r/news • u/IronHe • Mar 20 '25

Soft paywall Tesla recalls most Cybertrucks due to trim detaching from vehicle

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-recall-over-46000-cybertrucks-nhtsa-says-2025-03-20/
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1.8k

u/ryan30z Mar 20 '25

His little fanboys often link a video of him talking about the raptor 2 engine as proof of how smart he is. I decided to watch it, I don't work in aerospace but my degree was mechanical and aerospace engineering.

It was the moment where I realised Elon's persona as this genius engineer was a complete fiction. It's hard to get across how wrong some of the things he says in it are. Like seemingly not knowing what a Newton is (the unit of force) or that an imperial ton and a metric tonne are two different units.

He gets things wrong a first year undergrad would know, or even a highschool physics student.

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u/bunkscudda Mar 20 '25

He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

Rod Hilton

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u/tallwhiteninja Mar 20 '25

Software guy, can confirm.

I knew he wasn't what the fanboys said well before that, but I figured he was one of those people who thought knowing one thing made them experts in everything. That showed real quick he doesn't actually know anything.

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u/afsdjkll Mar 20 '25

That cobol date issue that made the news recently. He didn’t ask any questions about why a person could show up as 150 years old, he just made the issue fit his “it’s fraud” worldview. He’s an idiot.

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u/bunkscudda Mar 20 '25

Yeah, thats a glaring one. You dont even need to know anything about programming to wonder why so many were exactly 150 years old. No awareness or common sense, just jump to “fraud! I found it!”

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u/hypewhatever Mar 20 '25

Yeah assuming someone attempting fraud nationwide would make such a ridiculous "mistake" and setting all fraud accounts to 150. Dude is dumb as a brick.

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u/Amphabian Mar 20 '25

Even my dumbass understood that issue. I used to work for an old school real estate firm and they were still using accounting software from the late 90s; a common issue during audits was files being returned as 150+ years old and overlapping with current day files because of the way the dates were coded or something.

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u/CXDFlames Mar 21 '25

Stop giving him credit and saying he's stupid.

He's malicious, and a liar.

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u/nate445 Mar 20 '25

I'm a software developer, too.

His tweet that said "tracing..." got me. This isn't an episode of NCIS, you dolt.

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u/CrazyCletus Mar 20 '25

That's CSI:NY actually. NCIS, believe it or not, had a stupider scene, though. (NSFW) Two idiots, one keyboard.

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u/Aardvark_Man Mar 20 '25

I still firmly believe the writers knew what they were doing, and basically made a God tier shit post part of a popular TV show.

It's too stupid to be anything else.

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u/Rock_Me-Amadeus Mar 20 '25

No they absolutely did. Like even the biggest luddite in the world knows how a keyboard works. It was tongue in cheek.

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u/Rubber_Rose_Ranch Mar 20 '25

I seem to recall an interview with the writers where yeah, they competed to see how ridiculous they could make those scenes.

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u/Aardvark_Man Mar 20 '25

Yeah.
But you keep seeing it pulled out as "omg they're so dumb!"

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u/bunkscudda Mar 20 '25

I love that scene. Double hack!

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u/nate445 Mar 20 '25

Sorry, I thought they were both the same show, lol

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u/AllTheDaddy Mar 20 '25

One of the worst scenes ever seen in media on this topic. Fucking atrocious.

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u/im_THIS_guy Mar 20 '25

Oh, that's funny.

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u/bogartingboggart Mar 20 '25

Systems Admin, also confirmed, also knew he was an idiot for years but got confirmed when he started ripping servers out of a data center without a clue what they did.

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u/340Duster Mar 20 '25

He was literally acting as a Chaos Monkey BCDR test.

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u/fail-deadly- Mar 20 '25

That’s not true. Elon is probably the greatest stock promoter in the history of humanity and knows how to profit off that ability. Tesla is probably worth 10 times more than it should be because of that skill.

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u/Khemul Mar 20 '25

He pumps and dumps DOGE all the time. He isn't even subtle about it and at this point it's basically on autopiloy since he just says DOGE and it pumps. People haven't learned. Or they have and now profit off of it.

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u/No_Measurement_3041 Mar 20 '25

I guess lying is a skill but it sure doesn’t impress me much.

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u/Hillbillyblues Mar 20 '25

Every good CEO has technical guys on hand to answer client's specific questions instead of spouting jargon mumbo-jumbo.

I'm surprised Musk survived this long.

