We all have our reasons for disliking a person in the public eye, but often the media has
a hand in shaping our opinion of that person.
The media likes nothing more than a hero-to-zero story, when the man, or woman of the hour
is later reduced to a villainous good for nothing.
But we can’t always blame the press, after all, sometimes the heroes dig their own graves
by posting what seem like outlandish comments on their social media accounts.
Twitter it seems is the go-to place where this happens, a kind of dumping ground for
late night thoughts that could be the noose that hangs someone.
One errant comment could be the end of you, as Jon Ronson pointed out in his book, “So
You've Been Publicly Shamed.”
With that in mind, welcome to this episode of the Infographics Show, Why People All of
a Sudden Hate Elon Musk.
Before we get our teeth into the undoing of Elon Musk, let’s first have a look at how
he rose to fame.
The young Musk grew up in South Africa, then later moved to Canada on the back of his mother’s
Canadian passport just before he hit 18.
He always had a move to the U.S. in mind, though.
Prior to that, Musk had excelled in many respects, developing a computer program at a very young
age while also reading voraciously.
Perhaps he lived the life of what we might call a “nerd”, an unflattering term in
the past, although during Musk’s lifetime we would experience what you could call a
“Revenge of the Nerds” as those young folks studying computer technology would become
some of the most powerful people in the world.
Nonetheless, life was tough for Musk as a kid.
He was bullied and at one point was thrown down some stairs by his school enemies.
This is a scene that has been talked about in the press numerous times, something we
can’t discount when we talk about his rise to fame.
He was an underdog, and the American media, as most media, loves the narrative of a downtrodden
nobody rising from the ashes.
Musk has said in interviews that one of the reasons he was besotted with science was because
he wanted to be involved with humanity’s progression, the survival of our species.
He has said he wanted to prolong civilization, and as best he could, help divert humanity
from entering another dark age.
This is highly commendable, but as we shall later see, these noble sentiments have also
been part of his downfall.
Inside the U.S., Musk powered along in the business world.
He created the company Zip2 with his brother when he was just 24 years old.
For his efforts, around 4 years later he walked out of the sale of that company with around
$22 million.
But he is better known for the online payments company PayPal, which, when it was sold, gave
him around $165 million.
The young man had done well for himself, but he still wasn’t a routine feature in the
public’s eye.
He was an up and comer, an intrepid entrepreneur with a failing head of hair that looked like
it was about to take off with the rest of his big ideas.
There is a saying that goes, “Grass doesn’t grow on a busy street,” meaning people that
think a lot might tend to go bald.
Only bald men say this of course, but Musk defied nature, something he has been doing
his entire life.
His hair grew back, perhaps with the aid of science, not broccoli, and his face was about
to become a staple in our lives.
We must blast through his career right now as this is not an Elon Musk bio.
The seemingly unstoppable entrepreneur then created Space X.
He renewed the public’s fascination with space exploration.
He launched rockets into space and sent vehicles to the International Space Station.
He promised us a colony on Mars, a future of space travel for everyone, not just astronauts.
Perhaps his crowning glory, at least in terms of his celebrity, was when he launched one
of his own Tesla cars into space as a dummy payload.
Was there nothing this man couldn’t do?
Tesla was creating futuristic cars, developing self-driving technology at a speed as fast
as anyone else.
He promised us a place in space after we had destroyed planet Earth.
In the meantime, he was developing technologies for cleaner power, trying to relieve some
of the stress of our congested streets by digging holes underground where we would ride
in capsules to our destinations.
For the good of mankind, he created OpenAI, which was in place to talk about the good,
bad and ugly of artificial intelligence going forward.
He kept to his promise, in that his mind was focused on creating technologies that helped
mankind, that served progression, the betterment of civilization, that averted all-out destruction,
and didn’t only serve mankind’s principle religion: Money.
Elon Musk became a Greek God, sat up there on tech’s Mount Olympus; except he was a
rebellious God, part Dionysian, different from his Apollonian counterparts, the nice
but dry tech Gods of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
So, where did it all go wrong?
Well, you could say some things were gradual and others sent him right into media Hades.
While Musk’s warnings regarding end-of-world scenarios were to some people very important,
if you follow the tech media you’ll see over a few years his sandwich board “It’s
the end of the world as we know it” forecast started to grate on people.
Musk predicted that global warming might end us all.
As for advanced tech, he once said, “competition for AI at national levels will most likely
cause WW3.”
He also said, “Something strange has to happen to civilizations, and I mean strange
in a bad way.”
There is nothing wrong with having concerns, but we all know that people have been predicting
the end of time since time began.
Before Musk really fell from the public’s graces, he had already become a doomsday prepper,
and to the public, and even science, his bleak outlook was somewhat hysterical.
