Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyone’s dreaming about.
Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that he’s currently below average intelligence if anything.
They wanted Iron Man and got Justin Fuckin Hammer.
Phoney Starck
Well yeah, that’s the American Dream right? That if you’re smart and work hard, you’ll be rich?
Yeah and you need to be asleep to believe it
And like most dreams, it just won’t happen in real life.
My feelings are that Steve Jobs was the quintessential cultural personality CEO and his early death sent a lot of people desperately looking for the next one, who ended up being Elon.
The difference was that Jobs actually had taste and a good vision for the future. He could build a smart team and let them drive progress then motivate to go further without making things up like Elon. So the media papered over Elon’s wild confabulation, instead of showing him in a true light.
Most of that’s false though. He couldn’t build a good smart team, Wozniak could. He was very good at screwing others out of ownership in the company they helped build though. He was also very good at one thing, envisioning a computer in every home, and a computer in every pocket. That was his one true talent.
But he was not “smart”. He died to cancer detected early enough to heal with modern medicine, but chose quack treatments instead. There really isn’t any such thing as general intelligence. Everyone’s got very specialized knowledge in some topic, and are idiots in everything else.
Na, that is just historically inaccurate. The original Macintosh team collected their stories/memoires at folklore.org, which give you a pretty good overview of his talents. He was really mercurial and Woz was the better engineer, but played a really important role in the vision/design of computers as we know them today. In the original Mac team others did the engineering and Jobs never claimed to be and engineering type of person, but he had a good feel on the importance of design, clear visual metaphors and good interaction design and pushed the team relentlessly into that direction.
Jobs was a salesman, Woz the engineering brain.
He was quite good at marketing. He wasn’t a technical guy and apparently wasn’t terribly good at driving technical people either. But he was great at selling whatever the tech people came up with.
His only smart trick was to sell things super expensive to flatter the ego of the buyer. It’s not rocket science.
The focus on the user experience, rather than the underlying tech, was Job’s key insight.
aka he was an idiot who didn’t want to / was too dumb to take the time to understand machines.
That’s the opposite of genious lmao. My boss is the same.
some, like me, are idiots in everything
elseI doubt that.
Quack treatments meant he could keep working. Modern medicine would mean he would have to admit his beliefs about human health were wrong.
Steve Jobs tried to cure his cancer with essential oil. If that doesn’t scream dumbass I don’t know what is
With an all fruit diet because everything else creates “mucus” which is bad according to his anti-scientific bullshit.
An all fruit diet IRL is horrible for cancer as cancers feed on sugars.
Had a colleague die from cancer, after being given a very good prognosis with treatment and declining all that because he read somewhere just getting a whole bunch of vitamin C would reverse cancer.
His case he had a powerful personal anecdote, a brother he lost to cancer who did try the medical route and died after a miserable treatment course. He even acknowledged that the prognosis was dire for his brother from the onset, and they described medical intervention in the brother’s case as a long shot versus his being probably curable. We tried to share our own anecdotes about friends and family that were saved by cancer treatment, but ultimately nothing could overcome his personal experience seeing how much the medical treatments made his brother suffer and it failed to help in the end.
which he inherited from a Venusian Space Magic cult who believe the Roswel landing was people from Venus who gave us the raw fruit diet to heal all human illnesses because that’s what they do on Venus.
I thought it was eating a raw fruit diet?
Time has been kind to Mr. Jobs. Read about his early years at Apple… he was famous for skewering anyone that disagreed with him. He also had lovely habits like parking his sports car in handicapped spots so he didn’t have to walk as far. You can’t disagree with his talent for running a company that did an awful lot of innovation, but he wasn’t a nice guy. He named one of his first products, the Lisa after his daughter, but didn’t treat the actual daughter that well.
For a “smart” person, his death was quite possibly a very unintelligent way to go. He basically decided to give all kinds of “holistic” crap a chance to treat his cancer and avoided medical intervention for almost a year. If he had gone with the medical path from the onset, he might still be alive today.
But he did have his moments. Like how he basically told the music industry to cut out the DRM, because it just made the ecosystem impossible. Or one time when someone was picking at him over abandoning OpenDoc in favor of Java (Java didn’t work out either, but his response was on point, without being dismissive of the person).
