Elon Musk calls Thai cave rescuer a 'pedo guy' | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk calls Thai cave rescuer a 'pedo guy'

sfgate.com

62 pointsyumraj32 comments

I honestly think Musk was trying to help. He does this stuff everywhere, Puerto Rico, Australia etc. it does seem PR, but also very risky and I like that he does unorthodox not by the book things.

I also understand he sucked the gravity of the praise there with news articles mostly mentioning him and I understand how divers who risked their lives might feel constantly being asked about the sub.

This diver was rude, but if he’s been asked this constantly I don’t blame him really.

This is one moment where he should have kept quiet on twitter and it would have blown over, but he fired back which is in poor taste, but still not too bad.

But the second he called him pedo...that was the lowest point of Elon Musk ever. It was petty, narcissistic, rude. His teen fanboys will no doubt harrass and dox this hero, he’ll have this moniker on him forever, and it’s just because Elon was attacked. Whenever he feels unfairly attacked he always attacks back, sometimes very very rudely. I hope he gets sued for millions. I don’t blame his journalism attacks because they were fairly justified, but this was really messed up.

”I honestly think Musk was trying to help. He does this stuff everywhere, Puerto Rico, Australia etc. it does seem PR”

He may have been trying to help without consideration for how the world thinks about him and his companies, but it became PR the moment he tweeted about it (if John Doe tweets he’s donated to charity X, i consider that PR for John Doe, too. If he just wanted others to donate, he could have tweeted “X does good stuff and needs money” without mentioning his own good deed)

Wow that is so bloody obvious, I didn’t even think about that...Elon was constantly tweeting it out, updates and everything. You can help others and have it be PR simultaneously like Elon was doing, or you can help others and not be PR. So this was obviously PR for Elon, SpaceX,and Tesla.

One of the replies to his tweet made me change my opinion a bit too. Government officials who make the decision what to do should listen to the experts, but if famous people come the govt officials might listen to them instead and it could have been a disaster. She was saying how in these situation, rescue workers hate celebrities coming because they have to fight against their usually erroneous opinions, making it harder for the workers to get through to the decision makers

Absolutely disgusting on Musk's part. Calling an actual hero a child molestor simply because he called out an obvious PR stunt.

Hopefully Unsworth sues him for libel.

As several American lawyers have pointed out on Twitter, this is just about the easiest libel per se lawsuit you could have. I guess Elon can stand to lose a few million dollars, but it's still incredibly stupid.

It would be an easy suit. Especially since musk doubled down in a second tweet, saying he has evidence...

FFS, Elon. You had this one in the bag. Even though Thailand didn't end up needing it, the sub offer made you look great and even crowded out the bad news about Tesla for a while. All you had to do after the rescue was over was say "Glad to hear all the kids are safe; we'll keep the sub mothballed just in case this happens again" and you'd have been golden. Instead you go off on these tangents about how Thailand is incompetent and now this, and now you just look like a prick for about the twentieth time this year.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Yeah, pretty much this. I'm actually willing to accept that this wasn't initially meant to be just a PR gesture, but a sincere attempt to help. But now his tantrums over not getting to be the hero have gone and poisoned it all, rendering it indistinguishable-from-PR whether or not it was intended as such in the first place.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that this outburst makes it distinguishable from PR. Not that it's pleasant to see.

Elon Musk needs a serious figurative punch in the gut, to get back to the actual outlook of a collaborative problem solver and away from pumped up competitive douchebag. The world already had enough of those.

> Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Well said. All of it.

I get the feeling Elon might need someone to reign him back on some of his tweets. I've heard he suffers from bipolar disorder, which, even if medicated, can sometimes flare up.

If that's the case, and some of his episodes bring this about, he really does need to either recognize this in himself, and exert some self-control, or straight up have someone else check it over.

This is especially dangerous because, since his companies' valuations are so intrinsically tied to his 'cult of personality' (I'm using this term neutrally - I believe 'both sides' will agree that a large percentage of Musk's companies' valuation does come from his bombastic personality and presence), this behaviour can only damage his work, which may put him into a negative feedback spiral, with each subsequent outburst plunging it all further down.

