this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Yep, Gates era billionaires had the good sense to maintain a vaneer of selfless philanthropic personality where each interaction with public was carefully crafted by PR experts. So the general public didn't know who they really were as actual people.
But Musk landed on the scene and showed the world that billionaires are as stupid as—if not more because they are out of touch with the reality—as the regular person.
Wait what? How is Gates seen positively? Microsoft was the worst tech company under him and did so much awful stuff …
Most people know 2 things about Bill Gates - he's rich, and he donates a lot of money. They don't think about it any more than that, and they certainly aren't going to research anything about it, so they consider him "one of the good ones"
Why do you think I used words like "veneer" and "carefully crafted PR"?
Gates after his PR rehab, that is. Society seems to be forgetting just how universally hated that guy was.
After the antitrust deposition where he came across as petty, arrogant, contemptuous — and clearly guilty — he disappeared for a while and returned with perhaps the greatest PR transformation of all time.
To be fair that’s just the nature of a deposition. Because it’s the other side grilling the defendant for hours trying to bait that person to make a slip up. You saw the same thing in the deposition tapes of Lil Wayne for example where they constantly asked him stupid questions until he got annoyed.
To be faaaaair!
A-to be faaaaair 🧐
The hilarious part is, he absolutely had the same PR team that the Gates and Jobs and Buffetts had.
And at some point in the Trump presidency, he just straight up threw them to the curb. Fired the lot of them, or at least stopped listening to a word of advice they gave. And he just started going on rants, tangents, and showing who he really was for all the world to see.
Nobody will ever know for sure, but best guess is his addiction to Twitter drove his need to be acknowledged and accepted by the general populace. He was a rockstar, and he got off on that feeling.