Was he lying back then and is truthful now, or did the pandemic just break him?
There is no truth to him, only what he says in each instant. Textbook strong narcissism.
He changes his opinions based on what benefits him, but he genuinely believes them at the time. He’s an idiot.
He was lying back then, just like he is lying now.
Don’t let this fool you, not from him and not from anyone representing a corporation. Corporations time and time again will say and do whatever it takes to profit, including pretending to care about human rights.
His daughter came out and he lost his shit over it and blames Biden.
Six years ago, conservatives would vandalize Teslas in parking lots. Then, when Elon became an open bigot, conservatives started buying Teslas and worshipping Elon. I wonder why that is.
Guys, I’m starting to think conservatives might be bigots.
That’s called voting with your wallet, which is different from cancel culture, because woke.
I’m guessing he realized within those six years that the political party which lets him run his companies as though USA is a third world country have a very different set of values which he has to follow to influence the elections.
I think he desperately wants to be liked. He used to say liberal things, because that’s more popular. Now he’s got enough money that a bunch of people will like him no matter what (or pretend to), so he can say what he really thinks while being insulated from the repercussions.
he just realized which crowd responds better to sucking up
When a billionaire cishet guy talks about LGBT rights in order to sell cars, how can anyone think that’s not pinkwashing?
He was pandering them, and hes pandering now, its just to different people
Bingo. Elon has a pathological need to be fawned over and will say whatever he needs to to make that happen.
Initially, he found that warm mouth in the left wing for championing products to address climate change, but he was still being held accountable for his failures and obnoxiousness.
When Trump showed him that reactionaries will love you just being a narcissistic asshole and they could be bought for a pittance, he jumped ship. If a bigger, more easily swayed group of people became available to him, he’d rewrite his personality to pander to them instead.
Why can’t he pander to his children then?
he doesn’t see them as people, plus he can’t make money off of them so they’re of no value
He got rid of his PR team at some point, his trans daughter disowned him, and Grimes left him and started going out with Chelsea Manning. I think he got broken. Add wanting to be cool on top of that and you’ve got a recipe for a billionaire “pick me”
I originally thought that, but when I read the interview with his daughter- nope. He’s always been a queerphobe bigot. Long before she transitioned, when Elon thought she was a gay boy, he constantly berated her for not being masculine enough and just for being queer in general.
I like to imagine he was “hiding his power level” before.
Wasn’t there also the thing where he offered a horse to a masseuse if they’d give him a happy ending? A couple days before the story broke he made some statements supporting Republicans then said “watch the left come up with a story to take me down now that I’m a Republican,” or something like that. All his political shit has been downhill and ever more unhinged since.
He was always saying side-eye worthy shit, but in a generic rich guy way. His political stuff, before the horse thing, was always progressive-ish. Whether that was what he ready thought, or as the biggest shareholder of an electric car company he knew which side his bread was buttered on, I’m sure I don’t know. But it seems like trying to preempt the horse story was the turning point for his public persona.
One does have to wonder how the horse came up. I can only come up with raunchy pythonesque logic based bartering.
Wait what’s that about Chelsea Manning‽
Genuinely, this was back when he still had PR people managing his reputation.
Iirc, he got rid of them sometime around the submarine incident.
This was also around the time when the public perception about Musk was different. Reddit thought of him as a “real-life Tony Stark”, who put a car in space and is a little eccentric. That perception about him peaked on August 2018 when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Around 2020 he started to go deeper into QAnon-esque rabbit-hole, turning into the despised far-right wacko he is today. Of course he has been always an opportunistic hack.
pretty sure still thinks about him that way
He genuinely did not ever appear (publicly) to be a shit bag narcissist, though. I say this as someone who kept an eye on musk from around 2000, and invested early (as well as exiting early due to his narcissism). In every interview he just came across as neurodivergent, but never as though he didn’t care about the planet, the environment, or the climate crisis. He was one of the only wealthy people promoting electric cars 20 years ago, well before it was considered profitable. He was also the only wealthy person advocating for risk mitigation as a species (a mars colony).
Regardless of recent events, I’m not dumb enough to believe he was always a sociopath who simply managed to act like an empathetic human, flawlessly, for well over a decade. If he were always the narcissist he is today, and has been the last 5-10 years, the cracks would have been apparent long ago. Musk is not, and has never been, a great actor. In fact he’s always been extremely awkward; what you see, is what you get. That was legitimately refreshing before the narcissism! Instead I came to the conclusion — like many people before me — that absolute power corrupts, absolutely. Narcissists are not born; they are created. It’s no different to Bezos. In this interview from 27 years ago he’s just a regular nerd; not the corporate “let them piss in jars” sociopath he is today. The evidence is clear. The evidence is abundant, going back long before antiquity. Extreme wealth and power create narcissism; an anti-social, destructive mental illness. For the sake of all life on Earth, Billionaires should not exist.
Thanks for posting the Besos interview!
Super interesting that they were already hoovering up user data as fast as they could in '97 - half a gigabyte per day.
if Trump loses the election, expect musk to suddenly attempt to reconcile with his trans daughter and embrace indigenous cultures or whatever the hell he thinks liberals like
Nah he’ll declare that the United States has become a fascist dictatorship and probably spout some lies about election rigging.
