But ... Elon is the opposite of Wall Street.
So we must ask ourselves why do they target Elon Musk (Planet saving, self made entrepreneur working 100h a week) but ...
- not Bill Gates (retired former Monopolist and recent Epstein buddy),
- not Walton Family (who just lucked out with Inherited Wealth without ever working much)
- not actual Wall Street like the owners of Blackstone, JPMorgan Chase, The Carlyle Group or Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts ?
Once we ask this question the answer is clear: It is not really about tax dollars and it is not about inequality.
It is politics.
Sometimes we forget that not everyone is on TMC.
They don't have a great way to separate the signal from the noise. And the noise is
deafening. Elon is probably the hottest name in the SEO of the last few years. You put his name somewhere and all hell breaks loose.
I've built myself a mental model of Elon Musk (who he is, what motivates him, is strengths and weaknesses...) over 6 years, reading this forum religiously every day and articles and watching Youtube videos and reading Vance bio, etc.
Have you by chance read any article from the WP or NYT in the last few years? Bloomberg or CNBC or other media?
Have you payed attention to what happened on social media with the infamous Musk tweets (pedo guy, private at 420, Covid!...)
Elon uses twitter like a 15 years old with 64 millions followers. Of course he gets flak, it's part of the game. He's the richest man in the world, has an ego the size of Texas and the sense of humor of a pre teen. He likes to troll people.
All the billionaires you mentioned spent *decades* and hundred of millions carefully crafting their public persona.
Or even better, they make themselves invisible, working and profiting and lobbying behind the scenes.
People don't know that. They read a tweet and get triggered, is how social media works, exploiting your dopamine levels.
Hell, even Elon himself gets triggered and is replying to old Bernie tweets like their are written by him and not from a twenty something social media manager following a script.
Within a pandemic and with the climate crisis that is already upon us, people are scared and angry.
They should be: what do you tell your sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, about the carbon budget we all spent so easily in the last few decades? What about their future? California burns every summer, Canada gets 50° Celsius degrees, and some old boomers still worry about their cruise...
I'm 36 with a three-old son, and I'm terrified about will happen in his lifetime. People are angry and inequality is, beyond any reasonable doubt, one of the culprit of the climate crisis.
I think Elon is an ass sometimes, but he can be, I don't care. He's not perfect and I did not marry him.
I sometimes worry about him following people on twitter that are just fanbois and yesman (I do think this doesn't help him think straightly, nobody can resist that kind of pressure, he's not a Zen monk), but I can't do anything about it. I'd tell him if I could.
The things he's doing with Tesla are absolutely incredible and toward "a better world", for real.
Tesla is literally the main hope I have for a partial solution of climate change.
That's enough for me, and then some.
But people out there don't have this kind of in depth knowledge.
They see him trolling on twitter and think he's a jerk like all other evil billionaires (because there are some evil billionaires).
But he's on twitter so they can reply back. This doesn't happen with the others.
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