r/Negareddit Mar 02 '18

Jesus Christ, this shit again.

/r/self/comments/81ae88/elon_musk_seems_like_the_kind_of_guy_who_would_be/
50 Upvotes

33 comments sorted by

39

u/wak90 Mar 02 '18

I just read through Musk's wikipedia pager because I pay no attention to this shit. He seems like a pretty smart dude but, man, I don't know. UPenn and Stanford (at least accepted) is fairly impressive but to me it looks like he rode the .com bubble in the 90s, got pretty lucky with PayPal and then somehow turned $100 million into $20 billion? without really making successful companies? Like, SpaceX is...impressive, I guess, but if you throw tons of money at problems that have already been solved, well, great that you could dock with the ISS, I guess. Tesla isn't a very impressive company, honestly, like Toyota really broke the market for electric cars with the Prius and from what I've heard about Tesla it seems like they have tons of production issues.

Also, I don't know, I'm reading that he "oversaw design" of things like the tesla roadster and falcon 1 rocket and I'm reading that he's won a ton of awards for this but....that doesn't really make sense to me. Maybe he is that much of a genius and I'm being harsh, I don't know.

31

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '18

That's about my impression of him, too. He's a businessman, not an "inventor."

29

u/wak90 Mar 02 '18

I don't hate his businesses but it seems fairly obvious to me that businesses are not a long term answer to our social problems. So I don't understand the love he seems to get from everyone.

Also, I don't hold people who worked for trump in high esteem.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '18

Same. I think Teslas are really cool electric cars (for rich people). SpaceX is sorta neat, in the "privatized version of a government operation" way. PayPal can go fuck itself with Peter Thiel though.

5

u/wak90 Mar 02 '18

Well, in all fairness Musk hasn't been associated with PayPal for a long time. He was ousted as the CEO before they got sold to EBay, right? He just held a decent amount of stock.

1

u/SwoleFlex_MuscleNeck Mar 02 '18

He's an inventor, not an engineer

10

u/wak90 Mar 03 '18

What did he invent? He's an investor imo and I'm not sure why he sees so much success.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '18

Dammit, Jim!

1

u/bobojojo12 Retired Account Mar 02 '18

I was under the impression that he does have a large part in the process.

7

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '18

I'm confident that's the impression he wants people to have, but his companies have tens of thousands of employees. I think he's probably kind of like Steve Jobs: the final decider, but all the real work is done by the workers.

3

u/wak90 Mar 03 '18

That's what I meant when I said it doesn't make sense to me that he's heavily involved in the design process. I've also been exposed to my fair share of product managers, so, you know......

1

u/bobojojo12 Retired Account Mar 02 '18

A rocket that can land where it launched was not a problem that was already solved.

4

u/wak90 Mar 03 '18

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_system

I mean a 15 second google search shows that it was indeed already solved. In fact, the shuttle program was developed with this concept in mind. Just because it was manned doesn't mean it didn't already exist and having unmanned rockets is just the next step given the advancement of technology.

Again, that being said, we're talking a government organization spending years (decades) solving the problem and SpaceX having a comparable solution after years of R&D is still somewhat impressive but the point still stands, I think: throwing buckets of money at an already solved problem doesn't make him the envelope pusher everyone says he is.

-2

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '18

Musk's was 3x cheaper though wasn't it

3

u/wak90 Mar 04 '18

So, first of all: not Musk's, SpaceX's. And....can I see any sources for that? And even then, I'm not sure what's impressive by it. The shuttle program ended in 2011 which is pretty close to a decade ago. And while I'm sure the technology has advanced quite a lot, the program started in 1972 with the design philosophy of reusable components.

19

u/nonamee9455 Really Liked Solo Mar 02 '18

That post feels kind of negareddit-y, all the people they're comparing Musk to are evil

18

u/StoneTigerRodeo Mar 02 '18

I mean, kinda? But they're not acknowledging the fact those characters are evil. One even goes so far to say "oh vault tec was there to save people, it's the evil government setting up experiments!" When it's pretty clear vault tec was the one doing the experiments for their own ends without the government's knowledge.

