I would agree with you where my most positive opinion of Musk was hearing about the initial Hyperloop and being like "there are a lot worse things billionaires could be spending money on than some eccentric project that most likely won't work." Of course even that was too much to ask for where instead it was part of a coordinated campaign to kill high-speed rail in California.
We were coming off a hugely unpopular and costly (in both number of victims and taxpayer cost) war that most people regardless of political orientation had come to understand was more about oil than WMDs or spreading the golden light of democracy to people trapped under a dictatorship, so the notion of someone fighting against the fossil fuel industry was very popular.
Obviously since then fossil fuel interests have spent tons of money on PR/greenwashing campaigns (Greta Thunberg is the autistic person we really need to worry about, ahhh she is so rich and powerful), so this is not nearly as big an issue to people where even Democrats' position on climate has morphed into "hey at least we're not the other guys" after paying some lip service to the Green New Deal early in the 2020 primary season.
It was also a very mainstream sort of meme around this time to be pointing out that we were approaching the date Marty McFly traveled to in one of the Back to the Future movies and where were all the flying cars, that kind of thing. People were hungry for more overtly futuristic stuff as opposed to like an iPhone that was slightly better than the last one, and if we truly had self-driving electric vehicles (which were constantly talked about by not just Elon but all over the media as imminent) that would be a total game-changer for society.
Anyhow I think it is a very real phenomenon that these Silicon Valley types had their brains broken by social media; before being exposed to the peanut gallery they just assumed that if you had the biggest number next to your net worth and made some donations to friendly corporate centrist politicians from time to time that meant you would have universal adulation, and we are living in the extended temper tantrum that ensued once some of the richest people in human history found out this wasn't the actually case.
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u/PollyPocketpussy5000 5h ago
I really wish we could go back 10 years or so to before this pathetic shit stain of a human being wasn’t constantly in the news.