Cancer sucks. It’s hard to judge someone from dying when everyone dies. I do agree with you that treatment would be better. However finding out you are going to die has a grieving process. He took too long. But I kind of get it.
He also told the daughter it wasn’t named after her for most of her life.
I may be misremembering but I think she wasn’t a child anymore by the time he acknowledged that he was her dad.
He also told the daughter it wasn’t named after her for most of her life.
I may be misremembering but I think she wasn’t a child anymore by the time he acknowledged that he was her dad.
Sure, just like he told her about Santa Claus for most of her childhood. You’re right in that he did come up with some ridiculous backronym like Local Information Storage Architecture or something but let’s be real – he didn’t have a lot of daughters and he could have named that computer ANYTHING. That computer was named after her, full stop.
Jobs was just as sociopathic as Musk. You have to be to lead any corporation that relies on profit and is public. People that worked closely with Jobs often said he was an arehle and didn’t care about people’s feelings.
Youdon’t have to be a psychopath but it does work out that many who do lead these places are psychopaths.
It would be difficult to fire thousands of people if one wasn’t a sociopath, methinks.
Not at all, you have to weigh the loss of thousands of jobs bs the collapse of the company whereby everyone loses their job.
That’s often NOT the case. Executives are looking at their share price each quarter. It’s rarely about the ‘health’ of the corporation.
steve didnt take SHOWERS. he stunk up the office and his employees had to beg him to clean himself before meetings with potential investors and customers
Musk and Jobs are both business savvy people who had good publicists. The difference is Elon fired his good publicists years ago so now we all know the truth.
Steve Jobs was a bad guy. He wasn’t much better than Musk. He was just smart enough to not fire his pr team.
You can have a high IQ and still be an utterly inept moron. I have family in Mensa and they are hands down some of the laziest, stupidest people I know.
Mensa is utterly meaningless and so is any IQ test. We hardly understand how brain works and some think we can evaluate it through some online test and assign a number to it?
Ridiculous and anyone who’d fall for that should buy a bridge from me I have in Brooklyn to become a billionaire by collecting road tax fee, ayy great deal only mensa geniuses would recognize 😆
Oh, I know it’s ridiculous. They took my family member, that’s all I needed to see to realize that.
Camacho would be a much better president
Camacho at least wabted to make things better and hire a smart person
Musk is our “smart person”
They need some Friendship:
And the Understatement of the Year award goes to…
Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, that’s a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised he’s a moron about nearly everything. Now I’m not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.
He definitely dresses himself !
I believe he chooses his own clothes, just not that he actually puts them on. It’s a bit amazing that he doesn’t wear the same Darth Vader costume every day like some toddlers insist upon doing.
He seems like the sort of idiot who could strangle himself trying to figure out how a shirt works, is what I’m saying.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful ability…
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
It’s the “Peter principle”:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Feel like I see a variant where they were never competent, and promoted based more on willingness to game the system than results.
For example, there was this guy who started about the same time as I did, and he was utterly useless. The team would largely endeavor to keep him away from anything important, but he’d still screw things up and cry for help and after saddling his mistake on someone who was going to stay after hours, he’d just leave and hope it got fixed. If the person sorted out his problem, he’d make a big deal about how hard his problem was and now it is resolved and how awesome it was for him to pull it off in spite of the headwinds.
Some years later, the person was in an executive position and the person that pretty much did all the work he was supposed to do had zero promotions. Most of us had learned our lesson and were content to let him thrash (his work wasn’t really important), but there was one guy that couldn’t stand to see work not happen successfully, and thanks to that he was able to get ahead.
The other thing has been that work never promotes from within, they always get some exterior hire that seems to have the qualifications more like ‘was a cool guy at the golf course’ or ‘son of a friend I owe a favor to’.
My thoughts exactly! After that it was like a domino effect… I realized that probably everything this guy ever said and done was pure BS. Fake it until you make it.
A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer “fiddly bits” on the outside.
Leon came from Apartheid driven wealth, which paid for his education, and learned how to suck the US taxpayers dry while firing people left and right. Fuck him and DOGE. What about his brother Kimball who hides behind the curtains?
This is such a burn! “Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them.”
For many evangelicals, they also associate wealth with divine blessing.
Also any sort of success.
