hachyderm.io is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Hachyderm is a safe space, LGBTQIA+ and BLM, primarily comprised of tech industry professionals world wide. Note that many non-user account types have restrictions - please see our About page.

Administered by:

Server stats:

10K
active users

Paul Cantrell

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.

1/3

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.

2/3

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.

nytimes.com/2024/11/23/books/r

3/3

The New York Times · From ‘Wicked’ to Elon Musk, How Americans Learned to Root for the SupervillainBy A.O. Scott

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.

4/3

Responding to popular replies:

- I understand why some people push back against post 2, and yes, I understand the urge to refuse that dingbat credit for •anything•, but…look, if we're going to understand the present moment, then I think we do need to reckon with the fact that being a con artist •is• in fact a special skill. It's a skill we need to figure out how to counter (individually, institutionally, and societally).

- Comparisons to Edison (credit for others' work) and Marconi (same but extra-fashy) and Howard Hughes (unhinged from reality) are all apt, but I think all the above were quite a bit brighter than Musk. Same with my Barnum comparison. And on that note, @hugoestr makes a good point:
functional.cafe/@hugoestr/1135

Functional CaféDuchamp Pérez (@hugoestr@functional.cafe)@inthehands@hachyderm.io @jstatepost@mstdn.social The irony is that Elon pretends to be a humanitarian inventor when is a con man. P T Barnum pretended to be a con man, when he was secretly a humanitarian

- Finally, shout out to everyone in the replies who managed to pivot this into a “bUt THe dEmoCRatS” train of thought. Good job! I'm impressed at your dedication!

@inthehands I am impressed with how prophetic the satire Network appears to have been about the dynamics of public outrage escaping containment. en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php

(edit: urlencode parentheses as %28 %29)

en.m.wikipedia.orgNetwork (1976 film) - Wikipedia

@inthehands @jmeowmeow

It wasn’t prophetic at all… its writing, development, filming was only 20-30 years from the last apocalyptic, millions of deaths outburst of nihilistic outrage.

@jmeowmeow @inthehands I’ve seen a theatre play on “The Network” on Broadway and it was amazing. Didn’t know it was an adaptation of an earlier show.

@albertcardona @jmeowmeow @inthehands wasn't there also a film "The Network", about FB? Was the play an adaptation of that?

That's different from the film "Network," for which Peter Finch won a best actor Oscar.

@jmeowmeow
I really, really need to watch that!

"We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it's true! You people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know! You're beginning to believe the illusions we spin! You're beginning to think the tube is reality, that your own lives are unreal! You do what the tube tells you, you dress like the tube, eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs!"

@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.

@lerxst The trick is to start not bother /that much/ about /most things/. That is more long term sustainable. Growing into a (slightly) grumpy old guy is a life-saver.
@inthehands

@Finerthanfroghair @inthehands Sorry, how is anything ChatGPT says ever relevant to anything?

@inthehands I have no direct experience with Musk, but from the sidelines, it appears most of his companies succeed despite his influence, rather than due to his influence. Though, yes, a good point about raising money from people who don't really understand Information Technology.

@inthehands

This doesn't really close the loop. Most of what people call a "nihilist desire for destruction" is caused by neoliberal policies that actually make life horrible for people and naturally lead to disaffection from the entire social order. When people widely feel that the status quo is not worth saving, it's because the status quo is bad, not because nihilism suddenly made a big comeback.

@richpuchalsky @inthehands

When the electorate must constantly choose between one party that won't acknowledge widening wealth inequality claiming the economy is the best it's ever been, and the other that does publicly acknowledge how the working class is struggling but blames it all on various oppressed minorities, it should be pretty obvious WHY despair and nihilism is on the upswing.

@Wally

Not to mention that a factual description of the climate crisis is: will lead to disaster for everyone, all parties in power are doing nothing effective about it. That quite logically leads to a belief that we'd be better off if the entire system collapsed.

@inthehands

@richpuchalsky @inthehands yeah. I want radical change but in more of a solarpunk anarchist sort of way

@fluffykittycat @richpuchalsky @inthehands I don't see solarpunk so much as being a form of radical change but a way people survive and rebuild when the systems we had have failed us. IMO solarpunk isn't about upheaval as a political good.

@inthehands I honestly don’t get the “projecting confidence“ part. He already had that mystique first time I saw him keynote a Tesla event and I couldn’t watch all that yammering and halting speech. It was messy and made him seem unprepared and neglectful of his audience. And the audience eating it all up and new-clothesing it made it that much grosser.

@godofbiscuits @inthehands I am generally not all that fond of Dead Ringers' caricatures of Americans, but they portray Musk as a robot and I think that does capture something essential about him that their portrayals of Trump, Biden, and Harris largely fail to do. (Of course they are performing for a British audience that may not be well attuned to the niceties of #uspol but is very accustomed to fakers and bullies.)

