• Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    8 hours ago

    The part that stings the most about Elon to me is the failed potential or his missed opportunity to have been a great man and a true benefit to humanity. Larry Ellison has always, ALWAYS, been a cartoonishly evil fucker. So, when he does evil shit you aren’t shocked. Elon was, on the surface, trying to do things to help humanity progress. Instead, he shit on all of it and threw fuel to the fire that will burn the USA to the ground.

      • underisk@lemmy.ml
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        7 hours ago

        He almost got himself and Peter Thiel killed by crashing a $1m car while trying to show off for Thiel. He got kicked out of PayPal for nearly bankrupting the company and insisting that they switch all their servers from Unix to windows for no fucking reason.

        So yeah, he’s always been like this.

        • madde@feddit.org
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          2 hours ago

          It feels unfair that in our timeline Bush somehow won against Al Gore and Musk didn’t take out himself and Thiel before they could bring substantial damage to our societies.

          Are we somehow just living in like the worst possible timeline after 2000?

      • LordMayor@piefed.social
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        7 hours ago

        I think that’s what they mean by “on the surface”. If he had just kept the cringe quiet and stayed out of politics, he could have pushed the envelope on electric cars, rockets, robots, etc. and a majority of people would have been happy to see him do it. He had two things going for him: enormous wealth and a desire for cool tech.

        He could have had as many stupidly named babies as he wanted, seethed about trans people and have time to actually get good at video games, all from the luxury of his many homes and jets. All he had to do was let his PayPal money get to work in his chosen tech industries and keep his personality out of it.

        The world might have progressed a little, even. His companies would be better off. Many of us would have bought Teslas. The Cybertruck would never have happened. Twitter would… well, Twitter would still suck but it would be someone else’s fault.

        • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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          6 hours ago

          This is exactly what I meant.

          I dealt with Elon during the PayPal days. He was a cringey fucker back then too, and we essentially laughed him and his stupid idea out of the building. So, I knew the type of guy he was back before 2015.

          Ultimately, Forest Gump’s momma said it best. Stupid is as stupid does. If Elon’s actions pushed forth positive change, it wouldn’t matter how big of a cringey fuck he was.

      • Random_Character_A@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Yeah, it was funny how he was in pre-twitter days considered to be a tech industry prodigy who was going guide humanity to a better tomorrow. Then he bought Twitter and started broadcasting what’s running in his head to in extend that entire world knows he’s a right wing fuck knob.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        I think he has always been an asshole, but at least he was working on things that actually helped humans, like popularizing electric vehicles and lowering the cost of getting to space. Nowadays he mostly just brainwashes Grok into spreading propaganda.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      Yeah, no. He never could have been because there never was potential. I keep hearing this and talks about how smart he is and why would he use that for evil.

      No.

      The guy is a fucking idiot.

      He has a certain charisma, and he is a great scammer, that’s for sure, and he got lucky like hell multiple times, but please stop pretending that this guy who got fired from his own company for incompetence has any abilities or redeeming qualities. He doesn’t. In. A different universe, he simply would have failed at step one and nobody would have known his name.

      He is a dumb but lucky lying scam artist, nothing more. Any qualities that people think he has, are just other things he made up and claimed. He claims he’s the world best engineer yet literally every idea that comes from him directly is just too stoopid to even say out loud.

      The earlier Tesla’s aren’t his (no he did not found Tesla, that too is a lie) but the cyber truck is his idea and design and that should show the absolute insanity in his head.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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        5 hours ago

        I never said he wasn’t an idiot. I know from personal experience he is cringe and an idiot. My comment relates to the path he had chosen, where he was focusing his energies and , more importantly, the investment dollars he was getting, and how he veered off that path.

    • Ember James@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Elon Musk has never been anything more than an investor with a good PR team. He doesn’t have a brain to develop anything on his own.

        • Ember James@lemmy.ca
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          5 hours ago

          The part that stings the most about Elon to me is the failed potential or his missed opportunity to have been a great man and a true benefit to humanity.

          This opening sentence feels like they may not know.

    • dandylion@lemmy.zip
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      5 hours ago

      Elon was what? you need to learn a lot about narcissism and love bombing and the various forms of it…

      save your empathy for people who need it - and thanks to billionaires, a LOT of people would be happy to receive empathy.

    • Sarah Valentine (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 hours ago

      False narrative. His children can tell you he’s been a shitlord for a long while now. He was a nepo baby from a family that got rich off exploiting human beings, and he did nothing to distance himself (not his image, himself) from that legacy. He hired people to do the work for him then took credit for it like he’s a genius.

      Elon can eat shit.

    • Asetru@feddit.org
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      8 hours ago

      Well, he got his mention in Star Trek as one of the great people to will have advanced humanity, so I guess after having that had crossed off his list he could just do something different next.

        • Asetru@feddit.org
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          7 hours ago

          DIS S01E04

          How do you wanna be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane? Or as a failed fungus expert? A selfish little man who put the survival of his own ego before the lives of others.

            • samus12345@sh.itjust.works
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              6 hours ago

              It was said by Lorca, a character from the evil Mirror Universe. So although it wasn’t intended at the time, the case could be made that we was accidentally outing himself as being from that universe since where else would Musk be remembered positively?

            • Asetru@feddit.org
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              6 hours ago

              Currently doing a DIS rewatch. Not a big fan but not on the hate train either. But man, my intestines cramped from the cringe when that scene popped up.

          • Little_mouse@lemmy.ca
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            6 hours ago

            I choose to believe that that is not a list of three similar things, but a list of different ways to be remembered.

            Do you want to be remembered as dilettante competing in a crowded field who managed to have the right combination of skill and luck?

            Do you want to be remembered as the one collosal idiot with a cult of personality, who claimed to work for humanity but only ever dipped us into a kessler syndrome and helped set the conditions for the Bell Riots?

            Do you want to be remwmbered as the inventor of a revolutionary technology in desperate times that single-handedly averted the doomed fate of humanity?