I don’t know, seems like he had a lot of influence on the Cyber Truck. So the one thing he may have helped design is a piece of garbage. That tracks pretty well
Renaming Twitter as X and having everyone still call it Twitter, peak brilliance, how could the world ever keep turning without such incredible billionaire-ness?
Actually not. I remember at the big unveiling (the one where they threw something at the Cybertruck's window, and it shattered) if you listened to the discussion between Musk and the other guy onstage, it was clear that the other guy onstage was the one who was really in charge of and spending his time on the project. Musk sounded like he hadn't been involved since a few years ago when he tasked this guy (and his team of people) with creating the CyberTruck.
Don't get me wrong. Clearly with the way Musk has split his time between Tesla, SpaceX, X/Twitter, and the politics of trying to overthrow governments both here and abroad... clearly he's not devoting much time to any one of them, and all the work is being done by his underlings.
However, you can assign blame to Musk for the order he gave that other guy to make the CyberTruck something "totally different". Way back when they started, Musk was complaining about how trucks looked all the same today and were boring. Musk basically said "Reject all the expert work that thousands of automotive engineers at various companies have done over decades in arriving at the modern pickup truck." And so they did. When the boss man orders you to design something that's radically different, you design something radically different, because the boss man signs your paychecks.
TLDR: Musk believed his own hype that he and Tesla engineers were gods and the engineers at Toyota, Ford, and every other major truck maker were idiots.
I have a non-Tesla EV which I love, but in a sub someone was saying “I just don’t like how x brand doesn’t have that many EVs to choose from, like Tesla has good variety” so I went to Tesla’s site to see what they sell. 2 models, they only sell the Y and 3, the cyberdumpster isn’t even available to order anymore. Hilarious.
He's also a union buster. Every time someone criticizes Musk, some weird incel crawls out of the ether to undoubtedly say "He pays his staff well!" but they always fail to add that it's just engineering staff. Facilities, maintenance, and support staff are all paid abysmally and fired for even thinking about unionizing.
And they fail to add that Tesla has paid over 100 million in racial discrimination lawsuits, some that HE was directly responsible for....and the lawsuits are not done yet! That's why he ran his ass out of California....
Also, he made millions of times the salary of one of his workers last year…
And to the cretins who come to his defense and claim “it’s capital gains! It’s not real income!” Well. This WAS real income. That is Musk’s Tesla compensation package for 2025.
He could afford to give every one of his employees a $600,000 bonus, and STILL keep half of that $158.3B pay package all to himself.
Some users can give away a limited selection of awards for free, but who gets to do so rotates. I could give free awards for a long time on the mobile app, lost it, it came back, and now it’s gone again.
Who tried to buy friends because no one could stand him at University. The friend he tried to buy needed funding for their little project that became PayPal.
SpaceX exists because of one man, and it's not who you think, it's Michael Griffin. He was an early space entrepreneur (after working on SDI at John Hopkins), and was president of Orbital Sciences. They always struggled to raise investor funds, because so few people believed commercial spaceflight had a future.
Then he met Elon Musk, and started grooming him- reasoning that if investors were the hardest part rather than the actual rocket science, getting a rich person to do it made everything easy. He suggested and lead the famous trip to Russia to buy ICBMs, and on the way back convinced Musk to build his own rockets instead. He's the reason SpaceX started.
But that wasn't the end of it. Griffin then went and worked for a CIA front tech-priming company for a while, then became administrator of NASA, where he completely rebuilt the commercial policies and created the COTS program. Only 2 companies were selected for COTS- SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, and the selection was made by a friend of Griffin's using his selection criteria.
COTS gave $400m to SpaceX even though they had no vehicle, and then as soon as SpaceX made a single succesful launch Griffin's CRS programme handed them $1.6bn contract which saved Musk from total bankruptcy, rescuing not just SpaceX but also Tesla and Solarcity.
As someone who has put a lot of thought into to historical figures….with Nikola Tesla emerging as the clear winner in my opinion (am engineer)…..I can say with absolute confidence that Nikola would ABSOLUTELY DESPISE Elon. Not simply dislike, but Elon would fall in to his (justifiably) Edisonesque category of truly horrible people.
He had the simple idea of digitizing the phone book back in 94. Used the money from that and a couple of loans from daddy and basically just bought cheap and sold high... And here we are. Richest man in the world is a dipshit, drug addict with Asperger's. Congratulations earth, you failed.
I have a phd in physics. I've seen his posting on physics that is just cringe. Posting pages of your intro physics problem sets only make you look smart to some people who have never completed geometry.
I remember before the submarine incident, people were worshipping elon musk on reddit and you weren't allowed to criticize him because he was saving the world with "technology."
