I’ll be honest about something: I post under my real name. I also work in tech, so this occasionally makes me feel like the biggest idiot on the planet. It’s a stupid thing to do, but at the same time, we live in a terrible inflection point in history where we’re finally forced to learn what we would do in 40s Germany. I don’t want to figure out what I’ll do, but for the time being, I think it’s important that we don’t hide. We need to say what we think about what’s happening, we need to do it clearly and without anonymity, because these assholes need to see what real people think about them.
To that point: I think Elon Musk is a complete idiot. I’ve thought it for years, basically since listening to him try to talk about my field (software engineering) and realizing almost immediately that he had no idea what he was talking about. I followed the Twitter takeover pretty closely, out of anxiety and bemusement watching this chucklefuck slam his dick in a car door over and over and over. So I didn’t think there was much I could learn from Character Limit.
I was right. There are a couple of choice anecdotes, and there’s plenty about early Twitter under Jack Dorsey, who you will come to loathe if you didn’t already from his hard pivot to cryptocurrency bullshit. But ultimately there’s nothing new outside of closed door specifics if you already knew what was happening with the Twitter takeover. If you don’t, this really is the best summary you can find of what happened, from Elon making his weird trolling moves to agreeing to buy before doing any due diligence, and getting bent over a barrel as a result.
Pretty much everything here is based on closed door, sometimes anonymous interviews. As a result, if you look at the Google reviews it’s flooded with fanboys who don’t think it’s real. I do, anonymity be damned, because I spent my time listening to the Twitter spaces where he behaved exactly like he does in these anecdotes. Right down to the first vignette within the story, where someone tells him something he doesn’t want to hear and he growls “fuck you” to the person. He’s done that in public enough times to make these stories believable.
I would recommend this book to anyone because it’s important to know as this ghoul attempts to transform our government into an Ayn Rand nightmare, unironically failing to notice that he’s behaving like one of the Takers in Atlas Shrugged that exploit the government, not fucking John Galt. Here are some other things you should know about Elon:
- He and Kimbal’s first company, Zip2, is alleged to have purchased their core technology, not built it. This is difficult to verify, but I personally believe it.
- The diamond mine was real, both he and his dad have admitted this on the record, and they were additionally rich enough to have multiple fancy cars, including the “Rolls Royce that drove [him] to school”
- Elon’s code in X, that became PayPal, was such fucking shit, that his daddy had to pay for real engineers to rewrite everything. Both he and his dad have admitted this one, which is why I believe the Zip2 thing.
- I can’t speak to SpaceX, apart from pointing out that it is no longer saving the taxpayer any money. He made space travel “affordable…” temporarily. Now it costs more than the Soyuz did per launch.
- He didn’t found Tesla. Eberhardt and Tenpenning already had the battery drive figured out, aka the most important part of the electric car, before he got there.
- Tesla wouldn’t be profitable without government largess like carbon credit sales.
- Neuralink isn’t going anywhere.
- A light rail with three train cars can carry over 1,000 people, meaning cars will never be as efficient for people moving as trains, so Boring Company isn’t going anywhere either.
He’s not a genius, he’s a spoiled rich kid who is trying to take your tax money away from you and rule over you as a monarch. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.