Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[OttoVonBismarck]

I will say some controversy I had to research a bit to know about has finally affected my "personal" use of Twitter. Up to this point the main negatives I had seen from Musk's ownership were a slight uptick in shitty trending topics and a few random posts on my feed that wouldn't have been there before that I didn't want to see. I guess Musk did some sort of personal attack against Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety (Yoel Roth), Yahoo News has some specifics:

"People really want him to be the villain of the story, and they want him to be unequivocally wrong and bad, and everything he says is duplicitous," Roth told tech journalist Kara Swisher earlier this month. "That wasn't my experience... he's not the unequivocal villain of the story, and I think it would be unfair to suggest that he is."

But the sense of charity clearly wasn't mutual. On Saturday, Musk used his giant public megaphone to groundlessly imply that Roth – an openly gay Jewish man who was already the target of an ongoing right-wing hate campaign – was a danger to children or an enabler of child abuse.

Where this affects me personally is this has been the first time a good chunk of my important follows have actually left the platform--a lot of my law/legal and national security high visibility guys I follow have left the platform in the last 24 hours over this (which is what clued me in on it being a thing, I had not heard of it otherwise.)

It's annoying because there is no real good platform to follow these guys on collectively.

[OttoVonBismarck]

This FWIW is kind of how I imagined Twitter "dying" a while back in this thread, it won't ever shut down or go away, so I don't really think it dies. But as I start to have to utilize multiple tools to follow the same people I used to follow just on Twitter, it becomes less and less valuable to me and I'll spend less time there--which I think is going to be a pretty common experience.

[Jacob]

I guess suing Musk for slander for that kind of thing (baseless allegations of pedophilia etc) is a long, tedious, expensive, and uncertain process?

[HVC]

He's really likes accusations of pedophilia. Wonder if he diddled or got diddled.

[Josquius]

I will say some controversy I had to research a bit to know about has finally affected my "personal" use of Twitter. Up to this point the main negatives I had seen from Musk's ownership were a slight uptick in shitty trending topics and a few random posts on my feed that wouldn't have been there before that I didn't want to see. I guess Musk did some sort of personal attack against Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety (Yoel Roth), Yahoo News has some specifics:

"People really want him to be the villain of the story, and they want him to be unequivocally wrong and bad, and everything he says is duplicitous," Roth told tech journalist Kara Swisher earlier this month. "That wasn't my experience... he's not the unequivocal villain of the story, and I think it would be unfair to suggest that he is."

But the sense of charity clearly wasn't mutual. On Saturday, Musk used his giant public megaphone to groundlessly imply that Roth – an openly gay Jewish man who was already the target of an ongoing right-wing hate campaign – was a danger to children or an enabler of child abuse.

Where this affects me personally is this has been the first time a good chunk of my important follows have actually left the platform--a lot of my law/legal and national security high visibility guys I follow have left the platform in the last 24 hours over this (which is what clued me in on it being a thing, I had not heard of it otherwise.)

It's annoying because there is no real good platform to follow these guys on collectively.

Someone needs to start a legal mastadon server it sounds.
Hop to?

[The Brain]

I guess suing Musk for slander for that kind of thing (baseless allegations of pedophilia etc) is a long, tedious, expensive, and uncertain process?

Having Musk's army of scumbags going through every little detail of your life and making public a misleading version of anything that might harm you doesn't seem attractive.

[The Brain]

Does NASA plan to do any more business with SpaceX? Seems hard to respect NASA if they don't sever ties with Musk.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Eh, NASA / DOD have procurement rules they can't just stop doing business with SpaceX because Musk is a piece of shit. However there are significant national security issues with that procurement and some of Musk's behavior absolutely merits closer analysis of him personally and what exactly he is doing and who he is having relationships with.

[Barrister]

Eh, NASA / DOD have procurement rules they can't just stop doing business with SpaceX because Musk is a piece of shit. However there are significant national security issues with that procurement and some of Musk's behavior absolutely merits closer analysis of him personally and what exactly he is doing and who he is having relationships with.

Given that until very, very recently NASA was doing significant business with Roscosmos I think NASA has a fairly flexible interpretation of national security issues.

[The Brain]

Eh, NASA / DOD have procurement rules they can't just stop doing business with SpaceX because Musk is a piece of shit. However there are significant national security issues with that procurement and some of Musk's behavior absolutely merits closer analysis of him personally and what exactly he is doing and who he is having relationships with.

Barring something even more grotesque than Musk's present behavior existing contracts will have to run their course I assume. But they don't need to be renewed. Funding can suddenly disappear, programs be cancelled...

[OttoVonBismarck]

Eh, NASA / DOD have procurement rules they can't just stop doing business with SpaceX because Musk is a piece of shit. However there are significant national security issues with that procurement and some of Musk's behavior absolutely merits closer analysis of him personally and what exactly he is doing and who he is having relationships with.

Given that until very, very recently NASA was doing significant business with Roscosmos I think NASA has a fairly flexible interpretation of national security issues.

Do you think anything has changed in the last 10 months that might affect the likelihood of relationships like that happening in the future? 

[Barrister]

Eh, NASA / DOD have procurement rules they can't just stop doing business with SpaceX because Musk is a piece of shit. However there are significant national security issues with that procurement and some of Musk's behavior absolutely merits closer analysis of him personally and what exactly he is doing and who he is having relationships with.

Given that until very, very recently NASA was doing significant business with Roscosmos I think NASA has a fairly flexible interpretation of national security issues.

Do you think anything has changed in the last 10 months that might affect the likelihood of relationships like that happening in the future? 

The relationship with Roscosmos was always incredibly fraught, but NASA had no other choice - they had no other way of getting to the ISS.

Space X gave them that way.  And right now Falcon / Crew Dragon are still the only way of getting there.  So I suspect NASA will continue doing business with Space X.

[The Brain]

Maybe relying on Musk for the manned space program isn't a great idea. He doesn't seem to get less unhinged with time.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The ISS is being shutdown relatively soon.

Boeing's craft which was awarded an ISS contract at the same time as SpaceX is also expected to start sending crewed missions up in the first half of 2023, even if it's delayed again it is fairly close to being ready, they've had extensive test launches / flights.

All that is to say, I don't care? If we find evidence Musk is improperly doing stuff with countries we have security concerns about under the table SpaceX gets blacklisted, we'll work around the implications of that after.

For what it is worth, I see zero proof of that--but lots of smoke, which simply means an investigation is warranted, which is also all I ever said.

[The Brain]

The ISS is being shutdown relatively soon.

Good. Good.