Re: fantastical science fiction
"I agree he's an unlikeable autocrat at this point, but.."
I also agree. I signed up for Twitter/X for the first time just recently (last year) and quickly had to mute his constantly promoted stream of excrement. I wonder if there is something like Roman lead lined drinking water pipes (pb for plumbum) that drives all fantastically rich people completely insane. Maybe it's a 2 part poison, like maybe ozempic plus viagra, more likely something much more obscure, but something is making obscenely wealthy people lose their god damned minds.
But. So many buts. I love everything he has done. But I hate everything he says. Like Twitter banned him, so he bought the whole thing and fired all those fools. Isn't that everybody's fantasy? He's setting the pace for launching rockets into space. He's developing neural interfaces. He watched "who killed the electric car" and he commoditized luxury electric cars built in totally automated gigafactories in response. He's building androids. You must be able to hear my raging childhood boner for all of that from all over the planet. BUT HE'S SUCH A PALEOCONSERVATIVE RIGHT WINGNUT DOUCHECANOE. It's cognitive dissonance.
"Jeff Bezos..." is the prototypical villain, Amazon is The Borg. "Bill Gates..." is a bumbling nerd who happened into millions and hired the most ruthless mercenaries to turn it into billions and is now focused on giving it all away, almost neutralizing all of his crimes against humanity. "Steve Jobs..." was just a celebrity, it was Wozniak and all the victims who came after him who made the name Jobs at all memorable. Evil, Neutral, and Chaotic. Elon seemed like he could have been Good.
He must be putting everything he has into supporting Trump and Trump like people all around the world because he can see something I'm not smart enough to see, right? Right? RIGHT?? Deep breath.
"If it's as easy as just "hiring" someone else to do the work..." - he did do that, simply hire the people to do the work. But it really seemed like he was easily capable of doing any of the work.
"Nikola Telsa had a plan..." an apt comparison. Elon has already gone much further than Nikola ever did. Debatable which one was the more impressive mind, I would lean heavily towards Nikola, but Elon has been quite impressive. But in the end, they will both have died utterly alone with people pontificating after the fact about what might have been if either of them had just been a little bit more comfortable in the world.
Hand me trillions of dollars and watch my bright light put them all in the shade ;)