i always say musk is stupid, which isn’t exactly true. i’d say he’s actually probably somewhat smart. smart enough to convince smart people to believe in the vision he presented, smart enough to game the system.
That's it. He's very good at gaming financial and corporate systems, a trait altogether common in West Coast business and politics. That takes some seed money, but mostly it takes a lot of bluff, bluster, and bullying. With patience, you can work your way up that ladder without actually being good at anything else.
but what he isn’t is a genius. he’s also made a ton of mistakes, and lately massive ones.
he also has no respect for anyone else. he will tell poor and easily disproved lies by anyone who does a modicum of fact checking.
Elon Musk is not a genius at anything except gaming systems to acquire wealth and power. He's not a brilliant scientist or engineer. He's not even a competent player of video games. But his
obsessive need to be seen as all that is what makes him so very dangerous. Once he acquires enough wealth and power to compel belief in his supposed genius, these massive mistakes he's making (and that, frankly, he's been making all along) will start to engulf innocent people who have no choice. "Oops, I mistakenly fired the people who guard our nuclear weapons? Hm, I guess that means Philadelphia is going to get nuked. My bad, but I'm still a genius."
I feel little sympathy for anyone who voluntarily allies with Elon Musk. They are free agents who have ostensibly weighed the options and made their choices. And they can leave at any time, cut their losses, and move on if things go sour. But when people are suddenly compelled to obey him or endure the consequences of his bad decision-making, those people deserve sympathy and justice. From the Oval Office he said he will say and do things that are wrong, and that he should be corrected when that happens. But someone with a delusional picture of his own importance and genius cannot be told any such thing, and often suffer greatly when the attempt is made. We don't need someone with an inflated sense of his own intellect to move fast and break things and brush off the breakage. We need people who move slowly and carefully and understand that for the sake of others, some things must not be allowed to break.
As we note with conspiracy theorists etc. here, the goal is often for them to create a world in which they are geniuses, superheroes, or whatever. And in that little bubble of self-delusion fueled by conspiracy theories, whatever little knowledge or skill they possess is all that's ever needed to address the issue at hand. These conspiracy theorists then engage with the real world, either to see how much of it they can co-opt to support their delusion or to convince themselves that any opposition to the delusion is badly motivated and invalid. For most conspiracy theorists, fringe thinkers, armchair detectives and the like, these bubbles stay small. But what if the bubble of someone's delusion of grandeur really does start to extend to a large part of the real world? What if no one can meaningfully challenge it, or even survive the attempt?
