Hacker News Reader

Comment by evilzuku | Hacker News Reader

Nothing says evil more than preparing reactive PR to bury your competitors. And the nonchalant way his response sends chills down my spine. These people will suffocate innovation just to win.

View on HN

CEOs and executives are the closest equivalent of royalty in the United States. Their media coverage is often hagiographic as a result. They are humanized and puffed up in the press to an extent that foreign press would never think to do about business leaders in their own countries.

Inch upon inch of columns are dedicated to their morning habits, favourite TV shows and fashion choices, and other fluff content to make them "relatable" to the average joe/jane. This is especially magnified when it comes to SV execs because they wear hoodies and tshirts instead of bespoke suits.

And that's what leads to reactions like "I can't believe he'd be so callous to users", as if the person in question is a hard working bootstrapper and not a billionaire looking to maximize market share and profit.

Zuck has a bespoke hoodie, and ordered a pallet of them for the company so his employees could dress like him.

Gross

As the news coverage of the time pointed out, Facebook did this to Twitter a few months after Twitter themselves did the same thing to Instagram (which was already owned by Facebook at that point) and Tumblr: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3913082/facebook-has-appa... All of the big social networks were and still are like this.

> And the nonchalant way his response sends chills down my spine.

CEOs of massive companies don't have time to write long and explanatory emails. They put people in charge that they trust, so they can just say one word or sentence and know that it'll get handled.

Sometimes I write some half ass objection before green lighting it just in case the convo gets leaked

idgaf though

> These people will suffocate innovation just to win.

I don't like Zuck, but come on, you just described every CEO in America, that when they have a choice they will do this.

Yes. Which is bad!

Very definitely this is bad. But it's not a surprise.

Nobody said it is.

It shouldn't have to come as a surprise in order to be against it, that's how we get complacent and accepting of this behavior.

I don't agree that Elon Musk is like this (quite the reverse) and I'm sure there are many other CEOs who aren't too.

Let's not normalise sociopathology, even given its prevalence amongst business executives.

I am definitely no fan of Zuck but on the subject of Elon Musk, this is the same guy who tried to use his high media profile to call an innocent man a pedophile just because he would follow Musk’s crazy plan.[1]

So that another one off the “CEO billionaire but not a sociopath” list.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...

I'd suggest you find a better source than The Guardian for news about Elon Musk. They have run a relentless smear campaign against him for years now. Just one more reason to loathe that publication, in my book.

Can I read about this somewhere? Did the Observer write about it?

Yeah it was really widely reported, not just in the Guardian if you don't like that paper.

Here's 4 other sources. There are many more on DuckDuckGo News.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/07/18/elon-mus...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44870303

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/elon-musk-apologizes-blam...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/18/elon-musk-apologizes-to-brit...

From CNBC:

> The apology comes after the spelunker, Vern Unsworth, who was involved in the early days of efforts to save the now-rescued boys’ soccer team, threatened legal action against the billionaire executive over the comment.

> Musk said on Twitter late Tuesday that he had made the claim out of “anger” because Unsworth had criticized his idea to rescue the boys with a “mini-submarine” made out of a SpaceX rocket part.

Sorry, I meant the smear campaign. It doesn't sound like the Guardian.

I'm no Musk fan but he opened up all the Tesla patents so other manufacturers can use their intellectual property.

Maybe he had ulterior motives... Don't know. But opening up patents is certainly the opposite of squashing innovation.

Yes, that was my point. That Musk actively encourages other companies to share in his companies' innovations.

Isn’t that like saying one must be a foolish consumer because they live in a western nation?

> Nothing says evil more than preparing reactive PR to bury your competitors.

Really?

Hyperbole. Facebook is a free website... A website.

Burying competitors is a good thing. That’s the whole point. That’s literally the objective of every business in the entire economy.

The holocaust? That's nothing! Check out these guys, they're preparing PR to say bad things about their new competitors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com