Did you forget to finish?
Even if he didn’t found Tesla, he’s certainly smarter than the average person. You’re a reasonably intelligent person. Do you think he’s average intelligence?
Yeah, I was going to write more, but decided to cut it short.
Basically, I did buy into the Elon as Super- Genius narrative for a while, as there didn't seem to be any reason not to. I've actually started a couple threads on Tesla and Elon on here over the years and they were positive. He seemed to be a serial entrepreneur who was behind world changing companies and I didn't really question that. I knew that Tesla was always missing major deadlines, but i thought that was just par for the course for ambitious technologies.
When he was forced to buy Twitter, that kind of changed my perspective on him. The timeline of what led up to it was monumentally stupid and I was just confused about how someone who is touted as a genius could have made some of the basic mistakes he did. (I can go into what I think those mistakes were if you'd like, but I'm trying to keep this brief)
For the first time, I started looking into his background past his PR bio. The genius arc has been re-written pretty thoroughly over the years. Where at one point, it looked to me that he just hopped from successful company to successful company, the more I looked into his history, it seems that he was just lucky enough to be in a money generating industry at the right time and managed to be successful almost in spite of himself. Elon's first company took off because one of his dad's friends helped him out. He's often referred to as part of the Paypal mafia, but his failing startup was acquired by the company that became papypal. While he was there, he caused more harm than good and was only able to cash out so much because he was essentially thrown out of the company before they went public and he retained his merger shares. Tesla was founded by two other guys, he invested in the company with his paypal money,pushed the two guys out and had the official history of the company re-written. Which might seem par for the course, but it was a tactic he had already used at paypal- as part of his termination agreement there, Paypal the corporation was not allowed to officially list who founded the company so that he was able to use his association with the company to promote himself as a successful serial founder.
Tesla has this insane valuation, but it reached profitability primarily through selling regulatory credits. Which I don't have a problem with, but it does temper the idea that Tesla is this brilliantly run company. Tesla is constanly missing scheduled targets. Neuralink apprears to be a mess.
He has made a shit ton of money and even just getting one company to a high-level of success is an impressive achievement, but it's just become pretty clear to me how fabricated and intentional the Tony Stark comparisons are. He's not an accomplished engineer and probably doesn't contribute too much to the technical side of any of his companies and, honestly, maybe doesn't even understand a lot of the technicalities very well.
eta So with that said, I can't really reflexively give him the benefit of the doubt that something that seems poorly thought out is probably some galaxy-brained 4d chess move. At one point I was fully convinced he was a level of genius that is probably hard to completely grasp in day-to-day conversation. I no longer believe that.