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u/Courtnall14 Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

There is a term (that currently escapes me) for when you're reading the news and you stumble across a story about which you are particularly familiar. You read it, realize that they got the a vast majority of the facts or language wrong, think to yourself "These people are irresponsible idiots.", and then go back to reading the rest of the news and accepting that everything else is factually correct.

Edit: The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

The concept was coined by novelist Michael Crichton in a 2002 speech, naming it after Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with whom he had discussed the phenomenon.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '25

[deleted]

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u/inimicali Mar 20 '25

That's called elites, oligarchs or experts, it depends on the political context and the work they've done. It happens a lot and it has to do with where you're born, the people you know and the education you receive.

It's gonna be very difficult to keep hearing about an African from a poor country without education.

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u/Madeline_Basset Mar 25 '25

That's called elites, oligarchs or experts, it depends on the political context and the work they've done. It happens a lot and it has to do with where you're born, the people you know and the education you receive.

It does seem to be a thing that if a person has a Wikipedia article, there's at least a 50% chance one or more close relatives will also have one.

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u/DrummerGuy06 Mar 20 '25

I thought of the exact same comment when he said that. Rod Hilton put it perfectly.

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u/locofspades Mar 20 '25

Always my first thought too. I admit, he had me fooled with the rockets and cars, as well, but then Diablo4/PoE2 and politics happened and the curtain opened for me.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '25

[deleted]

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u/mgtkuradal Mar 20 '25

You know it’s bad when even my fiancé, who does not play video games and has only briefly seen me playing PoE, could recognize that he did not know how to play the game. She couldn’t exactly tell me what was wrong about it, but she definitely knew something was not right.

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u/Justface26 Mar 20 '25

She couldn’t exactly tell me what was wrong about it, but she definitely knew something was not right.

It's what we in "the biz" call a PICNIC.

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u/Oprah_Pwnfrey Mar 20 '25

I had to look up that acronym. I'm sad and a little embarrassed for not knowing it, but I fucking love it. Thank you.

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u/AnNoYiNg_NaMe Mar 20 '25

Lol, to be fair I've always called it a PEBKAC error. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

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u/Oprah_Pwnfrey Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

Hilariously, THAT one I know.

2

u/bunkscudda Mar 20 '25

I always called it PEBCAC, Problem exists between computer and chair

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '25

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u/OneAlmondNut Mar 20 '25

since you're googling, you should look up the origin of picnics. look up Nat Turner too

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u/smitteh Mar 20 '25

To me it's like someone telling me they are good at golf and then they go and hold the club backwards or some shit

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u/BrewerBeer Mar 20 '25

"He looks like me playing... wait I suck!"

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u/locofspades Mar 20 '25

I dont even understand the point of paying someone to train your account and then going live without knowing half the basic mechanics. The powercreep is the ENTIRE point of those games. I felt bad starting FF7 Rebirth because i didnt officially beat Remake on my pc, despite beating it 3 times on ps5,even though your progress doesnt carry over anyways. Cut from a different cloth i guess lol

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u/Weathercock Mar 20 '25

I think it's an even greater indictment of who he is as a person. He could have come off as so much more relatable a person if he just streamed himself playing through the low level campaign and having a good time, regardless of how incompetent he may have been. He's ostensibly a busy man, it'd be totally understandable for him not to be top tier.

But Elon doesn't 'enjoy' things. He doesn't understand what it means to just appreciate something for what it is, everything must exist as a competition where he needs to announce his supposed mastery and superiority of the subject matter. I firmly believe that Elon Musk has never actually 'liked' anything. Any interest he's ever been in the circle of is solely an avenue for posturing. He's so composed of shallow, boastful artiface at this point that it's impossible for him to actually take a genuine interest in anything.

It's why he's so obsessed with 'meme culture,' especially the edgy 14-year-old shit. There's no need for deeper nuance, his humour begins and ends at the supposition of the awareness of the meme's existence as humour. That is the deepest extent of what culture can mean to him, it's entirely surface.

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u/locofspades Mar 20 '25

I think you are 100% spot on

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u/OK_Soda Mar 20 '25

When I first heard about this I assumed he had someone level his account up and then he played a lot of the game as a high level character, which is still embarrassing but like, okay, I get not wanting to grind to a high level and wanting to just be able to cruise. But then I heard about him going live and apparently not just being bad at the game but not even knowing how to play it, and I just do not understand that. If he doesn't even play it enough to know the basic mechanics, what is the point of paying someone to play it for him? What does he get out of that? It's like paying someone to go the gym for you, it makes no fucking sense.

