It's amazing how Elon Musk managed to turn his life around in the years since this was recorded, and is now a paragon of virtue in our community. Yep, he's not at all a far, far bigger catastrofuck of a human being today.

Man this episode is such a time capsule. What a wild time when we didn't know Elon's opinion of every single political issue, and couldn't escape knowing that.

Here's my thing about Musk's life growing up- he may say he hates his dad, or the way things were in S. Africa, but a a grown man he certainly doesn't act like someone who hates those things. Documented facts about how he treats his spouses and children. Documented facts about how he treats his workers. Documented fats about the kinds of rules he wants for society, whether he's building his own or trying to change this one. All those show him to be just like his dad and just like someone really fond for the white ruling class days of S. Africa. Sure some thing about his life sucked and some people treated him like shit. But instead of growing past it, he's taken 'hurt people hurt people' to industrial levels.

so insane listening to this one in the future knowing he’s gone full alt right at this point. I keep waiting for them to mention his daughter who disowned him, or his attempt at running twitter, or literally anything else he’s done over the past three years. I always knew he wasn’t legitimately working for the good of people but if you’d asked me at the point this originally aired if he’d end up being one of today’s most powerful fascists, I don’t think I’d have been able to predict the extent to which he spiraled

my god....revisit this episode now....hilarious that you back then compared the elon breakdown to the kanye breakdown, and they should keep it off twitter. I guess the writing was on the wall

Common Sense Skeptic did a thing about the stairs incident - what Elon left out what that he didn't just "bump into the guy" in the cafeteria. Apparently the guy's father had recently died (edit: apparently it was a suicide! /edit) and Elon made a joke about it. And *that's* why they went after him. That doesn't excuse what happened to him... but it wasn't just some random bullying as he makes it out to be.

On behalf of the International Order of Errols, Errol Musk is the Canonically worst Errol. And that's saying a lot when Errol Flynn is in the mix.

Knowing what we now know about him, a LOT of those stories about the computer rocket-building geek sound like complete bs

The story I heard on why Elon got pushed down the stairs was that he was mocking one of the kids because his father had just died by suicide. It was an interview with Errol talking about it. *edited for accuracy

I am of a similar age to Elon. People of our age didn't get assessed for autism unless we were beating our heads on the ground and playing with trains and dinosaurs. I had my tonsils and adenoids removed partially because they thought I was hard of hearing. I would just go off and zone out randomly. The sad thing is I was hard of hearing and autistic, but because of my hearing issues the autism was missed. I was bullied. I had weird levels of genius about some things, and was stupid about others. I could read at a college level, yet I couldn't learn to tell time. As an autistic person I can tell you that Elon is definitely on the spectrum. He is probably more on the spectrum than I am because I learned how to socialize almost to a "normal" level. Now don't get me wrong, I am not proud of Elon being an autistic person. Most of us are awesome, but when we are bad we are really really shitty people. I have an older brother who is Asperger Syndrome, mentally gifted, very very weird. He is also a true psychopath. You can be a psychopath and have autism. I think Elon is a psychopath. He devalues other people's lives.

I think when he was asked to describe his version of socialism once, he described a world where resources are allocated, but, for the benefit of everyone, the greatest slices of pie should go to those already wealthy/successful so they can still be in charge of leading everyone else with their successfulness and wealth and... capital. So......... a type of capitalism in which they're absolved of all guilt for owning too much because someone OFFICIALLY picked them to be the best, smartest boys.

Rich trust fund kid 'sink or swim' is like they do a gymnastic routine on the floor while everyone else has the do the same on the balance beam.

New to the podcast and instantly clicked "Subscribe" on "I want to make sure everyone is giving him shit for the proper reasons". Eff-ing loved it.

I've only just recently been recommended to your channel, but I have to say that I am really loving the depth of the content and the even-handedness of dealing with these truly terrible people.

I dont think you can equate Elon hating South Africa with hating apartheid. He has no trouble behaving, speaking, and tweeting in a way that shows he thinks he owns people. And his contempt for those he considers beneath him is breathtaking.

It's so interesting to listen to this in context of everything that happened between 2020 when this was recorded, and now.

I refuse to call him anything but his full name: Elongated Muskrat. XD

Honestly I actually really enjoyed the fact that Sofiya wouldn't let things lie and would poke holes in the kind of narratives that get pushed for these dorks. I admire that, I can't say I'm a strong enough person to do that amongst people I consider my friends (but I do have my limits).

Yeah a group of Italians in Africa in the late 70s or early 80s in desperate need of a plane were willing to pay around 8 times what it would cost new and owned part of an emerald mine just across the border from Rhodesia they wanted to get rid of. I am sure everything was legit.

2012 - Disney buys Lucanfilm for $4 billion (and immediately proceed to destroy it), 2022 - Creepy Musk buys TWITter for $44 billion - 44 BILLION - 11 times more than the Disney Purchase, thus making him, eh, 11 times SMARTER, yeah? Oh wait - he also immediately proceeded to destroy it. KNOB!

