Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

OK, if he wants to offer that deal I'm totally taking it and splitting it with y'all.  Unfortunately, we don't have  ~300MM daily active users.

[Tonitrus]

OK, if he wants to offer that deal I'm totally taking it and splitting it with y'all.  Unfortunately, we don't have  ~300MM daily active users.

Languish is dying. 

[Admiral Yi]

OK, if he wants to offer that deal I'm totally taking it and splitting it with y'all.  Unfortunately, we don't have  ~300MM daily active users.

We could let the bots post again. 

[Zoupa]

Berkut, after reading this thread and with Musk's recent behaviour, do you still wish we had 50 of him?

Well, maybe not 50 of him.

But I do wish we had more people who somehow manage to make profound, meaningful improvements in things like the cost of getting stuff into orbit. And if those people turn out to be contemptible assholes, I can live with that. It's not that I wish we had a bunch more assholes, it is that I wish we had a lot more innovative people who can drive change, and am willing to live with them being assholes if they are, rather then just passing on the innovation.

What I find interesting about your take is two things.

1. It seems like you liked Musk because of what you thought of the things he accomplished. OK. But then he started going all asshole like (he was actually always an asshole, BTW, it's just that nobody noticed), and now you don't just not like him, but you've decided his accomplishments are no longer accomplishments either. But there can be only two reasons for that conclusion:

A) You evaluated what he has done, and determined that he didn't actually do it. It was others, and he just took the credit. OK - if that is the case, then you should come to that conclusion regardless of whether or not he was an asshole. That is true regardless, right? Or

B) You are dismissing his accomplishments BECAUSE you've realized what an asshole he is - but that doesn't make sense either, unless you believe that assholes cannot accomplish things (which I guess is the OVB view? Not sure exactly). That goes back to my original point, that people are evaluating his accomplishments based on their emotional distaste for him as a person.

2. You said you think that Tesla would have happened without him, and that SpaceX would have happened without him. Again...ok. Not a ridiculous argument at all. But.....if he is not responsible for the success of Tesla and SpaceX, then is he responsible for the meltdown of Twitter? Again, it seems like there is some special pleading happening here. You can make an argument that people like Musk are just the face of things that are happening anyway, and hence do not deserve and particular credit for them. And if that is true, then we sure as hell don't need another 49 prominent douchebags.

But if that is the case, then it seems to me that we must apply that principle consistently. If Musk gets no credit for Tesla, does Martin Luther King Jr. get credit for his leadership of the civil rights movement? Should we stop talking about the genous of Leonardi da Vinci or Galileo or the Wright Brothers? Does Mussolini get to be spit upon for leading Italy into fascism, or was that all just inevitable, and the people involved don't really matter? De Gaulle not worthy of respect, because everything he did was going to happen regardless?

And if that is true....then why get worked up over them? Again, they are just assholes in a world with lots of assholes, or good people in a world of other good people.

I am honestly not trying to "gotcha" you - I really am curious about whether you've thought this through. I suspect, and I apologize if this comes across as being dismissive, that you have not, and your views on Musk as a person (he is a piece of shit) are largely informing your views on Musk's accomplishments, and in fact you do recognize that individuals, for better or worse, do in fact accomplish things worthy of praise or anger.

Musk's accomplishments are: being really good at making money, then investing in stuff most nerds like us find cool like rockets and electric cars. That's it.

I don't think he's the most giant asshole on Earth or something. He's just an immature edgelord.

He's not an inventor, he didn't work out the kinks of the battery on the model 3 or anything like that. Spacex would have happened without him, by that I mean look at Branson or Bezos. Tesla would have happened without him, that;s where the culture and climate change is taking us anyway.

I don't think me thinking he's an asshole made me dismiss his accomplishments. I didn't really pay that much attention to him beforehand, like before maybe 2 years ago. He made lots of headlines, prompting investigative journalists to take a deeper look. I read investigative journalism, and came to the realization this dude portrays himself as something he's not, and his companies are not gonna save humanity or anything.

That's pretty much the extent of my 2 cents on Musk. I believe in great men shaping history and propelling humanity forward, but this guy is not it. I guess it can always change, but I'd be very surprised.

[Berkut]

Fair enough. 

I think we diverge on the assessment that all he did was invest money in nerdy stuff. Or rather, we diverge on how much that matters, and I think looking at what he did and summarizing it as "....really good at making money and investing in nerdy stuff...." is a bit reductive. You can reduce anyone's accomplishments in a similar way, right? It's not an incorrect assessment, but it seems like an assessment being driven by the desire to diminish, rather then actually assess. Edison didn't invent the light bulb, and Ford didn't invent the car, and someone else was right behind the Wright brothers, and MLK just tapped into an existing movement, etc., etc. Surely someone else would have figure out that you can kill microbes in milk by heating it up!

