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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand why everyone does this, Elon has pointed out, he designed one of the original cars for Tesla. He was in fact a founding member of the company. One could say, since he was a founding Engineer, he was one of the real people to do some of the real work at Tesla. He also didn't exactly inherit Tesla in a successful time, he had to bring it up to where it is today, and every year people say its doing the worst it'll shut down, and this and that. I just don't get the hate he's gotten for decades. Does someone have some context?

My understanding is when he took it over, it wasn't anywhere near where it was, and he has in fact placed it as a competing company that mass produces cars, and is a leader in its respective space in the industry.

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They do it because his political views don't align with their own. It's a fairly simple thing to understand about human nature.

Alternatively: Because he literally is not a founder and is often portrayed as one (such as in GP’s comment)

But also yeah, generally he gets a lot of hate for a long and increasingly public track record of being a jerk.

For example, big jerk move to announce he’s “switching parties” to try to frontrun a story about him sexually harassing an employee. Dragging 300MM people already in a lot of stress and cultural tension into your own sexual misconduct issues is really bad form IMO.

They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say.

When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.

> When Elon changed his political opinions

Has he changed his political opinions?

His downfall to me started when he called an actual hero a pedo for no reason at all, except to salve his damaged ego.

Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.

> dangerous thoughts

It's getting awful tough to separate the serious from the satire nowadays.

Elon is a litmus test for nerds. You can tell a lot about an engineer by when they decide(d) Elon is a clown. No doubts the insanity started long before the cave diver defamation incident (although this was the turning point for me personally as well)

If you're a techie that is still holding onto Elon as a hero, good businessman or otherwise decent human being after the Twitter fiasco I'm not sure there is much left to save (or the horse incident, or the time he had secret children with an employee, and the time he stole Grimes' eggs to have a child with a surrogate, and the time he.... )

I think assuming any white guy living in Thailand is a sex tourist was pretty common up through the 2000s. It’s like the kind of joke you’d expect South Park to make.

I'm not sure that even remotely tracks if you're trying to imply that the American left claims that everyone that agrees with them is the only smart people. If anything a lot of their narrative is that they're oppressed by people who are smart and better at politics and business than they are.

Did Elon ever really change his political opinions? Or just become more clear about them? Either way, I think a lot of it was the Twitter takeover just going full "he's either taking this 0% seriously, or doing the most insane maneuver ever" and I'm not sure the evidence has come down on the side of him being all that serious about it.

You can debate if it'll ultimately work out better for him/Tesla/Twitter, but it certainly seems like he's playing pretty loose with his money, Tesla's future, and a lot of other things.

There's a lot of articles about how he maybe is doing something dumb because he may be doing something dumb. It's not the first time he's done it, and most of the things I've seen have included a caveat that this could very well work out.

Think about the number of times that Donald Trump got called stupid starting from when he launched his presidential campaign. You may hate the guy's politics, but he is objectively not dumb, but the "bad people are dumb, smart people are good" narrative must be reinforced relentlessly. It's the golden hammer of political propaganda because IT WORKS!

The counter for Donald Trump being stupid is that Greta Thurnberg is smart and good and everyone must listen to her and do what she says when she is at best very average.

Both Bush Jr and Trump actively played dumb as political theater. That is not the same as the narrative switching to Elon being dumb (and totally not even an engineer, can’t even code lol) the second it became clear he held right wing opinions and planned to act on them.

Trump historically hasn’t been stupid, but that doesn’t mean much in the present. Age gets everyone and his frontal cortex doesn’t exactly seem in shape.

Beyond his usual behavior of believing the last thing anyone told him, when you let him in front of kids he tells them Santa isn’t real, he gave a bunch of Boy Scouts an unrehearsed speech mostly anecdotes about high society parties he went to as a kid in NYC… is that “smart”?

(Also, after he got hospitalized for covid, it was notable he kept bragging in public that he’d passed a dementia test.)

Not the political views, they are irrelevant. His others views make him really unsympathetic.

As a Christian, I find Elon to be an immoral man, but I still think that he is an objectively successful entrepreneur and an engineer who's extremely skilled in execution. Why does his viewpoint on things irrelevant to business and engineering matter in this discussion?

I recommend reading this guys books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman

You're in a cult, and you dont know it. I was raised in this cult too, now I see the light (so to speak)

I don't believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, so this book wouldn't 'help' me. Thanks for the tip though.

Also, this is again irrelevant to the discussion of Musk's business/engineering prowess.