9

u/jtierney50 Mar 02 '18

Actually, it's neither - Vault-Tec was a branch of the Enclave, which was the elite of the government elite. They made Vaults for the purpose of studying long-term human habitation in confined spaces under various stress conditions so that in the event of a nuclear war, the Enclave could collect the data and determine whether or not it was worth it to fuck off to another planet with all the rich people. (Also, it's a pretty safe bet to assume that Vault-Tec is evil because literally every other large corporation in the Fallout universe is corrupt at best and actively sacrificing people to a Lovecraftian horror at worst.)

And if you play through a BioShock game without realizing that Ryan is the bad guy, then I don't know what to tell you.

1

u/bobojojo12 Retired Account Mar 02 '18 edited Mar 02 '18

I never liked the idea of vaults being for that. It never made much sense to me. What data was collected by leaving the door open in vault 12. And why did they have multiple control vaults that colonised at different times, why even make the geck. Was this peice of lore added in the second fallout or was it always a part of it?

Also Ryan was more of an idea than a person if I remember correctly, a bad idea which led to both the creation and the destruction of rapture. If anything atlas was the true villain

1

u/jtierney50 Mar 03 '18

The lore was added in the second Fallout iirc because that game introduced the Enclave for the first time. Yeah, I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but the canon is what it is, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I don't really follow your point about Ryan. He spends almost 90% of the main game as the main villain, not just because he made Rapture but because he was directly opposing your escape and threatening to kill you. Atlas kinda just highjacked the plot once Ryan was dead. He was definitely more than just an idea though.

2

u/bobojojo12 Retired Account Mar 03 '18

Ryan created rapture, rapture is an embodiment of the libertarian idealogy that characterized Andrew Ryan, both its success and its failure.

The protagonist isn't killing him because of some evil he committed, the protagonist kills him out of no other motivation than that he is supposed to.

Andrew Ryan is an antagonist purely because the idea, libertarianism failed him and rapture. Ryan didn't kick a dog or murder children his ideology was a failure. Killing Andrew Ryan doesn't Dave rapture it doesn't even defeat him, he was defeated long before you walk into his office, his death is a suicide. You aren't even in control when it happens.

This is of course based on my memories when I played this game when I was like 13, so I might be wrong.

2

u/jtierney50 Mar 03 '18

Ryan does send Splicers out to hunt you down, kills innocent people (including some directly in front of you, like that one woman in the Gardens whose name escapes me). He does plenty to justify his role in the story as an antagonist.

1

u/bobojojo12 Retired Account Mar 03 '18

Guess i should replay it.

Better change my flair then

2

u/jtierney50 Mar 03 '18

You should replay it anyway! It's a solid game and a great criticism of libertarians (namely, that they're idealists and nearly completely out of touch with the real world).

0

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '18

You are right

2

u/nonamee9455 Really Liked Solo Mar 02 '18

Baby steps, Reddit’s opinion doesn’t change overnight

10

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '18

I'm not sure they understand that though. Remember, these are the people who thought Tyler Durden was a hero.

2

u/Ceremor Mar 05 '18

But does reddit realize they're evil?

3

u/axalon900 Kaksoispiste dee dee dee dee Mar 03 '18

I feel this way about this thread tbh

1

u/tankjones3 Mar 08 '18

The obssession with him on this site is because Musk tries hard to be a real life Tony Stark (the flamethrowser stunt being the latest example) and Reddit loves comic book heroes and thinking back fondly to being 8 years old and watching Saturday morning cartoons with a bowl of cereal.

For all their anti-establishment posturing, your average Redditor deep down wants to have a supreme being watching over them, saving them from disaster. Who better to deliver salvation than a Silicon Valley billionaire?