not "rich." Yeah, net worth and liquidity aren't exactly equivalent, but your statement on that has exactly zero relevance here.
As far as intelligence goes, there are certainly ways to become rich without it. But Musk didn't do it any of those ways as far as I can tell.
I totally get why people would say he misleads people and his stated wealth is inflated as a result. He has enormously overpromised and underdelivered, no doubt about that.
But I can't understand saying that is the only element of his success. Forget about his blather for a second. Tesla has sold millions of cars. SpaceX has done hundreds of successful orbital launches. You can't fake that.
Is he entirely responsible for those successes? Of course not. Could Tesla and SpaceX have achieved those things if the only thing Musk brought to the table was a relatively paltry amount of money? I really don't see how. You're telling me that this guy founded rocket company with $90 million that two decades later accounts for more than half of all orbital launches on the planet, and he's a talentless hack and only succeeds because he's willing to lie and his fans are too stupid? That doesn't add up.
Elon is willing to lie and his fans are too stupid to see through being mislead. What major targets of teslas have been met? Fsd? Nope. Sub micron tolerance on builds? Nope. None of what he promises happens, but it doesn't stop stock surges. Did doge (shit coin) go to the moon? No. Bunch of chumps got pump and dumped though. Did grok beat anyone at anything? Nope. Is it non-woke? Nope.
Grifting people takes a form of intelligence, i agree, but it is not what we usually mean when we say intelligence in this context.
If I were Vernon Unsworth I'd be fine with searches for "Vernon Unsworth pedo" coming up with discussions about how stupid Elon Musk is for calling me a pedo out of spite and how he really should be in jail for that absurd defamatory statement, but isn't because he's politically untouchable.
There's a model Y with The Sticker on it in my street, introduced years after he showed his colors like that. No, dear neighbor, when you bought that car, you knew.