I was a fan of Musk until only recently with the dealings with Twitter. Right off the bat treating peoples livelihoods as a joke was wrong and cruel. This isn't some sensationalized political story, he literally started off the acquisition carrying a sink into the Twitter HQ and thought it was hilarious.

But I still totally agree, arguments to downplay his role in Tesla are totally illogical. Founder or whatever, he took control of a company that was totally irrelevant and led it to 1+ million vehicle per year, 10s of billion revenue, and pretty undeniably caused a huge momentum shift in the industry.

he's had a similar attitude with employees at TSLA for over a decade now - the difference is everyone who joined Tesla knew what they were getting into.

But literally his first act as CEO of Tesla in 2008 was to lay off 20% of the company. He's always been very fire-happy.

He value truth more that the jobs of the former employees at Twitter.

The Twitter files tell us about the level of corruption going on with real implication on the live of way more people that the select few that worked at Twitter.

> It's a fairly simple thing to understand about human nature.

Amercian Nature.

Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak. There's no point in replying to these people, there are thousands of them and I don't think they care to be fair.

> Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak

People have said negative things about Jobs etc, yes. People also said negative things about Bernie Madoff, Hitler, and other people who inarguably were not changing the world for the better.

Having "haters" is not proof of success or how right you are, it's a measure of fame, and is probably closer to value-neutral than a sign of good or bad.

This dynamic is also why it is worth continually pointing out the badness of bad people. It’s not good for our society if we allow people to build this idea that “negative feedback from everyone around you is a good thing, actually.”

It’s very often not! It’s very often evidence that you’re an asshole, liar, or cheat!

> Elon has pointed out, he designed one of the original cars for Tesla.

"he designed" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence.

Musk was definitely instrumental to Tesla's early success, but my understanding is that's mostly due to his deep pockets, his fundraising connections, and his ability to attract and motivate real engineering talent. his direct design and engineering contributions are marginal, and he continues to inflate his role in those areas as part of his decades-long project to portray himself as an engineer or designer (which he definitely isn't).

Elon says he "led the design of the original Roadster"[1]. However, Elon is often loose with the truth - and even by his own admission in 2006[2], his role at Tesla mostly involved business and product strategy.

Really, the visual design of the Roadster is a highly modified Lotus shell. It was designed by a group of people, notably Barney Hatt[3]. Musk had strong opinions about how the car should look, and participated in key meetings with designers. You can think of him as the product owner for the visual styling of the Tesla's shell (but not the designer). This is impressive on its own, as he was also running a fledgling SpaceX at the same time.

Building a really nice version of the Lotus Elise shell is not what makes Tesla unique, though: their all-electric drivetrain and battery systems were revolutionary at the time, and they designed by a bunch of brilliant people like JB Straubel[4] -- not Elon Musk. Ze'ev Drori also deserves credit for bringing the Roadster from prototype to production and bringing the discipline needed to solve their early manufacturing issues.

Tesla's incredible marketing, though? The thing that let them hire best-in-class engineering talent and inspire those folks to work for long hours on changing the auto industry? The thing that let them raise money from Google and eBay founders? The thing that continues to inflate their share price to massive P/Es, even today? That's all Musk. He's the best marketer in the world, bar none.

It irks me that Musk is not satisfied with his incredible level of accomplishment and needs to also obscure the work of the people around him who made important contributions. It's been a successful strategy for him so far though, as evinced by the wide acceptance of his version of events and the resulting positive effect on the companies he's involved with.

I'll write a blog post about this with more research if people are interested.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596862790408568836

[2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...

[3] https://www.tesla.com/blog/lotus-position

[4] https://archive.ph/HK5uh

A big turning point for me with Elon was actually listening to him talk. In countless interviews he's asked some variation of the question "how do you do it all" and every single time it's the most obvious softball question begging for an answer that praises all the amazing and dedicated engineers that worked on these products and every single time his answer is is some variation of "I'm just that amazing" -- "I only sleep 4 hours a night" -- "I work really hard"

Decoding the Gurus pod nailed it with their most recent episode on a Musk interview where he hammers this point home. He's the techno-shaman — by demonstrating how different he is to the rest of us mortals and how he has unique knowledge of beyond the cutting edge of tech, he gives people license to believe in whatever he's selling. Just like a traditional shaman does but it's work 120 hours a week sleeping on the factory floor + intimately familiar with every aspect of design, engineering and production (and routinely solve problems none of his brilliant engineers can), instead of going into trances with a direct line to a deity.

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