Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Tamas]

The BBC interview with Musk was a bit of a car crash. Apparently the poor journalist involved had been given 90 minutes to prep when the key to a good interview is being absolutely on top of the detail (why Andrew Neil is very good). Feels like a bit of ediitorial negligence and chances are they won't get a second go for a while.

I mean that's good, the BBC would not want to make the darling of the Right sweat. Would be way too political.

[Sheilbh]

We can't have it both ways - the BBC are either editorially independent and shouldn't be labelled state media, or they're as robust as a wet paper bag and fuck up an interview because "the Right" likes Musk.

I feel like you need to pick one of them or it's just conspiracy talk at the level of the "tofu-eating wokerati"

Edit: You see similar stuff about the judiciary - when they rule against the government they're magnificent, independent lions under the throne who should be given wide ranging powers to enforce "norms" across politics. When they rule for them it's because they've folded to pressure. Again you can't have them both

[grumbler]

We can't have it both ways - the BBC are either editorially independent and shouldn't be labelled state media, or they're as robust as a wet paper bag and fuck up an interview because "the Right" likes Musk.

I feel like you need to pick one of them or it's just conspiracy talk at the level of the "tofu-eating wokerati"

Edit: You see similar stuff about the judiciary - when they rule against the government they're magnificent, independent lions under the throne who should be given wide ranging powers to enforce "norms" across politics. When they rule for them it's because they've folded to pressure. Again you can't have them both

Can you have other choices between the extremes?

[Josquius]

Thinking about it Musk at twitter is proving a brilliant example of how the image of the comic book businessman single handedly making all the corporate decisions just doesn't work in reality.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I wonder if this is the difference between running a tech company, and running a company in the "real world" like Tesla or Space X.  A rocket or an electric car take years to develop, design and build so any crazy ideas he comes up with can't be implemented for a long period of time so he has a chance to think better of it.  Whereas if he wants to unban Donalt Trump he can do so almost immediately.

I think part of it is Musk just lacks respect for social media. Which...of all Musk's stances that's a pretty defensible one, who doesn't kinda hate social media. I think he just has a lot of respect for hardcore rocket and auto engineers, he has regular meetings with them etc and he isn't so stupid as to think he know the engineering they know. He knows enough to give big ideas, and he knows enough to let them handle the heavy lifting. And, as you say, he probably does inject dumb ideas into Tesla / SpaceX but they do have better filtering mechanisms--we've even heard reporting that there are upper level executives at those companies who mostly handle "filtering out bad Musk ideas" as their full time job.

Meanwhile with Twitter, he sees it as a thing he uses to spew out stupid memes when he's taking a shit or when he's bored in bed at 3am laying next to his replica firearms and case of caffeine free Diet Coke. However, a huge web application with hundreds of millions of users, complex algorithms, that must operate across national boundaries and follow fairly complex privacy and other regulations across myriad countries--actually ends up being genuinely quite complex. He doesn't really understand that, and he doesn't respect that, and the consequences are fairly obvious.

[Tamas]

I drink caffeine free diet coke. 

OK, caffeine free Pepsi Max, but it's kind of the same thing just tastes better.

[The Larch]

caffeine free Pepsi Max

Jesus Christ. Why do you do that to yourself?

[HVC]

So brown water and aspartame?

[OttoVonBismarck]

I drink caffeine free diet coke. 

OK, caffeine free Pepsi Max, but it's kind of the same thing just tastes better.

Sir, you're drinking water. Quit paying PepsiCo markup!

[DGuller]

And even for Putin things seemed mostly democratic in Russia in 2000 - the country is in a far, far different place now compared to then.  So when exactly did Russia become an autocracy?

I now think that Russia never was democratic to any extent.  It wasn't even a flawed democracy, it was truly an autocracy all along.  Yeltsin was just a weak autocrat and so wasn't able to monopolize power, whereas Putin pretty quickly established himself to be undisputed boss.  The speed with which he did things like close down opposition media indicates that there never were democratic institutions in place to begin with.

Even if Russia was democratic for some period, it certainly wasn't "mostly democratic" in 2000.  During the last year or so of Yeltsin's presidency, the talk was of who would be appointed as Yeltsin's successor.  There was no talk of voters having a say in the matter.

[Valmy]

Russia was kind of moving towards a Democracy until 1993 when Yeltsin launched his coup. Who knows if it would have gotten there without that, but that was the end of optimism as far as post-Soviet Russia's near future.

[DGuller]

Russia was kind of moving towards a Democracy until 1993 when Yeltsin launched his coup. Who knows if it would have gotten there without that, but that was the end of optimism as far as post-Soviet Russia's near future.

Yeah, the only debatable period is 1991-1993.  After Yeltsin's coup/self-coup, there was no more democracy.  Just like Hindenburg, Yeltsin was too feeble to seize power for himself, but he put everything in place for someone more ambitious to seize absolute power almost immediately.

[celedhring]

I wonder if this is the difference between running a tech company, and running a company in the "real world" like Tesla or Space X.  A rocket or an electric car take years to develop, design and build so any crazy ideas he comes up with can't be implemented for a long period of time so he has a chance to think better of it.  Whereas if he wants to unban Donalt Trump he can do so almost immediately.

I think part of it is Musk just lacks respect for social media. Which...of all Musk's stances that's a pretty defensible one, who doesn't kinda hate social media. I think he just has a lot of respect for hardcore rocket and auto engineers, he has regular meetings with them etc and he isn't so stupid as to think he know the engineering they know. He knows enough to give big ideas, and he knows enough to let them handle the heavy lifting. And, as you say, he probably does inject dumb ideas into Tesla / SpaceX but they do have better filtering mechanisms--we've even heard reporting that there are upper level executives at those companies who mostly handle "filtering out bad Musk ideas" as their full time job.

Meanwhile with Twitter, he sees it as a thing he uses to spew out stupid memes when he's taking a shit or when he's bored in bed at 3am laying next to his replica firearms and case of caffeine free Diet Coke. However, a huge web application with hundreds of millions of users, complex algorithms, that must operate across national boundaries and follow fairly complex privacy and other regulations across myriad countries--actually ends up being genuinely quite complex. He doesn't really understand that, and he doesn't respect that, and the consequences are fairly obvious.

Related, he likes to have a Big Vision for his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, even The Boring Company) and how he's going to save mankind with them. That just isn't there for Twitter - he tried to push the world's agora thing when he took over, but that was dropped quickly in favor of memes.

[Syt]

[Syt]