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Celebrating Success

Entry 2216, on 2022-05-07 at 22:22:42 (Rating 5, Comments)

I often get some grief for my support of people like Elon Musk. Since his acquisition of Twitter many people seem to be out to discredit him as much as possible, although that has always been a popular activity for certain elements of the mainstream media, and has never been conspicuously successful.

Some articles imply he wants to turn Twitter into a site which can be used to suppress and abuse minority groups, and there is a suggested tenuous connection with his birth in apartheid era South Africa. Others describe bizarre and reckless behaviour which is detrimental to both his companies and his employees.

I would suggest that the real problem here is that he is just too effective and too successful. I would also suggest that he encounters a lot of criticism because of his refusal to follow politically correct norms, which often results in him ridiculing left-leaning politicians like AOC and Elizabeth Warren in a very entertaining way.

There is also a lot of more non-specific criticism coming from left oriented people in general. In their pathetic, whiny little voices they ask why Musk and Jeff Bezos should be allowed to run expensive space programs when there are people on Earth who are starving. Why can't the money being spent on rockets be spent on food instead? (I won't answer that question here, because it needs a whole post to do it justice).

There is one additional issue which virtually guarantees unjustified criticism: that is the fact that Musk, and virtually everyone else who is similarly innovative and successful, is an "old white guy". I am almost certain that if a young black woman (bonus points if they are also gay and Muslim) started a company and did exactly the same things as Musk or Bezos that they would be celebrated in nauseating detail by the mainstream media.

Given my criticism of many business leaders in the past you might be a bit surprised about my defence of them here, but let me explain.

First, I am not a fan of all business leaders. I do recognise that many of them do work hard, and many are quite smart, but equally, many are mediocre and boring. In fact, apart from Musk I really can't think of any business leaders I truly admire. For example, I am less impressed with Jeff Bezos because, while he is very successful from a traditional business perspective, he really hasn't done anything truly innovative or original. He gets some credit for his rocket company, Blue Origin, but even that seems less genuinely important than Musk's SpaceX.

Second, in recent times I have tried to be less critical of people because of a single aspect of their personalities. So while I find it hard to truly admire business people, I do recognise that they often make useful contributions to society. For example, while I don't really admire Bezos, I do recognise that Amazon is a company which is successful because it gives people something that they want. Like everything, Amazon has good and bad aspects and it is just too simplistic to entirely concentrate on just the negatives (or just the positives for that matter).

Third, we have a system which has many flaws but might still be the best we can reasonably expect to exist. If some people become very rich and powerful through this system and I don't like it, I should be blaming the system, not the person. Of course, many of those critics of the rich also blame the system, but I think the alternatives are so poor that we need to be very aware of the danger of rejecting a somewhat flawed system for a totally disastrous one.

What about Musk's famous mercurial personality and strange management habits? Well, that is fine with me. There are two other people who are obviously similar here: Steve Jobs and Nikola Tesla. They also had odd personalities, but were incredibly important to technological and societal progress. If they acted the same way as every other person on the planet would they have been so effective? That seems unlikely.

Often criticism of conventionally successful people is seen as a form of jealousy. I can understand that. It is hard to see someone who you have no respect for making ten or a hundred or a million times as much as you, but while I don't like the extreme variations in wealth we often see today, I do try to excuse it if the wealthy person offers some positives to balance that. And I think Musk does. Many would disagree, and many would be wrong.

And this goes beyond simple jealousy in many cases. The negativity comes from a tendency for some sections of society to reject anything positive about people they see as their political enemies. If you dislike capitalism you are never going to support the most successful capitalist of our time, and you shouldn't if making money was all a prominent capitalist had done. But in addition to that dreadful practice of accumulating wealth, some people also make society better, and that is worthy of respect.

I have talked about "progressing society" here on several occasions. Has Musk really done that, or could the activities of political activists, like AOC, make a bigger and more valuable contribution?

Well, clearly that depends on your values, but I think if we ran an experiment where the two forms of "progress" were used in two different communities, and the results examined after a few years, we would get a very clear indication of the real value of each approach.

In Musk's world we would have innovations like electric cars and therefore some chance of improving the current situation with the climate. In AOC's we would either be living in a society where we weren't even allowed to use a car, or we would have worse global warming happening. So people would live horrible lives, with some aspects of it like going 100 years back in time, but at least white people would be just as poor as black, and men would be just as mediocre as women. In fact, we would have true equity: everyone would be worse off!

Those previous comments are somewhat controversial, I admit, but I think there is an element of truth there. All the most offensive comments have some truth in them, which is what makes them offensive, I guess.

Getting back to the old white guy (AKA OWG) thing again. Is there something about them which means they are almost always the demographic where the most brilliant and important people come from? Or is our society set up in a way to allow them to succeed while blocking others? Or does "toxic masculinity" give them an unfair advantage where they can succeed through engaging in bad behaviour that other groups might not condone?

Well, it's hard to say which of these have any affect, and it's even harder to say how much, but given the massive bias against OWGs from most of the media, many politicians, and a lot of industry leaders, I can't attribute it to anything but talent and attitude. I'm not saying OWGs are inherently superior, but I am saying the culture amongst most of them can potentially result in them doing extraordinary things. And yes, that culture does include what critics refer to as "toxic masculinity", because that can be a good thing as well as bad.

So I don't apologise for being a Musk supporter, just like I don't apologise for ridiculing many of his enemies. The most successful people really don't care too much what lesser individuals think about them, and that is a good thing for us all.

Comment 1 (7156) by Anonymous on 2022-05-10 at 09:18:08:

Maybe you should marry Musk, such is your obvious adoration. It's perfectly fine to critique a person who so clearly puts themselves and their ideas int he public domain. For example, pointing out Musk's criticism of Apple's "walled garden" while refusing to allow Android Auto and Apple CarPlay into his vehicles...

Comment 2 (7157) by OJB on 2022-05-10 at 11:39:19:

Sure, it's fine to indulge in fair criticism, and everyone has faults, but I think it goes beyond that. It's criticism not for any specific reason, but because of who he is. It's also fine to criticise the people who criticise him, which is what I have done.

Comment 3 (7173) by Ayi Ariquater on 2022-05-22 at 14:45:44: Nice.

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