I would argue that the charisma is what allows him to fool people and put up that smoke screen, and you can't argue that many have not been fooled.

Kind of disingenuous to say that. He has some sort of weird nerd charisma. Prior to him revealing how much of an asshole he is, he had way more people that thought he was cool, myself included.

NO, it's not safe. They're designed by a nazi that only cares about profit, and doesn't give a shit about his nazi cars setting people on fire, or driving families off cliffs. After all the doors are locked, and can't be opened - of course.

Get these the fuck off the road.

Honestly at this point, I'm not sure which has the greater cost to life. I'm starting to think, maybe this is the fastest way to tangently demonstrate how fucking full of shit this guy is. He blows up a few space ships, no one's directly effected. Maybe running over one or 2 kids directly with a robo taxi will wake enough over to "maybe we shouldn't let this guy kick tens of thousands of americans off healthcare."

(not saying this is a good thing, but of a trolly problem. Musk has spent hte last 6 months getting in positions to do horrible things to so many people, and god knows how many deahts he's responsible for. Maybe if he messes up and does a few of the kinds of deaths that people get scared over and take action, than things will go better.

I think the IDEA of Elon back then was charismatic and energizing. He was seen pushing space flight and EV’s forward into the future. Watching a video stream of the first Falcon flight to land the booster back on Earth was exciting. The fact that their stream was on the internet and full of interesting detailed real time telemetry and video was something new and different and felt like the future.

But watching Elon the man talk and stumble through even early interviews and press conferences was not, and to this day, I find it painful to watch. A great orator he is not. But then neither is Trump, I suppose.

You pulled out the main point here - the idea of him, particularly the early idea of him. Back before he started speaking publicly, and I'm not even taking about the past 5-10 years when he's been vocal on Twitter, being political, or spreading his personal beliefs (pro-natalism, anti-trans, etc)

I mean the early early days post-paypal but when he just got involved with SpaceX and Tesla and he hadn't been paraded around the interview circuit yet. No one really knew anything about him, but because he had used his money and bullied his way into being named founder of companies, when people heard of him through these and looked him up, they assumed he was this brilliant man who must have founded these groundbreaking companies and invented incredible things. He was just going around doing his thing and these companies kept doing things that seemed great and people could create any story in their head. They were fanboy-ing about an idea they had created for themselves, about an image that has been curated and created. Investments came in, his stock went up, all he had to do was keep quiet and it would have stayed the same.

But he didn't - he started doing interviews, during which he couldn't answer simple questions that somebody how claimed to design the rocket should be able to answer. He got on Twitter and started lashing out at people. He started claiming he had amazing ideas for designs for projects that would save all sorts of things and became furious when the flaws were pointed out (eg, the soccer team stuck in the cave and the mini submarine). Then he went all in and letting the world see all of him.

A lot of us that liked the idea of Tesla (an EV for a relatively lower cost so everyone could get it, but still look super sleek, and then have tons of upgrades for the ones that could afford it) actually looked into it when we could finally see it and realized it was just junk-it was made with the cheapest parts in the cheapest way possible with an unbelievable number of flaws, there was no way someone brilliant oversaw the production of these. With SpaceX we were already horrified at the idea of putting something as important as a service to our country and people into the hands of a single CEO that could decide to simply change his mind and decide to cancel the launch of a resupply mission. Sure, even in the 60s there were contractors working for NASA, but it was contractors that NASA hired to work on a NASA led project, this is not a project we should be outsourcing.

I think too many people stuck with him beyond that though and were in a sunk-cost fallacy thinking that they've put so much time into being a fan and singing his praises that they better stick with it. I feel like they have to claim it was his charisma because what else could it have been? When really it was just their idea of him.

Yet he has charisma for a certain demographic.

This means, too, that Tesla hasn’t hit the milestone Musk promised back in January, when he told investors that the company would launch “unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June … no one in the car.”

Back in 2015 he claimed fully autonomous driving would be available in 3 years (by 2018) and since then it was always a year or two away. Why does anyone believe anything he says?

"From a technology standpoint, Tesla will have a car that can do full autonomy in about three years, maybe a bit sooner."

List of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles by Elon Musk - Wikipedia

(en.m.wikipedia.org)

Wow, do you really know the definition of Nazism, or are you just throwing around clichés under the cover of anonymity on the internet?

Leave Elon alone, he is advancing humanity forward!