Comment by codechicago277 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codechicago277 | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk is a gas lighter and his takeover attempt has nothing to do with free speech. Judge people by what they do, not just what they say. In the last few years, Musk and his companies have:

Asked China to censor social media criticism: https://amp.interestingengineering.com/tesla-asked-china-cen...

Doxed Tesla critics and tried to get them fired, complained to their bosses, and sued them: https://www.inverse.com/article/47461-elon-musk-responds-to-...

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/randeep-hothi-the-...

Paid private investigators to dig up dirt on people who criticized him: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-unswo...

Placed dangerous features behind NDAs: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-fsd-beta-nda...

Fired people who posted accurate depictions of their products: https://teslanorth.com/2022/03/16/tesla-fires-employee-behin...

And swatted, harassed, and sued several whistleblowers: https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-tried-to-destroy-a-whistleblo...

This takeover has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with controlling the public narrative. Elon is a masterful troll and manipulator of public perception, but behind the scenes is not pretty.

Judging by how petty an individual Musk is alone (openly going ballistic at the slightest critique not even of his person but merely his PR stunts [1]) I assume he would never put free speech first, or only if it's people and topics that are 100% decoupled from anything he does, says, or pump and dumps at the moment. And that doesn't leave much.

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

> gas lighter

> harass

you say these things as if they were something bad

> Fired people who posted accurate depictions of their products:

that's pretty liberal of you. the article didn't even mention musk till the very end (and only then in accordance to the latest news) and you make it sound like he personally fired him. you do know that there are managers working at tesla, right?

I think your comment illustrates why Musk gets away with it. The truth is so unintuitive that people who just read the headlines miss the real story.

Musk knows the social media influencers, he interacts with Gali, wholemarsblog, and others regularly. AIAddict was part of that inner circle and was posting FSD reviews for a long time. He wasn’t fired until he posted the first known crash of FSD beta: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30235231

The message is clear, whether the order to fire him came directly from Elon or whether it came from the culture he set, only positive posts about the product are allowed. Gali almost lost access after something similar.

> why Musk gets away with it.

Gets away with what? With being based?

> The message is clear, whether the order to fire him came directly from Elon or whether it came from the culture he set, only positive posts about the product are allowed.

So, ok, he is super-defensive of his products, fires employees who show his company in a bad light. So? I am sure you can dig up much worse on just about any CEO or person in power. It doesn't really say anything about how this will turn out for twitter. The real question is whether one man should be in power of a huge social media platform or not. To me, it doesn't matter if it's one rich fuck or a committee of rich fucks. The latter will tend to mediocrity and common denominator, the former may actually do something fun. He's been delivering so far. You know, fuck twitter, let's see it burn, or let's see it be something different, it's a cesspool no matter how you look at it anyway. I don't understand why people are so upset.

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