Hacker News Reader

Comment by asddubs | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you can't really take a company at face value if they reverse course after having already profited from their "lapse in judgement". The parent post lined out potential motivations behind all this that IMO aren't really that outlandish. It's speculation, but it's not some outlandish crackpot theory

View on HN

They do not gain anything by crashing bitcoin. They could gain by selling bitcoin, but they sold only 10% of their position.

Even when you "pomp and dump" you have to dump as the name suggest. It is not "pomp and crash&hold".

Unless they show profit from selling 1B$ bitcoin in next financial statements it is just Elon being dumb idiot.

Both for buying Bitcoin in the first place and for not offloading to make money to invest in Tesla.

Sure, but a basic rule of civility is that you should "assume good faith" and give others the benefit of the doubt when the good faith explanation is plausible.

That assumption of good faith works (mostly) for individuals. It does or should not extend to for profit corporations.

It absolutely does.

The way I understand all the responses to my comment, it seems a lot of people have the impression that the assumption of good faith makes someone naive... But that's absolutely not the case.

The assumption of good faith does not require one to "believe" that any given action is the product of good faith. The only thing it requires is that good faith be the starting point from which you evaluate someone else's (or yes, a for-profit corporation's) actions. All one needs to do is begin by first trying to understand how an action could be explained by factors other than bad faith, or could be compatible with good faith.

This is in fact a very weak requirement!

Please don't think "for profit" is evil. It's just normal. You can find enormous negative things about all financial structures.

I think a lot of people feel that the good faith explanation isn't sufficiently plausible in this case, assuming even just the most cursory of research was done before this decision

I think you can and should assume good faith. However, the explanation about the environment seems dubious for reasons people have pointed out here. They didn't know about bitcoin's environmental impact? The people at Tesla didn't think about negative environmental impact being counter to their brand? Giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming good faith does not mean you have to be gullible.

Read enough news and your good faith for publicly traded companies of any kind will be gone quickly. Tesla may be more trendy than EA, but the motivations are always the same.

You should assume good faith until money comes into play. Once that happens, you should assume little.

Assume good faith for a company? It’s called being naive/biased for Tesla/Musk.

Do you assume good faith when it comes to Facebook’s data handling? Or goddamn disgusting nestle doing basically anything? (Btw, can’t we just cancel nestle?)

In this case it isn't plausible as GP pointed out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com