An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.
His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.
People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.
At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.
1/3
Musk does have a special talent, but the talent is for hype: projecting the kind of overconfidence that gets investors who also have shallow technical understanding to give him money.
That kind of overconfidence •requires• ignorance. Any actual understanding of technical details might give him a dangerous sense of nuance and complexity, which of course would scare away investors looking for an infallible Supergenius Unicorn who can offer huge returns.
He's basically P. T. Barnum.
2/3
One of my students remarked the other day that Musk seemed like a supervillain straight out of a comic book — and I agree. Sort of Lex Luthor but a dumbass.
This piece you gives interesting dimension to that observation: charismatic incompetence can be appealing as a destructive force when people don’t believe the status quo is worth saving.
3/3
And I guess I need to close the obvious-but-needs-stating loop on that:
This nihilistic desire for destruction is how fascism gets in the door.
4/3
Responding to popular replies:
- I understand why some people push back against post 2, and yes, I understand the urge to refuse that dingbat credit for •anything•, but…look, if we're going to understand the present moment, then I think we do need to reckon with the fact that being a con artist •is• in fact a special skill. It's a skill we need to figure out how to counter (individually, institutionally, and societally).
@[email protected] @[email protected] The irony is that Elon pretends to be a humanitarian inventor when is a con man. P T Barnum pretended to be a con man, when he was secretly a humanitarian
@inthehands I am impressed with how prophetic the satire Network appears to have been about the dynamics of public outrage escaping containment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network_%281976_film%29
(edit: urlencode parentheses as %28 %29)
It wasn’t prophetic at all… its writing, development, filming was only 20-30 years from the last apocalyptic, millions of deaths outburst of nihilistic outrage.
@inthehands when I despair and get into a “fuck everything” mode is when I’m most vulnerable to bad ideas. I’ve learned to look past the surface feeling when I get that way and see what’s really driving that despair.
BTW this was not a magical transformation that I decided to do one day. This was the result of years of therapy and practice.
This doesn't really close the loop. Most of what people call a "nihilist desire for destruction" is caused by neoliberal policies that actually make life horrible for people and naturally lead to disaffection from the entire social order. When people widely feel that the status quo is not worth saving, it's because the status quo is bad, not because nihilism suddenly made a big comeback.
When the electorate must constantly choose between one party that won't acknowledge widening wealth inequality claiming the economy is the best it's ever been, and the other that does publicly acknowledge how the working class is struggling but blames it all on various oppressed minorities, it should be pretty obvious WHY despair and nihilism is on the upswing.
Not to mention that a factual description of the climate crisis is: will lead to disaster for everyone, all parties in power are doing nothing effective about it. That quite logically leads to a belief that we'd be better off if the entire system collapsed.
@inthehands Here's a paywall free link to the article:
@inthehands Psychopaths don't necessarily equate to geniuses — even though Eloon Musk, now foreseeably part of Trump's corrupt pathocratic regime to have his own businesses & revenues liberated from any rules potentially demanding he pays his fair share to the nation he more than deservedly benefits from, would surely disagree.
https://gotmusked.com/content/sociopathic-tendencies/
#Pathocracy #Psychopathy #Trump #Musk #OrganizedCrime #CriminalNetwork #CriminalsInOffice #BetrayingAmerica #DefraudingAmerica #LootingAmerica #Insurrection #AttackingAmerica #USAuthority #USPol #USPolitics #RuleOfLaw #Law
The first #TraitorTrump #Regime (and maybe #WBush as well) taught me just how right comics were when they originally portrayed #supervillains like #LexLuthor or #NormanOsborne as "dumbasses."
Lex in reality absolutely WOULD "steal forty cakes" he could have paid for, just because.
@inthehands Interestingly, there was point in the 1980s when the writers of Superman (John Byrne in particular) tried to turn Lex Luthor into pretty much exactly that. In previous media, he had been a pretty standard genius mad scientist, but Byrne's Luthor remade him into a wealthy corporate CEO who merely had geniuses on his payroll.
Then the tech moguls of the 1990s gave the public the idea that a person could be both a tech genius AND a corporate CEO. So that's what Luthor became.
Heaven help us…
‘Trump, whose involvement with the sport goes way back — and who has named Linda McMahon, one of the prime movers of World Wrestling Entertainment, as his secretary of education…’
Overhyping stuff is not a talent.
The fact that such a large portion of the media and the political and financial elite today keep getting taken in by such a transparently obvious fraud speaks volumes more about their own gullibility, incompetence, and poor judgement than it does any particular skill or talent on Musk's part.
Responding to popular replies: - I understand why some people push back against post 2, and yes, I understand the urge to refuse that dingbat credit for •anything•, but…look, if we're going to understand the present moment, then I think we do need to reckon with the fact that being a con artist •is• in fact a special skill. It's a skill we need to figure out how to counter (individually, institutionally, and societally).
@inthehands so @nceladean says the investors who believe in Musk's companies are stupid.
But what if they know he's ignorant and overhyping things, they're just trying to find 10 fools who "didn't know it was impossible so they did it" in hopes that one of them actually succeeds?
Roger
Paul Cantrell
Nicky🦨✌️
wasabi brain
Arcadiagt5
Darrin West
llewelly
CassandraVert
mikespreitzer
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)
David Mitchell 
Patrick Morris Miller
Albert Cardona
groff 🇺🇦
Ludwig Vielfrass
Speed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸
Finerthanfroghair
cholling
Erik Ellestad
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Wally
Fluffy Kitty Cat
Cassandrich
Jeffy 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🇺🇦 ❤️🇱🇺
Garrett Wollman
Chris Johnson
The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus
Arena Cops 🇺🇦✌
Dudula the Dud
Father Enoch
Wandering Star
Carl Muckenhoupt
Bryan H. Rombough
Kyle Memoir 🍉🐧
🇬🇱🇨🇦🇵🇦
Wolf480pl
JonChevreau 🇨🇦
Jörg Seidel
jgeorge
Óscar Morales Vivó
hagelzörnchen
AskPippa🇨🇦
Mark Whybird
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE
Daniel Dvorkin