Honestly I shop around to an extent and look at reviews for the area. I have to fly to an airport near family and then drive another couple hundred to get to some family. I’ll admit there’s a gambit in quality of the cars, but I don’t have a preferred. And seems like because a brand in x is good doesn’t mean their station in y won’t suck. Hence just hope in reviews being a good indicator.

Your rental experience sounds worse than any I’ve ever had. I have to rent a few times a year.

Also generally I like the idea of renting and having the rental insurance on a long road trip so if something happens then my personal car isn’t totaled or put into a body shop somewhere far away. I’ve hit a deer hours away from home before on a road trip that was WAY worse. If it had been a rental I could have just walked away saying I have insurance so your problem, I need a new car. Where as it became an ordeal of the car being in the body shop 4 hrs away, still needing a rental to get home, since it was far away couldn’t check in on it and the repairs were bad, had to get a ride to get the car, ended up having to drop it off again somewhere local to fix the bad repair job, and get another rental.

I also had range anxiety for EVs on long trips and then I remembered that experience.

Agreed. That’s why I really dislike the theory it’s some 4D chess. More prof of that is if he wanted it to burn he wouldn’t have renamed it his precious X.com. He wants to still show the world what PayPal would have been if they hadn’t removed him. The same reason he wanted to review all of the code and be in charge of development at X, he still is holding onto the image he’s a rockstar dev and everyone else just doesn’t know what they’re doing.

The sad fact is he may be intelligent in some stuff, but he also lucked out. And as you said he’s increasingly got surrounded by “yes men”, and let go of the people that had tried to mitigate some of tendencies. Not realizing they helped get him to where he was. Even in the original x.com days he had someone help manage and buffer him because he had the tendency to scare off investors.