Dear Mr. Musk,

As a young boy, I neglected the advice to “never meet your heroes.” Honestly, my 8-year-old mind couldn’t comprehend its downside. Admittedly, I would have been honored to meet you and bask in your intelligence.

I placed you on a pedestal, seeing you as a smart man who truly knew what he was doing. As I grew older, this belief began to wane all the way until I heard about the straw that broke the camel’s back: you had acquired (the company formerly known as) Twitter for $44 billion – a company that is now, under your leadership, only worth $9.4 billion. In all reality, it wasn’t just this one action that made me lose belief in you – it was a series of really, REALLY stupid ones.

But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when I would hear your name and be excited, encapsulated by your perceived genius, gifted mind and cunning personality.

I first got to know you in the echo chamber that is Reddit (but if things keep on going at the rate they are, you might buy them too and rename them to “Z”), where it was pretty easy to fall in love with you considering the God-like attitude its users have taken towards you.

Many people compare you to Tony Stark. They see you two as misunderstood geniuses who were so fed up with the world that they decided to make it their own through their smarts, and although you both come from riches, only Stark could make the Iron Man suit in that cave, while you would have bought out the company that built it, kicked out the original creators, claimed it as your own and then mass produced it to make the most profit possible – doing all while ignoring its safety.

They painted you as a nerdy role model; one that I could relate to and one that I was willing to follow.

However, I now realize that you are as authentic as the CYBERTRUCK is round.

But back then? I was excited, and it wasn’t just because of the waves of memes that followed you. I was excited because you were promising.

You were promising a future where we would be free of the gas-guzzlers of yesteryear and one full of EVs equipped with so many extra features you’d think Q designed it for 007. You were promising a future where, by 2024, we would be sending people from our futile blue planet to colonize the glorious red terrain that lay in outer space. You were promising a future where nerds, just like me and (seemingly) you, would ‘take over the world.’

And yet none of that has happened.

As the years went by, the only promise you’ve kept true was the financial growth of Tesla, with its stock price seeing a 1500% hike since 2019. But seeing that this has only been accompanied by a growth in deaths due to its now revered Autopilot feature, which accounts for nearly 10% of all recorded Tesla crashes with 2 occuring while in Full Self-Driving, I’m unsure whether I would truly trust you to take me to Mars.

That’s where my biggest issue lies, Mr. Musk. Not only did you lie about your promises, you lied about your achievements. You lied about your true intentions. You lied about everything.

When I first heard of you, I believed everything the media said about you. I believed that you truly were just some guy that – through intellect and hard work – had made his way to the top, and that was what you wanted.

When you dropped out of Stanford to start Zip2, you didn’t want people to see you as someone who built his start off of daddy’s money – you wanted them to see you as a ‘rags-to-riches’ story of working hard and living out the American dream.

When you show the love and admiration you have for former President Donald Trump, you don’t want people to see you as a lonely man seeking affection from the Republican party after having had three divorces and disowning your transgender daughter. You want them to see you as respectable. I mean, really? Who wouldn’t support the same guy who has been seen chilling with Epstein’s bestie Ghislaine Maxwell and even received a generous donation from Sean “P. Diddy” Combs to help take over Twitter.

Even if you’ll never say it out loud, you were born into success, and the only smarts you truly had were in knowing how to scale it. You were just lucky.

Mr. Musk, if there’s one thing I want you to know after reading this it is that you and I are not the same. I can admit that I’m a nerd and be proud of it because I know that that label shows a mark of intelligence, strong character and passion. I’m conflicted to call you a nerd even in jest, because your intelligence was only backed by money and you have shown your true self to be a man whose only passion is driven by your profits – not by the promises you continue to break.

The only thing you have ever truly cared about is your ego.

Best regards,
Davis Adams