r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/tafa94 9h ago

When he called the diver a pedo cos of a bruised ego, that's when I stopped caring about him

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u/LordChunggis 9h ago

I remember thinking, "Fuck, he's just another piece of shit"

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u/Equivalent_Room3344 8h ago

I remember thinking, "Is he telling on himself?"

Projection and all that. Then the emails begging Jepstein to visit the Island showed... he most likely was.

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u/youhavenosoul 8h ago

The guy would fuck a fish if it meant acceptance into an in-crowd.

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u/MasterOfDerps 4h ago

Imagine being so weird they didn't let you go to Epstein island

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u/RndmAvngr 4h ago

It's incredibly dark to even say but that was one of the only "funny" things to come from what we've seen of the "Epstein files". The man is so goddamn unlikable that he couldn't even get an invite to fucking child-rape island. Just how bad and annoying is that dude in private? It has to be worse than what we all see in the media. It just cracks me up his dork ass basically was begging to be let in and they were like "Nah man, we're good. Find your own place to be a pedo".

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u/Inswagtor 6h ago

Are you also a gay fish? Kanye to Elon probably

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u/circadian_light 9h ago

That seemed to have been the turning point. I don’t recall any overtly crazy behaviour prior to that.

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u/Oriflamme 8h ago edited 7h ago

If you cared about labor law and that kind of things, you knew he was already a POS at the time, but no worse than most billionaires. I think he was already denounced for taking credit for everything like he invented/founded it, but these voices against him were few and far between.

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u/wcg66 5h ago

He forced the real founders of Tesla to name him a cofounder as part of a settlement from a lawsuit from one of the real founders. Musk is not the founder or cofounder of Tesla.

https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/gdx3yr/til_that_elon_musk_was_not_an_original_founder_of/

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u/GrantGorewood 1h ago

Don’t forget that the Muskrat took the founder series VIN – 002, the historic Tesla roadster that was supposed to be given to one of the original Tesla founders Martin Eberhard as a part of the deal that actually made the Muskrat one of the founders of Tesla retroactively; and gave it to one of his “Close Friends” instead. Eberhard was later given a replacement roadster, either number three or four ever produced; but he had to sue Tesla and Musk to get it.

Also, the reason that Eberhard had to settle for the VIN – 002 (and eventually 004) is because Musk demanded and insisted that he get VIN – 001.

There was actually a lawsuit filed related to this, it’s Wild to read that even back in 2009 it was obvious that the Muskrat was kind of a jerk. Apparently Musk and Tesla even let the person who test drove the car drive it into the back of a pick up truck, and then they didn’t repair it before shipping it to Eberhard.

You can read about the whole situation here, it’s actually kind of insane that they got away with it.

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u/Familiar-Cheetah-422 23m ago

So, the ONLY thing he really did was founding Space X ?

That dude is one of the most impressive impostor in the world.

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u/Honest-Weight338 7h ago

I remember my dad loved him, and would talk about the working conditions at his companies as a good thing. How he would tell his workers that if they weren't willing to basically live at work, they could leave. I couldn't figure out why that was good.

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u/RedNewzz 7h ago

Sounds like your dad read “Atlas Shrugged” and drank the Kool-Aid.

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u/sirspidermonkey 5h ago

Other billionaire have the courtesy to lie about it, pretend to be shamed when called out on it, and offer (meaningless) changes when challenged.

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u/notscenerob 8h ago

Wasn't public at the time, but he was trying to get to Epstein Island all the way back in 2012-2013

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u/Visual-District9838 7h ago

He wasn't cool enough to get invited lmao

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u/sando138 2h ago

How horribly unlikeable one has to be, to be a rich diddler and be told they disbanded the rich diddler club just so they don’t have to tell you they won’t invite you.

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u/Flaxmoore 5h ago

If I remember correctly, one of the Epstein files documents has him essentially begging to get to the island on Christmas.

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u/Koshindan 5h ago

Seems unlikely that he hasn't used his wealth as the richest person* to start his own by now.

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u/Nyoteng 6h ago

He was so lame and cringe he couldn't even get an invite to the lame and cringe island.

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u/donitdotis 1h ago

the guy literally has kids all over the place and is loved by millions.

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u/GivePLZ-DoritosChip 5h ago

No there were a lot of signs, people just refused to accept him being a d-bag especially on Reddit where you would be downvoted to oblivion for even talking down their favorite Elon.

/r/EnoughMuskSpam has existed for a long time and the pedo incident was actually quite a while after the sub was created and already fully populated. There were pro Elon trolls on it for the first 5ish years still defending him and calling us all nutjobs.

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u/cups8101 2h ago edited 2h ago

The warning were coming from people in the automotive(and to a lesser extent the space) industry since the beginning. The problem is that most tech people didn't listen to them or didn't want to listen to them.

