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> we would not be seeing such reactions even 5 years ago

5 years of broken promises and actively fighting to make the world worse will do a lot to opinions.

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The main polarization with Tesla is between fantasy and reality.
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Is this polarization or is this just people finally figuring out the grift after 10 years of "we'll be on Mars in 2 years"?
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Name a single person on Earth who has got us closer to Mars than Musk.
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Well, NASA has conducted surface operations on mars 5 times without any involvement from Musk, the CNSA has gone once....

What has Musk actually done to get us closer other than talk about how humanity ought to do it?

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Musk built the first rocket capable of transporting a base, and humans, to Mars. NASA has nothing close to Starship, and if they ever did, it would come at a trillion-dollar cost to the American taxpayer.
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NASA is currently the only organization to ever take humans beyond LEO.

Starship has only even achieved LEO once, in an unmanned mission a few weeks ago. Starship has so far cost about $15 Billion, the entire Saturn V launch program (excluding Apollo, to keep things apples-apples here) cost about $35 Billion in today's dollars.

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Why blame this on “polarization” and not on the guy who did the polarizing? Nobody forced Elon to do all that stupid shit that got so many people hating on him. He did it if his own free will. He ruined it.
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If you don’t like his politics and lean into that difference in opinions to criticise something orthogonal, like his technical innovation, then it’s YOU that is being divisive and partisan.
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Why is it my responsibility to carefully compartmentalize every aspect of someone no matter how loud and outrageous they are, and not their responsibility to stop being a colossal asshole in public? He gets to publicly disown his children and support proto-fascist political parties and call people pedophiles for displeasing him, but we are the ones who have to carefully manage our feelings so we don’t accidentally let them spill over? Nuts to that.
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You think he's being terrible in public. I don't, and I'm not alone. The way certain people judge his actions is quite obviously partisan and a subject of great emotional overreaction. Those exaggerated, sensationalised negative traits you described (which were fed to you by a leftwing media with vested interests) actually have zero effect on your life - so you are simply choosing to be offended by them.

If, instead, you had a grounded, balanced opinion about the man, you'd understand the great good he's delivered, and continues to deliver for the world, from Tesla (making electric cars desirable and mass-market) to Neuralink (making viable brain computer interfaces to give heavily disabled people back their lives), to SpaceX (giving humanity hope for a brighter, more exciting future in space, as governments once did, but have since failed to do).

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Right, it’s all the “leftwing media’s” fault. I got those things straight from him, dude. Here’s him calling a rescuer a pedophile, for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20180715143426/https://twitter.c...

(I assume your instinct will be to defend him because said rescuer was mean first. Don’t bother, as you can see I am well aware and it doesn’t change my opinion.)

I can totally understand if you think the good outweighs the bad. I tend that way myself: I own two Teslas and I eagerly watch every Starship launch. But I also think Musk has shown himself to be a real piece of shit. A real piece of shit who has done some great stuff, but that doesn’t negate it.

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