An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the larger world: he’s kind of an idiot.
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An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.
His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.
People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.
At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by [email protected]
Musk does have a special talent, but the talent is for hype: projecting the kind of overconfidence that gets investors who also have shallow technical understanding to give him money.
That kind of overconfidence •requires• ignorance. Any actual understanding of technical details might give him a dangerous sense of nuance and complexity, which of course would scare away investors looking for an infallible Supergenius Unicorn who can offer huge returns.
He's basically P. T. Barnum.
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One of my students remarked the other day that Musk seemed like a supervillain straight out of a comic book — and I agree. Sort of Lex Luthor but a dumbass.
This piece you gives interesting dimension to that observation: charismatic incompetence can be appealing as a destructive force when people don’t believe the status quo is worth saving.
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And I guess I need to close the obvious-but-needs-stating loop on that:
This nihilistic desire for destruction is how fascism gets in the door.
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@inthehands His 'talent' was the extremely rare blessing of being born into a wealthy and highly educated family.
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Jeff Miller (orange hatband)replied to Paul Cantrell last edited by [email protected]
@inthehands I am impressed with how prophetic the satire Network appears to have been about the dynamics of public outrage escaping containment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network_%281976_film%29
(edit: urlencode parentheses as %28 %29)
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@inthehands A friend of mine usually calls him a modern Howard Hughes.
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🎻s is the solution.replied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
Overhyping stuff is not a talent.
The fact that such a large portion of the media and the political and financial elite today keep getting taken in by such a transparently obvious fraud speaks volumes more about their own gullibility, incompetence, and poor judgement than it does any particular skill or talent on Musk's part.
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Matthew Merkovich :clippy:replied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands In many ways similar to your list here, he's also a low-grade Thomas Edison--a litigious patent squatter for things he had only marginal involvement in the creation of, if at all.
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The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculusreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands Here's a paywall free link to the article:
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I see Dud people!replied to Matthew Merkovich :clippy: last edited by
@MattMerk Marconi also fits that description: Took a lot of other people's ideas, put them in a box, and claimed it as his own. @inthehands
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Import Antifascistreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands when I despair and get into a “fuck everything” mode is when I’m most vulnerable to bad ideas. I’ve learned to look past the surface feeling when I get that way and see what’s really driving that despair.
BTW this was not a magical transformation that I decided to do one day. This was the result of years of therapy and practice.
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Every Business major wannabe techbro I've ever met has so much praise for Musk and they tell me that whenever they find out I work in IT.
But I know very few tech people who have a nice thing to say about the guy. Maybe a few at my old job, but that was over run by MAGA and MAGA-lite folks. So they were mostly impressed with his fascism.
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@inthehands so in the Horizon series of video games, the whole apocalypse was triggered by a CEO with a personality complex going from developing robots to weapons development and overriding the safeguards. so i’m afraid that series is more prophetic than i realized.
fuck ted faro #fucktedfaro
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@BackFromTheDud @MattMerk @inthehands It's interesting that those are the names that go down in history. The loud mouthed get remembered for what they did not create, but did promote.
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@inthehands I can confirm this.
I media trained him back in the 90's before PayPal. -
@inthehands Yeah, I discovered that we he spoke to the Twitter devs just after he bought it. He was just using jargon in a meaningless manner and told them to “rewrite“ the system.
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@inthehands He is the /ne plus ultra/ of the Dunning-Kruegeroids; so amazingly confidently incorrect that the normal run-of-the-mill Dunning-Kruegeroids see him as some kind of genius, because he obviously knows many more things to be wrong about than they even know exist.
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@inthehands do you have the sources of what you are claiming, or is it just "widespread knowledge"?
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I'd demand a refund for that education. Man is dumb as hell
