The short answer is that those were conceived during economic boom times before the median American was sold down the river with outsourcing, financialization, and good old fashion corruption. 50 years after this crime was commited against the people, the ideals espoused in those fictions has become hollow and sour.

What's your argument? That we should put aside rationality and basic honesty for feel good vibes, no matter the lies?

Musk lies constantly. He lies about stupid things there's no need to lie about like being better at video games than he actually is: https://futurism.com/gamers-disgusted-musk-cheats-diablo-pat...

He lied about the Cybertruck being faster than it is. It's fast anyway. There was no need to lie about it but Musk is pathological. He simply can't help himself:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3H8--CQRE

Tesla never ran the quarter mile they claimed they did. It's pathetic.

Neither Star Trek nor the Apollo program were popular at the time. The original Star Trek was cancelled after three seasons with no further content produced until a movie revival a decade later; contemporary polls of the Apollo program consistently showed that most people thought it was a waste of money. If (if) SpaceX and Tesla deliver on Musk's dreams, I expect people in the 2050s will wax nostalgic about the 2020s and complain that we can't summon the same spirit of adventure for the Dyson spheres Claude wants to build.

Star Trek is fiction, a hopeful vision of a far future and not a description of the present. ToS was also dark and verging on a horror series most of the time. The rampant optimism of the 1990's and TnG are NOT found in ToS. The Federation of ToS isn't a utopia or implied to be one, it's just more egalitarian than the present at the time which was defined by generational, racial, and economic fighting. It took place during the context of a war that claimed tens of thousands of American lives, most drafted from the ranks of our youth.

It's very easy to imagine a past defined by fictional narratives and idealized memories of the Cold War. Don't give in to nostalgia, it's a lie.

Selling out all of our values to make an extra buck.

Star Trek was pretty negative about this period in history.

In that universe, we had the Eugenics War/World War III during this time period. The most depraved and bloody war in Earth’s history that wiped out 1/3 of Earth’s human population and rendered hundreds of thousands of species extinct.

you can appreciate the work of spacex while also recognizing that Musk is one of history's greatest douchebags and civilization's worst enemies.

Besides lamp shading what are arguably Elon's biggest/most interesting flaws, it contained factual errors that he had to retract later.

These podcasters (who I quite like but may be an acquired taste) call him out on how little he pushes back or does basic fact checking:

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/elon-musk/id1651876897... * https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/elon-musk-part-2/id165...

Agreed. Also pretty telling that Ashlee Vance refused to collaborate or share his recordings with Gibney.

hiring video game player? what? why?

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They were once, but no longer. BYD has surpassed them in delivered volume and proft since 2025.

Tesla's net income has been declining YOY since 2023.

Would they have any profitable quarters if you subtracted gov subsidies and "green credit sales"?

Last I checked a few years ago, they were never truly profitable.

as you were already told BYD surpassed them, by quite a margin as well, and if you add the other chinese EV maker it's huge, even if you pit all the western EV car makers against the chinese one they are eating our lunch.

On top of that Tesla never reached the scale of any other car maker, those are some of the biggest and most complicated companies and supply chains on the planet.

I used to think we owed him the fact that EV are a thing, I then learned that China was preparing for it for a while, now I'm not so certain if he had the vision that it was possible to overcome the stagnation and resistance of traditional car makers or he just knew the chinese were also working on it.

for sure he saw the promise in reusable rockets, as he saw it with LLMs, a business genius he is, an industrialist I'm not sure.

Tesla is ~13% of the global EV market and one of the worst values at that.

Their total volume of vehicles sold is 15% of Toyota’s, and shrinking.

> Hit piece

How would you know? You haven't watched it.

business genius: yes unhinged: also, yes

should he hold all the power he does? no, he's unhinged.

Would you say the same if it's a biography of say, Charles Manson? He's just a human as well, like you and me, but the world cares more about all the horrible shit he did.

You can spot that I'm not a fan...

So maybe the book cares more about the thought process behind the destructive shit Elon has done. For one thing, Doge's probably has fatally damaged the USA, and oh yeah, Doge's there because Elon helped Trump get elected. How's your grocery and gas bill this week?

Sam Altman said "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.". Reading the beginning of this article about his climate fight makes me think maybe Elon's motivation is to gain the world's love to fill that trillion cubic meter gaping hole in his heart...

He's even tried humor, but as this lady's pointed out: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/13/it-soo...

Are you sure you're not just looking for moral justification for abusing your own trans daughter like Musk does?

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