I think people need a refresher course of the last 5 years or so. Because here’s the deal.

About 2017 to 2020, maybe 2021, the internet was a huge fucking fan of Elon. Including me. I LOVED Elon. Seemed like such a down to earth guy who genuinely wanted to help the human race and was super ambitious. Even if he was flawed. From what I remember, the general consensus was you either liked him, or you felt indifferent and just didn’t really care.

NOW that headspace has changed. Either you fucking hate him, or you do like him and get destroyed. Now, it took me about a year before I started to really dislike him the way the internet does. Because I felt like at the time the internet was doing what it always does. Blows shit outta proportion. That was, until I started seeing things change. Because starting about 2-3 years ago, there has been a massive ego fluctuation in Elon. His Twitter is not the same as it was back in 2019 for example. He was actually fairly level headed and would post the occasional meme. But it was always something amazing to do with Space X or Tesla. Okay, no harm there. NOW it’s full of nonsensical retarded tweets, dumbass memes left and right, tweets pretty much shitting on his own users…It’s a toxic fucking cesspool there. I mean this guy is at a point where he thinks rebranding a social media site that has been widely known to the public with one name, and one name only for YEARS, is a good idea. Let alone to rebrand it to a single fucking letter. Because why not? Kill your user base apparently.

What the hell happened to him? I understand why people dislike him now. As do I. But dude. How can someone fall from greatness like that? Being seen as the next Steve Jobs, flaws and all. To just a shadowy figure of himself? What made him go fucking insane and gain that huge ego?

To the people that would comment, “Well he’s always been like that he just shows it now”, I don’t believe it. When you have such massive egotistical and narcissistic traits, you could give two shits about showing it. He would’ve done so his whole career if he was like this. I’m not saying he NEVER had an ego, but it wasn’t anywhere fucking near the levels of where it is now.

“We were on the verge of greatness, we were THIS close!”

  • BURN@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    He’s always been this bad, he just had enough people around him that sanitized everything we saw about him. There’s reports of teams at Tesla dedicated to keeping him out of the way. His Twitter was sane probably because it wasn’t actually him running it.

    It truly is a case of he’s always been this bad, it’s just not being hidden anymore. I’m pretty sure he went off the rails during covid and stopped listening to anyone but himself. He’s shown glimpses of this through his career, most people just ignored it as eccentric billionaire though.

    Just like Kanye appeared to fall off the deep end, musk also looks like it was sudden, when in fact it’s been a growing sentiment over the years.

    • m0nka@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, he was always that bad. There is a an excellent example in Eric Berger’s book about SpaceX early days(Lift off). I don’t remember the exact details, but there is a critical failure with one of the rockets, and Elon blames it on one of the best engineers. Later is found out it was not his fault, but Elon never apologised which just leaves vibes in the company.

      And overall feel of reading the book that Elon treats everyone kinda bad, it is just not directly stated.

    • ptsdstillinmymind @lemmy.studio
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      1 year ago

      Thank you, I’m sick of the sycophants that pump and promote these right wing billionaires like they’re Tony Stark. These people ain’t geniuses, they just stole enough capital from people over the world to bribe politicians to do their bidding.

    • epyon22@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      He made also a lot more money during this time period by pumping and dumping crypto. He went from being rich to having fuck you money, hence how he came to own twitter.

      • SamiA
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        1 year ago

        He didn’t make money off of crypto and already had an estimated 20+ billion dollars in wealth before 2020. Telsa stock price shot up from around $20 a share to $400 after the quantitative easing (ie. “the money printer”) of March 2020 where he saw his wealth go 20x by doing absolutely nothing (currently Tesla sits at more than 10x pre-Covid price).

        • Proweruser@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Two things can be true. He is a billionaire because of his companies and he still pumped and dumped crypto and made even more money, because for these kind of people it’s never enough.

          • SamiA
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            1 year ago

            I’m not doubting his arrogance or stupidity but unless he’s doing it personally then laundering billions of dollars then the value of crypto that was held by Tesla was inconsequential relative to the value of his shares:

            The company disclosed that it currently owns $218 million worth of digital assets after selling $963 million worth of bitcoin

            (The rest being dogecoin)

      • agitatedpotato@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I still think he used Russian bot farms to help hype his pump and dump, which would explain why the dude has had corespondences with Putin. Then he buys twitter under the guise of getting rid of the bots. Honestly if you look at it like that him paying 44 billion to destroy a company makes sense.

        • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          BP is an explanation, not an excuse. OP is perplexed about how Musk is “suddenly” a jerk, which doesn’t have an easy explanation like BP. Kanye definitely seems to have gotten worse in the last few years, but I don’t know if the pro hitler thing was just well hidden before

          • Vaggumon@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            That’s totally fair, and I didn’t mean imply that it was an excuse, just was saying that some people are just assholes regardless of mental illness.

      • BURN@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk had some sort of condition he’s not being medicated for anymore. Or at least some kind of therapy that he stopped doing.

    • wintermutehal@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m seriously so glad to see so many people who never fell for it here. The rich are not your damn friend, they are not here to help you.