What annoyed people even more was that he was the man to save the world, which critics
said was certainly a Greek God complex.
Still, to others the scenario of catastrophic global warming, a world war to finish us off
for good, or creating machines that are far more intelligent than us which soon start
to find our company boring, well, Musk sermons were not exactly out of touch with reality.
It’s just preachers of doom don’t often go well with one’s cornflakes in the morning;
we don’t all want another Dark Ages shoved down our throats as we get on the bus to work.
The great technologist was becoming a thorn in some people’s sides, and not many people
like being preached to by billionaires who have answers to all our problems.
Musk needed allies, and he didn’t have that many.
He was still a tech rebel with a cause, but his pessimism didn’t have much virtual funding.
His predictions and confident solutions seemed hubristic, and hubris always ends with a fall,
it's a zero-sum game.
And when you act like you are bullet proof, above the Gods even, people will only kick
you when you are down.
But that wasn’t his downfall.
That was only the beginning, a nascent thread that Musk was, unbeknownst to him, unwinding.
While Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX didn’t exactly have a smooth ride, the fact
that he dug his feet in only served his greatness.
But then in 2018, the year Musk admitted had been the hardest year for him so far, he started
to make things harder for himself.
Like many others before him, Musk took to Twitter to air some views, and those views
went down like the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Where do we start?
Forgive us our non-linear timeline.
In terms of business, and not so much pubic image, Musk delivered a blow to himself when
in August 2018 he tweeted that he was going to take Tesla private.
It was almost a done deal.
Except it wasn’t, and Tesla stocks went all over the place.
Musk was investigated.
What was he up to?
In one interview he even said it could have been the drug Ambien that made him tweet that.
One thing was for certain, the man was likely overworked.
He seemed unstable.
It wasn’t that there wasn’t a chance of his company going private, but it was far
from a done deal.
Cracks had been showing in Musk for a while, and perhaps this high-flying Phoenix was heading
downhill.
But as we say, as far as public image goes, as far as gossip went, this transgression
wasn’t that bad.
He’d done worse.
Perhaps the nadir of his tweeting life, the one thing that singularly turned a God into
a mere man, a man who is just as childish and prone to silly verbal spillages as any
other man, was when he called a British cave diver a pe
This wasn’t just any cave diver, this was a man who was an integral part of rescuing
12 Thai soccer players from a cave.
A story that held the world’s attention.
A story that could be said to have been the biggest media event of the year.
It was a get your tissues out tale; it involved heroism, bravery, luck, the combined effort
of countries that for a few days worked in unison…and Mr. Musk, he called one of the
starring heroes a pemo
Why?
Who knows.
The diver had no criminal record of such acts and was happily married to a Thai woman that
was certainly no child.
It looked like sour eggs as the diver had told Musk that his Boring Company-made mini-submarine
was just an impractical device to help save the kids.
The genius had become human, and a hot-tempered, puerile human at that.
The world-saver became belligerent after he was rebuffed because his device wasn’t able
to save 12 kids.
In terms of his public image, Musk became a mini-monster overnight.
Who was this guy?
A well-intentioned genius or a cantankerous clown, perhaps someone we didn’t know after
all.
His story to some extent mirrored that of Dorian Gray.
He apologized for his offensive remarks, and then later said something much more offensive
to Buzzfeed, who published his words.
If there was a fiend behind the facade of Elon Musk, he certainly seemed real enough
when he appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast in September 2018.
But by coming out as just one of us, a regular guy, taking a pull of Rogan’s joint, he
also destroyed his own myth.
His critics say taking some weed from the often badly-behaved bro-like fighter/comedian
was bad for business, but we can’t give Musk a hard time about that seeing as drinking
alcohol is a right of passage in the USA and statistically, undoubtedly, tried and testedly,
it’s much more dangerous to people and society than cannabis is.
Still, others said Musk only showed how unstable he had become.
He didn’t let up on the end of the world stuff, and Rogan was reverential throughout,
not daring to ask any questions that didn’t deflate the genius of Musk.
Nonetheless, Musk had the courage to do the show.
From the beginning, he has been a man that has walked to the beat of his own drum.
He has done things that will go down in history, and as we know, many geniuses, great artists,
wise folks and creative iconoclasts, don’t act like performing monkeys, they don’t
move like rats in a Skinner box.
They upturn apple carts and sometimes can be intemperate, confounding, contradicting.
Maybe the public can’t always have its own way, and Elon Musk wouldn’t be the man he
is if he wasn’t sat there on the geek’s Mount Olympus acting up and being outrageous
at times.
If he is not exactly favored in the hearts and minds of the public right now, perhaps
he might also rise from the ashes.
We won’t tell you what we think, but would like to ask you what you think about Elon
Musk and what’s been going on lately with him.
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Elon Musk vs Average American.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.