A little off topic but GM CEO Bob Lutz kinda talked about why people had a general dismissal about Elon way back in 2009/10 on tape

Little by little Musk managed to increase the pool of people that turned on him because he would talk about something that they personally knew about. For example: The funny interaction with a Netflix Software Engineer woke up a lot of techies.

But all these traits were always there. In fact his first wife wrote essays when they got divorced about his behavior. Telling your just married wife, "I am the alpha male in this relationship" does not seem like normal behavior.

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u/rz2000 6h ago

His crusade against a NYT car journalist was pretty unhinged, and shockingly uninformed about how his cars work.

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u/InitHello 7h ago

There was crazy before that too, but it was more like ... "*bong rip* what if we put the roads underground, man!"

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u/KiloJools 5h ago

Didn't he also reinvent the train or something?

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u/Hellknightx 5h ago

Allegedly that was right after he fired his long-time publicity manager who kept him on a somewhat tight leash. He let his ego get the better of him and he fired her because he didn't think he needed a publicist anymore.

Then when his entire left-wing fan base turned on him, he flipped sides and went crying to the Republicans because no one else liked him anymore.

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u/FoxFyer 4h ago

I do. Most people who are asked seem to regard the cave-diver incident as the moment they lost respect for Elon, but my incident came much earlier than that during an early Falcon test at Kennedy, when the rocket exploded on the pad. No big deal, that happens; but in the aftermath, on social media, he appeared to seriously entertain the notion that NASA - who was allowing him to use the launch complex - deliberately sabotaged or destroyed the rocket somehow. He retweeted allegations by his fans about someone seeing a "flash" on top of the Vehicle Assembly Building prior to the explosion for example, implying some kind of secret attack with a laser weapon or some damn thing I suppose.

Eventually when the adults working for him came up with the actual reason for the explosion, the conspiracy-wank disappeared; but the fact that he took it at all seriously in the moment was enough to convince me that he was a nutjob actually and I never took anything he said seriously after that. And that has proven to be the right decision, over and over and over and over again ever since.

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u/donitdotis 1h ago

this is pretty normal. all football coaches feel likey they are getting robbed by the referee. there is always this sense of a conspiracy going on. this is pretty normal with competitive people.

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u/Thepsycoman 6h ago

I don't know if it was before or after that, because frankly I never cared much about any celebrity. But I had some level of respect for him, I believe I remember hearing him say something about how if him and science ever disagree follow the science.

Next thing I know, covid and the science is cutting into his bottom dollar, suddenly he knows more and they should just open up. From there it was sharp downturn or maybe I just paid more attention

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u/blacksheep998 4h ago

He used to have PR people who ran his social media accounts but he decided to start getting more directly involved with that around the time of the submarine thing.

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u/PeterVanNostrand 6h ago

That’s when his penis surgery went wrong and left him impotent.

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u/ChickenOfTheFuture 7h ago

I think that was the switch from eccentric to crazy.

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u/tantan35 2h ago

None that was public.

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u/ATLienNumber9 7h ago

I worked at a smaller tech startup at the time filled with engineers from GA Tech and Elon was all but worshiped in those circles.

At the time we knew that was weird way to handle it for a leader of such large companies but I think a lot of smart people still believed he was genuinely a very intelligent person.

Looking back of course that was truly was the first public red flag.

IMO the paradigm really shifted once he bought twitter and demanded his engineers 'print out their most succinct code'.

The wool was fully removed at that point. This guy is an air bag. A really, really, really deceptive air bag.

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u/mpdscb 3h ago

I bet the writers at Star Trek Discovery wish they had left his name off the list of great pioneers. It sounds so cringe now.

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u/MrPlowThatsTheName 1h ago

They also speak positively of him in Moonfall. “What would Elon do?”

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u/mpdscb 1h ago

What would he do indeed! LOL

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u/KiloJools 5h ago

I thought it was a joke at first, just like the "let that sink in" prank.

Later I read that he thought that if the flooring can handle up to 500lbs, a 2,000lbs server rack would be fine because they all had four rolling feet, so it would only be 500lbs on each foot.

Now, I am legitimately bad at math. I have dyscalculia. It takes me some serious effort to do basic arithmetic.

BUT EVEN I KNEW THAT WAS FUCKED UP! What kind of ignoramus do you gotta be? Plus that whole situation of suddenly moving data centers was bizarre.

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u/Alinier 7h ago

Real loser behavior. He opened his mouth on the internet and we all found out he's never had a single person stand up to him irl and doesn't know how to handle it.

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u/Extreme-Afternoon-12 8h ago

Vern Unsworth essentially drove the train of getting the worlds Best Cave Rescuers to Thailand. And should be regarded as a hero.

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u/Irrepressible_Monkey 6h ago

Yep, Unsworth had mapped the cave too. He was critical to the rescue's success.

When he was in hospital last year, the Thai royal family made sure he was well looked after so he's certainly a hero there.

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u/Guygirl00 6h ago

I was thinking, “What a bizarre and libelous thing to say.”

