Elon Musk | Doer of things on X and sad little man

frostbite said:
To older guys here: Does this whole discussion here remind you of the Bill Gates saga in the 1990s? Is Bill Gates smart? Can Bill Gates program? He is not a programmer, he doesn't even have a degree. He stole everything from Apple. Bill Gates is stupid, he missed the internet. Linux on the desktop had 100% increase last year (1998), Microsoft will soon be history.
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You really are a young 'un if you're revising history for us. Bill Gates might not have been as 'technically smart' as the Apple guys but he knew how to keep the behemoth computing monopoly and shoo away the opposition.

That period of my life (my early 20s) reminds me nothing of what's going on with this man child now. Nothing.
 
frostbite said:
But doesn't this whole thing about the Musk-hate remind you the Gates-hate in the 1990s?

Of course, there are differences. Perhaps the greatest difference is that back then we had the gigantic Microsoft-Netscape war, and we loved Netscape! And the Windows-Linux war of course, and we loved Linus. Now, Musk doesn't have any companies against him, it is just plain Musk-hate, there is no one to love today!...
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I don't remember Gates ever knowing so little about things he pretended to know about and then getting publically humiliated over and over on them. Also, whilst plenty of people though he would fail, that was a much bigger task Gates was undertaking and one that genuinely changed the world and how we access information. Musk has bought twitter and proceeded to show he knows very little about what it even is, let alone what runs it. That all being said, I get your thinking here.

If anything this reminds me of Trump. Delusional scumbag surrounded by sycophants who fecks everything up, yet nothing major will happen because of it. Twitter may go down, it may end up thriving, but no damage caused in the meantime will really come back to bite Musk in any meaningful way. Again, much like Trump and his presidency.
 
Redlambs said:
I don't remember Gates ever knowing so little about things he pretended to know about and then getting publically humiliated over and over on them. Also, whilst plenty of people though he would fail, that was a much bigger task Gates was undertaking and one that genuinely changed the world and how we access information. Musk has bought twitter and proceeded to show he knows very little about what it even is, let alone what runs it. That all being said, I get your thinking here.

If anything this reminds me of Trump. Delusional scumbag surrounded by sycophants who fecks everything up, yet nothing major will happen because of it. Twitter may go down, it may end up thriving, but no damage caused in the meantime will really come back to bite Musk in any meaningful way. Again, much like Trump and his presidency.
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But I am not comparing Gates to Musk.

I am comparing the Gates-hate to Musk-hate.
 
MTF said:
The company that Gates founded and built will in all likelihood last beyond his own lifetime, and probably with a greater value than it had the day he stepped down from being its leader. That's quite an accomplishment in itself because it takes more than just having 1-2 good ideas.
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I just mentioned that Gates does not have as diverse portfolio as Musk which is evidently true. MS had a monopoly on operating systems until Jobs in his second stint with Apple turned it around. MS would always have stayed a relevant company in some regard since Operating systems are a tough nut to crack but they had become stagnant before Satya Nadella pushed Azure to take on AWS, establishing it as the second most popular cloud platform in the market.
 
I work with someone whose partner works at Twitter. Most recent email sent to engineers

Muskrat said:
“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today.

Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”
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frostbite said:
But I am not comparing Gates to Musk.

I am comparing the Gates-hate to Musk-hate.
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Fair enough, there was suspicion as there is of all billionaires. Back when having one billion was a big thing. There was also admiration that he kept providing us with products that were more than useful. His employees didn't tend to hate him too much either.

Musk, with Twitter at least, has exposed himself badly in every sense of the word. The hate is coming from every angle at him. I don't even know why I hate him as I hate Twitter more. But I do.
 
stoinz said:
There is cycle for everything. Ya he was kinda of irrelevant in the late nineties and Microsoft might soon be history but that doesn't take anything away from what he achieved
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Revan said:
To be fair, Gates hasn’t been involved in Microsoft for roughly 20 years, so not fair to blame him for MS not being more creative in these years
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Make me wonder what kind of ideas do you have about how Microsoft is doing?
It's still the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world and makes more money from its cloud and office products than it does Windows these days. They are well set for the future.
 