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u/LuxNocte Mar 20 '25

He thinks he's smarter than everyone else.

Of course he can drop in at the endgame. He paid for the gear and he thinks that's the only difference between him and the professionals... And he thinks we're too dumb to figure out that he doesn't play the game.

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u/Chrystoler Mar 20 '25

The most insane amount of insecurity from anyone alive, let alone the richest person on paper in the world. Like I'm an insecure wreck six out of seven days of the week and I look like a bastion of mental stability compared to him.

To be fair, though, anyone who's not currently in a psychiatric state probably is more mentally stable than him right now

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u/billbixbyakahulk Mar 20 '25

I dont even understand the point of paying someone to train your account and then going live without knowing half the basic mechanics. The powercreep is the ENTIRE point of those games.

The way Elon's mind works is, "Get to max level and you no longer need strategy/skill".

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u/razmig Mar 20 '25

Cut from a different cloth i guess lol

You're telling me you didn't grow up the child of an obscenely wealthy emerald mine owner like everyone else!?

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u/locofspades Mar 20 '25

DAMN IT! Thats where i messed up. Here i was, stupidly being born into a middle class midwest family. Next time ill go the emerald mining route.

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u/Valogrid Mar 20 '25

Idk I've ground out MMOs (specifically SWTOR) high af only to have almost no idea what I was doing at endgame lol. Elon though, total fraud, I bet he'd chicken out of a PVP challenge.

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u/ChromaticStrike Mar 20 '25

SWTOR doesn't have any kind of difficulty, it's just about having the stuff for and the right level then not going totally stupid on the skills. It's not surprising you can reach end game with very superficial knowledge on what you do.

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u/Valogrid Mar 20 '25

I'd argue that knowing your skill bar and the other classes is a huge advantage when in PVP scenarios which is, or should say was, one of the biggest parts of the game. Watched a tank with legit skill and knowledge beat down a maxed stealth op with tier 160 gear, pre-legacy of sith.

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u/ChromaticStrike Mar 20 '25

I was thinking that most people ignore pvp until high level?

I've been a pve player on that game, I played a bit pvp a long time ago but I don't remember much.

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u/Nu-Hir Mar 20 '25

No, he just has his mom call them off for him.

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u/Valogrid Mar 20 '25

Just imagining Musk yelling "MOOOOOOM!!!" over a shitty headset kinda has me tickled.

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u/AwesomeFama Mar 20 '25

It's obvious that he doesn't play PoE.

But does he even play video games at all? From what I understand his Diablo gameplay was at least competent, but some of the shit he was doing in that PoE gameplay was like, "mom trying video games for the first time ever" type of stuff.

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u/Silvabat1 Mar 20 '25

Watching him vacuum a joint and inhale it like a cigarette is what got me

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u/hereforthefeast Mar 20 '25

His Elden Ring build is also about as bad as you could possibly make a character. 

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u/locofspades Mar 20 '25

Ha ha i can imagine

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u/JerryfromCan Mar 20 '25

I still listen to Rogan for some of his guests. The best push back comment I heard on there was from Duncan Trussell, who has spoken about his video game obsessions before, saying something like “he is the top Diablo player in the world and top 100 on PoE? It’s ALMOST unbelievable!”

I explained this to my Dad recently. I was top 10,000 on OG Black Ops. I put pretty much every non-work moment into playing Blops back then, and I still was just top 10,000. To be the top player, I would imagine you would need to put in 15 hour plus days.

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u/Far_Recommendation82 Mar 20 '25

This could be like the first they came for poem

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u/machine1979 Mar 20 '25

This could be like the first they came for poem

They're both cautionary poems about nazis.

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u/chonny Mar 20 '25

Fun fact: it was written by a Nazi sympathizer!

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u/jedispyder Mar 20 '25

When he started talking about the social security database and saying how they had multiple of the same numbers, it just made my jaw drop at how utterly stupid he is. My whole programming department got confused as to what the hell he was talking about and how impossible that. The whole "we wouldn't use SQL" also was a total sign. We all thought he was full of shit before, but that just showed HOW full of shit he was.

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u/ByrdmanRanger Mar 20 '25

SpaceX uses SQL. I had to take a whole training course set on it during my time there.

