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
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?
Paul Cantrell
🇬🇱🇨🇦🇵🇦
Wolf480pl