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u/wufnu 6h ago

That was it. That was the turning point. That's when he announced to the world he was fucked in the head.

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u/DarkHorseCards 8h ago

That was when he was still voting Democrat.  Everyone is upset at him for turning republican after the democrats screwed him over, but he was a jerk before that.  The pedophile comment, arguing with his children on twitter.  He’s an ass.  Every billionaire and politician is a sociopath, you almost have to be by definition to get to that level.

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u/tophernator 6h ago

How did the democrats screw him over?

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u/DarkHorseCards 5h ago

The White House didn't invite Tesla to an EV Summit in '21 after Elon had supported and voted for Biden in '20. It was a big event, highlighting American EVs and to leave out a huge contender was weird. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/tesla-snub-white-house-event The WH eventually confirmed it was because there were union reps there and Tesla was non-union.

I can't find a link but I feel like it was '22 when Elon really went right-wing, bought Twitter and said he wasn't voting Democrat after being a centrist up until then. There had to have been a few things that contributed to it, but that was a pretty big snub.

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u/tophernator 4h ago

That’s interesting, thanks. But I’d say it’s a very weak argument for “screwing him over”. It was just a bit of delicate politics around unions. Nothing compared to the massive government subsidies and grants that kept Tesla going through many years of loss-making.

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u/BetterCalldeGaulle 6h ago

Yeah, that was it for me too. Made it obvious that his ego was more important than any good works.

However it's now obvious he built himself on the work of other people and that a lot of his pushes for green tech hid an anti-egalitarian spin from the beginning.

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u/TastyBrainMeats 5h ago

That is the exact moment when I stopped liking him! It's not every day you can determine exactly when you started and stopped liking someone.

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u/sheepish132 5h ago

Yeah, he came out as a piece of shit years before he started backing Trump and the far right.

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u/inevitablelizard 3h ago

I always got a slightly weird vibe from him but that was the moment that fully confirmed the guy's just an awful man child.

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u/AshuraBaron 3h ago

Yeah that was the tipping point for me too. I didn't think he was a genius or amazing but I thought he was a respectable guy in the industry.

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u/NiceRat123 6h ago

You should see the court case for defamation and the defense Musk used... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593

One of the smartest moves by Elon Musk's defence was in introducing the concept of "JDart", an acronym to describe their client's conduct on Twitter in relation to the infamous "pedo guy" tweet.

A JDart, lawyer Alex Spiro explained, meant: a Joke that was badly received, therefore Deleted, with an Apology and then Responsive Tweets to move on from the matter. JDart.

Just crazy the richest and (one of the) most powerful men in the world can say shit like that on a social media platform and get away with it.

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u/bettymachete 7h ago

I remember literally saying out loud "wait, what the fuck?" When I saw what he wrote about the rescue diver. I was a big fan of Elon and that moment killed it for me (and obviously he's a nazi loser grifter)

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u/scalyblue 3h ago

Hyperloop was the turning point for me, it’s such a gloriously stupid idea that the person who made it couldn’t be anything but a bullshitter

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u/Jokkitch 2h ago

This is the EXACT moment I stopped as well

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u/Initial_Royal3258 2h ago

Probably Lance Armstrong. He went from inspiring cancer survivor and cycling icon to being stripped of his Tour wins after the doping scandal. The whiplash from hero to villain was honestly wild.

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u/TranWrecked666 2h ago

Especially since he begged Epstein to let him party on his island, I have a feeling this comment was major projection on his part

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u/GWindborn 4h ago

This was the exact moment for me too. I was like "Wow this guy is a real life Tony Stark coming up with tech to save these kids" and then a quick turn to "Oh wow he's a massive piece of shit."

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u/rock_and_rolo 6h ago

That was the first I even heard of him.

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u/impeterbarakan 2h ago

My eyebrow raised, and my heart sank when that happened

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u/alexjaness 1h ago

yep, that was the exact moment things turned for that cunt.

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u/strawberry36 1h ago

I quite liked Elon. And then that happened. Haven’t liked him since then.

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u/Bealzebubbles 54m ago

In hindsight that really was a Rubicon moment. He was told that his sub thing was viable in the narrow passages and, instead of taking the rejection by the experts on the ground gracefully, he went nuts.

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u/fgnrtzbdbbt 39m ago

I remember being completely surprised about that and seeing it as out of character

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u/zardoz73 25m ago

Yeah, that was the moment I realized Musk was a main character with zero situational awareness. He wasn't (I don't think) even a right-wing shitheel at that point, but I was done with him then.

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u/fodafoda 6h ago

He peaked right before the hyperloop shit (2013?). Rebounded a bit with the first double landings of Falcon 9 (2015). Downhill from there

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u/OfficeSalamander 5h ago

That was the first canary, absolutely. I filed it under, "Well, nobody is perfect, he's clearly made an error here and lost his temper/said an asshole thing, but given his track record, I'll let him have a mulligan" at the time, but he just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse