Oh man I miss the time when I thought this man was actually gonna be like the next Tony Stark.
If you read his reddit AmA he sounded like a pretty cool dude who wanted to advance science.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Yeah he had quite a few people in the geek / tech world that liked him or at least were indifferent. Then he started losing his shit quickly followed by getting all MAGA political.
He probably would have been happier had he not gone all Nazi, or if he always was that way, at least kept it to himself.
Now he is sad everyone hates him lol.
I think the first time people (like me) started realising how he truly was when he called one of those Thailand rescue divers a pedophile. He went fully mask off in barely any time after that.
Because how quickly he switched I still wonder if he is someone like Kanye who needs to be on meds otherwise he just can't help himself saying absolutely insane stuff.
I think that may have been shortly after he and Grimes got together so likely she introduced him to more drugs than whatever he was already taking.
Drugs don't make people racist pieces of shit, but they sure can help make it clear that the person already is.
He was probably already racist, but it really does seem like the drugs helped make him a Nazi.
It's probably a combination of the people feeding him drugs and him drifting towards manipulators instead of people who might tell him no.
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Yeah, his whole idea of sending a submarine to rescue the kids, then going completely berserk with pedophile accusations was the wake up call for me. Before that, almost the entire coverage of him over Ars Technica was positive
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I think he's more like Notch and Rowling, they had a fuck ton of money, the ability to never be told no, some pre existing regressive ideas, and got addicted to the internet as it became a hellscape. These people were each just as isolated as the friendless 4channer in their mom's basement, just in a different way, and they were just as in need of therapy.
What we know from Vivian Wilson and her mom is that both paint a believable picture of Musk pre extreme wealth. A tenacious man who always wanted more and was wracked by insecurity. He insisted on sex selective ivf to ensure he only had sons and he punished his daughter when she failed to be sufficiently masculine. He relentlessly pursued and wooed his first wife, but dumped her basically immediately upon striking it rich. When combined with his childhood abuse, current behavior, and emotional neediness in everything he does, I'm comfortable using a framework of NPD to understand him (yeah it's an armchair diagnosis so take it as a proposed model, not a diagnosis). Within that framework the worst thing for his mental health was to become rich, famous, and terminally online. His inability to take criticism and his response to lash out at it publicly and permanently is one of his big reasons for his rightward shift as it came while he was being criticized by the left for his treatment of workers.
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It seemed more sudden and severe than just "oh some people didn't not like him and then things changed".
I didn't know much about him really but he seemed to be investing in tech that could really shape the future, which I thought was "progressive". Like when the first Tesla hit the market "big oil" had been suppressing the EV industry forever and putting your money behind something like that was bold and progressive.
Now he's a Nazi supporting conservative nutty governments all over the world.
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Yeah, and all he had to do to maintain that image was keep his mouth shut and let the pr people talk for him, but no that wasn't good enough for his ego.
I wonder what this timeline would be like if he had accepted that his submarine idea was naive despite the good intentions and just paid to have a nice setup with comfortable tents and catered food for the divers and kids as they got out of the cave (plus their families). Instead of attacking the guy and showing the world who he was, kicking off a cycle of him lashing out at his falling popularity, resulting in it falling even more, then more lashing out, etc.
Even if he was like that the whole time, he might have kept his mask on instead of leaning into it, probably would have never made that offer for Twitter, might have tried to appear neutral instead of joining Trump's campaign.
Though hard to say because the self-driving bs and cybertruck would have still happened and might have kicked off that cycle anyways.
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He probably thought, "I could do their job!" and fired them to save money.
Worse. He believed them.
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one of the most retroactively embarrassing moments in my life is in like 2015 or '16 I was doing some dumb team-building thing for some school-adjacent activity, and the task was to create a "new Mount Rushmore," basically as a group nominate four people who are doing good and important work in the world. I suggested musk. at the time most people there hadn't heard of him, so I gave a little spiel about how he was the "founder" (which I thought was true at the time) of PayPal, Tesla (which people were just becoming aware of), and SpaceX. every time I remember it I cringe and hope nobody else does. although most other people in the group suggested Beyonce as someone doing "important work for humanity" so idk if they have much of a leg to stand on to criticize my choice
It's fine. He had potential, and he really did move fast and break things to make Tesla what it was. I don't think EVs would be where they are today without him.
The pedophile thing really was the turning point. It was possible to see before then, but it wasn't even the event itself that did it. He just changed fast around that time period. Whether his views changed or he just started revealing and acting on them much more is debatable.
He ditched his handlers and PR team. He never had potential. He had a team covering up what a meddling moronic piece of shit he is. Thing is, he's also a fat piggy bank.
His money had gotten things done because smarter people around him have been able to use it to advance tech from time to time, but he always takes credit in some way.
He has done nothing but throw around his daddy's money.
That's it.
Period.
He didn't "become shitty".
He threw away the people covering it up.
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The rumor is he had PR people (which he fired at some point) probably doing stuff like this for him with exactly this goal to make him look like Tony Stark or a pretty cool dude who wants to advance science.
I think of him more like the next John McAfee.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but McAfee must have been at least somewhat skilled in the past, no? That doesn't sound much like Musk.
I guess there is one way he could become the next McAfee...
McAfee was a perfectly competent programmer in the 80s and 90s. I think by the time most people heard of him he had already fried the part of his brain responsible for programming with copious amounts of every drug.
I'd still take him over Musk any day.
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I remember when I first heard about him, knew nothing about him. Just some guy who owned Tesla who was open-sourcing some EV tech. That sounded great!
That's about when it all fell apart. I learned who he was. Fired for incompetence. Fumbles basic questions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE_xHVYwHw8 tldr, guy asks about maglev and airbearings and Elon stumbles around a while to say... "wheels" 🤦♂️). He's not now, nor has he ever been a genius. I genuinely don't think he's even smart by any standard. I think he's just rich and that's it. I remember watching videos about Hyperloop, and the engineering behind it was painfully obvious how unsafe it was going to be, and somewhere between impossible and impractical to build/maintain. Like, that idea only works on paper, or in Sci-Fi. The test track they built rusted out and was poorly secured. And it rusted out largely, because the engineers didn't account for the water in the cement or something...
Or the Boring company. It could have been the best company if it were just called the Boring company but sold cool shit, like the flamethrower. I get the real reason behind it was to stop some public transit project, blah blah, I know, I get it, I've seen and heard it a million times. But the proposed idea he gave, the fact anyone looked at it, at him and was like "Yeah, this seem even remotely possible and definitely not a bat-shit crazy idea" astounds me. At best, it was a worse version of every single subway system ever invented anywhere on earth. At worse, a giant death trap machine that would make the Final Destination movies look tame.
I've riden on many planes, trains, and automobiles. And the only time I've ever felt really unsafe was in a Tesla. Poorly built, poorly designed. Yet people keep buying them. You have mechanics saying their a POS, you have tech folk saying it's a POS, you have the news showing you it's a POS. I don't understand. Hell, he's made so many claims that just haven't happened. Vehicles that he said were coming out, "next year"...
Explaining Elon to people, it's like explaining why "Solar freaking roadways" doesn't work and is a stupid fucking idea.
Tony Stark made his money primarily by inheriting and then massively expanding his father’s defense technology company, Stark Industries. You do not become the biggest weapon manufacturer in the world by not being a psychopath/sociopath so while the movies held up Tony as a genius, he like Elon is a genius at exploiting others and not really a genius at inventing new tech. I wish more people saw through it.
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Back in the day I've listened to him at some panel gathering, about AI. And heard nothing that wasn't already said by sci-fi writers and tech thinkers. So his ‘genius’ anyways eluded me, while him being the moneybag raised suspicions.
Hearing that he was in PayPal immediately put everything in place, because that company was known for decades for freezing people's accounts on random pretext and keeping the money.
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please leave the musk bullshit in the musk communities. it's what they're for
stop musk spam. goddam yall.
Did he really post that? I can't lie that's pretty funny
elon being funny? gotta be fake
I highly doubt the man is off ketamine
It would be the least convincing yet most welcome heel-face turn of the century tbh
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Sure I can answer him: because there was no better way to push your white supremacist nazi propaganda and launching a child porn abure tool as a stand-alone app would have landed you in jail.
You're welcome!
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I do wonder how his ketamine use will play in custody court.
Does it matter when he can just pay the judges?
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What is a k hole?
It's when you take ketamine and dissociate
a dose of more than 150 mg is required to enter the K-hole.[3]
I love the fact that is actually a phrase you can read in a Wikipedia article.
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