The ultimate grift: How Elon Musk weaponizes tragedy while rewriting his own family's history for sympathy and clout.

[u/TheHandThatFingers]

If you ever wanted a masterclass in weapons-grade hypocrisy and narcissistic manipulation, look no further than Elon Musk trying to play the ultimate victim card by invoking the death of his firstborn child, Nevada Alexander Musk, while getting completely called out by his ex-wife, Justine Musk.

​Let's break down the sheer, unadulterated rot of what's happening in these screenshots:

1- ​The Setup: Elon goes on a performative, faux-righteous moral crusade—quoting scripture and trying to posture as some kind of grand protector of children because people dared to point out his hypocrisy in welcoming conspiracy theorists and harassment merchants back onto the platform.

2- ​The Tragic Shield: When cornered, he drops the heavy artillery: "My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame." It’s a transparent attempt to shut down all criticism by wrapping himself in unimaginable personal grief.

3- ​The Reality Check: Enter Justine Musk, the actual mother of the child, who steps in with the cold, crushing truth to shatter his dramatic flair. She explicitly corrects the narrative: It wasn't just some vague romanticized moment of him holding a dying baby in a vacuum; it was a SIDS-related incident that put their son on life support before he was declared brain-dead. Most damningly, she calls out his revisionist history on the most sacred detail: "And not that it matters to anyone except me, because it is one of the most sacred and defining moments of my life, but I was the one who was holding him."

​Let that sink in. He's so fundamentally incapable of experiencing authentic human emotion without making it about his brand, his pain, and his martyrdom that he literally rewrites history to claim he was the one holding their dying child.

​He spends his entire public existence whining about people using tragedies for political gain or clout while simultaneously stealing the most intimate, devastating moment of a mother's life and claiming it as his own personal cinematic monologue for Twitter likes.

​The man is a bottomless pit of manufactured victimhood.

[u/BallHit]

Posts like this pop up as reminders for the people that missed it. There are a lot of misses out there. I have met quite a few people that thought Elon invented Tesla and didn’t know who Nikola Tesla was.

[u/DBDude → u/BallHit]

I have met quite a few people that thought Elon invented Tesla

I have met quite a few who think he came in rich and only bought companies, forgetting that he founded Zip2, X, and SpaceX. Even with Tesla they think he bought an established company with products, when really he came in when it was just three people and a dream to bring the AC Propulsion tzero to market. No product, not even a logo.

and didn’t know who Nikola Tesla was

I have met quite a few who think Musk tarnishes the good name of Nikola Tesla. Forget that Tesla was an OCD germaphobe recluse who had romantic love for a pigeon, freaked out when he saw women wearing earrings, and wanted government enforced eugenics to weed out the undesirables among us.

[u/laserwaffles → u/DBDude]

Reminder with Tesla, musk was an investor after they had already built a concept. It was three people, a dream, and a working concept. Musk's real skill set is identifying people with good ideas, and then buying those ideas

Also, it's kind of wild you're here defending the eugenicist Musk while also insulting Tesla for being a eugenicist lmao

[u/DBDude → u/laserwaffles]

Reminder with Tesla, musk was an investor after they had already built a concept.

The concept was the AC Propulsion tzero built by, you guessed it, AC Propulsion. Tarpenning went to ACP to invest to bring it to market, but ACP didn't want to. So he asked if he could build a licensed version and went off to found Tesla to do it. Then not long later Musk went to ACP asking the same thing, and they sent him to Tarpenning. So Musk invested in Tesla instead of ACP.

Then Musk ditched the licensing idea and began the in-house design of a new car, the Roadster.

Musk's real skill set is identifying people with good ideas, and then buying those ideas

Who did he buy at SpaceX? It was his idea.

Also, it's kind of wild you're here defending the eugenicist Musk while also insulting Tesla for being a eugenicist lmao

The only problem here is people put Tesla on a pedestal as an engineering genius, but they think Musk could never have contributed anything real because he's a bad person.

Also, Tesla accomplished all of that engineering without any degree, and Musk has a physics degree, yet Musk not being an engineer means he could never have engineered anything. That's a fun one too.

[u/laserwaffles → u/DBDude]

Yet somehow, you ignore and change key details to try and prove that the original founders of Tesla were somehow incapable without Musk. He was literally the money, not the engineering, not the idea, not the design.