This is the result of deep insecurity (and maybe narcissism), not a bipolar disorder. He has always been like this, overreacting to criticism, rage outbursts, constantly having conflicts with other people, trying to appear smart.

Not to say he isn't smart or even extremely smart. But I also noticed the insecurity. He desperately needs people to love him and searches for validation with his fans. But that's not a stable way to live.

From Musk's recent interview with Bloomberg [1]:

“I have made the mistaken assumption—and I will attempt to be better at this—of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season,” he said in an hour-long interview with Bloomberg Businessweek for this week's cover story. “That is my mistake. I will correct it.”

It seems like Musk ought to be smart enough to generalize from "Twitter" to any sort of media (I don't think Unsworth is on Twitter), but I guess maybe he's still working on it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-13/-the-last...

Hard to say I didn't see this coming. Elon has been lucky he's had the world's media on his side for a lot of his career. But he's been too loose with his words for a long time. Getting into arguments and making risky jokes.

If there's anything the media loves more than building a hero up it's tearing that hero down. It was only a matter of time before he started saying things that would get him in trouble.

The deleted tweet

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Zdx_Qw...

Doubling down

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qsVGLi...

Software CEOs are eating themselves, in front of the world.

I have reservations using a just-in-time assembled prototype for a life-critical task. How well-founded is my reservation?

It depends. Are you on Apollo 13?

Very. The actual rescue involved "plastic cocoons" and sedation for the kids, I don't think any of that was previously proven. If there was a proven rescue technique, they would have used it.

Has anyone confirmed this wasn't just an unfortunate typo?

Why is sfgate making an issue about this prior to doing that?

He doubled-down in another tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824

Thanks.

Yeah, IMO that's pretty stupid and Musk would do well to take a break. :/

Pity, because I think he overall did the right thing with that sub idea - it was a good plan B and what was done in the end was pretty similar to it (strap the kids into stretchers with positive pressure full face masks). But calling one of the team a pedo doesn't help anyone; better to just shut up.

It's not a typo. In an earlier tweet he says "Never saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus)"

He's clearly implying that the diver fits the stereotype of old white men who retire in Thailand to have sex with young Thai boys/girls.

Yeah it's not like there's amazing diving in Thailand that expert British divers would want to explore... This is crazy.

But why "pedo"? Why not ahole or something less specific. Is there something Musk knows about the guy?

Such a comment is what frightens me in today's uber-connected world of instant information. Don't get me wrong - I understand what you are saying and know the comment is genuine.

We have in French an expression "il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu" (there is not smoke without fire) which means that since a random person (Musk in that case) said a random thing (his tweet), there must be something behind.

In the past it was a village gossiping, worst case one could envision leaving and making his life somewhere else. Today, he is dead socially because "who knows".

Musk should be punished for such words. oit punished by a few millions because this is not going to teach him anything (beside the fact that having a lot of money is cool) but rather denying him for 5 or 10 years the possibility to communicate on Internet (à la Mitnick) and denying him the possibility to be a CEO/engineer. Just so that he understands how painful this can be.

But then in classical SFGate style — they basically “insult” him by suggesting he donated to Republicans. What does that have to do with the main topic of the story? It seems like that last paragraph was added simply as “punishment” to Musk (in the eyes of the typical SFGate reader.) This story hardly feels newsworthy — it’s just gossip.

This seems so totally out of character for Elon that I can only assume he is drugged or mentally ill. Maybe he's Ambien tweeting. If he's still in southeast asia, that would make sense (as he'd be tweeting around midnight local time).

How is this out of character? He's constantly insulting people on Twitter.

Honestly, I'm surprised this one blew up more than the time he called a guy from South Africa a 'chimp'.

I follow Musk on Twitter and I've never seen behavior like today. Yes, he sometimes insults people, but there's a huge difference between offhand insults and sticking to your guns accusing a rescue diver of being a pedophile.[1] It's utterly bizarre.

1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1018513369404493824

This is exactly Musk's behavior. He does shit like this on Twitter all the time.

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