Revan said:
To be fair, Gates hasn’t been involved in Microsoft for roughly 20 years, so not fair to blame him for MS not being more creative in these years.

Gates was definitely brilliant on MS though, no doubt there.
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That's true also. It was the Balmer era where MS rested on their laurels and let start ups like Google dominate a new space.
 
crappycraperson said:
Unlike Bezos or Zuckerberg who got a lot of hate. He since then, inserted himself in popular political discourse for no reason which eventually culminated in the shit show of last 2 weeks.
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In April this year, his favourability was 80-20. Now it is 43-42. Back then he was still insulting Warren/AOC/Bernie, talking about pronouns, doing dogecoin nonsense, etc. Buying twitter really messed his image.
 
Dumbstar said:
Fair enough, there was suspicion as there is of all billionaires. Back when having one billion was a big thing. There was also admiration that he kept providing us with products that were more than useful. His employees didn't tend to hate him too much either.

Musk, with Twitter at least, has exposed himself badly in every sense of the word. The hate is coming from every angle at him. I don't even know why I hate him as I hate Twitter more. But I do.
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For me the biggest difference was that in the 1990s Gates was involved in multiple huge corporate wars. Microsoft vs Apple, Microsoft vs Netscape, Word vs Wordperfect, Excel vs Lotus 1-2-3, Windows vs Linux, Microsoft vs US Department of Justice.

Musk seems to have zero corporate warfare. No competition.

But the Musk-hate today is very similar to Gates-hate in the 1990s, in the tech world. And I have not seen anything like that, in the tech world, since the 1990s. It is remarkable.
 
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B20 said:
Make me wonder what kind of ideas do you have about how Microsoft is doing?
It's still the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world and makes more money from its cloud and office products than it does Windows these days. They are well set for the future.
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I was replying to the previous post that said MS might be history - even if they may be history it doesn't take away what Gates achieve before. For what it's worth I thought MS did lost its way somewhat in the 00s what with the Zune and Mobile phones. But they made a successful comeback especially with Azure.
 
frostbite said:
For me the biggest difference was that in the 1990s Gates was involved in multiple huge corporate wars. Microsoft vs Apple, Microsoft vs Netscape, Word vs Wordperfect, Excel vs Lotus 1-2-3, Windows vs Linux, Microsoft vs US Department of Justice.

Musk seems to have zero corporate warfare. No competition.

But the Musk-hate today is very similar to Gates-hate in the 1990s, in the tech world. And I have not seen anything like that, in the tech world, since the 1990s. It is remarkable.
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I don't agree. There was no hate for musk in tech world before Twitter fiasco. In fact some of his biggest fan bois were from tech world. If you were frequenting Blind forums you would have seen that. Gates was hated because he had a monopoly on a product that was not even cutting edge and used to be littered with bugs for its new product releases. They were notorious for pretty much releasing beta versions for users before ironing out the issues with updates.
 
I don’t remember anyone hating Gates for being successful. His business practices, yes.
 
crappycraperson said:
Same is true for Gates, Bezos, Jobs etc. Very few if any example exist of an individual "inventing" a product that then turns them into a successful businessman. Even Zuckerberg, might have coded the initial platform of Facebook himself but it was not an innovative product by any means. Even established companies like Google had similar platform (Orkut) at that time, it is just that Zuckerberg had a better business strategy than them to succeed.
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Absolutely, and I have very little (or zero) respect for any of Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and all other tech billionaires. I am not saying they're great and this one is awful, it's just that this is the Elon Musk thread, and I'm pushing against the surprisingly common belief that Musk is an engineer, a scientist, that he was somehow directly involved in making the rockets, or the cars, or whatever. And by directly involved I don't mean as a CEO, because obviously he was that. But many people who worship Elon seem to think he's literally on the floor getting his hands dirty, and that's why he deserves more respect than the others. One guy in this thread called him the new da Vinci, for crying out loud.
 
