this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Enough Musk Spam

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For those that have had enough of the Elon Musk worship online.

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Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.

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[–] zgasma@lemmy.sdf.org 159 points 2 years ago (4 children)

You don't become a billionaire by caring about people.

[–] SwallowsDick@lemmy.world 63 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And I believe he was raised wealthy too. Extreme wealth fundamentally disconnects you from most people.

[–] Eldritch@lemmy.world 48 points 2 years ago (1 children)

He was a pampered prince among priviliged white children. In white supremacist Pretoria south africa. So he's doubly detached and dysfunctional.

[–] outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Emerald mine with heavy labor exploitation was involved, too, IIRC

[–] Nythos@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 years ago (3 children)

It was, that he denied and even put a reward up saying if people could find the proof.

Then his dad came forward saying it was true.

[–] MercuryUprising@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

lol threw his own kid under the bus for a reward he didn't need

[–] outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 years ago

Lmao. Did he give his dad the reward?

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[–] Hazdaz@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

And yet millions of naive people around the world still love that psychopath.

[–] BobbyBandwidth@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I agree, but I want to imagine a world where you could.

[–] Konlanx@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 years ago

One really contradicts the other.

A person can only generate so much money by not caring about other people. If they cared about other people, they would spend their money to improve something instead of hoarding it for themselves or distribute it evenly between themselves and those they exploit.

An empathetic person would know that they have no right to have that much money.

They would be able to see that they were lucky in an exploitive system and they would understand that their work is not worth more than the work of other people.

You can't be rich and be a good person at the same time, because money is generated by exploiting labor and you can only generate more money by exploiting more work.

In the very end this money belongs to the people who carried Elon Musk through his life. He did not invent those rockets. He did not program those cars. He did not dig the lithium for the batteries under extremely dangerous conditions out of the ground while being paid peanuts. What he contributed to his wealth is the willingness to exploit other people.

If only meritocracies were real

[–] Zrybew@lemmy.ml 87 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] Meltbox@lemmy.world 25 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Could also just be quite a bit further along the autism spectrum.

Hard to say for sure, but he’s never struck me as sincerely psychopathic. Narcissistic sure, but not really psychopathic.

[–] ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 52 points 2 years ago

Autistic people feel empathy.

[–] VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean he profits from the suffering of others. I don't see how that's not psychopathic

[–] PrometheusG@lemmy.one 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Because that's not the definition of psychopath.

Most of us profit from the suffering of others. Does that make us all psychopaths?

In any case, I would probably classify him as evil, regardless of whether he's a psychopath.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The three core traits of psychopathy:

• Arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style: impression management or superficial charm, inflated and grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying/deceit, and manipulation for personal gain.

Everything about this describes Elon.

• Deficient affective experience: lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (coldness and unemotionality), callousness and lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for own actions.

Several people have described this about him, especially his first wife. This article is about this. And he routinely blames others for negative things that happen. He called a professional diver a pedophile for not liking his stupid submarine idea to rescue those kids from that cave, and doubled and tripled down on it when called out. Again, not accepting responsibility for his own idea being dumb, he had to deflect and slander someone else.

•Impulsive and irresponsible lifestyle: impulsivity, sensation-seeking and risk-taking, irresponsible and unreliable behavior, financially parasitic lifestyle and lack of realistic, long-term goals.

This is a man that will do monumentally stupid shit on a whim, which has landed him with fines from the SEC. Like saying he was taking Tesla private, that he already secured funding, etc. None of which happened. He ended up buying Twitter based on an impulse tweet and got stuck with it after signing the contract without doing any due diligence at all. He has thousands of engineers behind him that make his impulse claims come true a lot. And several of them across companies have come out and said that they didn’t know about features until Elon just tweeted them out.

By pretty much all metrics he is a psychopath. He just has the money for an army of people to keep him in line enough.

[–] DrRatso@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is not a good descriptor of paychopathy. Psychopaths are essentially people with antisocial personality disorder, you can look up the DSM or ICD 10 entry for that, having those traits is not enough to secure a psychopath label.

[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The ICD-10 is out of date. The current revision is ICD-11, which collapsed all personality disorders into one single “Personality Disorder” diagnosis. Antisocial Personality Disorder doesn’t even exist anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-11#Personality_disorder

Psychopathy is a trait of Personality Disorder. Not a standalone diagnosis.

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[–] x4740N@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Most of us don't willingly profit from the exploitation of others

[–] MercuryUprising@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The dude fired a bunch of people, never paid their severance and refuses to communicate with them. The dude is a fucking complete sociopath. He lies to investors about deadlines, he lies about the potential of his technology to consumers, and he lies to his own staff.

You can stop simping for him, he doesn't want to ride your dick, mate.

[–] Meltbox@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

What was this firing people?

Hmm yeah I’ve never been able to decide if his lying is because he’s actually delusional or if he is a sociopath.

I mean either way I think he’s an idiot. But I’m not sure of the root cause.

[–] sapient_cogbag@infosec.pub 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

Autistic people feel empathy. Source - am autistic, feel (pretty strong and sometimes unpleasant) empathy.

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[–] afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

People on the spectrum generally do feel empathy it is of a different sort than people who are NT.

[–] Gorbachof@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

Sociopath, big difference

[–] sudo@lemmy.fmhy.ml 83 points 2 years ago (9 children)

Flawed genius. The flaw being he isn't a genius but is rather a fucking idiot with a silver spoon.

[–] x4740N@lemmy.world 39 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yeah he's the modern day version of Edison

They Both stole inventions the employees invented and claimed to have invented stuff that had already been invented

americans say it with me "Edison did not invent the light bulb"

[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Ever see the actual founders of Tesla talk? They laid out the whole Tesla plan. Elon takes those talking points and everyone thinks he made it.

https://youtu.be/JW95LCkxlb4

[–] Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

The irony of him buying a company called Tesla and taking credit for their work would be seen as too on the nose if it was a plot point in a movie.

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[–] HollandJim@lemmy.world 32 points 2 years ago

We need a “No Shit Sherlock” tag

[–] hugpeter@programming.dev 28 points 2 years ago

I knew this when he laughed at a deer that drowned in a backyard pool when he was in a pewdiepie youtube video.

[–] onionbaggage@lemmy.world 25 points 2 years ago

Obvious sociopath called a sociopath. More at 11.

[–] WorldieBoi@lemmy.world 20 points 2 years ago

No need to follow him for 3 years to see that he has no empathy. Just hear him speak for a couple of minutes.

[–] panja@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Could have seen that coming with how his estranged daughter feels about him

[–] Eldritch@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Could have seen that coming by looking at Errol. Elon claims he's not close to his father. But he acts like him in a lot of ways. Odd right.

[–] LEDZeppelin@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

Unlimited money does that to people

[–] ColdWater@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

Because he is a clown

[–] mysoulishome@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

Sweet Walter Isaacson is a brilliant biographer. I bet Elon flips his shit when he writes the truth…

[–] fidelacchius@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

That's most of the people on Twitter.

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