> Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me.
It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow plays a part into why Musk gets named Elon.
> It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture.
To me (and I realise this might not be a broadly accepted definition) a nerd does things for the passion and without regard for the money. Woz was a nerd, Jobs was not.
Musk has always been about monetising these things. Not to discount that he's interested in them, but for me personally he's not a true nerd. He's a businessman with nerdy interests.
A nerd that perennially wrong about their passion pits (e.g. when self driving is coming, the viability of his tunnel projects) would be mortally embarrassed about being so publicly wrong. Musk doesn't care.
His "ventures" started out with PayPal. Not exactly nerd culture.
For the nerdy ones, he bought his way in; he never actually founded Tesla.
Everything you think you know about him, at least as expressed in this post, is a result of his carefully crafted PR propaganda.
Suggesting nerds were never interested in electronic payment systems seems like a very No True Scotsman argument to me.
Buying one's way in doesn't exactly negate being interested in the underlying venture. He still had to provide significant funding.
Where did he get that funding?