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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

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Yet oddly enough, the vitriol didn't turn up against him when he was creating awesome stuff, but when he was creating awesome stuff and behaving like a monstrous asshole. Curious!

(There are plenty of people bandwagonning on Musk hate, and definitely some for his political bent, but there are also plenty of totally valid and non-political reasons to have disdain for him)

I remember plenty of naysayers claiming that Musk was going to go broke with Tesla and SpaceX, driven more by vitriol than fiscal arguments. Astronomers (and only astronomers) also hate Starlink.

I'm going to agree with Walter that it's just human nature to want to drag down the successful. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins, after all.

Pride is also one of the deadly sins.

If anyone has a justification for being proud of his accomplishments, it's Musk.

That's why you see everyone losing their goddamn minds over Warren Buffet. They just can't stand to see success. Jensen Huang. Michael Dell. John Mars. Alain Wertheimer. Phil Knight. Dustin Moskovitz.

People literally just trawl the most-successful-people list and find folks to hate. Simple as.

Mark Cuban is an interesting in-between case. But yes, you have shown that wealth doesn’t do it; but wealth and an appetite for publicity (especially for wealth-related attributes) seems a solid predictor.

Part of that correlation is because one of the best ways to get publicity, as Musk has discovered, is to be a monstrous asshole.

Of course you can also get it for philanthropic acts, but Musk doesn't, again because he's an asshole.

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