First Your team could to 1000 episodes on this guy and I would listen to all of them.

Important note about how he benefited from grandpappys citizenship is that Canada doesnt let autistic people immigrate here, and it is extremely likely that he was only able to come because of the familial connection. (Speaking as an autistic Canadian, this is a deeply screwed up situation, particularly given that the claimed purpose is to limit the burden on our support systems, and yet it is exceedingly difficult even for someone born here to get access to those supports)

I live in the bay and it’s CRAZY how much good will Elon has squandered.

That part about Kingston has me laughing. To this day, Queens/Kingstown is considered the party school and party city for our Universities/colleges. That tracks and has lasted over thirty yrs

Wow I really want them to revisit this episode. When I first started listening to it I thought it was only 5 months old (the KZfaq post date) but the half hearted semi defense of maybe he didn’t deserve an episode at the beginning and other sympathetic comments throughout made this very hard to listen to (it’s obvious he was having major trouble dropping his fanboy opinions of Elon at that time still in 2020 and I would hope that has changed) made me realize this had to be an archive episode so I checked the description. Still the Kanye comparison was apt and the writing was on the wall in 2020 and I just want to hear updated opinions now that he’s gone full mask off Nazi, all his degrees are fake, he’s been sicking people on the trans community, most of the abusive childhood and bullying was fake (Elon was the bully in most cases and that beating they mentioned came after Elon was bullying them and they fought back - we now know he just wanted this backstory of a bullied misunderstood genius), and he has been courting MAGA Republicans and helping Russia in their war against Ukraine. And that’s a very incomplete list.

I believe Elon was traumatized at very early childhood, which led to him dissociating and being misdiagnosed with some other disorder around hearing and attention. It took me a lot of therapy to reach a point where I didn't dissociate. What happens is time freezes, your whole body clenches, and you become catatonic. Sometimes it happens while you are doing something, so your body kind of just keeps doing whatever repetitive pattern you were doing that doesn't require cognition, while your consciousness is sifting through memories to consolidate them. With very early childhood trauma, we don't retain much of the raw sensory input as memory, we just absorb it as a strong emotional response. Therefore, we grow up never knowing we were traumatized at very early childhood. We just grow up with these intense feelings and confusion around it all. Given how bad Elon's father was, there is no doubt that something traumatic happened either to him or around him at an age when he didn't properly consolidate the memory.

Might need to do an update on the ol Muskareeno there, with all the ways he's gone even more off the deep end since 2020 lmao

But is he really a career obsessed workaholic? It looks to me like he f*s around on twitter all day. I counted them once and he sent over 90 tweets in one day, I don't have time to do that with one job.

This aged well 🤣

I can somewhat relate to the guest whomst I have forgotten the name of. When I was a small ween, I had to have grommets shoved in my ear canals due to fluid build up making me deaf for quite a bit relatively and unable to speak for a bit. I now just have to clean my ear canals quite often, because them mfs fill up with wax and are huge. Like getting noise-cancelling to work with ear buds is a pain, and I can hear and feel pressure changes when going up and down elevations when in a car or train. Hearing is kinda cool tho, so I wouldn't object if I was given a time machine and the ability to change the outcome of my life.

Listening to this in 2023 is a trip.

If only he had the money to get some therapy for his issues... 😶

At last! Thanks Robert.

Damn this really needs an update

Thank You:) Informative Color Commentary that actually is vividly colored for a change.❤🧡💛💚💙💜 You guys Fucking Kick Arse!!

Ashlee Vance is a guy, not a girl.

damn watching this from the future makes me really appreciate sofyia's anti-musk energy

Spacing out occasionally is associated with a number of neurological disorders, but seems to be common in certain heritable epilepsies.

yea so this is gonna need a part 3

1:06:49 This was pre -Raytheon as a sponsor? Because that would have been a great 'Knife missile" plug

Update when?

"do you think I'm insane" The blandest breed, yes

I enjoyed the video! Thanks so much! All hail the Algorithm.

Listening to this almost a year after it aired, I just don’t buy the story of Elon Musk as an innocent, misunderstood, highly intelligent kid who was bullied relentlessly by his classmates. There’s two kinds of bullying behavior - reactive bullying, in which bullying occurs in response to some sort of provocation, and direct bullying, or unprovoked bullying that’s initiated for seemingly no observed reason. Even as an adult, Musk takes a certain delight in bullying and harassing individuals on twitter, usually for no reason other than they don’t conform to his way of thinking. See, for example, how he harassed former employee, Yoel Roth, by posting a part of his dissertation and using it to make horrible and misleading accusations against Roth - who had to leave his home as a result of the harassment that Musk knowingly incited against him. The fact that Musk, who claims to work harder than anyone else at his companies, actually took the time to find and read through Ross’s dissertation just to retaliate against some perceived slight is troubling. Or look up the defamation lawsuit filed against Musk by Ben Brody, an innocent college student whose life was turned upside down thanks to Musk amplifying phony conspiracy theories about him. Or when Musk gleefully joined Joe Rogan to bully a Covid vaccine scientist, who was also harassed at his own home as a result of the online bullying that Musk himself took part in. These are just a few of the many examples of Musk’s vindictive behavior as an adult. So imagine what he must’ve been like as a kid. It’s possible Musk was more a target of reactive bullying due to the direct bullying he himself engaged in. For example, according to his father (whose claims we should take with a grain of salt), the reason why Musk was once pushed down the stairs at school was because he had mocked a classmate whose father had just taken his own life. We should not condone physical violence against a kid no matter the circumstance, and who knows how much of this story is true. Yet even as an adult, Musk has a hard time acknowledging his own role in the problematic public perception he’s created for himself. So when he refers to his so-called “hard childhood” as an excuse for his intense adult behavior, Musk is probably conveniently leaving out important details in order to cast himself as just this harmless yet quirky, misunderstood genius.