Beans said:
I don’t remember anyone hating Gates for being successful. His business practices, yes.
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Many called the end of Windows and Microsoft because of dislike of Gates and his business practices.
 
Beans said:
I don’t remember anyone hating Gates for being successful. His business practices, yes.
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Also, the Gate foundation has done some phenomenal work in the areas of infectious disease, so he is able to point to that philanthropy as well in recent years, but I remember Gates being hated quite a bit. Musk's view of philanthropy is sending a submarine too late to people who never wanted/needed it.
 
nimic said:
Absolutely, and I have very little (or zero) respect for any of Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and all other tech billionaires. I am not saying they're great and this one is awful, it's just that this is the Elon Musk thread, and I'm pushing against the surprisingly common belief that Musk is an engineer, a scientist, that he was somehow directly involved in making the rockets, or the cars, or whatever. And by directly involved I don't mean as a CEO, because obviously he was that. But many people who worship Elon seem to think he's literally on the floor getting his hands dirty, and that's why he deserves more respect than the others. One guy in this thread called him the new da Vinci, for crying out loud.
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I always find the notion that any business owner is somehow discredited unless he/she invented the relevant technology a bit silly. That’s not how these things work. The vast majority of start-ups in every sector involve teamwork between the nerds behind the tech and someone who knows how to build a business around it. Without that business acumen the invention is quite literally worthless.

Which is not to say I’m a fan of any of those names you list. Especially Musk. Who seems like a complete prick. And not particularly good at what he is supposed to bring to the table, based on the shitty job he is doing of running Twitter.
 
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nimic said:
Absolutely, and I have very little (or zero) respect for any of Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and all other tech billionaires. I am not saying they're great and this one is awful, it's just that this is the Elon Musk thread, and I'm pushing against the surprisingly common belief that Musk is an engineer, a scientist, that he was somehow directly involved in making the rockets, or the cars, or whatever. And by directly involved I don't mean as a CEO, because obviously he was that. But many people who worship Elon seem to think he's literally on the floor getting his hands dirty, and that's why he deserves more respect than the others. One guy in this thread called him the new da Vinci, for crying out loud.
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I agree with this sentiment. I will say he was influential and critical in the sucess of his businesses though. You don’t need to be a engineer or scientist or whatever to be critical to success. Especially not for a social
media platform where there isn’t that much technological invention going on.
 
WI_Red said:
Also, the Gate foundation has done some phenomenal work in the areas of infectious disease, so he is able to point to that philanthropy as well in recent years, but I remember Gates being hated quite a bit. Musk's view of philanthropy is sending a submarine too late to people who never wanted/needed it.
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There are some very problematic things about Bill Gates and even his foundation, which I think people forgot once he left Microsoft (and once we started getting new, more obviously obnoxious tech billionaires). But that's neither here nor there as far as this thread is concerned.
 
Cassidy said:
Many called the end of Windows and Microsoft because of dislike of Gates and his business practices.
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Sure, what's your point? You'll find people taking both sides of any question, no matter how obvious the answer is.

Someone counted out Gates, and he succeeded, and now people are doubting Musk, but like Gates he'll succeed? That doesn't seem like a very strong or convincing argument.

Gates having a monopoly allowed him to create a mediocre product that would sell anyway. They still have their OS on the vast majority of computers. I ran windows 95 as long as possible because it was still the best version in many ways, for me anyway. Like Gates and Musk, I'm no scientician. I avoided learning code because I foresaw a lonely life with back problems.

Of course had I know I'd end up there anyway I may have taken the money too... ;)

Elon had been able to approximate charism, Gates never could, he didn't charm anyone, so that's a big difference. I don't recall a cult of personality around Gates. But to be fair I wasn't paying a lot of attention to opinions in the tech space, just what other nerds thought and the bit of news that want mainstream. I'm 42, so only turned 18 in '97.
 
I've despised Musk ever since he called that diver a pedo. Knew the vibes were off. Although yeah he was a darling of tech bros.

