I don’t think Musk is super smart. I think he has some skills that account for how he got to his position other than privilege and luck, I think he probably works hard (or at least, harder than me), but I can’t get to “super smart”.

> I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart.

It's also worth keeping in mind that super smart people can say and do lots of really dumb things. Smart != wise.

>The "you're a sheep" rhetoric. Great!

you mean the same rhetoric I observe whenever the wrong entity wins an election anywhere in the West? have we not accepted for a fact that most people are so uncritical of the media they consume that a thousand Russian Internet Defense Force operatives can topple a Western democracy over Xitter and TikTok?

>Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/)

I never said he was a good man before then, or that he is a good man now.

Yeah, it was mine. That's the moment I thought 'wow that guy is deranged now, he should step back and take some vacations'. Now I realize he was like this from the start, but that was the moment I questioned my hero worship.

That 2021 event was very much not about EVs-in-general, but about supporting UAW as a union at a time when a lot of their jobs were about to be disrupted because Biden just signed an EO (14037) that pushed traditional automakers towards making more EVs.

So, why were Ford, GM and Stellantis there but Tesla wasn't? Because Tesla was already making EVs only, because none of its workforce is a part of UAW (due to Tesla being anti-union) and because this EO had no impact on Tesla's workforce what so ever. Elon being butthurt about it doesn't change the fact that it would've made zero sense to have Tesla there.

You don't have to take my word for it, Jen Psaki directly addressed this at a press briefing:

> Asked if Tesla being a nonunion company was the reason it wasn’t included Thursday, Psaki replied, “Well, these are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/tesla-snub-white...

Tesla not being unionized was the main guess I heard about it at the time. The legacy auto industry has a history of outsized political influence leading to many dumb decisions on politician's part from an administrative success perspective.

I don't know either really, I'm just reporting remembered second-hand sources.

He obviously always held the normie billionaire libertarian "taxes bad, regulations bad, unions bad" right positions, enjoyed "politically incorrect" jokes and had some weird preconceptions like obsession with male heirs that might not be overtly political but line up with certain more fringe right views. Maybe he chose to hide some spicier views about the apartheid era.

But there's also definitely been a change. He publicly endorsed Democrat candidates on numerous occasions, including against normie business-friendly Republicans. Think his metamorphosis in actual unfiltered views is best shifted from the "I absolutely support trans but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare" to his current campaigns...

In the past (early Tesla - SpaceX - Boring Company - Hyperloop - crypto) he seemed apolitical and only to really care about setting up the building blocks for a new, different society on Mars. Maybe a pipe dream, maybe megalomaniac, but just very cool and very futuristic. He didn't seem very political aside from a libertarian bent.

Somewhere along the road he devolved into a petty and weird character, and then went off the deep end into full spectrum alt-right weirdness.

He is the same type of talented hype man as Jobs was, with the same sort of reality distortion field. Otherwise SpaceX reusable wouldn't have happened. And even Jensen Huang was supremely impressed how fast xAI built up data centers.

I think as the left has become more homogeneously college educated they are less likely to wholesale accept blatant lies and falsehoods. For someone like Musk this will naturally push them to the right because he incessantly lies/bullshits so often and has a visceral negative reaction when being called on it (the cave fiasco comes to mind).

If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.

> Are you implying that "moving right" necessitates lying about basic things constantly?

Not OP ... but it would be consistent with observations. It is a party that admires lying and rewards it.

And the point of the purity test isn't to establish guilt. You're already declared guilty and the purity test is an attempt at finding or creating evidence of your guilt.