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Comment by avmich | Hacker News Reader

> Why do people hate Elon so much?

Because he hurts people, different people in different ways. There are plenty of examples, e.g. handling the Twitter employees and Twitter users. Elon does a lot of genuinely useful things, but that doesn't mean he doesn't also do bad, selfish things. And even people who aren't directly affected by that see those bad things.

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You could say the same about Steve Jobs being a tyrant boss, but despite this he achieved God-like status in tech circles. So did Elon for that matter, before he became a pariah seemingly overnight.

Steve Jobs also had a lot of critics, so I don't see any contradictions here. Many people would disagree about God-like status of Steve Jobs. Same for Elon Musk, he didn't start doing bad things overnight, it was accumulating, until at some point, which was different for different critics, he was worthy of robust criticism.

Steve's assholarity over the years was well documented (he was known for parking in handicapped spaces in a car with no number plates, exploiting a loophole in CA law). They both contributed greatly to the advancement of technology - by telling other people what to invent - yet I never saw the same deranged, visceral hate for that man.

Jobs was really selfish as a person but he wasn't anti-LGBT like Musk. Nor getting involved in politics. He was just like that to the people around him, not the general public.

I suspect Elon would be liked more if the annoying things he did were limited to being a dick in meetings and the parking lot.

AFAIK he was only personally an asshole (parking in handicapped spaces), not advocating for everyone to be an asshole (e.g. declaring handicapped spaces a form of "wokeness" and "government inefficiency").

What you can't say about Steve Jobs is that he ran a hostile workplace environment based on sex and minority status. They are very far from being the same.

> handling the Twitter employees

Aside from firing most of them, what did he do?

Aside from hurting them?

Why are you using a word like "hurt" to describe the ending of a legally binding contract?

No, I use "hurt" to describe what happened in Twitter with employees. Don't reduce events to schemas.

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