It seems like Musk has been pretty quiet since Tesla's last earnings call. Maybe the protests/boycotts actually succeeded in getting him to STFU?
I won't verify personally, as I refuse to go on Xitter. But his name has been coming up a lot less in rage-posts recently.
It certainly hit the EU sales hard. And maybe, just maybe he realized that a 400 million people government is a bit too complicated to just randomly cut in half because you dont like the name. A leap of faith, I admit, but physically not impossible.
I would never assume he's realized anything or learned a lesson. It's not in his nature. He learns what impacts money and power, no more and no less.
The Tesla board was about to revolt on him, which is a big deal since its mostly friends and family. He absolutely did not learn anything from the last six months. He's incapable of it. In that call where he said he was going back to Tesla at the end of the month, he said he's still keeping a foot in DOGE, all of his decisions were correct, and that everything was the fault of radical leftists. All of that bad press and baggage is going to follow him, especially since he refuses to renounce his DOGE decisions and keeps using Trump as leverage for new Starlink contracts.
It's not that he's incapable of caring about consequences, it's that he generally has the power to decide for himself which consequences are worth caring about and which aren't. Which means that he can rapidly move any goalposts he wants to.
It's a huge mechanism of his success that he's able to outright reject any system of evaluation that dictates that he's wrong, because defying such dictates is exactly how he got where he is today.
Failure isn't an issue for him because it's part of his "larger process," but he's so sensitive and reactive that he will just redefine his "larger process" according to whatever metrics work for him in terms of defining success.
Ultimately, he does actually have to succeed according to *some* external metrics in order to maintain the wealth that allows him to have so much control over his own goalposts, but unless/until that wealth comes collapsing down, he has A LOT of rope to hang himself with in the meantime.
This is why money and power are so corrupting. The rest of us exist in a world with substantial, tangible impacts. We don't have nearly as much freedom to determine our own metrics of success. But when you can, and when defying rules is how you are able to do it in the first place, it becomes almost impossible to morally calibrate your behaviour according to natural consequences.
You begin to define your success by the judgemental of those you trust, and those you trust increasingly become those who validate your behaviours, and those who benefit from them being immoral.
