Summary

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Elon Musk “one of the most unintelligent billionaires” she has ever met.

She criticized DOGE for placing unqualified 19-year-olds in Treasury positions and failing to do “their homework.”

Musk’s team has accessed the Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system, raising security concerns. Ocasio-Cortez warned of his “lack of intelligence and expertise,” calling him “morally vacant.”

DOGE has also shut down USAID and moved it under the State Department.

  • jj4211@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    Actually he got his start selling some random website to Compaq in the middle of the “everyone throw their money at random websites” craze of the late 90s. So he was among the folks that won the dot-com lottery.

    Then he took his winnings and rolled it into x.com, which was solidly on a trajectory to fail. He also wasn’t allowed to be in charge.

    Then after the merger with the much more popular PayPal (which could have done just fine without X.com ever coming along), Elon somehow got put in charge. He wanted to run the whole thing on Windows and it was a terrible terrible decision, with Paypal only being saved by kicking Elon out. Despite his role being just briefly in charge of it taking a wildly successful product and nearly destroying it only to be kicked out, people popularly credited him as ‘the Paypal guy’.

    So a guy got lucky and got $22 million from Compaq, and then $170 million from eBay because he still had a ton of PayPal stock despite no longer allowed to make decisions about it, and was carried by his “he was in charge of PayPal!” creds into Tesla, rewriting history of that company to declare himself a visionary founder rather than an early investor after the fact.

    All the while the media sucking up to him hard, putting him in various cameos and references to portray him as a great mind of modern times, a real life Tony Stark. Feeding his ego while people close to him personally wrote about what a loser douchebag he was.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      I’ve read most of this stuff; someone needs to do a 1.5-2 hour documentary on this guy and just what a total FRAUD he is, and how nearly everything most people think they “know” about fElon is just flat wrong.

      Know of anything like that? Even a reputable thing on Youtube would be nice if someone summarized it all.

      I’d like to point people at such resource(s) when I can. Even some lefties I know don’t really quite understand just how fraudulent fElon is; they still think “he’s a smart guy with good ideas and really pushed things forward for cars, etc.”

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        53 minutes ago

        I’m not big on the video thing, but the Wikipedia article at least mentions most of this. Though you have to be aware of the broader dot-com context to know that getting millions from Compaq for a website in the late 90s didn’t mean anything much beyond luck.