By Sc*entology-tier I mean filing like a recognized religion for tax purposes, devotees registering as ELO~Nologists on the religious survey blank, and so on.
I think the chances are roughly a coin toss. If the writer of Battlefield Earth can start a cult/religion that's still going after a bet, maybe that's something that :my-hero: can pull off too.
L. Ron Hubbard actually had some level of commitment to the bit. He wrote books and traveled around doing seminars. Bought a big house where his followers lived. He captained a cattle boat.
He put in the time and energy to make his thing happen at a level I can't imagine Musk doing. Musk is one of the laziest capitalists on planet Earth. He barely does a thing at his factories except toss some ideas around sometimes. He can't even follow through on purchasing twitter. Musk is personally a complete worm and people like him less the more they're exposed to him.
Musk's best bet at starting a cult is doing it how he always does things, he'd have to buy an existing cult and then rename himself the founder.
Musk is one of the laziest capitalists on planet Earth.
Agreed. Yet according to a remarkably :debatebro-r: exchange I had minutes ago, he can't be called a failson (because he's too successful off of other people's backs, so that nullifies it somehow), no matter how ignorant and lazy he is and no matter how much is handed to him or spooned into his mouth. :galaxy-brain:
Definitely a success son in that his father is a racist grifter sex weirdo and Elon is the same with much more money
So what you're saying is that WE should create Elontology and sell it to him for a couple hundred mil?
Maybe not, but like everything else he gets credit for, he can have an underpaid employee write it for him.
Well longtermism is a thing he and a bunch of other bazinga brains in power believe in. It's basically:
"All our problems are less important than colonizing space and the billions of hypothetical humans later. If you're not helping that, you're hurting these hypothetical humans in the future, and that's worse than all the bad things in society that are happening now (please ignore those)".
He won't form a cult around himself by himself because he's got no follow-through, but he's definitely going to be sainted by people who believe in longtermism.
"Longtermism" can be summarized even more briefly: "Things that matter now don't matter in the bazinga future, but making the rich even richer is top priority because they promise to build the robot god."
Not his brand, he'd do more of an Andrew Tate here's how to get rich like me thing
I've seen "ironic" cult materials already, but I suppose that was bazinga brains doing it for free.
I think that frankly, Elon doesn't have the correct kind of charisma for it.
Most of his cult is self sustaining around him, he can influence it by saying his usual dumb shit but I cant imagine him organizing anything long term like Hubbard.
It's weirdly unfair if Hubb*rd was more charismatic and actually tried hard to build and expand his cult and died far less rich than :my-hero: .
Even for grifters, the system's rigged.
Unlike Hubbard, I doubt Elon could organize a mass infiltration of the U.S. government using 5,000 of his cultists
He could conceivably provoke a mass Zerg rush of 50,000 or maybe even 500,000 of his cultists to do something far less precise, though.
On a more serious level, they could do organized harassment, stalking, or maybe even stochastic terrorism. "Would no one rid me of this turbulent critic?" :billionaire-tears:
Or buy stupid garbage that might hurt or kill them. :shrug-outta-hecks:
He'll promise to start a cult by 2025, then he'll push it to 2030, then he'll just hope that everyone forgets about it.
If Musk wants to start a cult right now he could do it 100%.
Let's be honest, he'd just buy out an existing cult.
I just don't think that Elon has the competence and work ethic needed to start a cult that would be that successful.
It'd be like his Hyperloop, he'd talk about starting a
cultNew Religious Movement but it'd never materialize.He might suggest it I R O N I C A L L Y so he could dial it back if/when it failed.
I don't disagree, but it is weird how LRH seems more competent but didn't get nearly as rich. It might've been the head-start that the apartheid "TechnoKing" was awarded at birth.
Idk about odds of an Elontology, but I have been wanting to bring up here that I recently reread Cat's Cradle, and I think a leftist slant of Bokononism is exactly the spiritual necessity of the current moment. A religion of lies based on love for all humans.