If you’re chronically ill or have family problems or are poor, you must have done something to deserve it, because god will reward the worthy. Makes it really easy to be bigoted.
Presumably his companies must just run themselves, because we seem to be expected to believe that he’s running a rocket ship company, an electric car company, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, moon-lighting as the de facto President of the United States, while also dicking around on Twitter all day long and being one of the world’s #1 gamers and parenting like 15 children or whatever it’s supposed to be now. (Or at least, the ones that are still talking to him I guess.)
Those are probably corollaries to Worthington’s Law. “He makes more money than you do!”
Didn’t one of Trump’s professors call him one of the dumbest students he ever had?
In that light, these two are perfect for each other.
I’ve met a couple people who’ve met Trump, and let’s just say “He’s the dumbest person I’ve ever met” is the default opinion of him.
It’s giving Oblivion NPC lmao
Not trying to be an ass, but do you have a link to that tweet?
Not op, but here you go: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
Just add “cancel” after x for a Nitter link.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
The ass is the one who posts screenshots of a website without linking to it. Especially if its a screenshot of text
We don’t need to link to X.
I suggest linking to Nitter instead. Easy way to get a link is to add “cancel” after X (and before .com).
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
We need to link to all sources. If the source is malicious, replace the dots with [.]
No. We don’t. We don’t need to feed X.
Want to know the souce? Google “musk x ‘you have committed a crime’” and it’s the top return.
Not hard at all. Don’t feed that troll site.
Again, you’re not feeding it if you replace dots with a [.]
What you’re doing is preventing misinformation
I know you have but what did I do?
Elonis a highly productive con man. He fooled me when I bought the FSD option on my Tesla in 2019 for $8k. When I sold it, the market only was willing to pay $1500.
Congrats on getting out of the abusive relationship, but may I ask why you believed him in 2019 when it was clear he had been lying and promising FSD for nearly a decade at that point? Were you just not following the news all that closely and took his word at face value? Or was the promise, if it came true, just so tantalizing that you turned a blind eye to the turmoil surrounding Musk? Thanks in advance, I love learning about peoples’ thought processes after they have realized they made a mistake.
Personally, I don’t blame anyone being fooled. He has an army of social media cultists obfuscating reality for him without him even asking. It’s hard to see the truth when it’s drowned out by religious doctrine.
also his PR team was really good for a long time. If he hadn’t called that one diver a pedo I think it would have taken much longer for his facade to break.
Yeah that bitch still own me 20 bucks when he closed my paypal account. What a cunt
like kim dotcom. same guy to me.
There’s this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)
When I visited the site last time, I was like “ohhhhh, they’ve found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn’t know what else I was expecting.”
Wasn’t he German?
I’m surprised that the website doesn’t list Felon Muskow as a charlatan.
Who?
Man this book will probably be banned before it comes out
What about his intellectual bankruptcy?
Ahh, i loved reading this. like blam on a sunburn. cold water on a hot day.
I think i discovered i have a kink for people shit-talking about tech CEOs.
Blam!
Blam-o!
alright, one sec, registering BLAM! as skin lotion brand.
Perhaps if you could package it in a ninja smoke bomb form. So you get to the beach, set up your blanket and cooler, take off your t-shirt and pull a little yellow ball out of your pocket, and THROW IT DOWN BLAMO!
The sun has no power here!
:D
You have just been promoted to Product designer.
Imagine being as stupid as this clown is and his vice president and still… STILL somehow being smarter than the average voter. The bar is on the ground, folks.
If it makes it any better id argue that the average voter at least has the excuse of being propagandized and under educated with minimal ability to improve. These fucks have more than enough money to inprove themselves nearly infinitely but would rather wallow in their egos and call it wisdom.
I feel like if ya sat down with Cletus the Appalachian hillbilly and told him the tale of his names origin he would probably find it interesting at the very least.
with minimal ability to improve.
This is the part I’m still trying to wrap my head around. In the US, almost everyone with a pulse has internet access, and websites like Wikipedia are not blocked or filtered. Obviously you’re right because there are a lot of misinformed people, I just don’t understand how people let that happen to themselves.
To benefit from information, you have to be able to filter out the nonsense. Most people have no baseline to work with and are taken in by anything presented confidently and repeatedly.
