Will Musk Destroy His Own Success?

The thing about Musk is, he's always talking about himself, and he's always lying.

And -- now this is significant -- he's not even particularly good at lying. The thing he does all day long  every day, and he's not good at it. So people notice.

 

He keeps alienating one significant demographic after another. He refers to himself as an engineering genius, but any actual engineer can easily see that he's faking being an engineer, and taking the credit for the work of many engineers who've worked for him. How many engineers are there in the world? A job at Tesla used to be a dream destination for many engineering students. It surely is much less so than it once was. Less than outstanding pay, a boss who takes credit for everything you do, the risk of being rage-fired at any moment for no good reason...

He claims he's autistic, and we autistic people can easily see he's not. So can psychologists who specialize in the autistic spectrum, and family members and friends of autistic people. As one of those psychologists recently put it, we're not saying that autistic people can't be assholes. We can be. But even the assholes among us tend to care very much about improving our situation through accurate understanding of our condition. Musk trying to piggy-back on us, why? So people will feel sorry for him and more inclined to forgive his bad behavior? It's deeply annoying on several levels, even before we get to those of his fans who are trying the same thing.

Ha says he was bullied as a child. I imagine that people who actually were bullied as children, or who care about children whom have been or are being being bullied, can see pretty easily that he's a bully.

He says he was poor when he was young, saying, for example, that he had to live on a dollar a day as a undergrad, and that he often had nothing to eat but ramen noodles, but it's come out that his family owned an emerald mine. He has also talked publicly about the private plane his family owned when he was a child.

If you want people to believe you were poor as a child, and you're a good liar, or even a very mediocre liar, you don't talk about things like the family's private plane.

So let's see. So far we've got engineers, autistic people, victims of bullying and poor people, all of of whom Musk has given reason to take a particular personal dislike toward him. And how many more groups has he alienated in exactly the same way, just by unnecessary lies about himself? It's adding up. That's even before we get to his spectacularly bad behavior as an employer, executive and businessman.