If Elon recognized that he had the social skills of an NPC and had hired a PR team, we would probably all still adore him and likely he would still just be doing engineering company stuff.
Take heed, if you have money, power, and poor social skills, hire people to manage it for you.
I believe he has pretty good social skills, he managed to fly under the radar as a public figure for long enough, until he was powerful enough to no longer need to give a fuck.
He could, however, not give a fuck about whether he is liked or not, which is certainly what I would do if I had 400,000,000,000$ of fuck you money. But being what would in rude terms would be described as an "attention whore", he instead spends his time making insane tweets and pretending to be good at videogames in order to impress a bunch of adolescent boys. It's almost sad.
I don't, but I expect a powerful person to have the foresight to have not just Yes men around them and listen to advice/voices that give them counter points to what they want to blurb out before they blurb it out.
It's not merely about "likability" but more about carefully controlling the messaging, and avoiding controversies or really bad missteps.
A defendant or plaintiff can choose to remain totally silent in a court of law and speak through their attorney. The attorney filters what their client has to say, recasts it in legal terminology, and everything the attorney says and does should protect the interests of the client and the court, in opposition to the other side.
It's also about a division of labor: for God's sake, what CEO/politician/bishop wants to open all his own mail when a secretary can filter it? What CEO is going to read social media all day and respond to their DMs? Waste of a salary! Does Mr. Musk or President Trump really write all the covfefe on his own, or does he employ ghost writers? How would we know?
A PR firm likewise has a fiduciary and legal duty to protect the interests of an entity, to keep them out of litigous entanglements, and yes, to put on the best public face that they can in order to 'be liked'. Unless the org has some weird reason to play the villain or adversary in some way, and likability is not an ultimate goal, such as a gangsta rapper with a public beef, I suppose. They still use social media to sell music.
Not as sad as a world in which Billionaires actively and shamelessly use their power to rebuild the government on their favor and spread misinformation, populism and hate globally their own media platforms.
For me all he had to do was not openly be a genocidal white supremacist. Maybe he needs a crew to help him with that, but I think there's something about that that's a bit more than "poor social skills" and I'm sick of pretending that me not knowing what to say to people at funerals is the same as him delivering multiple Nazi salutes at the presidential inauguration.
Elon Musk is the head of the republican party and won the election? Or do you just ctrl+f for "white supremacist" and throw the same shit at every wall you find to see where it will stick?
The temerity of the whole TDS bullshit is the most obvious proof of an astounding lack of self-awareness on the right. Here the people obsessed with Obama around baseless internet memes for 8 years, who were clutching their pearls over Clinton having an affair, who stuck stickers of Biden on gas pumps for years, who now have latched onto "domestic terrorism" as their new favorite phrase, think dislike of Trump is some unique thing affecting just the "other team."
All you have to do is listen to Trump speak to realize he's fairly unique in quickly-obviouly-un-American ways among recent US Presidents.
It's not a lack of self-awareness, it's a purposeful muddying of the waters. It's making being angry at a nazi salute the same as being angry at a tan suit: meaningless. These people aren't stupid. You can tell because what they do works.
Not starting transition is also a life changing decision. Testosterone never stops permanently mutilating the bodies that it poisons until it's removed from the body.
> It's quiet amusingy that up ubtill recently in the usa it was easier to get surgery to turn you to your 'real' gender compared to buying yourself some alcohol.
That's not true at all. Kids can't just get surgery on their own. They need parental consent at the very least. Interestingly, one survey indicated that 97% of minors receiving breast reduction surgery were not transgender kids, but cis male kids with gynecomastia. In your hand-wringing about life-changing decisions, would you deny these boys the treatment they need and instead force them to keep their breast growth all throughout adolescence?
And it's certainly easier to get parental consent to consume alcohol than it is to get elective gender-affirming surgery. The total number of people getting GAS in the USA in one year has never exceeded ~13,000. That's for all ages. Meanwhile about 10 million young people under 21 per year drink alcohol, of whom about 10% were able to obtain it from their own home, which in some states is perfectly legal.
> I think the republican position is more nuanced than that. To summarize: 'all children are special and important but any life changing decisions like joining the army or getting a tattoo are best left for later in life.
I didn't realise republicans were against genital mutilation.
After that he started getting more and more unhinged, leading through to buying twitter, then trying to get out of it, then doubling down.