Brietbsrt, info wars, storm front or whatever they call it now, anything zuck, 4chan, damn, fox, etc
The ability to improve oneself consciously requires the acknowledgment and will to do so those are both just as important. Thats not even getting into the mental health crises which adds its own problems and even more roadblocks. Imagine if you will a 30 year old man working a shitty job in a loading dock in rural Idaho the pay is shit the work is hard and when that dude finally gets home after 12 hours of work do you really think he will want to watch PBS eons or do you think he will watch Rust videos and pass out?
I may find that relaxing but even ill admit it that there is an appeal to mindless entertainment. Now consider the fact that this by itself has been going on for at least fourty years and thats not even getting into religious and political indoctrination. If theres one way to describe Americans as a whole its that we are broken.
I suspect that plenty of folks are hoping everything collapses simply because then theyd be able to get a fucking break even if it is only in death.
The thing is they might be passable as random folks. The problem is their power and aspirations far exceed random folks, and so, compared to what you’d want to see in those positions, they are very dumb, but exude so much confidence that people have a tendency to assume that confidence must be somehow justified.
I work a dangerous job. When I see super confident people I refuse to work with them (edit: I am super skeptical, there are folks who know what they are doing but I wouldn’t call that exuding confidence). I have learned over the years that confidence is fake as fuck, and usually correlates with incompetence and ignorance (when you don’t know what the heck you are doing you can be unaware of the risk involved)…
There are people who know what they know and know what they don’t know, but it doesn’t come across in the same way as someone who exudes confidence.
I despise confidence lol…
While I agree with the premise of the book, everyone who has met/worked with/knows Seth Abramson all day what a piece of shit grifter hack he is, so I don’t know how much confidence I have in the book overall.
I do not doubt that evidence to support this assertion exists, but Abramson is always chasing the next big thing and bitches about how no one likes him on bsky like an angsty teenager. He’s just cringe.
I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming book… Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? I’m not super familiar with him.
Oh! Haha now I know who you are talking about. Yes he is very… Intense on Bluesky. I must say I understand. Living in this world is like taking crazy pills and I can understand “just reciting reality out loud for as many people to see” as a coping mechanism.
Did he even get a real degree?
I’m not convinced he even knows how to code, if we are being honest.
People who know how to code are in agreement that he has no clue.
Elon doesn’t think the government uses SQL. He’s dumb as fucking rocks.
What does that mean? I don’t understand the reference about SQL.
Think of it like this:
“This r**ard thinks the government uses PAPER [SQL]” - Elon Musk
It is literally that standard and common and obviously in use in the government.
(SQL is just a computer language for dealing with data and databases)
Sorry. Yes, I understand what SQL is. I just don’t understand the reference - did fElon make some kind of remark about SQL and/or databases?
Also, for the record, I thought there are/were formats and standards for data within mainframes that pre-dated the SQL standard - such as ISAM. This stuff (COBOL and ISAM) pre-dates my entry into the workforce by a long shot, though, so I’m unsure that the use of COBOL means that ISAM is in play, or if those two things (COBOL and the chosen data store) can be independently selected, at least in typical use cases.
(These are probably the kinds of questions that fElon and his dogebags are unlikely to ask, because it might give the correct impression that they have no idea what the fuck they are talking about. Believe me, I’ve worked with their type, and in fact, with a few of this type right now, LOL. Swaggering cases of Dunning-Kruger poster boys that think they know every-fucking-thing there is to know about anything and everything. People that still have not figured out that a bit of curiosity and at least an ounce of humility goes a much longer way in learning.)
SQL is a language used to format requests to most relational and nonrelational databases. Databases are extremely commonly used for data persistence and retrieval. It’s like saying the government doesn’t use binary - or the government doesn’t use TCP - or the government doesn’t use paper. It uses all these things in abundance.
I know how to code and during my career, I’ve worked with people that could only barely do it, mostly relied on others to carry their weight, and often would fail upwards into management track stuff, usually done as a defensive strategy to get them away from doing damage hands-on. Of course, some of them effectively did MORE damage later by doing incredibly bone-headed things because some of them suffered from extreme arrogance and Dunning-Kruger.
Watching fElon in his takeover of Twitter and turning it into xitter, I was not paying too close of attention, but the level of chaos and performative bullshit seemed to be terrible at both a management/ownership level and on a technical one.
