• BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      Nah his downfall started years ago with his stupid undelivered promises. You see, Ironman actualy builds cool shit. Ironman actualy has coolshit to show off. Ironman is actualy competent.

      Its been years that people on e.g YT have been shitting on Tesla autopilot being a scam, literaly running over children in tests etc. Then his tunnel shit makes him look like a clown and THEN his silly ass looking space ship manages to explode some half a dozen times.

      I don’t think Elon would be able to maintain his early fandom because he is not just about Tesla anymore and even if he was its not 2016 anymore anyway. Tesla can’t compete with e.g Chinese EVs. Just go look at the comparisons and except for arguably performance Tesla is absolutely dogshit.

      TL;DR Elon lost everything that made him appealing and even Tesla is shit compared to the overall EV market these days. Even if somehow the Twitter deal didn’t happen I doubt he would be much better now.

      • gay_king_prince_charles [she/her, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        30 days ago

        His PR downfall was super preventable. Ironman is fictional and unrealistically competent, and nobody expects no failures. A good portion of the tests on YouTube were designed to be impossible to fail (such as the ones where a mannequin gets shot out .25s from a model y doing 30), draw attention to those and make people associate “Tesla assisted breaking test” with “impossible to pass clickbait” and the problem is minimized. With starship exploding, space travel is hard and starship is ambitious. Spinning a series of failed tests into proof that the project is ambitious is a very easy thing to do; every space project has failed a lot before succeeding, so just draw attention to that. He could absolutely maintain his image to most people and rebrand his failings as progress — “Elon time” has been a thing for at least a decade. His downfall wasn’t inevitable, people just stopped looking past his issues when he bought Twitter and supported DeSantis.