SpaceX just got what it wanted from the FAA for Texas Starship launches

Why do people hate Elon so much? If the government is gonna be in bed with any capitalist I am ok with it being the guy who has repeatedly almost destroyed his personal fortune trying to build rocket ships, electric cars, WiFi satellites, and other push the envelope type stuff. I find it hard to believe he is selfishly motivated because he could have just sat on his billions and accrued more money/power instead of taking wild risks to do new things.

Beats being in bed with bankers, pharmaceutical companies, arms dealers and people selling our personal data.

I think it's 90+% political. The right and left are at war. It's beyond any real civility -- anything short of actual physical violence is fair game. This doesn't leave room for a lot of nuanced views of different political figures.

> Why do people hate Elon so much?

Because he hurts people, different people in different ways. There are plenty of examples, e.g. handling the Twitter employees and Twitter users. Elon does a lot of genuinely useful things, but that doesn't mean he doesn't also do bad, selfish things. And even people who aren't directly affected by that see those bad things.

Everything is political bro. You're doing the appeal to moderation fallacy.

You could say the same about Steve Jobs being a tyrant boss, but despite this he achieved God-like status in tech circles. So did Elon for that matter, before he became a pariah seemingly overnight.

> It's beyond any real civility -- anything short of actual physical violence is fair game.

I think that's sort of the problem, the person we're discussing is a significant purveyor of that sort of incivility. When someone chooses to play in the mud like that it should not come as a surprise that people respond with distain.

Steve Jobs also had a lot of critics, so I don't see any contradictions here. Many people would disagree about God-like status of Steve Jobs. Same for Elon Musk, he didn't start doing bad things overnight, it was accumulating, until at some point, which was different for different critics, he was worthy of robust criticism.

He knowingly sells fatally defective products that he misrepresents with a reckless disregard for the truth at the cost of killing his customers and members of the public.

He has resisted all calls to rectify obvious and public fatal design defects since they would harm his profits.

He has a pattern of abusing the legal system and the natural extensions of the “benefit of the doubt” to shield him and his companies from their responsibilities.

For all of this, he has been richly rewarded and made the richest person in the world, yet demands the lowest level of scrutiny. He is a role model and a blueprint showing that the path to riches is lying your ass off and killing your customers for a profit as long as you can spin it as “for the greater good”.

Steve's assholarity over the years was well documented (he was known for parking in handicapped spaces in a car with no number plates, exploiting a loophole in CA law). They both contributed greatly to the advancement of technology - by telling other people what to invent - yet I never saw the same deranged, visceral hate for that man.

Jobs was really selfish as a person but he wasn't anti-LGBT like Musk. Nor getting involved in politics. He was just like that to the people around him, not the general public.

But he didn't choose any more than a soldier chooses to bring a gun to the battlefield. It's not a few guys in one party. The whole thing is covered in mud.

I suspect Elon would be liked more if the annoying things he did were limited to being a dick in meetings and the parking lot.

Ridiculous. He's not a random guy, he's a major MAGA political player now. You will find that Democrats do not like most major MAGA figures. Works similarly the other way around.

Everybody else is gonna point to politics but how about inspiring Grimes’ cringiest single ever?

> handling the Twitter employees

Aside from firing most of them, what did he do?

Aside from hurting them?

He can't choose not to be a troll and memelord? To level baseless accusations against people he disagrees with, like "pedo guy", etc? This started long before his alignment with the current political movement.

AFAIK he was only personally an asshole (parking in handicapped spaces), not advocating for everyone to be an asshole (e.g. declaring handicapped spaces a form of "wokeness" and "government inefficiency").

He was literally cool-scifi-ceo to everyone but the most fridge of leftists until he bought Twitter.

Why are you using a word like "hurt" to describe the ending of a legally binding contract?

No, I use "hurt" to describe what happened in Twitter with employees. Don't reduce events to schemas.

What you can't say about Steve Jobs is that he ran a hostile workplace environment based on sex and minority status. They are very far from being the same.