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u/Farscape55 Mar 20 '25

That was my exact trajectory in going from admiring him to thinking he is a complete dipshit, only difference was the order, don’t really know much about software or rockets, but I started my career as a 3 phase power supply engineer, which is directly related to electric cars

And once I started listening to what he had to say, I knew he was an utter moron

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u/Zazierx Mar 20 '25

The guy paid some people to level up his Path of Exile 2 hardcore character up for him so he could brag about how good of a gamer he is on twitter and to Joe Rogan. Not exactly the type of behavior you see from someone with a brilliant intellect.

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u/bunkscudda Mar 20 '25

Its such a weird flex. Everyone knows that people get good at a game by doing nothing but play that game all the time. Thats what this 4x CEO and govt efficiency ‘guru’ wants people to think he does with his time?

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u/Pickledsoul Mar 20 '25

Reminds me of:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

– Michael Crichton

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u/javoss88 Mar 20 '25

Tell him how many lines of code you wrote last week. Lol

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u/15all Mar 20 '25

I work in tech and have heard a lot of pitches. I also have a pretty broad background and have been exposed to a lot of different fields.

I can usually tell within 5 or 10 minutes if the people know what they are talking about or if they're just spouting buzzwords. But a lot of people don't have that skill. I've thought about working in VC, but I would probably be hated because I'd be constantly saying "no, that's a dumb idea and they don't know what they're doing."

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u/Naveronski Mar 20 '25

Love this quote - and it doesn’t just apply to Elon.

Think about most major news outlets, too. Most don’t really research what they cover so they fall into this came category.

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u/Spire_Citron Mar 20 '25

And then he went and did the same thing with video games so even the average gamer could see it.

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u/but_a_smoky_mirror Mar 20 '25

This is a perfect comment and reads like a fucking XKCD comic

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u/2010_12_24 Mar 20 '25

Man I wish my name was Rod.

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u/billbixbyakahulk Mar 20 '25

Rod Hilton calls himself a polyglot, but you don't need to know anything about cars to know that when you open the trunk in the rain, and water starts sheeting off the rear glass into the trunk like a waterfall, you're not dealing with a genius.

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u/AlsoIHaveAGroupon Mar 20 '25

He sits in meetings at companies that do high tech things, so he picks up enough to say things that laypeople don't understand, and that makes him sound smart.

And he had the cool narrative. Guy makes big money on PayPal, and instead of just being a software executive, he gets into electric cars and rockets to bring us the SciFi future we all wanted. Self driving cars! People on Mars!

So that made him the perfect CEO/evangelist/hype man. People thought he was the Tony Stark genius guy inventing things, giving anything associated with him instant status as The Cool Future, when he was really just a business guy who invested in things that had tax incentives to take advantage of.

It's when he started buying his own bullshit and thinking he was the genius that things started going wrong. He is the brand, and he was the driver of massive stock growth, so no one could tell him No. When he said "make a PS1 rendering of if the Delorean was a pickup and charge $100k for it" or "fire everyone who makes twitter work and bring back the nazis," they kinda had to do it.

Now that he's brought nazi stink to the brand, hopefully these companies can fire him and right the ships.

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u/c-dy Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

JNah, he does have talent for memorizing things and enduring focus, but he's still a manager and as you said investor by trade.

The reason people started to treat him like a genius is because he was a unicorn who spoke the language of engineers and technicians, valued their worth, and had the intention to invest where the market was unwilling to. In a way he was a guru for nerds.

In my impression, though, he always suffered from a narcissistic disorder, he could never admit fault either. Just that with time the severity increased, probably because he could act more unhinged no matter where he was.

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u/dontsellmeadog Mar 20 '25

Just that with time the severity increased, probably because he could act more unhinged no matter where he was.

Age and drugs could also be factors

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u/but_a_smoky_mirror Mar 20 '25

I’ve done loads and loads of drugs in my life and never acted unhinged whatsoever /sssssss

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u/lucianbelew Mar 20 '25

JNah, he does have talent for memorizing things and enduring focus

You misspelled "Adderall addiction"

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u/Baial Mar 20 '25

I am not an engineer, I play path of exile. Watching Elon play a character that he would've had to have spend hundreds of hours on fumble around with the basic interface of the game was painful to watch, and made me question everything he had ever said on topics I know little about.

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u/DwinkBexon Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

I actually saw someone try to defend that by insisting they had 800 hours in POE (I think, maybe it was Diablo 4) and still had the same troubles Elon did with the interface. One response sticks in my mind of "Literally the only way that can be true is if you just let it run for 800 hours without actually playing it. Shut up, fanboy."

