But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."
IMO it is way more damning to us as a society that people can be this stupid and still become so insanely rich, then if someone had an evil masterplan to manipulate others into making them more and more.
But at the end of the day, this concern is dwarfed by the fact that in either case we let them get away with it and ultimately reward them with insane wealth. This is the true damning of our society that these people are given all this wealth and power in the first place, and after the fact, honestly they can do whatever they like. And what they do isn’t pretty at all.
The difference between me, clever socially but idiot as an entrepreneur, and Musk, the definition of asshole but with good instincts, is enough I suppose ?
B.b.but a bunch of his PR guys convinced a lot of Redditors that he's the real-life Tony Stark who's saving humanity as we speak. What have you done? How could the PR not by true, if so many people repeat it?
I'm yet to see how that idiotic "pedo guy" episode turns out to benefit Elon Musk.
I see the accumulation of social capital no differently. This particular transaction might not have benefited him, he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.