There’s just something fucking hilarious about laying off employees, mocking them, and being sued for improperly firing them – and then whining that your competitor hired them and that they have access to Twitter information still.
I believe this fits well under the “fuck around and find out” doctrine.
Musk is not a likeable person, and I’m definitely not a fan - but he has changed the world. Not many people can say that and Reddit’s distaste for him has spilled over here recently.
Paypal - first and still biggest widely trusted online payment handler.
Tesla - Started a ground-breaking electric car market that’s changed the entire face of motorised transport, and is still the leader in the sector. Their motors and battery packs are still way ahead of anyone else.
Starnet - Bringing low latency, high speed internet to remote locations around the globe. Even in the developed western world where other technologies have deemed it unaffordable.
SpaceX - Seriously, who can fail to be impressed by seeing a rocket LANDING intact?
All areas where other companies dicked around and really achieved very little through lack of vision, drive or funding.
Yes, he’s had failures (Boring Company, Twitter) and yes he’s a category ten arsehole (accusing people of being paedophiles without grounds, manipulating stock prices illegally, pot smoking on live tv, having complete disregard for human beings’ feelings and lives, etc etc) . Does that give him a free pass to act like a knob? Of course not, but the man has actually achieved genuinely amazing things.
He didn’t start either PayPal or Tesla, he got fired as PayPal CEO because it wasn’t doing so hot and he paid his way into Tesla to be able to call himself founder. He’s not the genius. He’s the guy who started with money to throw around, did so to make even more money and put his face on the poster and started to drink his own coolaid.
To follow up: he got fired from PayPal before it was named PayPal. Another words: he never worked at PayPal.
Even better, he built a shitty banking website (X.com) that merged with the company that owned PayPal, they kicked him out of the CEO position the same year, and later they claimed to have rewritten everything Musk wrote. They rebranded as PayPal, one of their products, the following year and Musk had nothing to do with it other than sitting on the board because he got super lucky in the dot com bubble.