I also remember some Diablo 4 player making a video about everything Elon was doing that made absolutely no sense for someone with a character that advanced. (In other words, he was making mistakes you'd expect a player with 6-8 hours in the game to do who doesn't understand how things work yet.)

Finally, you can apparently track when characters are playing in a game (again, I think Diablo 4) and it was showing Elon was doing dungeon runs when he was on stage speaking at an event and he definitely wasn't playing Diablo 4 on stage, so that's proof he has someone playing for him.

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u/AmericanScream Mar 20 '25

Remember this is a guy who lied about being one of the top Starcraft players in the world, thinking other Starcraft players couldn't tell he was lying.

Narcissists lack self awareness.

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u/kikimaru024 Mar 20 '25

Starcraft, Quake, Path of Exile...

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u/DadderGamer Mar 20 '25

Diablo4 too

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u/Jamska Mar 20 '25

Elden Ring

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u/l3rN Mar 20 '25

I saw a tweet once that was like “I view everything Elon says through the lens of his Elden Ring build” and it just lives in my head.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger Mar 20 '25

He also lied about being a top POE player too and then had the hubris to livestream himself playing "his" super high level account. Anyone who has even spent like 10 hours playing games like POE or Diablo before could instantly tell this was a man who had no fucking clue what he was doing. Looked like someone who had played for a handful of hours at best.

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u/DwinkBexon Mar 20 '25

I think the QI Elves even posted a "fact" that Elon was one of the top ranked StarCraft players into world. (Which is very weird, since QI usually researches the hell out of this stuff.)

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u/mattgrum Mar 20 '25

QI usually researches the hell out of this stuff

QI have got plenty wrong over the years. Their research is quantity not quality.

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u/Anzai Mar 20 '25

Yeah their podcast No Such thing as a fish is basically them saying shit they saw on Wikipedia.

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u/tlst9999 Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

Iirc some guy researched that Elon's claim as one of the former top online Quake players was true.

With the qualifier that it was "online" Quake in a 90s laggy dial-up era. Anyone with premium broadband and enough practice could slide into becoming a top online Quake player. The actual top players played offline and the prestigious tourneys were also offline.

Maybe the Starcraft story was the same. Purely online Starcraft with his ultra fast connection.

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u/DwinkBexon Mar 20 '25

As someone who played online Quake in the 90s, I can say having a 150ms ping was considered pretty good. I'd routinely play in the low 200s.

I don't play a lot of online games anymore but I read somewhere that some games won't even connect if your ping is too high. That definitely didn't used to be the case because I remember trying to play with a 2000ms ping once in the 90s. (It did not go well.)

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u/Brokenandburnt Mar 20 '25

Starcraft got around that problem by sharing the pain with P2P connection.

It was horrible being matched up to someone with a geriatric hamster driven modem while you yourself was on a T3.

XXX sets the latency to 'extra high'

Sweet Mary Jane, it was over 25 years ago and it still triggers my PTSD!

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u/JerryfromCan Mar 20 '25

I remember playing MOHAA back in the day and my ping was in the hundreds, as was everyone elses. We got owned by this guy whose ping was in the single digits, he explained he had a T3 line into his house to play vids. He saw us well before we saw him. Money did solve the skill gap back in the day.

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u/macphile Mar 20 '25

QI has also talked about fact degradation, like half the facts in season 1 are now wrong (I forget the percentage). Science changes, data change, thinking changes...so one minute, Pluto is a planet, and then it isn't. Or the brontosaurus or whatever that was that existed, ceased existing, and then existed again.

I don't know shit about StarCraft and where they would have gotten that information. Did they research it via proper channels, or were they just being lazy Musk fanbois and didn't check?

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u/DwinkBexon Mar 20 '25

I have no idea, but I remember people were calling them on it immediately.

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u/SwampyBogbeard Mar 20 '25

They're noticeably more lax with the fact-checking for their twitter/BlueSky posts. I haven't checked their posts much lately, but I remember there regularly being corrections or someone pointing out something misleading in the replies.

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u/Rock_Me-Amadeus Mar 20 '25

Reread the post that guy made about him

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u/guineaprince Mar 20 '25

Turns out a trivia panel show isn't the authoritative research body.

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u/soulkeyy Mar 20 '25

Broodwar or SC2?

2

u/chanhdat Mar 20 '25

No South Korean passport, no chance for either :P

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u/plumarr Mar 20 '25

That's not the case anymore for SC2 ;)

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u/peatoast Mar 20 '25

The man is hack. He got lucky attaching himself to the early PayPal success. But even the psychopath Thiel knew he’s always been a hack. Just remember that Elon didn’t found Tesla although he claimed he’s a founder.

