Just to pointlessly clarify, this is article is a paraphrasing of tweets by a journalist who calls himself a Musk biographer. The quoted journalist is not, as the possessive apostrophe in the headline implies, a biographer hired by Musk.
I didn’t realize it was the guy behind the Proof series, but I like his work. His book on Elon is apparently upcoming.
Some zippy quotes from that article include:
Musk “was sued for stealing the idea for Zip2—which fired him as soon as investors got involved” and “was going to run PayPal into the ground after his company merged with it—again he was fired.” He then “invested in Tesla when it was distressed and quickly began running it into the ground.”
Musk founded Zip2, described as “a sort of digital Yellowpages” by Belmont Hill School’s The Panel Online, with his brother. The outlet reported that in an attempt to impress investors in the company, Musk “created a large, fake casing around the Zip2 computer to make it seem like an extremely advanced supercomputer” — a move that worked, but investors who put $3 million into the company did so only after Musk agreed to step down so “someone more experienced to take his place.”
The code used by the program, which Musk taught himself, “was soon exposed to be so scrambled that a majority of the program had to be rewritten by more advanced programmers.”
Musk ultimately returned to the company as CEO and benefitted financially when it was sold to COMPAQ in 1999. He used the $22 million his 7% share brought in to an “internet bank” at X.com — the same company he merged with the founders of Paypal. He was named CEO after the merger in April 2000 but was removed from the position six months later.
SpaceX, Abramson continued, is Musk’s only “truly successful and novel company” and a chunk of its success was owed to President Obama, who Musk “successfully lobbied” after “Russians had laughed Musk out of Moscow.”
I have watched that joke start off unfunny, get repurposed ironically, fade into sincerity and circle back to being unfunny, get exhumed in a funny way, die again, and now there’s just this breccia of nuance that makes me feel weird and sad… But in a funny way.
True, hence why the grammar used in the headline implied to me that these were the words of a biographer either hired, or at least sanctioned, by Musk himself. So I just wanted to point it out in case other people were having the same interpretation as me.
Just to pointlessly clarify, this is article is a paraphrasing of tweets by a journalist who calls himself a Musk biographer. The quoted journalist is not, as the possessive apostrophe in the headline implies, a biographer hired by Musk.
I didn’t realize it was the guy behind the Proof series, but I like his work. His book on Elon is apparently upcoming.
Some zippy quotes from that article include:
Oh man… So Obama not only roasted Trump so bad that the touchy little bastard ran for office, but he also handed Elon his only genuine W.
Talk about a monkey’s paw president.
thanks Obama!
I have watched that joke start off unfunny, get repurposed ironically, fade into sincerity and circle back to being unfunny, get exhumed in a funny way, die again, and now there’s just this breccia of nuance that makes me feel weird and sad… But in a funny way.
What a trajectory, failing upwards at each step.
Good thing he’s a white man! Or that plan would have never worked.
biographers are not always and more clearly rarely “hired” by their subjects.
True, hence why the grammar used in the headline implied to me that these were the words of a biographer either hired, or at least sanctioned, by Musk himself. So I just wanted to point it out in case other people were having the same interpretation as me.
So he a Musk biographer, not Musk’s biographer.