So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

As well as building a stupid stainless steel truck the market doesn't want; or a "futuristic" car tunnel in Vegas nobody wants; while god knows where neuralink is gonna head...

Results? The man should have known when to sit back, enjoy the goodwill of Tesla / SpaceX, and be a rich nerd people like - instead of believing his every fart is some pearl of genius. His little infatuated àrse licking tribe has been the worst thing for Musk.

On another note, I've seen a bit of social media chatter about Musk appearing on Star Wars: Ahsoka, by way of the villain Thrawn. And, yeah, I see it lol. Very likely an accident but seems Musk is now a SW villain? 😆

And if we're talking "great leadership". Good leadership is recognising when you don't lead, but simply sit back and let people who know better drive the bus. Or indeed, design the truck.

Putting the pieces together, pushing people forward and letting them make the magic. Ford, Disney, Dyson, Jobs, Branson etc. all flawed men as much as Mush was but they knew when to let others use their skills. Walt Disney didn't draw Mickey Mouse. To use another quote, this time from fictional cop "Dirty" Harry Callaghan:

Or indeed Steve Jobs from the (Fantastic) titular movie:

That's leadership. Being the conductor for other people's expertise.

Bullishness and arrogance that your every utterance has value is less Nikolas Tesla, and more John DeLorean. Musk has become high on his own supply, letting fawning internet idiots ramp up his ego rather than go back to basics. Oh but his "meme game is strong".

This is the problem though: the infatuated are all-in on the idea that if Musk says or does it, it must be a good idea. There's no critical thinking WRT his actual actions, no matter how ostensibly or obviously inane or bad they are. There must be 4D chess at play, it's just part of the brand etc. - while bad behaviour is waved away as liberals being thin-wristed and unable to take a joke.

Clearly Musk made huge strides in Tesla & SpaceX, regardless how thin his actual contributions might have been - but he headed the changes that ramped them both into market leader positions. I've said it dozens of times already but I liked Musk, I admired his far-thinking WRT space travel & the electric car. But the bloom has clearly come off the rose, Tesla in particular now struggling to keep parity with the waking behemoth that is the car industry. The Cybertruck now a proper albatross around Tesla's neck, all while Ford makes bank on the electric F150.

Were Musk the true innovator and bleeding-edge thinker, he'd had recognised you gotta iterate and keep moving; to constantly develop and evolve your product, not build stupid cyberpunk / Halo inspired vanity projects. Steve Jobs tried to come up with things people actually want, even if they didn't know it yet. Elon Musk is building an immensely stupid truck 'cos he likes video games.

Just on this: not having a go at you personally, only I've got a little tired of this vision of Musk's that somehow Mars should be earmarked as a "backup plan" or somesuch; as opposed to him leveraging his unimaginable wealth and sway to try and make Mars unnecessary to the survival of humanity. WE still have a planet earth, just about: why not try and terraform that? lol.

I can't admire that he's not even gonna try and save earth, but instead just context shift all our flaws and problems on another planet altogether - one that can't even sustain life in the first place. Requiring an even more brittle setup for humanity's existence than the planet we're on. One slip and everyone dies? And if not giant domes on Mars, then a very long-term terraforming tactic that, again, asks the question of why not put that time and those resources into saving Earth? Cos we'd be all dead by the time Mars was terraformed, at the rate things are unraveling both politically and environmentally.

Again not taking aim at you specifically, but I've seen it said before here and elsewhere; like Musk's Mars plan is another piece of breathtaking genius, without stopping to think about the immediate, solvable problems that'd make Plan B totally redundant. It's all well and good daydreaming about Martian colonies - 'cos that's a conveniently abstract plan that doesn't require thinking about fossil fuels, poverty, autocracy, rainforests, ice caps or the myriad of things that need addressing here.

I just can't swallow the idea that giving up and focusing on Mars is a particularly insightful, celebratory tactic by Musk

Yeah; there's not much lingering fondness for Jobs as a Perfect Human Being, and there's a much stronger culture of critiquing the man's obvious flaws - as seen with the very film adaptation I quoted.

It probably helps the man's dead now so the various skeletons could come out of the closet, the worry about right-to-reply passed. While Musk is still alive for another few decades, followed by a horde of pathetic man-children whooping his bullshít and aggressively dog-piling even tepid criticisms of their idol. To loop it back to Twitter, the service has only helped whip these idiots into a bigger frenzy than we ever saw with Jobs worship at its height.