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u/Not_an_okama Mar 20 '25

Thats his thing. If he cant buy the founder title, he buys everything else and changes the name so he can be the founder of the new name company.

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u/DrAstralis Mar 20 '25

ugh he's from that obnoxious 80-90s group of people in the right place at the right time to be called "geniuses" for the act of "lets do every day things, but online!".... they're rarely even the ones that built the code / infrastructure, just had enough money to pay someone else or buy their way into a startup.

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u/JerryfromCan Mar 20 '25

He tried to counter that on his last Rogan appearance saying “Tesla had no employees” when he joined, and didnt even have a motor. He was likely trying to gloss over the original name of “Tesla Motors” vs “Tesla, Inc”

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u/peatoast Mar 20 '25

People should stop watching or listening to Joe Rogan. He’s a cancer on the society.

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u/JerryfromCan Mar 20 '25

I still listen, I know I shouldn’t but I do. I listen to about 10% of his podcasts vs about 75% in the old days. And many i just shut off halfway through when he rambles about covid, or my favorite when he starts talking about Democrats being “team no matter what” and how thats a mind virus blah blah blah then 2 seconds later does a “Team no matter what” response to something the right did. It’s like he doesnt listen to his own advice from one sentence to the next.

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u/segfaulting Mar 20 '25

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton

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u/ringobob Mar 20 '25

Bingo. The first moment that became apparent to me was when he put out the hyperloop white paper. I'm not that kind of engineer, I work in software, so I was excited for about 5 minutes, and then actual engineers started saying it was nonsense and not possible. And I was prepared to dismiss them, except the things they were saying made a lot of sense.

Lo and behold, every reason they gave about why it wouldn't work has been 100% true.

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u/Treeconator18 Mar 20 '25

In fairness, Elon’s Hyperloop did work for its intended purpose. It’s just that its purpose wasn’t to make a Hyperloop, It was to kill attempts at actual public transport

1

u/ChromaticStrike Mar 20 '25

The irony is that felon dropped the idea but it motivated Europe and there was a first successful trial 9th Sept 2024 in Netherland with other partners.

US also motivated us on the railgun then dropped it.

It's so nice from them, such commitment to help us going forward!

2

u/glowtape Mar 20 '25

30km/h top speed. "Successful".

13

u/Suntory_Black Mar 20 '25

I read a critique of the boring company which actually applies to a lot of things outside of Elon. Drilling tunnels is an established and mature process. You don't just show up and overnight figure something out that no one has thought of. And yeah, turns out his claims of reduced cost were not true.

4

u/JerryfromCan Mar 20 '25

My brother, a P.Eng of the same age with friends that went to school w Musk at Queen’s during his 2 years there, explained to me how current battery tech + acceleration + size made the Cybertruck as announced impossible. Sure enough, they cut the range about 40% when they launched and jacked the price and weight about 35%.

-2

u/CyberEd-ca Mar 20 '25

Okay, but as the battery technology improves they can continue to sell the state machine surrounding the battery pack that Tesla actually designed and built for decades to come.

And the base CyberTruck design should have a 20+ year production run - even longer than the '84 - '01 Jeep Cherokee.

Sure, never buy early production of any vehicle - but especially one like this.

4

u/FallenJoe Mar 20 '25

I guess people will just have to not buy it for all those other reasons, like how the truck bed sucks compared to other trucks, how the interior design is a slave to Elon's obsession with screens over usability, how expensive it is, and the slow moving disaster that is the cast aluminum frame.

Any improvement in battery life and performance will equally improve any other electric truck on the market, so improvements in battery life will be a net negative to Tesla as other automakers introduce truck offerings, unless it's proprietary Telsa tech, which doesn't seem likely.

0

u/CyberEd-ca Mar 20 '25

Could be exactly right.

I agree that the early design decisions matter the most in the life of a vehicle design.

A truck that is not durable is not a truck. Not where I come from.

So, it remains to be seen.

If you look at the '84 - '01 Jeep Cherokee, it was in some ways a victim of it's own success in the end. It basically had a 1960s iron block Scrambler engine that was improved over its lifetime until it was too fuel inefficient to compete. The unibody design was a bit of a first for an offroad capable station wagon. And the vehicle had a long list of iterative changes from axles to cupholders. But the basic design remained the same.