@inthehands I would only argue the nihilism/destruction bit. Capitalism breeds for nihilism: a perfect consumer. From the top to the bottom. The bottom worship scales up to the greater the nihilist. Capitalism feeds from this trait, cancerous to the core. This trait is a check for the species, get too many nihilists and the society collapses. Too many post industrial rev. and the eco system helps kill them off.

How do you wake the masses from their own nihilistic dunning kruger prison camp?

@inthehands maybe they’ll stop…🎶one day 🎶 (snorts)

@inthehands @hugoestr so many people who know what they’re talking about keep losing their shirt shorting musk. He’s a master at missing targets that should absolutely smash the genius narrative but being able to continue distracting capital so the scorecard that matters (net worth) keeps going up

@virtualinanity @hugoestr
Oh, I wouldn't short him. I'm serious in post 2/3 about this being a special skill, and our society offers lavish rewards to con artists. I argue only for seeing him for what he is.

@inthehands @hugoestr well put. Just so frustrating that as a society we correlate net worth with being right

@inthehands @hugoestr Well said. Phony Stark's delusions of adequacy would soon come unstuck without the, as noted, emerald mine up his but that he was born with...

@hugoestr @inthehands I’d include Henry Ford as another template for Musk. Especially the Nazi connection.

@inthehands I observed that Elon is excellent at convincing tech people to work for him. Either by communicating a vision (often stolen from sci-fi), or by providing attractive incentives. It’s the real tech nerds that get the things done. Plus he’s good at convincing money people to back his plays.

@inthehands None of that means I respect him. He’s obviously an idiot. Who would risk their brain doing ketamine? And you can judge people by who they choose to hang with.

@inthehands
makes me think of this quote: "Convince your opponent he is smarter than you, and you may gull him with the simplest and puerile of tricks."
(whose source I don't know.)
sauropods.win/@llewelly/113454

Sauropods.winllewelly (@llewelly@sauropods.win)Content warning: uspol

@inthehands
Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy are all conmen. They recognize that in each other.

@inthehands the pushback seems to ignore how much "investor story time" drives late stage capitalism.

@LambdaCalculus
The link I posted appears to already be paywall-free — was for me, anyway — but I appreciate the archive link too.

@inthehands i think Trump is the same way. People can't believe he's as criminal as he is without having any consequences so he must be innocent.

@inthehands Psychopaths don't necessarily equate to geniuses — even though Eloon Musk, now foreseeably part of Trump's corrupt pathocratic regime to have his own businesses & revenues liberated from any rules potentially demanding he pays his fair share to the nation he more than deservedly benefits from, would surely disagree.

gotmusked.com/content/sociopat
#Pathocracy #Psychopathy #Trump #Musk #OrganizedCrime #CriminalNetwork #CriminalsInOffice #BetrayingAmerica #DefraudingAmerica #LootingAmerica #Insurrection #AttackingAmerica #USAuthority #USPol #USPolitics #RuleOfLaw #Law

Got MuskedThe Sociopathic Tendencies of Elon MuskIs Musk “cray”? Is he simply eccentric? Indications point to a darker aspect of the Tesla CEO’s psychology.

@inthehands Lex Luthor owned his baldness at the end of the movie. Muskrat had a transplant, like Elton John!

@inthehands

The first #TraitorTrump #Regime (and maybe #WBush as well) taught me just how right comics were when they originally portrayed #supervillains like #LexLuthor or #NormanOsborne as "dumbasses."

Lex in reality absolutely WOULD "steal forty cakes" he could have paid for, just because.

@inthehands the way I usually describe the image Elon Mush sells is "real life Tony Stark"

which is also funny knowing RDJ hung out with him as research for playing Tony Stark

so it makes sense he would actually seem more like a comic book villain than the hero he wants people to think he is

@inthehands Interestingly, there was point in the 1980s when the writers of Superman (John Byrne in particular) tried to turn Lex Luthor into pretty much exactly that. In previous media, he had been a pretty standard genius mad scientist, but Byrne's Luthor remade him into a wealthy corporate CEO who merely had geniuses on his payroll.

Then the tech moguls of the 1990s gave the public the idea that a person could be both a tech genius AND a corporate CEO. So that's what Luthor became.

@inthehands

Heaven help us…

‘Trump, whose involvement with the sport goes way back — and who has named Linda McMahon, one of the prime movers of World Wrestling Entertainment, as his secretary of education…’

@inthehands He thinks he's Tony Stark (and treated like it), but he's really Justin Hammer from Iron Man 2.

@inthehands

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.

@inthehands so @nceladean says the investors who believe in Musk's companies are stupid.

But what if they know he's ignorant and overhyping things, they're just trying to find 10 fools who "didn't know it was impossible so they did it" in hopes that one of them actually succeeds?

@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.

@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

@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.

@ELS At least with Marconi there's no doubt about his politics: His mausoleum was designed by a guy named Benito Mussolini. @MattMerk @inthehands

@ELS @BackFromTheDud @MattMerk @inthehands exactly. Like the overrated Wright Brothers (who didn't fly in public, but convinced people they were first...)