I cannot argue the claim that what Tesla did or SpaceX did would have happened anyway, except to note that that before Musk, those things did not happen. He didn't design a better battery, or invent the rocket. But then....nobody does those things, no individual anyway. No "invention" happens without a group. To the extent that I think Musk is worthy of noted accomplishment, I don't think anyone thinks it is because he sat down and designed the first electric, self driving car or knows much of anything about how to actually design a re-usable rocket. 

I look at SpaceX, and I think that nothing they have done could not have happened 10 years earlier. Or 20 years earlier. Or probably even 30 years earlier. The tech they are using is not cutting edge in its components. The ideas are not new. It is a travesty that NASA didn't go after this kind of hyper aggressive push to drive down launch costs themselves. But nobody did - the risks were too great, the costs enormous, and the pay off rather unknown. What visionaries do, and what (I think) Musk did, was demand the unreasonable, inspire others to buy into his vision (whether that be a bunch of egghead engineers who can design the next better battery or rocket or even just people willing to invest in it) and take on risk that others would not or could not. That is worthy of our admiration, when it works. 

I think without Musk we are not where we are today in electric, self driving vehicles nor have we advanced as far in the nuts and bolts of getting a kilo into space. That doesn't mean we would never get to those places, but without the Wright brothers, we would still be flying airplanes, just not quite as soon as we did.

[Zoupa]

It's not an incorrect assessment, but it seems like an assessment being driven by the desire to diminish, rather then actually assess.

What visionaries do, and what (I think) Musk did, was demand the unreasonable, inspire others to buy into his vision (whether that be a bunch of egghead engineers who can design the next better battery or rocket or even just people willing to invest in it) and take on risk that others would not or could not. That is worthy of our admiration, when it works.

Dude I also don't particularly admire Edison, Ford, Gates or Jobs. Am I also driven to that conclusion by a desire to diminish?

Lots and lots of people admire Musk. I'm free to admire who I wish and so are you, and it's ok to differ on that.

[Berkut]

It's not an incorrect assessment, but it seems like an assessment being driven by the desire to diminish, rather then actually assess.

What visionaries do, and what (I think) Musk did, was demand the unreasonable, inspire others to buy into his vision (whether that be a bunch of egghead engineers who can design the next better battery or rocket or even just people willing to invest in it) and take on risk that others would not or could not. That is worthy of our admiration, when it works.

Dude I also don't particularly admire Edison, Ford, Gates or Jobs. Am I also driven to that conclusion by a desire to diminish?

Lots and lots of people admire Musk. I'm free to admire who I wish and so are you, and it's ok to differ on that.

Of course. I don't think there is any kind of problem with people getting upset at anyone not admiring Musk though - there is no lack of that for sure.

Rather the opposite. Anyone not buying into every single possible argument for how Musk is just the worst, or having any views other then that his accomplishments are largely uninteresting is labeled a "Muskie" as if that cannot possibly be supported except by some emotional cult love for the guy.

[OttoVonBismarck]

OK, if he wants to offer that deal I'm totally taking it and splitting it with y'all.  Unfortunately, we don't have  ~300MM daily active users.

We could let the bots post again. 

We still let Berkut post, so we never stopped.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't think he's the most giant asshole on Earth or something. He's just an immature edgelord.

I don't think anyone thinks that. We live in the same world as people like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and MBS. Musk is a very rich liar and asshat, but he is by no means in the upper echelons of bad actors in the world, and he's probably fairly close to a neutral actor if you look at the totality of his actions.

Some of us just don't choose to admire someone for getting really rich by being a good capitalist. I am an ardent capitalist, but I am not a Max Weber worship money style person like so many Americans are, virtue and capital accumulation are not the same thing. Some people struggle to understand the idea that capital accumulation doesn't necessarily make you a genius or virtuous, it can actually just be luck. Usually, it is luck and investing savvy and business savvy. Most more grounded plutocrats of the 20th century have been fairly ready to admit luck played an immense role in their success because many people were trying to do the same thing they were and missed out sometimes by very minor chance here or there.

[Berkut]

Always fun to see Legal Eagles take on stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxCRRcWSt4I

[OttoVonBismarck]

In Twitter news both their notification and search systems appear to be nearly completely broken, I was just messing around with them and saw a bunch of problems and a number of prominent Twitter users are posting about it.

Elon recently hired George Hotz as an intern to fix it, apparently.

[Zoupa]

It's not an incorrect assessment, but it seems like an assessment being driven by the desire to diminish, rather then actually assess.

What visionaries do, and what (I think) Musk did, was demand the unreasonable, inspire others to buy into his vision (whether that be a bunch of egghead engineers who can design the next better battery or rocket or even just people willing to invest in it) and take on risk that others would not or could not. That is worthy of our admiration, when it works.

Dude I also don't particularly admire Edison, Ford, Gates or Jobs. Am I also driven to that conclusion by a desire to diminish?

Lots and lots of people admire Musk. I'm free to admire who I wish and so are you, and it's ok to differ on that.

Of course. I don't think there is any kind of problem with people getting upset at anyone not admiring Musk though - there is no lack of that for sure.