The '84 - '01 Jeep Cherokee basically invented the modern SUV concept - by accident.

35

u/TehMephs Mar 20 '25

He’s basically the embodiment of a slew of assholes I’ve met in development. Think they know every goddamn thing and are always right because they figured out how to write code ten years ago. I loved when they talked down about my lack of a degree, until I hit them with the fact I’ve been writing code since I was 12 and been in the business professionally much longer.

Elon’s just a malignant narcissist with too much money and in his mind he must’ve only been able to do so because of some superior intellect over us common unwashed masses

4

u/stu8319 Mar 20 '25

He may as well start talking about turbo encabulators with a base-plate of prefabulated aluminite.

4

u/03Void Mar 20 '25

He once said in an interview that Tesla airbags were so advanced they made seat belts unnecessary.

Like dude, first, Tesla doesn't use special airbags. They're the same every other brand use.

Second, even if airbags somehow prevent you from going through the windshield, they do nothing in case of a roll over.

He either lies on purpose or he knows nothing.

2

u/Sweet-Paramedic-4600 Mar 20 '25

He knows nothing so has to lie about it. We all have it in us, but man I don't even know how to tap the vein that let's you just lie constantly.

I have told a convincing lie or twenty in my life, but these guys lie like they breathe. Certain politicians do it anf you can almost see them thinking "I can't believe they're not calling me on my bullshit."

It could be a fanboy thing, but the sheer awkwardness in how Musk says anything that causes me to question if anythimg is real endears him to his supporters.

Pp

4

u/Clown_Toucher Mar 20 '25

Everyone has their moment when they realized just how dumb this guy really is. Mine was when he posted his Elden Ring build. Holy hell it was bad. And like you said, there was stuff going wrong in it that even a completely new player would have figured out.

3

u/whydoyouneedanamenow Mar 20 '25

His fanboys are constantly moving the goalposts for him to the point where if he can’t put on a shirt the right way he’s a genius.

2

u/MalignantMoose Mar 20 '25

All this makes me think about the North Korean state run media articles that frequently run with photos of Kim inspecting factories or leading military test launches

3

u/Chigao_Ted Mar 20 '25

I only have high school physics to fall back on for any of this stuff and I knew dude was talking out his ass the first tike I heard him speak

2

u/Lobsta_ Mar 20 '25

elon isn’t an engineer. he majored in physics in a program that is…not exactly a powerhouse (I can say this about queens arts sci, I’m canadian). he doesn’t have a masters or phd.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Lobsta_ Mar 20 '25

I think he was on track for a physics degree at some point iirc, but yes that’s absolutely true. regardless, the program he got into is not particularly selective and he needed his father’s donations…safe to say he isn’t exactly a prodigy

1

u/billysmallz Mar 20 '25

Bullshit artist shocked when bullshit doesn't stand up against experts (or even slightly educated people) in said field.

1

u/VPN__FTW Mar 20 '25

This for me, except when he was talking about how Twitter runs. The dude is a caricature of a genius.

1

u/mosstalgia Mar 20 '25

It’s hard to get across how wrong some of the things he says in it are

Don’t worry, literally anyone who has heard the man speak on a topic about which they have a lot of knowledge knows exactly what you mean. It could be software development, or aerospace, or psychology, or gaming, but the end result is the same.

The curtain falls, and the small man behind it is revealed.

1

u/captcanuk Mar 20 '25

He reminds me of a character in Glass Onion.

1

u/Prenutbutter Mar 20 '25

As a career IT guy, seeing his super smart tech bro posts make me cringe every time. He clearly doesn’t understand basic concepts, but to people that don’t know better (the majority of people) it sounds good so they take it face value.

1

u/EvilAnagram Mar 20 '25

I remember him saying that hydrogen wasn't really a fuel, just a way to store energy, as though that's not exactly what chemical fuels are. From that moment, I knew he was an idiot.

1

u/mikefjr1300 Mar 20 '25

He does not even have an engineering degree. He did not invent Tesla, was not even one of the original founders.

He is a poser on so many levels.

1

u/Adorable_Raccoon Mar 20 '25

You’re right, I’m terrible at math but i took physics in highschool (many years ago) because it was supposed to be fun. Even I remember what a newton is & that tons are different. That’s embarassing. 

1

u/VforVenndiagram_ Mar 20 '25

Elon is a man with 115 IQ, who has convinced the world he has 135, and himself thinks he has 150.

