Incidentally, do you guys remember when this fuckhead was a darling of the left?
And when was this? I cannot remember a time when a celebrity capitalist parasite was a “darling of the left.”
it was before he was an actual celebrity and was only known for creating Tesla/SpaceX. He was also “only” a millionaire and well before Tesla stock went nuts, and he also wasn’t posting like crazy on Twitter so people only knew him via Tesla and SpaceX’s achievements, both of them legendary underdogs looking to overthrow the well-established big industry corporations.
Soooo… just the kind of person the left has despised for more than a hundred years now?
what? The “left” has always been the side of revolutionary upstarts and underdogs. The right is the conservative, old guard, established players.
you’re literally trying to rewrite history just to try to hate Musk a little more
I will admit there was a time when he was pushing electric cars while traditional auto manufacturers seemed to be dragging their feet. It felt like he was on the right side of a big issue and shaking things up. I think it’s important to admit when we get it wrong. And boy did I get it wrong.
It felt like he was on the right side of a big issue
No. No, he never was. Any leftist will tell you that the only solution to the car problem is public transport… not silly attempts to make individual cars more “eco-friendly.” That’s not leftism - that’s what we call “green capitalism.” And leftists have understood that loooong before Phony Stark skipped South Africa to avoid being drafted into the SADF to uphold the white supremacist state he benefited so richly from.
100% agree with you now. I wasn’t at that level of analysis at the time yet.
Do you think you could be a little more careful in your angry smearing of conscientious objectors please?
My brother dodged the draft. He’s a theologian who spent years in exile due to his refusal to serve the corrupt apartheid government.
Give a fuck about Edolf Twitler or don’t but leave the rest of us out of this. Cunt is your problem now anyway.
Just, mind the facts while you rant if you don’t mind. Please.
You’re pushing a very niche view as if it’s universal, I get why you’re doing it but you’re wrong to. There is no single solution to transport requirements and while the vast majority of leftists of course agree public transport is vital it’s not a magic solution for everything and outside the car hate bubble is very rare for anyone, even a leftwing person, to be staunchly anticar.
You might not like it but it’s reality.
When he was spending money on electric cars, solar, renewable energy storage and (relatively) low-cost space travel.
Yanno, before he got addicted to Twitter and became terminally online.
It honestly baffles me how many people have forgotten that Musk was heralded as basically being irl Batman because electric cars prior to Tesla were actual trash, there was little to no research being done on how to make space cheaper, and renewables only worked as long as the sun was shining and the wind was blowing (iirc the power wall was originally developed for renewable energy storage; Tesla also developed solar roof tiles so you could turn your roof into one big solar panel). He was using his money to actually help develop cleaner transportation, cleaner energy development and space travel instead of filling Olympic swimming pools with cash like most rich fucks.
Then he started posting on Twitter and everyone realized he was an idiot with too much money who got lucky with Tesla and SpaceX.
(Yes, I know he wasn’t the founder of Tesla; however it was his money and idiocy-induced stubbornness that made the company successful)
When he was spending money on electric cars, solar, renewable energy storage and (relatively) low-cost space travel.
You mean… all those things that came from public institutions (ie, universities) and not parasites like Phony Stark?
It honestly baffles me how many people have forgotten that Musk was heralded as basically being irl Batman
Yes… by a media completely given over to licking the boots of the wealthy. Soooo… no leftists involved at all.
You mean… all those things that came from public institutions (ie, universities) and not parasites like Phony Stark?
And how many of those people actually spent time implementing these improvements? Iirc, no one. Because the infrastructure wasn’t there for electric cars and developing the infrastructure was going to be expensive, making electric cars basically useless for anything except short drives.
…which is where public transportation should be used.
But public transportation doesn’t work in every situation, especially in a country where everything has been designed around cars, making public transportation retrofits obscenely expensive. Musk said, “I have a fuck ton of money, and that money is worthless if I’m not using it, so let’s build the infrastructure to make electric cars worth it”.
And so he did.
Yes… by a media completely given over to licking the boots of the wealthy. Soooo… no leftists involved at all.
You know politics are a spectrum, right? There were a lot of people on the left who weren’t associated with the MSM who thought he was the hottest thing since sliced bread. I knew a lot of people ranging from moderate liberal to hardcore left who liked him. The reason why the hardcore lefties liked him was because they saw him as a necessary evil.
The general opinion among the more hard leaning left was that the world is burning and something has to be done, if a rich person is taking steps in the right direction, then we’ll back him until he stops being useful. We don’t have the luxury to wait for the revolution or sit with our thumbs up our asses hoping oil and gas companies will just suddenly keel over and die. We need to do more to save our world and anything is better than nothing.
The only people who couldn’t see that he was useful were idiots waiting for a perfect idol and were willing to sacrifice everyone for their personal, sky-high standards.
Edit: fixed a bit where I had inserted a sentence and forgot to actually connect it to something.
Tesla “developed” those solar tiles as a fucking scam to sell investors on the Solarcity merger to bail his family out. It only ever came to fruition to keep him out of prison for outright fraud rather than just “fibbing”. He bet the wellbeing of every employee and shareholder on that absolute dumpster fire of a company, literally scamming investors, just to save his ass, and it was nothing short of dumb fucking luck that kept it all burning to the ground, as he himself stated in a deposition.
Like everything else Musk does, those solar tiles are a way for wealthy people to greenwash their decadent lifestyle, while also allowing them to stay NIMBYs who don’t want to ruin the look of their gaudy McMansions. Normal arrays cost fractions of what those tiles do, work better, and don’t require replacing your entire roof for them.
Powerwalls were just a way to get rid of out of spec cells to people at 10x what their value is in an automotive pack. A home ESS is much gentler on them comparatively, so even out of spec cells work fine.
You want to talk about clean transportation? He came up with the literal pipe dream of the Hyperloop to keep cities from funding actual high-speed and light rail projects, so people would have to buy his shitboxes.
Literally everything he does is to keep his game as a greasy car salesman/government welfare queen going (see, SpaceX), and nothing more. Any positive benefits conferred from this are basically just a coincidence.
Tbh I liked him when the whole GME thing happened, because when Robinhood screwed over all the GME holders Elon blew the lid off of Dogecoin and I basically made all my profits back. I also thought him poking fun at the SEC while all that happened was pretty ballsy and I respected that.
But now he’s made it known that he’s a conservative bootlicker, transphobe, antivaxx, corporate shill… 🤷♀️
I think it’s important to distinct what part of the left.
Most of the left on Lemmy? Probably not.
A lot of liberals who align themselves with the US democrats? There was a lot of support until the famous pedo incident.
Along with pre-pandemic (roughly) Musk, Sam Bankman Freed was also buddies with the left and even had a second co-ceo to court the right wing politicians while he hung out with the left wing (those that were dumb enough to believe in crypto anyway).
