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I used to be a huge elon fan, watched spacex rocket development daily, livestream all of the launches, watched many of his interviews, very impressed by tesla, selfdriving, starlink, optimus, neuralink.. he came off as a very skilled engineer.

however..

when he started spamming political misinformation on twitter i had to block him. very concerned he was burnt out and brainwashed into into politics. the nazi salute, then making nazi jokes about it, was just insane.

doge is a joke, he lost the plot.

now i barely check updates on whats happening at starbase, cheer on when the rockets explode, couldn't care less about tesla.. it's a real shame. all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..

he needs to resign from everything and go hide under a rock for a few years until he finally gets into orbit and burns up on rentry.


TheOtherHobbes
DOGE is not a joke. DOGE is the modern equivalent of an enclosure act - privatisation of state data for private profit and political leverage, some of which will be wielded by hostile countries.

And Musk was personally responsible - not just for that atrocity, but for poisoning the world's leading progressive social media site, for being complicit in the neutering of countless world-leading science projects, for defunding basic research at NASA and firing hundreds of employees with solid achievements and genuine passion for space science, for gutting the FAA, and so on.

I cannot say enough unkind things about the man. The fact that he has any kind of following at all after the last year is both shocking and disappointing.

haspok
> he came off as a very skilled engineer.

No, he did not. I still can't believe people bought his BS so easily - "it must be true, because he said it!" No, it isn't, never was, never will be. And I don't even care about that salute - Musk lost all his credibility around 2015 when he promised self-driving cars (coming next year! for the past 10 years, and counting), then by lying about the Solarcity roof tiles (and basically committed fraud for which he didn't go to prison - go figure).

It is also quite dehonestating to those _real_ engineers working for Tesla or Spacex, who actually know their stuff. It was them who made Musk possible, not the other way around.

> all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..

Exactly.

CamperBob2
If you use a combination of math, science, and available resources to create something that didn't exist before, and were paid to do it, then you are doing engineering work. Every other take on the profession is just pointless gatekeeping from the bleachers.

Engineering great organizations is still engineering (a fact that I personally wish I'd appreciated at a much younger age.)

And yes, speaking of engineering: FEM.

vjvjvjvjghv
Same happened for me. It started with the Thai cave rescue and his submarine where it showed that he is a big attention whore. From then on he seemed to lose his mind.

I still have to respect Starlink, accelerating adoption of EVs and the work SpaceX does. His businesses have reshaped several industries big time. It takes a lot of courage and insight to pull this off.

more_corn
That’s when I burned my Elon fan club card.

When he baselessly accused a hero rescue driver of a terrible crime and then refused to back down (if it’s not true sue me for defamation) then hid behind a technicality… yeah that’s the end.

That’s the behavior of a childish bully shithead not a leader. I can’t believe people still think he’s the man to lead the companies he runs.

noworriesnate
Children need heroes to look up to, I’m glad that children of right wingers can look up to him but who do children of left wingers have to look up to? Jeff Bezos is hardly inspiring.
bayarearefugee
You think Jeff "All WaPo opinion articles must focus on personal liberties and free markets" Bezos is a left-winger? lol.

You must have missed the part where he got divorced and then predictably shifted hard right.

(Being credibly accused of being a sex pest is the only thing more powerful than divorce when it comes to putting men on the right-wing-shift pipeline).

vjvjvjvjghv
Not too long ago the left wingers had Musk to look up to.
saalweachter
I mean, in general, idolizing billionaires isn't really the "left wing" thing to do.
helge9210
The pattern "I used to be [...] fan, but|however|... because of [...] I'm not anymore" is like em dash in the world of propaganda.
EdwardDiego
Or, wild idea, people change their opinions based on new information. The propagandist monsters!
helge9210
Expressing new opinion is OK. Expressing a change of opinion in the format "Before ..., but now opposite after ..." smells like propaganda.

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