I think people who hype on and on about his personal life are just grasping at straws to mask their own insecurities.
As someone who grew up not spending that cliched ooey gooey version of "family time" that we always see on television and someone who has been married once, I'm fairly sure it's a lot more complicated than "oh always working, and doesn't care about his family? --insert underhanded "I'm better than you statement here"--. My parents worked hard to take care of me and my sisters. Did I see them all the time? nope. Was I bothered? nope. At the end of the day whenever I needed them they would drop everything and show up. We never had dinner at the table, as a matter of fact I pretty much up and moved out when i was 17. But we're a very close family. As for my marriage, despite how hard we tried to maintain it, one can't control feelings, and eventually we realized that even though we were comfortable with each other, we couldn't get those feelings back.
Now, I don't know Elon Musk, and quite frankly I think there's a bit too much hero worship surrounding him - don't get me wrong, he does some crazy stuff, but he's not as much a sage entrepreneur as we make him out to be. Having said that, the reality is that life is a lot more complicated than what it looks like on Little House on the Prairie. A "close family" doesn't have to sit around the table and chat, a close family doesn't even have to have members who live in the same country - I'm a case in point. So people talking about how he's some bad father as if they live with him or know him personally should go focus on their own personal lives. And to John Battelle's, quite frankly rude statement at SXSW, well he works at a media company that hosts conferences, not running and re-imagining two pillars of heavy industry.
This sentiment, exactly - although I will say our family lives are probably pretty rare. My father was/is a successful lawyer and my mom had her own thing going for quite some time as a painter so I rarely ever "saw them". Whenever it was important though they were there, present, non-judgemental, and loving.
He does have too much hero worship going on - the example in the article of Bill Gates proves this. Bill is maintaining a healthy family life (as far as one can tell that doesn't know him or his family) and he's doing "sci-fi s$#t" (thorium reactors? curing malaria? MICROSOFT!?!).
Judging billionaires is silly - if the OP thinks there needs to be more Elon Musks in the world then he should be working on it. I personally don't think we need more of any person in the world; they are all fitting in precisely where they should be.
Yeah, it is fairly rare. I think it's because , to some degree,people try really hard to make families conform to a certain idea of family life, so you get a lot of noise like "can you have it all?" - what exactly does that even mean? - or many a fodder for Dr Phil specials. Really the best thing my parents did was treat us like people who had their own lives, not some dogs that were supposed to be domesticated and bred.
Indeed. As far as we can tell, Gates is quite the family man. The reality maybe opposite, or it may be in line with what we see. Either way these are people with lives that don't or shouldn't fall into any static schema that we formulate in our heads. I think everyone has a little TMZ in them. While we like to look at the Hollywood and People magazine set and decry them for being trashy, we do the exact same thing; we just have our own celebrities that we pester.
The fact that someone can in all seriousness talk about the "hype" of personal life as "grasping at straws to mask their own insecurities" is a very sad indication of some aspects of modern life.
What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?
I would trade any amount of billions for that, in fact I probably have, because I decided long ago that family and my personal happiness are more important than millions in the bank.
"What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?"
Perhaps to you nothing is more important, fortunately people can do what they want - some choose family, some choose other responsibilities, most choose a balance. Whether Musk is happy or not he seems to have made his choice.
I don't know if you even read the post fully, but the post was about the hype of Elon Musk's personal life, not the hype of personal life. And yes for the most part, it is. The reality is he's a busy man, with a busy life, anyone who thinks that his family life is somehow supposed to be like that of a traditional "as seen in social studies" textbook either has their head up their you know what or is trying to mask a certain insecurity with a veneer of self-righteousness.
>What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?
That may be all well and good for you, but first, you have a terribly ethnocentric and rather simplistic view of life as seen only from your perspective. Some people want to get enough and retire and frolic. Other people want to discover. Your ideal life may be sitting on the porch waiting for little Timmy to get back from school so you can build a go-kart; that's great, but that's not everyone's ideal life - and it doesn't in any way mean that little Timmy is any less important to anyone else. So if your thesis is that your vision of life is somehow better simply because it's the most traditional, you're going to need a more robust argument for that.
>I would trade any amount of billions for that, in fact I probably have, because I decided long ago that family and my personal happiness are more important than millions in the bank.
Also, you make the assumption that the man is somehow concerned about money. Whether you do that on purpose to further your point, or whether you didn't take full stock of the situation, I don't know. But the man is rich. And if he wasn't rich before, he's certainly "fuck you" rich now. He could be earning multiples on his money without even lifting a finger. It's not about money, it's about interest, and apparently, for him, about vision. My comment was about people self-righteously trying to compare the amount of time and the way they spend time with their families to someone who - regardless of how you feel about him, and I don't feel as hot as everyone else about him - is taking on two immensely difficult tasks. So when John Battelle, and everyone else self-righteously comment about not using email when spending time with their kids as if they were some martyrs of child-rearing, I'd have to say there's some insecurity involved.
So it's great that you wouldn't trade money over your children. That's great and I'm sure no well-adjusted person would. However, there are things in life that do not fit in to the inane work-life paradigm, and people expecting it to, either have very limited scopes of what life is and how one should live it, or they have their eyes glossed over by nicely packaged institutions of socialization. The truth is, a lot of people have very complex family lives. It's nice when you look at social studies textbooks and see two parents, one son, and one daughter, but life's never been like that and a happy family can't simplistically be reduced to "one that doesn't check email and text while spending time with each other - which, by the way, must be x amount of hours if you really want to be considered a close, happy family"
As someone who grew up not spending that cliched ooey gooey version of "family time" that we always see on television and someone who has been married once, I'm fairly sure it's a lot more complicated than "oh always working, and doesn't care about his family? --insert underhanded "I'm better than you statement here"--. My parents worked hard to take care of me and my sisters. Did I see them all the time? nope. Was I bothered? nope. At the end of the day whenever I needed them they would drop everything and show up. We never had dinner at the table, as a matter of fact I pretty much up and moved out when i was 17. But we're a very close family. As for my marriage, despite how hard we tried to maintain it, one can't control feelings, and eventually we realized that even though we were comfortable with each other, we couldn't get those feelings back.
Now, I don't know Elon Musk, and quite frankly I think there's a bit too much hero worship surrounding him - don't get me wrong, he does some crazy stuff, but he's not as much a sage entrepreneur as we make him out to be. Having said that, the reality is that life is a lot more complicated than what it looks like on Little House on the Prairie. A "close family" doesn't have to sit around the table and chat, a close family doesn't even have to have members who live in the same country - I'm a case in point. So people talking about how he's some bad father as if they live with him or know him personally should go focus on their own personal lives. And to John Battelle's, quite frankly rude statement at SXSW, well he works at a media company that hosts conferences, not running and re-imagining two pillars of heavy industry.