The more public facing elmo becomes, the more confused I get. This man is as developmentally challenged as he is emotionally stunted. How the fuck is he successful?
The upside to all this is, the more I hear from him, the less I fear him stealing our democracy. He's too dumb.
Money. He's successful because he's obscenely wealthy by birth and gets to buy and take credit for whatever he wants and nobody can stop him. It's literally as simple as that.
I disagree, there’s still something surprising about how wealthy he became. There’s surely people who grew up as privileged/wealthy as him, are smarter and more mature, but didn’t end up as wealthy in the end. Genuinely curious what separates them from each other. The best answer I can think of is he just got lucky.
He was rich enough to have a good start and the ability to make some fuck-ups before he got lucky and hit a jackpot. Then after that, he became the level of rich that has lawyers and accountants who know how to make it faster than he could spend it and who know how to grift more of it from the gubmint.
For awhile, I think, he also had people around him with good heads on their shoulders who mitigated his damage, but like any 800-lb gorilla, you can only feed it so many bananas before it gets big enough to demand the ho-hos with growth hormones in them and smashes its banana-handlers to get to them. His first wife seemed a decent sort and down-to-earth, but once they split, he had fewer and fewer guard rails.
But he's also had several years to perform a shit-ton of cause-and-effect testing and measure the effect of his social media presence and public statements on his companies, and he developed a good instinct (the same way a raccoon figures out what a trash can is and how to open it) of the reach of his influence. Especially once he got hold of the internal metrics by buying a social media platform. He buys attention but he knows the exchange rate between dollars and attention in an attention-based economy.
What separates the others from him is sociopathy and narcissism. Either the not-so-well-off ones aren't as sociopathic or they're not as huge of a malignant narcissist as he is.
And there's a possibility that some of them have a person who is big enough/important enough to them that that person can take them to the woodshed for a come-to-Jesus when their money is outpacing their reality.
I think we must also admit that he’s actually quite intelligent. He is obscenely wealthy and has founded or moved in and continued multiple very successful ventures. On a personal level he is a loathsome weasel, but he employs many who seem to continue to value their jobs.
He is of course a narcissist and habitual liar, but also a competent futurist.
Richest man in the world but has to literally buy attention. Nobody likes him.
I partially blame us (as in, reddit, Twitter, social media in general) for gassing him up so hard as this genius techbro tony stark space explorer for 8 years, ignoring all the warning signs that he's a tyrannical manbaby, who isn't even smart enough to know when to stop talking, much less do any actual work for his companies. He just works other people to the bone then takes credit for what they do.
I hold out hope that he'll get figuratively(?) guillotined by maga, but they don't do anything except sit around and fart angrily about gay people, so who knows
in a capitalist society everything is designed to make it so the already rich automatically get richer no matter what they do. at some level of wealth you dont have to do anything to make more money, and elon is far beyond that point. it takes a special kind of stupid to actually lose money at that point, and elon is either just barely smart enough for it, or was smart enough to keep some kind of safety net around in case he wasnt. (trump on the other hand is the special kind of stupid to fail at capitalism)
I read some articles a few years ago that showed the data is that ten million bucks is the lowest number you can have where, if you maintain a "reasonable" lifestyle, it will make more of itself faster than you can spend it.
Of course, "reasonable" falls into a range of values...
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u/Express_Fail3036 1d ago
The more public facing elmo becomes, the more confused I get. This man is as developmentally challenged as he is emotionally stunted. How the fuck is he successful?
The upside to all this is, the more I hear from him, the less I fear him stealing our democracy. He's too dumb.