And tbf there are a lot of tech bros still left who want to suck him off.
 
Beans said:
Sure, what's your point? You'll find people taking both sides of any question, no matter how obvious the answer is.

Someone counted out Gates, and he succeeded, and now people are doubting Musk, but like Gates he'll succeed? That doesn't seem like a very strong or convincing argument.

Gates having a monopoly allowed him to create a mediocre product that would sell anyway. They still have their OS on the vast majority of computers. I ran windows 95 as long as possible because it was still the best version in many ways, for me anyway. Like Gates and Musk, I'm no scientician. I avoided learning code because I foresaw a lonely life with back problems.

Of course had I know I'd end up there anyway I may have taken the money too... ;)

Elon had been able to approximate charism, Gates never could, he didn't charm anyone, so that's a big difference. I don't recall a cult of personality around Gates. But to be fair I wasn't paying a lot of attention to opinions in the tech space, just what other nerds thought and the bit of news that want mainstream. I'm 42, so only turned 18 in '97.
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No the point in my post was that it was related to hate/dislike which is the same here in alot of cases.

Many people dislike Musk and discredit even his success prior to taking over Twitter.
 
People disliked Gates but I doubt anyone seriously thought he was a dumbass.

Elon spent half of 2020 claiming covid was a hoax and doctors were making up numbers.
 
Suv666 said:
I've despised Musk ever since he called that diver a pedo. Knew the vibes are off. Although yeah he was a darling of tech bros.

And tbf there are a lot of tech bros still left who want to suck him off.
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I have to admit I turned for way too long a blind eye to how shitty he is as a person because I was really excited by all the stuff SpaceX did, being a bit of a space geek this was really exciting to watch. I always excused his shite attitude with him being simply one of those nerds with an edgy sense of humor. But the mask as well and truly come off and showed he is just another shite bully who uses and abuses his power and thinks he is above everyone else.
 
he just posted, and immediately deleted, saying "freedom of speech not freedom of reach", and said all "negative tweets" will be "max deeboosted."
the (undeleted) tweet below that is that 2 anti-trans accounts (JP, babylon bee) are back, but trump isn't. would much prefer trump's posting to those two humourless morons.
 
Cassidy said:
No the point in my post was that it was related to hate/dislike which is the same here in alot of cases.

Many people dislike Musk and discredit even his success prior to taking over Twitter.
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How is it similar, besides them both not being trained in the business they manage, and being (now that Musk just bought Twitter) in the software business?

Musk has been a car and rockets guy previously, which isn't very similar. Gates didn't go around claiming that ridiculous ideas like air pressure tunnels for trains would work or hyperloops would be efficient. It's been 9 years of "self driving next year".

Musk is more PT Barnum, like a snake oil salesman. I don't get any of that from Gates.
 
berbatrick said:
he just posted, and immediately deleted, saying "freedom of speech not freedom of reach", and said all "negative tweets" will be "max deeboosted."
the (undeleted) tweet below that is that 2 anti-trans accounts (JP, babylon bee) are back, but trump isn't. would much prefer trump's posting to those two humourless morons.
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max deboosted :lol:

He brought back Kathy Griffin as well, fair enough. The interesting thing about all this is that he responds quickly to his fans. He asked earlier in a tweet what twitter should do next and the majority of his base called for unbans.
 
MDFC Manager said:
Funny, that incident was what turned me too
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why on earth did he say that?

Somehow I started hating him because the wrong people liked him in a silly way. It was a huge red flag for me when someone I knew talked about how Musk revolutionized the economy, the internet, basically the whole world and started belittling Bezos', Jobs', Gates' and Zuckerberg's impact on our lives. Then it dawned on me, that if that cnutish guy adored him, he must be an absolute cnut as well.
 
Rektsanwalt said:
why on earth did he say that?
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This was during that Thailand cave rescue. He sent his Boring Company folks to the site to devise a rescue plan using their 'technology' (mostly for publicity, one would think). Unfortunately for him, the divers completed the rescue using traditional means and that triggered our manchild
 
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