this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
558 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
60052 readers
4042 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I feel like Twitter (I will always deadname it) was the beginning of the end for him. Unfortunately, things like this can take years or decades to resolve, but whereas 5 years ago he had the midas touch and could do no wrong now there seems to be nothing but a stream of negative news about him.
Time will tell
Naw, imho it was the Thai kiddy-submarine incident. He seemed at least semi-plausibly not horrible up until then; but then firmly established himself as just another piece of shit billionaire when he couldn't handle some diver stealing the spotlight from him.
Good point, I had forgotten about that nugget in the sea of shit nuggets around that man.
Yeah, that's when I started to call him "The pedo guy" (using his own words).
At that point he'd outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.
Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who'd heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn't just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.
The "midas touch" is basically just securities fraud. Something he can't get away with forever.
In what sense? Lying about the actual capabilities of the business? Full autonomous drive next year and Mars at 2022?
All of those statements existed to either drum up investment money or get people to buy non-existent products. So those things are examples of securities fraud too.