It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.

> It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.

You mean Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, right?

> Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't

...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?

Yep, it's crazy that people can correctly recognize that corruption is responsible for the current situation but fail to recognize that adding more corruption will not deliver us from it.

> He was involved in DOGE, which did nothing but catch fraud and cut worthless spending.

Elon wasn't just involved with DOGE, he was responsible for it. And Elon said he would cut $2 TRILLION in federal spending before ultimately claiming just $110 billion in savings -- which the GAO found he lied about. Considering out budget deficit is about $2 trillion, even his inflated claims are a rounding error.

(To say nothing of the fact that a lot of it was NOT useless spending. For example, Elon ended a program to fund countries in Central America to stop the spread of screw worms. Now screw worms are projected to cost $1.8 billion in damage to Texas alone.)

> while Elon encourages reporting on X

Elon has a track record of banning journalists on Twitter / X, the everything app, when they criticize him. Literally the opposite of encouraging reporting on X.

> We need more "Elons", people like him are actually helping dig us out of this mess.

I would encourage you to start reading independent news sources and forming your own opinions, rather than uncritically believing everything people in power feed to you. Otherwise you end up saying things online that are trivially disprovable.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/09/gao-repor...

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/flesh-eating-scr...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus...

Conservative media even barely talks about DOGE because of how bad the optics are, and how much of an utter failure it was.

>Isn't that an Elon thing? He was involved in DOGE, which did nothing but catch fraud and cut worthless spending.

It did nothing of the sort.

Finding someone still pushing this line in 2026 is like seeing a thylacine in the wild. One can only stare in awe.

he's in china working on trains and renewable energy

rockets and wifi satellites are only solving problems because corporations have sucked public infrastructure dry for generations

I think the root of the problem is “vetocracy.” We’ve created a system where small minorities can hold everything up, sometimes for ideological reasons and sometimes for financial reasons. The classic case of the latter is homeowners opposing all home construction to raise their property values, but it happens in other areas too.

Vetocracy isn’t democracy. It’s a tiny minority having veto power.

So yes the only person who succeeds in such a system is a human battering ram who can just bash their way through it by being a manic asshole with insane force of will.

There should be tons of Elon Musks, including nicer ones, but nice people get vetoed.

This sums up my and many others timeline of his understanding of engineering diciplines: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958

He is (inaccurately) known for his engineering _because of_ his marketing.

He doesn't build anything. Everything he's done has been acquisitions that he tries to astroturf as founding.

As I said, he's a marketing genius.

Or maybe "was" is more accurate.

*financial engineering

See? Great marketing, he is not an engineer.

He personally ran the department that eviscerated funding for basic scientific research in the United States

Funding DJT while he was running for office?

The one with the intentionally broken federal government

One such example - he's using his massive wealth and influence to support fascist political movements that promise mass deportation and "remigration", and even supporting these policies explicitly himself.

In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.

If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.

And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.

Everyone who’s someone has moved to Twitter (or bluesky), even PG does not comment here like he used to.

Reddit is dead, the investors know this, their only income source is selling data to AI companies, and discord ate the “build your own community” lunch.

Talk with someone from a lab and they’ll tell you weighing Reddit data too highly results in more “hallucinations” so even their product is bad..

All the high signal commenters left Reddit, and they’re leaving here slowly too.

Is your cognitive dissonance that strong that you don't see that if all major countries follow that line of thought all have to have their own golden domes and invite WW3?