The complaint about his ego is warranted, but he also earned it. Wolfram earned his PhD in particle physics from cal tech at 21 years old. Feynman was on his thesis committee. He spent time at the IAS. When he speaks about something, no matter in which configuration he chooses to do so, I am highly inclined to listen.

Same here on anything Elon. HN is like an uncle who knows a lot and teaches you new things every time you hang out with him… but who also has a few really weird sore spots that you better never mention in his presence.

Agree - the whole "he's great" vs "he's evil and a con" just gets old.

Everyone is a complex mixture of both.

My dad loved reading and sharing technical subjects with me and is probably part of the reason why I enjoy a good career today.

He also cheated on my mom for 30 years for which we didn't discover until the last 3 years of his life. We didn't have much money growing up. He probably took her out to dinner with money we didn't have.

It's perfectly normal to both love and hate parts of someone, but not reject them as a whole.

Elon's not more evil than anyone else, he's just way dumber than everyone expected him to be when we were in the honeymoon phase.

Elon is unusual not in how much his fans adore him (and they do), but the degree to which his haters hate him. I've seen plenty of places where people simply stating facts or talking about their own experiences gets downvoted to invisibility.

Even points that you wouldn't think would be controversial, like "Tesla disrupted the EV industry that was previously only interested in building compliance cars for rich crunchy-granola city weirdos", are almost instantly shot down. Anything that isn't just outright hatred for Elon gets slammed to hell. It's almost impossible to have a balanced discussion about him or his companies.

I also don't think he's as dumb as people think. He has an eye for industries that are ripe for disruption and has actually managed to deliver at least twice so far. There is no question at all that SpaceX is the premier launch provider in the world today (I know I'm getting downvoted for saying this). Tesla sells about half of the EVs sold in the US and basically didn't exist 10 years ago. The jury is still out on the Boring company. Neuralink and Optimus are still too new to tell. Even Paypal is a good example of seeing a market gap and exploiting it. Twitter/X was the real stinker. Elon is exactly the wrong guy to be running a social media company, and worse he thinks he is winning by out-foxing Fox News. He's got that engagement algorithm brain that results when you chase bigger numbers. It is the biggest right wing black hole you could imagine and Elon himself has fallen right down the center. You couldn't ask for a more perfect radicalization system than he has built with the "pay for voice" scheme with basically no bot protection.

Agree about SpaceX, but I'm not sure how much of that is about Elon. Tesla used to be awesome, its nascency is what I was referring to as the "honeymoon phase," but it definitely feels like it's gone downhill with the Cybertruck goofiness. Like it feels like it has some awesome engineers that do the cool stuff, and then you have Elon interfering from the top and injecting his goofy ass ideas while everyone else is trying to make the company work. Feels like Tesla is like, super cool engineering and then oh yeah there's Elon over there in the corner playing with his toys and we try to keep him from messing things up too much. Every Tesla engineer I've heard from echoes this, he springs random requirements on them and they often learn of new product requirements or features from his Twitter posts and then they're in panic mode trying to implement whatever half-baked stupid idea he had on the toilet at 3 AM.

Most of your last paragraph about Twitter is what has caused me to think he's dumb, in spite of having a few early successes which may be attributable to survivor bias (you have millions of people taking random risks, some of them are going to pan out randomly, and after the first one you have money so it's easy to make more money). Calling the rescuer guy a "pedo guy" during the crisis in Thailand and just myriad other inane utterances have tanked his valuation in my eyes.

But I think I might agree with you that "dumb" is the wrong word. Perhaps "unwise" is what I'm feeling. He may have skills and intelligence to apply those skills to start businesses or make money or whatever. But he doesn't apply that intelligence to the end that we might call wisdom, and I think that's what I as well as a lot of other people are trying to articulate when they say he's dumb. Agree with you though, people aren't black and white.

Maybe "poor emotional intelligence". Like you said, a person can plausibly get lucky on their first business and make it big once. But to do it repeatedly and to such a large degree takes skill. Say what you will about his politics, but his companies deliver. Even Hyperloop, which is basically just a bad subway, still has more buildout than pretty much any subway system in the US in the past decade. That might just be Elon willing to lose a ton of money on it to get it built though.

Might be interesting to compare and contrast the Las Vegas Hyperloop vs. the Las Vegas Monorail. Which is more of a boondoggle?

I was with ya until the hyperloop example. Hyperloop was pushed for years as a vacuum tube train. Serious prototypes of this were developed. If it had worked out absolutely perfectly, it would still have lacked the throughput to be a good idea, but the prevalence of earthquakes in its target area, the inherent instability of a vacuum tube, the massive intended scale of the system, the economic feasibility of digging a huge tunnel, etc all made it an absolute shitfest of an idea. They then came up with a new idea, which was a one-lane tunnel without a safety walkway, which is utterly useless for passenger transport because it has, at best, the throughput of a two-lane highway. The hyperloop is probably elon’s most embarrassing failure after twitter.