Gonna need a part 3 now lol

He's alive. That's the right reason. He's alive.

"These goods and services respect consent." I'm dying.

SpaceX would still be making good progress without him being involved. It might have been doing better had he just thrown a lot of money at it, and then done NOTHING. So the best I can say about his involvement with it, is that he didn't drive it too far into the ground for it to survive.

pre twitter buying elon deep dive ,,, its wild to hear anyone with a non decisive opinion abt muskrat

Don't worrh, he turned out fine

It's wild listening to this in the future after the twitter debacle

OMG, someone else who called Jeff Bezos Bee-zos. I thought it was just me

Oh of course he's tied to The Scoop. We aren't really a better country, we just have better PR Edit: my parents used to hide my books so I'd play with toys, according to them.

He's like the kid who wasn’t invited to the party but came anyway and shat in the pool just to get a reaction.

Errol Musk is maybe the only person on Earth whose version of events should NOT be given more credence than Elon's.

The sympathy here seems a little weird to me, because probably every other single bastard this podcast has ever talked about had shitty childhoods, some much worse than Musk and they don't get this level of empathy, it kinda sour the episode for me.

Can’t wait to hear about “Jamie Loftus/hammers”!!!!

IMO problem with Musk is he might not be the worst person in his childhood and at the same time he qualifies as the Bastard in flying colors at the same time which compounds with reality distortion effect

Child abuse sucks because it forces you to be slightly sympathetic towards assholes. That's probably the worst thing about it, tbh.

1:04:19 *Big belly laugh* 🤣😂😫

Ah, someone who would be gone if only the SEC did their job.

The "internship" was paid for by his dad.

All this was before Elon bought Twitter too. 😂

....then there was TFG, who threatened his kindergarten teacher with hid dad's clout and threw rocks at the neighbor toddler in his crib.

I'm late to this, enjoying the podcast ... but I would like to point out one small thing ... Ashlee Vance ... is a man ... 🤣

IT takes whomping privilege to PRESUME so far as to cold call influential strangers to ask for their personal time and attention, to say nothing of funds to buy lunch from wherever such people deem acceptably luxurious.

So Elon is basically Draco Malfoy. Very hateable, and then you see how his dad and his dad's friends treat 'em.

We don’t need Elon musk for any of the things Musky boy had taken credit for

Yeah but what about what Elon contributed to Cadillacs and dinosaurs? But honestly I heard his coding is shit and stuff he wrote just didn't work.

Elon seems to have learned all the wrong lessons(or just didn't learn any) about being an abused neurodivergent.

The waffling in this is legendary

God bless bad fathers. World wouldn't be the same without them.

sympathetic or simpathetic

Waaaay too much benefit of the doubt is given Elon here. Wow

I didn't know Sophie lived in Odessa. I almost died there at age 4. Odessa sucks almost as bad as Musk.

Whats wrong with nate silver? Why does robert not like him?

Elon Musk is a scammer and I’d want to snipe the short position, the only thing to look out is when the public perspective is changing.

I thought this was behind the bastards not an elon musk puff piece. Sheesh.

Yikes you are in support of elons ego SpaceX.

Unlike some of these I feel this is terribly out of date. And now either Robert hates Elon with serious passion or hes way more of a lib than I thought he was.

Oh boy their covid talk did not age well 😂

STOP SAYING "LIKE"

Your channel is similar to the young turks. Why don't you ever crit Biden, Schumer, Pelosi or the Clinton crime families? Just crit influential ppl near the right instead. Missed opportunities giving dems no attention. Bummer.

Bro why in the world do you pay that weird big head of yours there the whole time it's unnerving. Take it down!

Great segment on a well known bastard. Sofiya Alexandra is intolerable, however. Please I hope you do not have her return.

Elon Musk is a genius! I love him! He is advancing technology!! 🧬🔬⚗️🔭👨‍🔬🚀

58:10 insightful and valid point- difficult for most to apply in cases like these, yet appropriate. Despite her clearly stated disdain, she went here. She's potentially the most intellectually honest person I've heard in a while... Fresh air of sorts🫡 Honestly the most objective, deeper defense/insight into Elon than Robert or prob most similar analysis attempting the same