Comment by nrdvana
2 years ago
Or the easier explanation, that Elon has changed. He was my favorite billionaire back when all his prospects related to colonization of Mars and all his investments were aimed at creating new technology. But power can corrupt people, and he seems particularly prone to it. The entire Twitter episode is at odds with everything he did 10 years ago; Mars doesn't need a social network, and he's not innovating anything here. Not to mention that part where he's spent the last 7+ years sleeping around and fathering as many children as possible.
A different way of looking at "power corrupts" is that negative social interactions are an important part of the feedback loop that calibrates a person's sense of right and wrong. When a person decides that they don't want to hear conflicting opinions, they loose out on accurate feedback, and de-calibrate, unless they have a strong internal sense of empathy. Empathy is a disadvantage to becoming a billionaire in the first place, so very few of them have much of it. Guys like Musk and Bezos and Trump end up victims of their own success and echo chamber.
he basically just bought twitter because he wanted to ban people from making fun of him, every decision he makes is completely personally motivated and has absolutely no bearing on making the website better or reflecting the will of its users at all
And that's exactly my point, that his new decisions seem petty and self-centered, where his old decisions (sinking his significant wealth into risky car and rocket companies and sleeping in the factory instead of buying a Caribbean island and living out his years in paradise) seemed to be more about lofty goals and ambition. Something changed. $40B could have done sooo much more for his previous ambitions; it's a crime to see it wasted like this. If he starts gold-plating his toilets, we'll know he's really gone forever. Thank goodness he wasn't born in the USA.