• ravinggerbil@lemm.ee
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    3 hours ago

    Still not an Elon apologist, just so we’re clear.

    If it were that easy, why is he the one who’s “done it the best” so far? Definitely speaking loosely here.

    The ability to keep and grow money and businesses is not a trait of a stupid man. He did have seed capital from his family, as all these billionaires do, but it seems Elon has been able to do more with it, to the point that he is now acting Emperor. Whatever you think of the finance violations, fraud or sexual favors he did to get there, he has shown an aptitude for consolidating power. He’s going to fuck everything up for us, yes. But he and his friends are going to achieve their goals doing it. We do ourselves a disservice by writing these people off as stupid when they’re calculating and evil.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      37 minutes ago

      So the real turning point in his riches to more riches story was Zip2. People have never heard of it because it was never anything even vaguely important, but it was a website in the midst of the dot-com era and Compaq, desperate to be “in” threw a bunch of money at it. Elon basically won a lottery.

      His next stop was to roll his winnings to try to get X (not the current one, an online payment platform) going. By all measures, it didn’t get anywhere, pretty well stomped by Paypal.

      In the midst of that competition, X folded into PayPal. Against all reason, they made Elon the head of the now joined PayPal/X, despite being on what was obviously the losing side of the business. It was a disaster and they ultimately sidelined him to save the company because he was so bad.

      Ok, so now he’s on the sideline but a large shareholder in PayPal… And there came $1.5 billion from eBay to acquire, and that got him to about a quarter billion, just for being there.

      Then the next significant stop was to jump on Tesla, rewrite their history to declare himself founder and largely let them do what they will while he collected the money. Sounds like in recent years he’s started to believe his own mega-genius hype, and has been imposing his direction more, and not to Tesla’s betterment.

      Like every step of the way, he either fell into lucky circumstances and managed to get everyone to feed his ego. I suppose his “skill” was taking credit for Tesla despite only being a source of funding way early on.

    • undrwater@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      “Don’t underestimate…” may be the language you are looking for.

      There are many types of intelligences. He has a high level in at least one. Quite low in others.