Rather the opposite. Anyone not buying into every single possible argument for how Musk is just the worst, or having any views other then that his accomplishments are largely uninteresting is labeled a "Muskie" as if that cannot possibly be supported except by some emotional cult love for the guy.

You state others disparage him or diminish his accomplishments because of tribal politics or "he's a douchebag, so actually he didn't do anything important".

I think a fairly accurate statement after reading your posts in this thread is that you admire Musk. Does that not make you a member of his admiring tribe? Is it possible that being a member of that tribe, or just the fact that you do admire him, create a bias where you inflate his accomplishments instead of assessing them accurately?

[Berkut]

It is possible, but I don't think that is what is happening. Of course, the problem with bias it is that it is very hard to see in yourself, so I could be wrong.

But I think you have it the wrong way around for myself - I don't actually admire him at all except insofar as I admire what he has accomplished. So there is no reason for me to inflate his accomplishments. They are the entirety of what I care about.

If Otto proved that in fact Musk is a complete sham, and everything I care about as it relates to him was done by someone else, my admiration for him would go straight to zero, and I would not care one bit about that (because we would still have autonomous cars and cheaper rockets, which is what I actually care about). I admire the accomplishment, and wish we had more people who could accomplish what he has accomplished in other fields.

I have zero emotional investment in Elon Musk. If he got hit by a bus tomorrow, my only concern (other then concern over any human being I supppose) is whether or not SpaceX continues to push the boundaries with him gone.

[OttoVonBismarck]

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-tweets-cop-killed-unarmed-black-man-ferguson-1849815713

Elon Musk Tweets Defense of Cop Who Killed Unarmed Black Man in Ferguson, Missouri
The billionaire deleted his original tweet early Wednesday but replaced it with a DOJ report.

By Matt Novak

Elon Musk tweeted a defense of the police officer who shot 18-year-old Michael Brown—an unarmed Black man in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014—early Wednesday before deleting the incendiary post. Musk said the police officer was "exonerated" and that the narrative around the shooting was a "fiction."

Musk's tweet was apparently prompted by the discovery of some Twitter t-shirts at the company's San Francisco headquarters that read "Stay Woke," printed in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising. Musk clearly tweeted the shirts to ridicule them, though his friend, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, once wore the shirt to the Code Conference in 2016 during a panel discussing the Black Lives Matter movement.

"#StayWoke shirts stem from the Ferguson protests. Obama's own DOJ proved this & exonerated the cop. 'Hands up don't shoot' was made up. The whole thing was a fiction," Musk tweeted early Wednesday.

The tweet included a link to the Department of Justice report issued in 2015 on the killing of Michael Brown. Musk deleted his tweet with commentary early Wednesday, but reposted the DOJ report, this time without his editorializing.

The killing of Brown and refusal of local authorities to charge the police officer who shot him, Darren Wilson, set off heated protests in the summer of 2014 and helped shine a national spotlight on the epidemic of police killing unarmed Black people. The militarized crackdown on protest that summer was ruthless, to say the least. And none of those facts were fiction.

But one of the rallying cries from the movement, "hands up don't shoot," was picked apart incessantly by right-wing pundits who sought to exonerate the police officer, much like Musk is still doing today. Witnesses to the shooting claimed Brown had his hands up, though the U.S. Department of Justice investigators didn't find this credible. Wilson, who shot Brown at least six times, claimed that Brown had charged at him and the shooting was in self-defense.

Gizmodo isn't going to relitigate what happened in 2014. But we do find it notable that Musk wants to reopen the wounds of that summer, either to stoke more controversy on his social media platform with the hopes that it generates attention for a site that's hemorrhaging advertisers, or simply because Musk wants to signal to his right-wing fans that he's well and truly one of them. Whatever his goal, Musk succeeded at proving he desperately wants approval from the absolute worst people on the planet.

For the record, the Department of Justice issued two reports in 2015 about the police in Ferguson, Missouri. Musk tweeted the one about the killing of Michael Brown but didn't bother tweeting the report from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division which found the Ferguson Police Department had a systemic problem with regularly targeting Black people for the most minor of "crimes." While Ferguson's population was 67% Black in the early 2010s, police data showed that Black people accounted for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests in the city from 2010 to 2012.

Musk is making it excruciating clear who's welcome on the new Twitter. And it's people who look and talk like Musk.

Another Musk misstep. And just shows he doesn't understand (or doesn't care) that he spent $44bn on an advertiser supported business. I am not interested in the content of his argument--I studied the Ferguson case extensively back when it happened and it doesn't need to be rehashed. What is relevant is this is not something the CEO of an advertiser supported business needs to even bring up, literally many years after the fact. Musk because of his persona and personality is now intimately linked to Twitter. Twitter is not an essential advertising platform--advertisers just have zero desire to be associated with racial controversies like this at all, and almost anyone who is in that part of the business world that interacts with advertisers know this. But Musk knows better, because he's rich, and in some Muskie's minds, that is intrinsic evidence you know everything, because you have to be a genius to own a lot of money and have a big company.

[Berkut]

You really cannot help yourself, can you?