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Comment by burk96 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the Musk fandom in the comments, I've never seen anything to signal to me he's been anything but a savvy investor? He's a better engineer than the average finance bro sure, but seems far from notable in any discipline this site typically cares about? His acquisition of Twitter destroyed the lives of many hard working people and has made it okay for many more companies to follow similar dark patterns (insane API pricing, furthering content lockdown, probably other stuff I don't like to see in the industry)

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Not a fanboy but he definitely did something with SpaceX and Tesla. Both companies were laughable ideas that would clearly never work.

He used them to brand himself as Cool Sci-fi CEO. His Cool Sci-Fi CEO branding may have had a positive impact on the company.

I'd like to see any evidence that any other contributions of his were actually positive.

Bezos has had a rocket company for over a decade and never reached orbit.

I agree that Musk looks like an ass with Twitter but it's a heck of a coincidence that both Tesla and SpaceX were successful doing things nobody thought was possible.

Having spent some time in corporate america, it's a pretty low bar for execs in technical fields. Maybe he just had to be reasonably bright and focused on the mission instead of internal politics.

> it's a heck of a coincidence

I could make the same argument for me. It's a heck of a coincidence the place where I work had no product or revenue or customers before they hired me and a few years later suddenly we have 5 products, huge contracts, and are one of the most hot brand names in our AI niche.

But is my contribution interchangeable with any rando or am I a 10x engineer? Was my contribution even net positive or did others on my team carry my dead weight to the finish line?

Once you've seen a rocket land itself Musk looks like a visionary - that was the turning point for me personally.

I'm a huge space nerd and Musk seems to understand future trends and how to get in early regardless of how it looks from the outside. So a bit of savvy investor mixed in with passionate about product in ways you don't expect from a money man.

Plus his opinions just coincide with a lot of my opinions when i hear his interviews. The X stuff seems like something I can't see yet coz i'm not a social media guy and avoid it in general. I've actually started using twitter more as a consequence of the rebrand coz I want to see if it's going anywhere.

As for the "dark patterns" i think it's just a recession/AI content theft hitting and it was gonna happen anyways, everyone was just holding their breath hoping they weren't the first in line.

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