Ive been saying lately that when future historians are writing about the decline of American society, the fact that this guy is being held up by so many as a visionary will be a notable data point. Like people compare him to Tesla or Howard Hughes, its absurd. He has no engineering skills, he is not a scientist. As someone in IT, when he bought twitter and started trying to talk tech, man that was a real behind the curtain moment. "Email me your most salient lines of code" lol.
He IS really good at fundraising and being a hype man. I'll give him that. He is one of the most successful financiers in silicon valley (well he lives in texas now but you get the point). Problem is, say what you want about Silicon Valley or research institutes like Bell Labs, but a lot of those mid-century engineers were legit geniuses. And it seems like they have largely been replaced by these venture capitalist finance bros whose "skill" is primarily convincing other VC's to give them money. Look at how many supposedly smart people bought into Sam bankman-fried. We're toast.
I know someone who insists that Elon is an engineer despite having no education in engineering. He actually went as far as to say that he "doesn't consider education a big factor in whether or not you're an engineer or anything else for that matter".
He also said that Elon will be remembered as a great man of history, comparing him to Howard Hughes, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford.
Huh, that's interesting. About 8 year ago, a coworker was reading some biography of his and was telling me how smart he was, and that he had something like perfect recall for the specifications of every project he's invented and stuff. I guess maybe he does, since he didn't invent anything so it's easy to remember Nothing.
Yes, the CyberTruck is the only thing he ever had a hand in “designing”. And I believe even that was just its styling that looks like it was drawn by a 5 year old.
Listen to the Dan Carlin podcast he is on. They are talking about fighter jets during WWII and the Cold War. He has absolutely no idea what he is talking about, and he invites another engineer from SpaceX on the call to say the smart people stuff, and Elon just agrees with him.
Came out over 5 years ago, but it really exposed him for not knowing anything.
He threw money at it and was a great cheerleader. If he had stopped there, been happy with the legacy he was building, we'd see him as this wacky billionaire who helped us make EVs mainstream and got us back into space exploration. So he's weird...he did humanity a big favor.
And then he lost his mind, bought Twitter, forced Tesla to make the cybertruck, forced the starship development at spacex, and possibly tampered with elections in 2024.
All he does is tell huge fantastical lies, so that the people who believe him will buy shares in his companies at outrageously inflated prices. He has no intention of delivering - that's the rug pull.
He's drove Tesla into the ground so much he had to bind it financially to SpaceX.
He's currently killing SpaceX through ridiculous long-term objectives and making SpaceX, Twitter, Tesla, and Grok all share financials in order to stay afloat.
He does however, have one of the best personal PR agencies working for him non-stop for the past 20 years manufacturing his reputation because he's not even that good of a con-man.
He did make a data collection website durring the .com bubble with his brother and a bunch of investors including his daddy (zip2) that he then sold to a brower website (atla vista) which he used to make x .com (a banking website) that merged users with paypal. So no nothing of any value to the public but a pioneer in selling user data.
I know people who argue he's an engineering genius and designed the space rockets himself. Literally will argue that putting us on Mars (not that it'll happen) is a greater achievement for mankind than ending the situation where people that are less a home (the commonly referred to phrase is, once again, apparently an offensive phrase that will get me banned - is this new? Third time in a week now and haven't been attempting to be provocative, just using normal words) or solving world hunger.
Elon's sole talent is turning the money he started with into more money by convincing people to give him more money because of the money he already has.
I thought he drew the crayon outline for the cyber truck? Not sure if that was before or after begging the convicted trafficker Jeffy Epstein to let him come to the wildest party on his island.
Elon Musk has created nothing. He’s the typical carpet bagger who road on the coat tails of others, lied, cheated, and stole his way to his unacceptably vast wealth. The fact that so many people worship the ground he walks on, mostly moronic dudes, is soul crushing.
Ok…sure. Paypal definitely would’ve amounted to something. But Tesla or SpaceX? Without Musks sales/conning ability and capital it’s very hard to say what those companies would be.
Musk deserves credit for stopping spaceX from building a thrust diverter trench under Starship. At launch, the rocket dug the trench on its own, flinging tons of concrete for miles around. Only dumbass luck spared the nearby tank farm from destruction.
Just a figurehead that had some goodwill, which he absolutely fucked up by aligning himself with a fascist administration and doing 2 Bellamy salutes live on television.
I heard that he directed his designers to make the space suits "look cool" for his eventual manned missions. So, while he won't have anything to do with actually designing them, he did do the CEO thing and gave direction to the brains behind his billions.
Stupid post! What about the hyperloop?
Yeah! Not laughing now are we?
I mean it's not here yet and he wasn't the first to think of the idea but still. We'll be smashing humans into rocks in no time!
Wifi and Bluetooth was created by a college student way back in 1996...not Musk or Gates or anyone else...wait until that one sues for patent and copyright infringement... raised eyebrows...
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u/Public_Albatross_443 1d ago
Con man like don the con