I don’t think anyone can doubt that Musk is super smart. I’ve heard silly things like - he doesn’t do anything, it’s all his employees or board or assistant - but reading the history that’s obviously false.
It does seem some people can’t cope with the idea that someone is often an asshat is also brilliant. And I’m afraid it’s true with Musk.
It's also worth keeping in mind that super smart people can say and do lots of really dumb things. Smart != wise.
I think the Scott Adams piece the other day[0] described the system dynamics well:
"Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security."
I think Biden giving credit to GM[1] and being used as a political football, prior to Musk entering politics in a big way himself, drove him away from the left and (by process of elimination) toward the right. Once you're down the rabbit hole, the rest is history.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gm-ceo-joe-biden-elon-musk-t...
Also, didn't Musk publicly quit Trump's advisory councils over exiting the Paris Agreement back in 2017? Why does that rift not qualify for your "separating politics" hypothesis?
Not OP ... but it would be consistent with observations. It is a party that admires lying and rewards it.
If the right will welcome people like Musk with open arms (always a natural fit anyways, he's rich as hell) then why wouldn't he pull the mask off? Despite most Tesla customers being presumably left leaning, his heel turn doesn't seem to have had much negative impact on the things that matter to him so far, for example his net worth.
Musk was even then a polarising figure, but given Tesla was arguably more “American” than even the self-proclaimed traditional American car companies, it seemed a weird, self-defeating, perhaps emotional, position for the administration to take.
I don't know either really, I'm just reporting remembered second-hand sources.
He did not leaned a little right. He had the same political opinions, but less of narcissist rage over not being admired.
Somewhere along the road he devolved into a petty and weird character, and then went off the deep end into full spectrum alt-right weirdness.
He is the same type of talented hype man as Jobs was, with the same sort of reality distortion field. Otherwise SpaceX reusable wouldn't have happened. And even Jensen Huang was supremely impressed how fast xAI built up data centers.
But there's also definitely been a change. He publicly endorsed Democrat candidates on numerous occasions, including against normie business-friendly Republicans. Think his metamorphosis in actual unfiltered views is best shifted from the "I absolutely support trans but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare" to his current campaigns...
>pre-2018, he was a journalists' sweetheart. they were singing him praises and they didn't bring up attention to his misdeeds
>at some point around that time, he had pissed them off with the "who owns the media?" tweet, and they did a 180 degree turn. he didn't suddenly become eccentric then, his eccentricity started to get extensive negative attention. there's a plethora of media sweethearts who get away with far worse things without a peep from checkmarked firebrands
>in other words, you've changed your mind on cue, and you never had an independent opinion to begin with
Pre-2018 he had already made some substantial lies, (cf. https://elonmusk.today/)
Yes.
People's true nature reveals once they stop caring about money.
To be fair, he was really good at faking.
I mean Werner Von Braun was a Nazi party member and knowingly used slave labor. Doesn’t make his rocketry advancements any less impressive.
Or Charles Darwin’s views of superior races.
Or Gandhi’s gray area views of pedophilia.
I mean if you’re going to discounted every person with a view you find distasteful your list of people you admire is going to be blank.
You may find Musk’s views distasteful but he’s had an enormous impact on EV’s, rocketry, hell space in general. I think it’s pretty awesome.
"politics":
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
He meticulously worked on his image for decades.
So I wouldn’t be so sure as this piece is in Tesla’s downfall, and the emotive language doesn’t help this look like an objective analysis.
I also don’t like articles that take the industry consensus or expert opinion as a priori the correct opinion. Tesla wasn’t built by consensus; even the door handle example that is here touted as a negative almost certainly helped Tesla more than its harmed by being one of many unique features.
>Back in 2016, Musk personally pushed for almost all vehicle functions, including the door handles, to be controlled by electric buttons or touchscreens. His own engineers and executives warned that this is a huge safety risk... They argued for traditional, fully mechanical door handles, but Musk vetoed them for purely aesthetic reasons. He even pushed for the mechanical override, meant to be used in such emergencies, to be hidden
EDIT: I found a source[0], but that characterization is pretty misleading. The article even say that in internal discussions, "Musk wasn’t alone in pushing for electric controls." All it says about Musk is that pushed for "virtually everything" to be electric, but it doesn't say he pushed anything about the door manual release (you know they'd include that in the article if they could).
Given that, objectively speaking I could not call Tesla irrelevant.
Tesla is indeed a niche maker, but their valuation does not reflect that fact.
The market can remain irrational more than you can remain solvent. But the writing is on the wall for the valuation.
https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/tesla-full-2025-data-europe-t... https://www.reuters.com/business/tesla-registrations-slump-f...
Examples for Europe, 2025 vs. 2024:
Sweden: -68%
Belgium: -53%
Germany: -48%
France: -37%
Switzerland: -28%
Portugal: -22%
Italy: -18%
[1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/europe/2024-full-year-euro...
Norway is just 5-6 million population. Does being number 1 in Norway even mean anything?
UK is near 70million. Germany 80million. What about the stats for those? How many Teslas were sold as percentage in UK?
This is a website that took Hyperloop seriously because Musk casually threw it out there...
I remember he made some disparaging comments about other tech billionaires that while they were focused on ad revenue and social media engagement, he was out there working on the important stuff...
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