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Comment by wheelerof4te | Hacker News Reader

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wheelerof4te

Too much hate here.

It's surprising how quicly people jumped from "Elon is the genius" to "Elon is a fraud and a liar".

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Telling loads of lies and committing massive amounts of fraud will do that to one's reputation, yes.

Has he though? If you read the headlines defiantly. If you read the follow up reports, no not so much.

Maybe I’m missing something though. Would you mind expanding what exactly you had in mind when writing this?

For one Full Self Driving is shaping out to be one massive bit of vaporware after being just around the corner for about eight plus years now. For the task of actual autonomous navigation Musk's gamble on going camera only looks like it's not going to pan out any time soon, the only groups getting close have LIDAR plastered all over their vehicles. That was something people at the time were saying too so it's not just the benefit of hindsight letting us say that. There were loads of people at the time saying camera-only was not a functional path to early Autopilot.

How do you know that people change their mind so easily? Isn’t it much more likely that the haters and fanboys are different people, commenting on different topics? It’s much easier to hate on a topic like this and much easier to cheer for him when SpaceX had some world-first success.

I, for one, am not one of those. I was never a "fan boy", but I certainly held Musk in esteem. That went away during his obvious decent into narcissistic madness over the last ~5 years.

Anecdotally I used to think he was actually pretty smart and at the least good at building businesses around good ideas back when Tesla was relatively young and SpaceX was his only other really large venture. In the decade since though my impression has really soured. I'd hesitate to call myself a fan-boy of Musk ever though.

I mean, I've thought he was a weird idiot since before it was cool, but I think the Twitter debacle really has made it a lot clearer to people (and has made me revise my previous assessment; I hadn't previously realised he was _this_ bad).

It's not been a Holmes / SBF overnight reveal, it's been a long slow decline due to his twitter usage since the "diver paedo" incident.

Yeah, calling a selfless rescuer earnestly trying to save the lives of some children a pedophile was when I started to stop respecting him as a human being. I stopped respecting him as a professional when the racist Tesla workplace and management started coming out, with allegedly black people being shuffled off the floor when Elon walked through the factories so he didn’t have to see them.

There is nothing surprising. Elon is for a very long time on the scene. You must be a really good performer not fail during 2 decade long show. I don’t mind Tesla’s poor self driving, Tesla Model X is really cool vehicle (with some design flaws, but it’s ok). My personal turning point was calling a diver “pedo”. After all he’s just another mega rich guy totally decoupled from reality.

Yeah, the "pedo" bit did it for me too. It's when it became obvious how petty and fragile the man was. He wasn't willing to accept criticism of his unsolicited terrible idea (his scuba coffin things) and angrily lashed out at a domain expert who said as much.

Elon was always a fraud and a liar. As he became more outspoken on social media, more people were exposed to what he actually is.

The more surprising thing is the amount of people defending Elon.

I've considered him to be a fraud and a liar for many years now, I'm not going to begrudge anybody for figuring this out only recently.

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