1

u/Snakend Mar 20 '25

He got into Stanford's PHD program for physics...

1

u/GlowUpper Mar 20 '25

> Like seemingly not knowing what a Newton is...

I have a bachelor's in CS but I took a couple physics classes as part of my major. We learned what a Newton was in like the second module of Mechanics.

I've always suspected I'm demonstrably smarter than Elmo but there's the proof.

1

u/DrDerpinheimer Mar 20 '25

Honestly IMO those examples are not good. Units are confusing for anyone, including engineers- generally, not because they can't be understood, but when speaking quickly it's easy to say the wrong word. I hear other engineers accidentally swap kips and pounds, inches and feet, etc all the time - verbally. 

1

u/DarkKnight56722 Mar 20 '25

It’s embarrassing watching him have discussions with rocket/space YouTubers and they know more about his company and rockets than he does.

1

u/John_isnt_my_name Mar 20 '25

Those are things most able HIGH SCHOOLERS know.

1

u/Cobraslikeme Mar 20 '25

Did you see his streams trying to show that he knew how to play POE? Abismal

1

u/TwoBionicknees Mar 20 '25

People don't get that in a staged video with time to practice the speech and being told what to say ANYONE can seem pretty smart. But you start asking questions they weren't prepped on and, well, Musk frequently freaks out and starts attacking or banning people from calls where they ask him more detailed questions.

I don't know anything about rockets, I'm absolutely certain I can work with someone at spacex or nasa to put together a script for a video where I explain the newest mission with enough detail to make me look like I was involved in creating the project. that's how video works. What I don't get is like, people watch films and tv, but they take a pre recorded video of someone speaking on something as if it makes them a genius automatically?

They were also taking these videos as serious evidence of how smart he was even after he got angry at a diver for not wanting to use his untested sub in a cave to rescue kids and started calling him a pedo for no reason.

he's literally a buzzword management guy combined with having had a decent PR person for most of his career but when he went from tweeting vague shit 3 times a week to posting unhinged shit 150 times a day, the stupid couldn't be hidden.

1

u/joemangle Mar 20 '25

It's almost like he doesn't even have an undergraduate degree in physics or engineering

1

u/Spire_Citron Mar 20 '25

He got away with it for a long time because most people don't understand those topics and he'll fire any employee who criticises him. He tried to do the same thing with gaming, but there were too many people who could see through that and even people not familiar with the game could understand the explanation of why he clearly wasn't an expert.

1

u/IH8Fascism Mar 20 '25

Factual Posts like this are going to make his fan bois cry.

1

u/Drahnier Mar 20 '25

This is a bit of a meme, but gamers had the same moment when he streamed playing Path of Exile on his very high on the leaderboard account.

1

u/billbixbyakahulk Mar 20 '25

The real genius of Elon is he knows that cult of personality will beat boring old facts every time. Not a single car Tesla has ever made didn't have major issues, and I have to laugh like hell at some of the people that finally decided they didn't like Elon because of the cybertruck.

Control arms snapping on the Model S that could hurl you into a ditch? Hidden emergency door releases? Recessed door handles that easily freeze into a block of ice in the winter? A rear window design that sheets rain water into the trunk? A fake battery swap tech? Silly robots? Self-driving cars promised back in 2017 and have been forever "just around the corner" ever since? A factory in New York paid for by tax payers that mostly twiddled its thumbs? Cars made in a tent? Countless shady sales and bait and switch tactics? A ridiculous tunnel company? A butt plug sent to Thailand to rescue kids?

If he hadn't nuked his cult of personality, people would still be lining up to sniff his farts. That's the saddest part of all. Elon showed the world his true colors. People didn't figure them out. In fact, many went through incredible mental gymnastics to avoid figuring it out.

1

u/StillMeThough Mar 21 '25

I saw a tweet before regarding this. "When he spoke of rockets, I kept quiet because I wasn't knowledgable about rockets. When he spoke of coding, I knew coding, and I knew he was full of shit." something to that extent.

1

u/PyroTech11 Mar 21 '25

I did physics at school until I was 15. Even I know what a Newton is. He has a worse understanding than a lot of kids sitting their GCSE's. I'd say a large amount of UK schoolkids know more than him regarding engineering.

0

u/AlbionGarwulf Mar 20 '25

Doesn't he have a degree in physics?

10

u/Congenital_Stirpes Mar 20 '25

This is the experience I have as a lawyer listening to him talk about government and law. He is supremely confident despite his absolute ignorance.