Yep, and if you’re a real techbro, you start off by making the offering great. But then, you gradually enshittify it. Popups start coming up that ask her to consent to things she doesn’t really want forever, on unconscionable terms, but at first there is a ‘Yes’ or ‘Not now’ option. Behind the scenes, there are terms saying you can change the terms any time you like, and her only option is to leave within 14 days, and it is her responsibility to monitor the terms and stop using it if she doesn’t agree. You start silently changing the terms to allow you to opt her in by default to consent to things she doesn’t want. She opts out, so you change the terms again so she has no choice. All the while the service gets worse - but what’s she going to do, she’s locked in.

And that sort of thing is why working for companies known for doing the equivalent of the above but to the public is not going to get a good reaction.

But I also think he did really believe in electric cars and solar power

Musk is very good at separating wealthy investors from their money. Said investors are not entirely stupid - but Musk has historically been very skilled at cultivating a perception that he’s going to do something revolutionary that will change the world and make his investors rich, if only investors would give him money. You know, that he can colonise mars, build fully self-driving (on motorways) cars by 2015, and build a practical LA to SF hyperloop.

To con investors he was an amazing futurist, there needed to be a grain of truth mixed in there, even if there were other significant logical gaps in his claims. I don’t believe he genuinely cared about the planet or other people, but he did see (as many people were, in fact, already screaming) that change was coming and decide he could sell it to investors and enrich himself.

Pretending to be an amazing engineer and to care was his modus operandi for a long time - perhaps the most notable incident was in the 2018 Tham Luang cave incident in Thailand; Musk pledged to put engineers on inventing a submarine to rescue them. When Tesla’s design was unlikely to work, but a heroic team of divers rescued the children, instead of expressing relief the children were safe, Musk labelled the rescuer a ‘pedo’, showing that he never really cared and it was just a stunt.

Imagine if you were someone with no moral scruples and a lust for making more money than you ever need, and you somehow become the US president. How can you make lots of money off the position without being so blatantly corrupt that you actually end up in jail?

Well, you have the power to make decisions, decisions which drastically affect things like the oil price. You could monetise this small time by making bets on prediction markets, or maybe buying futures low and selling high, but that’s a higher risk strategy after you lose the presidency and has limits to how much you can make.

To think bigger, you could leverage the retail petrol industry. Normal participants buy wholesale and sell quickly at retail prices aligned to the replacement cost of what they are selling. They don’t usually stockpile large amounts, because they have no insight into what oil prices will do, and don’t want to take the risk. But if you are the president, you can influence that price, so you have a a strategy no one else has to profit big: drive the prices down through government actions, build up a large reserve wholesale while the prices are low, and when your reserve is full, drive up oil prices (antagonising another country into disrupting oil transport will do, for example). Your competitors put up their prices, and you undercut them and sell your reserves at a price significantly higher than what you paid, but less than your competitors are paying to replace their reserves.

You keep the level of your reserves, and your next move secret (refill reserves at the current higher price and try to drive prices even higher, or drain reserves, then lower prices with a fig leaf deal to the country you antagonised, refill reserves, and then drive higher again). This way, competitors can’t copy your strategy and reduce your profits, and they lose while you get richer.

Of course, all this is net destroying value for the world and your country as a whole - you are shrinking the pie, but none of that matters because you yourself get a much larger slice, and who cares about anyone else?