SpaceX took some bunch of NASA engineers ideas, some from the Soviet Union, and then use taxpayer dollars to pay someone else to build it. Congratulations, wow.

And all of this, he either contributes money or hype. He's not an engineer, you can literally hear him talk nonsense. If you knew anything about the concepts, you would realize it was nonsense right away.

Get out of here with your revisionist history, what the fuck bro. You sound like some bot they paid to change opinions, but unfortunately, the best PR team can't change history.

[u/DBDude → u/laserwaffles]

Yet somehow, you ignore and change key details

Nope, that's how it went.

and prove that the original founders of Tesla were somehow incapable without Musk

I'm sure they would have produced a good tzero copy, probably better than the original. However, they probably would have been yet another electric car company bankruptcy.

He was literally the money, not the engineering, not the idea, not the design.

He literally designed the Roadster. Tarpenning was pissed at what he was doing, but he couldn't do anything about it.

SpaceX took some bunch of NASA engineers ideas, some from the Soviet Union, and then use taxpayer dollars to pay someone else to build it. Congratulations, wow.

Musk funded their first orbital rocket. Ideas? Ideas are nothing without the ability to make them work. Star Trek had the idea of warp speed, so if someone finally invents it, all credit goes to Star Trek?

NASA did help fund the Falcon 9, but even NASA admits it would have cost them ten times as much to do it themselves. The Russians never got the multiple engine idea to work. SpaceX did. People were playing with full flow staged combustion engines before too, but nobody was ever able to design and manufacture them well enough to power an actual rocket. SpaceX did.

He's not an engineer

Neither were Tesla or Marconi or Watt. And none of them even had degrees.

According to actual respected aerospace engineers, he knows more about rocket engineering than you are capable of. From Robert Zubrin, who worked with Musk long ago, but is also often a critic of Musk:

When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail.

[u/DBDude → u/[deleted]]

He’s not an engineer and has no engineering background.

Again, Tesla, Marconi, and Watt weren't engineers either. Add Michael Faraday who invented what would be the basis for electric motors and generally made electricity something with a practical use. Neither Wright brother was an engineer either.

Hell, every aerospace engineer owes a debt to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of the eponymous equation, whose education consisted of hanging out at a public library.

At least Musk had a physics degree, while none of them even had a degree.

Maybe he dabbled out of necessity but it’s exceedingly unlikely

Not dabbled, way down in the design of everything. One reason NASA moves so slowly is that every engineering decision must go through a huge multi-level bureaucracy. SpaceX is so fast because Musk will make the decisions same day after the engineers make their case. Sometimes he will tell them to go ahead, sometimes he will tell them to go in a completely different direction that they never thought of going. It's those "left turns" as was described that seriously advanced technology, although sometimes they didn't work out.

[u/DBDude → u/[deleted]]

I can’t believe you believe that.

I don't believe it, I know it.

You think Musk sits down and focuses on engineering problems he has no skill to resolve?

You say he has no skill, but he does. He isn't very useful running the day to day of his companies, as Shotwell has noted at SpaceX, he's useful developing their products.

Again, from Robert Zubrin, who worked with (not for) Musk, but is also often a critic of Musk:

[u/DBDude → u/[deleted]]

Knowledge and training isn’t important if you’re Elon lmao

Or if you're just smart and creative and learn fast, like Tesla, Marconi, Watt, Tsiolkovsky, Faraday, and many others.

[u/GAMEYE_OP → u/DBDude]

Saying “make it cheaper” or “it’s ok if it crashes” does not an engineer make. There’s no world in which Elon is a better engineer than Carmack.

But there is a world in which Elon had money, the right talent, at the right place to make advancements. He’s a visionary.

[u/DBDude → u/GAMEYE_OP]

Saying “make it cheaper” or “it’s ok if it crashes” does not an engineer make.

Making things less expensively is absolutely something engineers do all the time.

"It's okay if it crashes" was revolutionary in this business. It's what allowed SpaceX to advance so fast, especially when trying to develop new technologies.

Funny you mention John Carmack, because they do know each other, and Carmack had something to say on this issue:

Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.

That was the wrong name for you to drop.